Seventeen

Jeannie was putting a plate of scrambled eggs on a tray together with a glass of orange juice, a mug of tea, and a couple of slices of toast.

“How’s Teresa?” Dooley said.

“She says she’s hungry, so I guess that’s good,” Jeannie said. “I’m going to take this up to her. After she eats, I’m taking her to my G.P., who also happens to be a close personal friend.”

“Thanks, Jeannie,” Dooley said. She was doing far more than she should. She didn’t even know Teresa.

“After that, I’m taking her home. I don’t mind looking in on her, Dooley, but I don’t feel comfortable having her stay here. It’s your uncle’s house.”

“It’s okay,” Dooley said. “I’ll check on her. I promise.”

“I’ll have to lend her something for now. But she wants to know if you can go and get her some clean clothes to go home in.” She put a key and a piece of paper on the table in front of him. “You know where she lives?”

Dooley nodded.

“She wrote down what she wanted.”

“I’ll go now,” he said.

“Also, Annette called,” Jeannie said. “She says she’ll pick you up here at three.”

Dooley did a rough calculation. He’d already got someone to cover the early part of his shift. Alicia’s party was at one. He didn’t have to be at work until six. Yeah, he could handle it.

After Jeannie went upstairs, Dooley gulped down some coffee and headed for the door. He made a quick call and ended up having to leave a message. Then he headed to Jeffie’s.

He let himself in with the key Teresa had given Jeannie and went straight to the bedroom to go through the closet and the dresser with all the makeup and framed pictures on it, which he figured—it was a no-brainer—belonged to Teresa. He found everything she wanted—even underwear. He was surprised it didn’t bother her, the thought of a guy she hardly knew going through that particular drawer. He dug a bag out from under the sink in the kitchen and put the stuff in it. Then he went back into the bedroom and looked at the other dresser, this one taller, not so long, with a bottle of men’s cologne on it and a package of disposable razors. Jeffie’s dresser. The cops had probably been here already. They’d probably gone through Jeffie’s things and had removed anything they thought might help them nail whoever had killed him. But Dooley opened the top drawer anyway. It was crammed with stuff—packages of rubbers, handfuls of change, pennies and nickels and dimes, old bills that had been paid (at least, Dooley assumed they had), underwear, socks that looked to Dooley like they didn’t match, a couple of pairs of sunglasses, a pair of black leather gloves, a couple of packs of cigarettes, a crumpled scrap of paper torn from the newspaper—Dooley smoothed it out—with four numbers scrawled on it, a bunch of cheap ballpoint pens, a couple of disposable lighters, a dozen or so matchbooks with some or most of the matches gone.

Junk.

On the bright side: There was nothing to indicate that Jeffie had been in touch with Dooley’s uncle. On the not-so-bright side: If there had been anything like that, the cops had already found it. He hadn’t been surprised when Randall had asked: Did you kill Jeffrey Eccles? He’d been expecting that. But he hadn’t been expecting the next question: Did your uncle kill him? It had shaken him.

His uncle knew Jeffie. He’d said he’d busted him a couple of times. And Lorraine had died of an overdose. There were bruises. Maybe someone had forced her. Someone with drugs and the whole kit. Maybe his uncle. He couldn’t see it. No way. But it was what Randall was kicking around. That and the blood in his car were why his uncle had been arrested.

Dooley wished now that he’d said more down there in that ravine when Jeffie had mentioned his cop uncle. Maybe if he had said his uncle’s name, Jeffie would have reacted—that’s your uncle? No shit. He could have pushed Jeffie on it—what did he mean, did he know his uncle? It could have led somewhere. As it was, back when they’d hung out together, Jeffie had been no wiser about the existence of an uncle than Dooley himself had been—forget knowing his uncle’s name. Hell, Jeffie had never even met Lorraine.

In the rest of Jeffie’s drawers, clothes: T-shirts and sweaters, jeans and chinos, socks and more underwear. None of it special.

He poked around the rest of the apartment, but most of the stuff looked like it was Teresa’s, not Jeffie’s. Besides the furniture, there were a lot of photographs in frames, almost all of them showing Teresa and Jeffie together. There was a pile of stuffed animals in the window seat of the window that overlooked the street, some dried flowers in a vase on one of the end tables, a bunch of celebrity magazines on the coffee table, and hundreds of CDs—Dooley scanned them. Half looked like they might be Jeffie’s, the other half definitely did not. He also saw half a dozen word search puzzle books, most of them with the puzzles all done. That had to be Teresa. Jeffie had enough trouble reading words when the letters were going in the right direction. There was only one real book in the whole place—no surprise there; Dooley couldn’t recall ever seeing Jeffie read. It was a book of baby names. Dooley thought about throwing it out, sparing Teresa’s having to look at it. Then he thought, maybe she’d still want it, maybe it meant something to her, so he left it where it was, on top of the big-screen TV.

