Chapter 27

Chloe was leaving as I arrived. She cast a disdainful glance at the Rabbit as she let me in. “What, no congratulations?” I asked.

“You shouldn’t be here, stirring up trouble.”

“I would have asked you to marry me, but I never thought I had a chance.”

“Ha.”

“Good luck with law school,” I called as she reached the driveway. Not that she needed it. She’d already learned the greatest skill any lawyer can have, knowing when to walk away from a bad situation—one I so far hadn’t managed to perfect.

I turned and found myself alone in the foyer. There was no sound from the house around me. I was considering whether to retreat to the porch and ring the doorbell a second time when Christine appeared at the top of the curving balustrade.

“Oh. Hi. I’ll be right down.”

Watching her manage the stairs, I had a vision of her in twenty years making the same tipsy descent in a house just as rich as this one, her face deepened with age, her tight body gone to flab, her liver swollen with secrets.

“My parents are in hiding,” she said with a delicious smile, leaning in for a kiss. “They don’t want to see you.”

“We could just go out to dinner and live happily ever after.”

Her smile and eyes widened. “I’m not going to let them hide.”

I thought about what Jeanie had said about Christine using me rather than the other way around. I wanted to tell her about Teddy, but before I had the chance she turned and went down the hall through the dining room to her father’s office. “Gerald!” she called, rapping on his door. She came back into the foyer, planting a kiss on my lips in passing, and proceeded to the other end of the long hall where her mother’s office was. “Mother!” she called. “Our guest is here!”

She rejoined me in the foyer, twining her arm through mine.

Her father was the first to appear. He looked older than he had the last time I’d seen him, dark circles under his eyes.

“Good evening, Dr. Locke.”

“Good evening,” he said, giving me a look suggesting he knew my game, whatever it was. “You sure work quickly.”

“So Christine has told you our news.” I offered my hand but he didn’t take it.

“There you are,” he said. It was Greta coming toward us from the other direction.

“What kind of man are you, Mr. Maxwell?” she asked, getting in my face.

“Greta,” Gerald said soothingly. He put a hand on my arm and another on his wife’s, turning us gently away from each other. “Why don’t Leo and I have a drink in my office.”

To Christine he said, “Put on some jazz, something celebratory. I have a feeling it’ll be called for once Leo and I have talked.”

Christine gave him a quizzical look but went into the living room with her mother. I followed him down the hall into his office.

As before, he poured us each a Scotch. When we’d settled in our places—he behind the desk, I lurking at the bookshelves—he said, “Normally a groom has this conversation with his future father-in-law before the engagement. And normally the groom, not the father-in-law, initiates the conversation. A father’s blessing doesn’t count for much anymore. Children do what they’re going to do regardless of how the parents feel. But from the day his daughter is born a man begins to anticipate the hour when another man pays him the respect of asking his permission to marry her.”

His drink sat untouched on the blotter before him. He looked at me expectantly, leaning back. “Please. I’m all ears.”

“Cut the crap, Gerald.” I downed my Scotch in one burning swig. “If I’d wanted your blessing, or whatever you called it, I would have asked for it. I didn’t come here to play sentimental games.”

I went around behind him for another drink. When I came back out to the front of the desk his face had gone pale.

“You must know that a Nevada annulment is about as easy to get as a Nevada marriage license. They might as well come in pairs. That’s what you really brought me in here to discuss, or am I wrong?”

“I hope you don’t view marriage so flippantly as to think you could just return it like—like a wrong pair of shoes.” His tone was unctuous.

To prove to myself that I wasn’t nervous, I went to the bookshelf and took down the first book that caught my eye—an edition of The Sun Also Rises. Flipping through the pages I saw that my hands were steady, not shaking, and I felt more sure of myself. I read a paragraph on bullfighting, then put it back on the shelf. I tried to remember everything Teddy’d taught me about cross-examination and all that I had learned from watching him. There was a definite technique to leading a witness away from your true target, letting him think he knows what you’re after, then striking home.

“Isn’t it customary in these situations for the father-in-law to ask the son-in-law how much it will cost to make the son-in-law go away—and stay away? Ever since I met Christine I’ve been anticipating this conversation with you. I thought you might start the bidding, let me know how much you think I’m worth.”

“Not one penny,” he said, tapping the desk with each word for emphasis and looking very satisfied with himself.

