The Sheriff to whom John referred is my father, the Honorable Burton Steel, Senior, now in his third term but currently debilitated by the early onset of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, ALS, otherwise known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.
Her Honor is my father’s wife, my stepmother, the estimable Regina Goodnow, the Mayor of Freedom. I stopped by their house, my childhood home, to deliver the news in person.
As is generally the case when I get my first glimpse of my father these days, I’m forced to conceal my shock at the level of his deterioration. Once a powerful and towering figure, the old man’s disease had diminished him considerably.
When he had received his diagnosis, he summoned me and insisted I join him in the San Remo County Sheriff’s Department. I had been living in Los Angeles, an LAPD homicide detective attached to the Hollywood division. Conflicted as I was about him and our at-best testy relationship, I answered his call and returned to Freedom and a lifestyle that grew disagreeable quickly.
My life was further complicated by his continued insistence that I be prepared to assist him in taking his own life whenever he deemed it advisable.
We had a great deal of unfinished business between us, but the encroaching ethical challenge was paramount in my mind. It took precedence over any presumed detente we might somehow manage to achieve.
When I arrived at the house, he was seated at the breakfast table in his bathrobe and slippers, a plate of uneaten scrambled eggs and sourdough toast growing cold in front of him. He looked up at me and muttered, “Murdered?”
“Murder? Someone was murdered?” my stepmother inquired as she bustled into the kitchen.
As usual, she regarded me warily, at once on her guard and, as always, ready to spring to the offense regarding any issue on which she and I might disagree. Which meant nearly everything.
“Did you offer Buddy some breakfast?” she asked my father, who mumbled some kind of unintelligible response.
She turned to me. “Buddy? Coffee? Eggs? Anything?”
“Thank you, Regina. I’m fine.”
“Burton’s not eating,” she proclaimed, ignoring the fact that my father was still in the room. “The doctor keeps telling him he needs to eat in order to keep up his strength. But does he listen? Not on your life, does he listen. Look at him. He looks anorexic. He refuses to eat.”
The Sheriff didn’t respond. I could detect the first spark of anger igniting in him.
“What’s this about a murder?” the Mayor asked, taking a seat across from my father.
“Henry Carson,” I said.
“Who?”
“Freedom High. Assistant principal. Stabbed to death.”
“Stabbed,” she said. “My God, how gruesome.”
“I wanted you both to know.” I hoped to appease the two birds with a single stone.
My father gazed at me through sorrowful eyes that begged compassion for his diminished faculties. His voice, once so forceful and commanding, had been reduced to a scratchy whisper. “Where?”
“In his office.”
“Suspects?”
“None yet. But I’m just starting. I’ll keep you in the loop.”
“Does the press have the story?” Regina quizzed me. “Will I be asked for a comment?”
I inwardly smiled in wonder at how she always managed to make herself the center of any and every event. Her question was a rhetorical one. My guess was she had already determined in which order she would summon her makeup, hair, and sartorial team. Her public relations reps, also. “A murder won’t reflect well on Freedom.”
“I’m sure you’ll charm the press in your usual manner, Regina.”
“She’s got the fucking media in her back pocket,” the Sheriff rasped.
“Oh, Burton,” she yammered, “must you always be so profane?”
Which I took as my cue to get out of there.