He locked up and took the bag of Teresa’s clothes and toiletries back to his uncle’s house. Teresa wasn’t there. Neither was Jeannie. He left the bag on the table in the front hall and headed for the coffee shop a couple of blocks away to wait.

Randall was alone, thank God. He got out of his car, glanced around, then trotted across the street and into the coffee shop. He didn’t even glance at Dooley. Instead, he went straight to the counter and placed an order. Then he stood there, looking everywhere but at Dooley, until the girl behind the counter handed him his coffee. Randall chatted with her while she made change. Only then did he come over to Dooley’s table. He dropped down opposite Dooley, blew on his coffee, took a sip, and said, “What’s on your mind, Ryan?”

“You’ve been asking people about my uncle and Lorraine.”

Randall took another sip of his coffee.

“I want to know why,” Dooley said.

Randall shook his head. “You have some information for me, Ryan, I’m all ears,” he said. “You think I’m going to sit here and give you the lowdown on my investigation, you’re out of luck.”

He started to get up.

“She was my mother,” Dooley said.

“Your mother who you weren’t close to,” Randall reminded him.

Dooley hesitated. He wasn’t about to tell Randall anything he might not already know. But he needed to get a fix on what was going on.

“You asked about rumors, about why she left home, about my uncle.”

Randall settled back down in his chair and studied Dooley for a moment.

“She never talked about him?”

Dooley shook his head.

“Never mentioned him?”

“I told you, I didn’t even know I had an uncle. I didn’t know anything. Then you showed me that picture.”

“You talk to your uncle about that?”

“Yeah.”

“And?”

“He told me some stuff.”

Randall waited.

“He told me she was adopted. He told me about his other sister—and about how his mother died. He said that’s why he and Lorraine weren’t … why they never talked.”

“I see.”

He saw? Dooley watched him take another sip of coffee. What did he mean, he saw?

“Is that what you meant? Is that the weird shit you’ve been asking about?”

Randall stared at him for another full minute. Dooley hated that. He hated the way cops always acted like they were holding all the cards. He especially hated it when they were.

“Here’s a mystery for you, Ryan,” Randall said at last. “A seventeen-year-old adopted girl gets pregnant, leaves home, severs all ties with her family. There’s no contact between her and her big brother—who isn’t really her brother—for, what, fourteen, fifteen years? Then the kid, her son, drops himself in the crapper and, all of a sudden, out of the blue, this respectable retired cop and all-round good citizen big brother steps up to the plate and takes responsibility for the kid.” And pays her a thousand dollars a month each and every month, Dooley thought. He bet Randall knew about that. He bet that’s what the subpoena for the bank records had been all about. “What do you suppose that’s all about, Ryan? Why would your uncle all of a sudden step into your life?” And pay for the privilege, Dooley thought. Jesus, had Lorraine been blackmailing him? Did she have some kind of leverage? But what? What could she possibly …

Jesus. No way.

He stared at Randall. Randall looked blandly back at him.

“Are you saying …? You don’t think …?”

Randall seemed to soften in that instant. Or maybe it was all an act. Maybe he wanted to see how Dooley would react.

“We talked to some of your grandparents’ old neighbors. One of them remembers overhearing a fight at your grandparents’ house one night. She says your mother … well, she made certain accusations.” Accusations?

“This neighbor called the police, who asked your mother about it. She refused to talk to them. She said she’d been angry at your uncle. He never mentioned that?”

“No. What are you—”

“Did your mother ever tell you who your father was, Ryan?”

What? Where did that question come from?

“Some guy,” Dooley said. “Some guy named Dooley.”

“You know him?”

Dooley shook his head. He remembered Lorraine used to talk about the guy sometimes. Half the time she’d be crying over him: He was the best guy, ever, Dooley. He was so fine, you would have liked him. The other half the time she was throwing stuff, saying what a jerk he was, how he’d left her like that with a baby on her hands, what an asshole, and, big surprise, the way Dooley acted half the time, he was just like his father, and that’s no compliment, Dooley, just so you know.

“You don’t remember him? You don’t remember anything about him?”