“You like home videos, Gerald?”

He didn’t answer, but I saw that I had his attention.

“Most people don’t think about hidden cameras, but they should. Almost anywhere you go now, it’s a possibility. And anyone with a camera can put the video on a computer, put it on the Internet. All these celebrity sex tapes, for instance. It’s not that celebrities are having more sex. It’s just that it’s gone viral. You can make a million copies as easily as blowing your nose.”

“I’m aware that my daughter has sex. If you’ve secretly videotaped your activities, that’s despicable, but I’m not going to make it my problem. I can’t shelter my children from humiliations they bring on themselves.”

“Not her and me. What if I told you I’d obtained a video of your daughter erotically asphyxiating her thesis adviser? Marovich. You remember him. He was the one whose body your son was caught trying to throw into a Dumpster down by Candlestick. It’s been generally assumed that he was strangled at the Green Light, but there’s no evidence of that other than Keith’s word. It could have happened anywhere. And anyone could have done it.”

From the other room came the notes of a jazz piano piece.

Satisfaction now appeared in Gerald’s voice. “Just as I thought. You don’t care about my daughter at all.”

“My guess is you’ll pay me to break the marriage, if it comes to that, no matter what you say now. Surely you’d pay a little more to put the rest of Christine’s troubles behind her?”

“Why should I pay you? Christine will realize her mistake in marrying you soon enough, if she hasn’t already. All I have to do is wait, and the marriage will fall apart on its own. If she stays with you, she’ll be unhappy. And to be honest with you, I’m ready to hand off responsibility for her unhappiness to someone else. When things come tumbling down, you’ll be the one to blame, not me. And I’ll have my daughter back.”

“All right, we’re not married,” I told him. “It’s a farce, a sham.”

He blinked. He started to rise. “Then I can show you the door.”

“That’s one option. But if you do that, I’ll have to tell your wife about this video of Christine and her dearly departed professor. Maybe even show it to her. I thought you and I might settle this without involving Greta. After all, it’s a serious matter. You’ve already got one child in trouble with the law. Do you want a pair of them?”

He hesitated, then sat back down.

“My brother received a copy of the video a week or so before he was shot. As Keith’s lawyer, he felt he had an obligation to turn it over to the police. He confronted your daughter, and they ended up in bed. Maybe he blackmailed her, maybe it was more complicated. She thought he’d destroy the video. He still intended to turn it over and told her as much.

“The shooter is described as a tall young man wearing baggy pants, a baggy sweatshirt, a baseball cap, and sunglasses. People were looking at the gun, not at what may or may not have been underneath the shooter’s clothes. No one looked too closely at this person’s face. I’m not saying Christine shot my brother, but if the police knew about the video, they’d have to look into that possibility. At the very least, they’d have to ask some uncomfortable questions.”

“You said before that you want to find your brother’s attacker. Isn’t it your obligation to turn the video over to them, not use it to extort money from me?”

I shrugged. “The video’s a red herring. She says she had nothing to do with it, and I believe her. But I think she knows more than she’s telling me. I think she’s protecting someone.”

Gerald’s face was a knot. He was thinking so hard he seemed to forget I was there. Finally he said, “And if I pay you, you’ll deliver the video to me, and the police will never know it existed. Is that your proposition?”

“Remember that we’re talking about two crimes here. Someone may have murdered Marovich, and someone absolutely tried to murder my brother. Last time I was here, you told me Keith may have killed before. Now I’m wondering whether it wasn’t so much a lie as a half lie, whether you didn’t have some inkling about your daughter’s possible involvement and were trying to keep me away from her. I’m not too fond of Keith myself. I can see how life might be more comfortable for everyone if he were out of circulation, but that’s really none of my business. Christine offered me twenty thousand dollars for the video. The only reason she’s playing along with this little charade tonight is because she’s hoping I’ll decide to take the money and hand it over. Now maybe she has twenty thousand bucks to give me, and maybe she doesn’t. Either way, I’m expecting you to make me a better offer.”

“You’re insinuating that I want my son to go to prison for a crime he didn’t commit.”

“He’s crazy. And almost certainly dangerous. I can’t help thinking maybe you’re right. Maybe prison is about the best he can expect. So how much is it worth? The photos from the private detective your wife hired to look into your affair with my mother sixteen years ago, that video of Christine, the whole package?”