“She said he took off when I was a baby.”

“He took off?”

Dooley looked at Randall. What was he getting at?

“Did you know that she didn’t list a father on your birth registration?”

No, he didn’t know that.

“Why do you think she left his name off?”

“I don’t know.”

Randall contemplated him again.

“You could ask your uncle,” he said finally. “And there are tests. DNA tests. You can find out for sure.”

Find out what?

“It would explain a lot,” Randall said.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Dooley said.

“That’s the other mystery, Ryan,” Randall said. “Either you know exactly what I’m talking about, or you don’t. If you don’t, then think about it. Think about why your uncle suddenly dropped into your life after all those years. Or maybe you know exactly what I’m talking about, in which case … well, your uncle isn’t the only one who knew Jeffie and what he did for a living.”

They were fishing on that one, Dooley thought. They already know where he was that night. If they had anything to connect him with what had happened to either Jeffie or Lorraine, he’d be sweating it out in an interview room. He stood up.

“Thanks for meeting with me,” he said.

Randall sat with his coffee while Dooley left. He went straight to Warren’s house where he smiled through chocolate ice-cream cake with Alicia, her mother, Warren, and some of the kids Alicia went to school with. She was thrilled with the DVDs Dooley gave her—some new stuff, all of them about animals, that he’d special-ordered for her. At ten to three, he hugged her and wished her many happy returns.

“Thanks for coming,” Warren said. “She talked about you all morning.”

“No problem,” Dooley said.

Warren peered at him.

“Are you okay?” he said.

“Yeah. See you Monday, okay, Warren?”

He got home just as Annette Girondin’s car pulled up at the curb.

An hour later, Dooley found himself talking to his uncle under conditions he never could have imagined. His uncle looked tense; his skin was gray; his eyes were tight and watchful.

“You okay?” Dooley said.

“I’ll live,” his uncle said.

“I just wanted to tell you,” Dooley said. “I didn’t tell them anything.”

His uncle didn’t say anything.

“All that stuff you told me that night,” Dooley said. “I kept it to myself.”

His uncle didn’t react the way he had expected. Instead, he leaned forward a little and said, “If they subpoena you and make you testify, do everyone a favor, Ryan. Tell the truth. Okay?”

“If they subpoena me?” Dooley said. “You’re going to get off, right?”

“I sure as hell hope so,” his uncle said. “But it’s complicated.”

One-thousand-dollars-a-month complicated. Not-brother-and-sister complicated.

“What do you mean?” Dooley said.

“This isn’t a good place to go into it, Ryan. You got something else you want to talk about, go for it. Otherwise—”

Dooley couldn’t believe it—his uncle actually stood up, making it clear what he would discuss and what he wouldn’t, still assuming the in-charge position.

“Okay,” Dooley said. “Can I ask you something?”

His uncle, wary, dropped back into his chair.

“How did she seem when she came by the house?” Dooley said.

“Who?”

“Lorraine. I know she came by. How did she seem? Was she clean? Was she high? What?”

He hadn’t told his uncle he knew about the visit, so he was expecting his uncle to be at least a little taken back or, possibly, embarrassed. He was neither.

“She was a pain in the ass,” his uncle said. “She was all smiles until she found out you weren’t home, and then she got pissy.”

Dooley sincerely hoped that his uncle hadn’t taken that attitude with the cops.

“Besides that,” he said.

“To tell you the truth, she looked pretty good.” His uncle sounded surprised as he said it, like he still couldn’t believe it. “Not her usual trashy self, you know what I mean? She told me she was clean, and she looked it.”

“Did she tell you why she did it?”

“Did what?”

“Cleaned up her act.”

“No. She said she wanted to see you. That’s all.”

“You didn’t tell me.”

“Turns out I didn’t have to,” his uncle said. “You had her address and her number.”

Dooley dropped his voice a little. “What about the money?”

His uncle’s eyes narrowed.

“You know what I mean, right?” Dooley said.

His uncle didn’t answer. Dooley knew what it felt like to be in his position, so he didn’t push it. But, boy, he had a million questions about all that cash and about what Randall had told him—and about why Randall had told him. Did he feel sorry for Dooley? Or had he agreed to the meeting and told him what he had for some other reason? Dooley ached to get into it with his uncle, but there were some things he couldn’t ask, not here. Still, he couldn’t help wondering, as he watched his uncle, do I look anything like him? Is it true what Randall had insinuated? Is that why his uncle had had Lorraine cremated, why he had never even suggested that she be put to rest in the family plot? Is that why, after all those years …

“You remember that first time you came to see me?” he said.

“Yeah,” his uncle said. “I’d be amazed if you remembered it, though. You were in bad shape.”

But Dooley did remember.

“I was surprised,” he said. “You remember that? I was surprised because I didn’t even know I had an uncle.”

“I didn’t think you were able to concentrate enough to be surprised about anything. I thought you were still focused on how you were going to score in there.”

“Yeah, well, that, too. But I was also surprised. Lorraine never mentioned you. Why do you think that was?”

“How the hell would I know?” his uncle said, irritable now. Well, why not? He was in here, wasn’t he?

“My whole life I never knew about you, and then you showed up out of the blue. You said something like, you didn’t know about me. Something like that.”

“I believe what I said,” his uncle said, his eyes hard on Dooley’s, “was that if I’d known, maybe I could have done something sooner.”

Dooley nodded. Yeah, that was it. That was what he’d said—If I’d known, which, of course, Dooley had taken to mean, if I’d known about you. He looked at his uncle now. Since he’d gone to live with him, Dooley had never had to guess what his uncle was thinking. If he was angry with Dooley, if he was worried, if, God forbid, he was proud of something Dooley had done, he put it all right out there for Dooley to read. But for the past couple of weeks, it had been different. For the past couple of weeks, he hadn’t been able to read his uncle. It had taken a while for him to get it. His uncle had been a cop most of his adult life. Cops, in Dooley’s experience, were good at hiding what they were thinking. They were good at bluffing when they knew you’d done something but they couldn’t prove it and when, therefore, they were trying to trip you up so you would hang yourself and save them the trouble. They were good at telling you that they understood exactly how it could have happened: The guy pissed you off, right, Ryan, and you got mad, right, and so you swung at him; you didn’t mean to, and you wouldn’t have done it if he hadn’t acted like such a jerk, right, Ryan? Telling you they understood when the truth was that they were probably disgusted with you for being such a lowlife; they were stringing you along so you’d finally come clean and say, yeah, I did it and here’s why, and then, there you were, hanging yourself again. Dooley couldn’t see why his uncle would have been any different when he was a cop, which meant that, if he wanted to, he could probably hide what was really going on in his head just the same as every other cop Dooley had ever known.

“What exactly did you mean when you said that?” Dooley said.

“What do you think I meant?”

“I thought you meant that you didn’t know about me. I thought you meant that you’d just found out about me.” Dooley had been pretty messed up at the time. Maybe his uncle was right. Maybe he hadn’t been thinking straight. “But that’s not it, is it?”

No answer.

“Is it?” Dooley said. He heard Lorraine’s voice in his head: You never came around.

His uncle didn’t answer.

“You knew she had a kid, didn’t you?” Dooley said. There was no other way to explain what Lorraine had said. “You knew about me. You knew I existed.” That had to be it. “You just didn’t know what things were like.” Say it. Ask him: Are you my father? That’s where Randall had been going with his questions. But, Jesus, did he really want to know? “Am I right?”

“I thought it would be easier if you and I started out with a clean slate,” his uncle said. “Without any baggage.”

“You mean, if we started out without me wondering where you’d been my whole life?”

It took a few moments before his uncle said, “Something like that.”

“So, what, you just didn’t care?” Or maybe he hadn’t wanted to face it. Maybe he couldn’t face it. Maybe that’s what all those cash payments were about. It sure as hell was what Randall had been hinting.

“I told you, Ryan. Lorraine and I didn’t get along.”

“But you knew she had a kid.”

“Yes.”

“And you never came to see me?”

He searched his uncle’s face but saw no emotion.

“No,” his uncle said.

“Why not?”

“What difference does it make?”

“It makes a difference,” Dooley said.

Nothing.

“The past couple of years,” Dooley said, “what’s that been all about?”

His uncle just sat there. Jesus, what a hard-ass.

“I know about the money,” Dooley said. “I know you were paying her regularly for at least the last couple of years.”

There it was, out in the open and hanging between them now, the complicated thing his uncle didn’t want to talk about. And what did his uncle do? He stood up and hammered on the door, summoning a guard, that’s what.

Shit.

That night: Customers looking to fry their brains with the latest in mindless entertainment. The busiest night of the week, and Dooley was stepping outside every time Kevin turned his back to try Beth’s cell number again.

Thinking about Beth.

Thinking about Lorraine, too, and about the regular cash payments that she regularly transformed into a good time—until six months ago when the partying had stopped and she’d opened up a savings account. His uncle had still been giving her money then. He’d seen the spreadsheets. Had she started saving all that money? She’d cleaned up her act, too. Were the two things related—saving instead of partying and getting herself together? And that day outside his school, she had looked good. She’d looked almost like a regular mom, not some cheap slut party girl. Why had she all of a sudden changed? Had she got religion? He couldn’t see that happening. But it had to be something. If there was one thing Dooley knew, it was that someone who was that long and that far gone didn’t just wake up one morning and think, hmm, why don’t I try the straight life for a while? No, there had to be a reason. Everyone he’d ever met who’d made the change had come face to face with a reason—a hard-core one. Was she sick? Sometimes that happened. People with lung cancer finally stopped smoking. People who were HIV-positive gave up the needle. Some people quit because they’d had a life-altering experience; maybe they’d climbed behind the wheel while under the influence and ended up killing or maiming or paralyzing someone. When that happens, what do you do, assuming they don’t lock you up for it? You either change or you get yourself more fucked up. Or maybe your doctor says, unless you make some serious lifestyle changes, you’ll be dead in six months. Maybe you don’t care. But if you do, if you’re not ready to check out, you make some changes. You start eating right, you exercise a little, you butt out. It’s always something. There’s always a reason.

Something had put Lorraine straight. But what?

Who would know? Who could tell him?

A hand fell on Dooley’s shoulder. He spun around.

Linelle. She said, “Kevin says to tell you if you don’t get back into the store right now and do your job, he’s going to write you up. He’s such an asshole.”

Dooley glanced through the store window and saw Kevin’s pinched face looking out at him.

“Tell him I’ll be there in a minute,” Dooley said.

“He’s an asshole, but he’s a pissed-off asshole, Dooley. This could get you fired. And if that happens, I’ll pretty much have to kill myself. You’re the only thing that makes this job tolerable.”

He looked at her. “Yeah?”

“Definitely,” she said. “I would have bled out a long time ago if it wasn’t for you.”

Good old Linelle. She always said the right thing.

“Two minutes, I promise,” he said. He punched in another number, talked fast, made an appointment, and then went inside and did something he’d never done before. He apologized to Kevin. Kevin was so stunned that all he could do was flap his gums; no words came out.

Dooley’s cell phone rang at one in the morning, just as he was getting into bed. It was Beth.

“I’ve been calling you,” Dooley said.

“My mother confiscated my phone,” she said, confirming one of Dooley’s theories and dispelling all the Beth-dumps-Dooley scenarios that had been plaguing him ever since her mother had marched out of his uncle’s house. “She totally freaked out, Dooley.” She was talking softly, as if she were afraid she might be overheard. “She told me she wants to send me down east to live with my uncle and aunt.”

Anything, Dooley thought, to keep her away from me.

“I told her if she did, I’d run away. She forbids me to see you anymore.”

“Beth, I—”

“I told her she can’t forbid me to do anything. I told her if she tries to stop me from seeing you, I’ll move out, get a job, and get my own place, and there’s nothing she can do about it. She’s trying to lay this trip on me, Dooley, how I’m all she has left and it’s her responsibility to make sure I get the very best—the best education, the best start in life, meet the best people, stuff like that. I know you probably don’t like her, but she’s not really the way she comes across. It’s just been hard, you know—first my father, then Mark. She worries all the time. She keeps thinking that something’s going to happen to me and then she won’t have anyone. She thinks we should go for counseling—her and me. I told her I would—she’s my mother. I don’t want to be fighting with her all the time. But I told her if I did it, she had to stop giving me a hard time about you. She finally said she would be prepared to do that.”

Dooley let out a sigh of relief.

“When can I see you?” he said.

“We’re up north,” Beth said. “We left right after school yesterday.”

“Up north where?”

“At a place in the country,” Beth said. She said something else, but her voice faded out.

“I can hardly hear you,” Dooley said.

“That’s because everyone’s asleep. I found my mother’s cell phone and snuck out of the house. I can see stars, Dooley. You can’t believe how many there are. I wish you were here.” Dooley wished he was, too. “My mom wanted us to spend the weekend connecting, you know? She says she feels like she doesn’t know me anymore. We went for a hike this morning and then we spent the afternoon at a spa. I won’t be back until late tomorrow night. But I wanted to talk to you. I didn’t want you to worry.”

“I’m glad you called,” Dooley said.

“So I’ll see you when I get back?”

“I can’t wait.”