“So you have the photos.” He was silent. “Just out of curiosity, how did you get them?”

“My brother was going to make them Exhibit A in a habeas corpus brief he was drafting. I assume he got them from Keith. Me, I’m not interested in filing any briefs. I want to start my own practice. You won’t find any of your relatives on my client list, believe me. I plan to represent nothing but drug dealers and pimps. The pay is small but it’s a constant stream, none of this feast-or-famine cycle my brother deals with. To get off on the right foot I’d need something in the range of, oh, two hundred thousand dollars.”

“This kind of blackmail is beyond belief. It’s one thing coming from Keith, but from a stranger—” Gerald broke off.

“Did I say anything about blackmail? I had in mind a lawsuit. Wrongful death. She wasn’t a stranger to me. She was my mother. As far as I’m concerned, these are settlement negotiations. The statute of limitations is long past, but never mind. Of course we would include a secrecy agreement in whatever settlement we reach.”

“Settlement negotiations.” He gave a halting sigh, then ran his hand through his hair. “It will take me some time to raise that kind of money, if we’re talking about cash. I’ll have to sell investments. It might take up to a week for the transfer to come through.”

“You see now why I thought you might not want to involve Greta.”

“Don’t tell me what I see or don’t see.” He rose. “We’d better join them.”

We hadn’t settled on a definite amount, and we certainly hadn’t shaken hands, but no matter. The money wasn’t what I was after.

He left his drink untouched on the desk. I went through the door ahead of him, my skin crawling as I gave him my back. Christine was lounging on a leather sofa. She looked up with a dazed expression and her newlywed smile. She was sipping something clear and brilliant and cold-looking. A martini. I glanced inquiringly at the drink, and with a twist of her head she indicated a cabinet on the far side of the room.

The French doors were closed and the curtains were drawn. I made one for myself and sat on the sofa beside her. She rested her hand on my arm; I put my free hand on her shoulder. Her father was at the stereo. The piano halted and something edgier came on, all screeching horns and saxophones.

“Is it come to that, dear?” Greta asked, walking in from the hall.

Gerald stabbed a finger at the stereo and the music turned off.

“So you made the most of your visit to Stanford,” Greta said, her anger under control now as she sank into the wing chair across from us.

“We’ll have to get on the waiting list for married-student housing,” I said to Christine. “I can sneak into classes at the law school while I’m waiting for my practice to get off the ground.”

Gerald had gone to the window and was looking out through a gap in the curtains.

“So you’re hanging out your shingle,” Greta said. “What sort of practice?”

“Criminal defense. Once it’s in the blood you can’t get it out.”

“You’ve never thought about prosecution? Don’t the best defense attorneys always begin as prosecutors?”

“Some. But there is a difference between the two sides. The prose­cutor’s job is to take an eye for an eye. They call it justice. To me it seems more like revenge. Revenge is fine. Actually, I approve of revenge. I just wish they’d call it that instead of trying to invoke some lofty principle. A defense attorney tries to save life rather than destroy it. That’s the difference.”

“I must be old-fashioned,” Gerald said, coming from the window to stand behind his wife, his face a twist of contempt. “I don’t have any problem destroying a life that needs to be destroyed, to use your words. The way I see it, we’re too soft on offenders in this society. Especially in this city.”

“You’re certainly entitled to your opinion. You’ve come by it the hard way, I’m sure. I know you’ve had some experience in these matters. If the DA’s office had taken the hard line from the beginning, Keith would have been out of harm’s way years ago, snug as a bug in prison, and it sounds like a lot of trouble would have been avoided.”

Gerald looked pained, as if I’d done something on the rug. Christine sat with her hand on my leg, her head lolling onto my shoulder. Greta studied her hands, then looked at me, her eyes swimming but with a diamond hardness behind the tears, the same hardness that was in her eyes the last time I was here, when she’d spoken to me of a mother’s need to touch and hold her son, when she’d begged me to find Keith.

“I’m afraid I didn’t have much luck convincing Keith to see you,” I said. “In fact, he pushed me off the rocks at Lands End. Now why would he do a thing like that?”

Greta’s voice was suddenly sharp. “He pushed you or he was forced to defend himself?”

“Is that the way you heard it?” I asked.

Gerald looked at me, then gazed steadily at his wife with surprise and incomprehension.

“What do you want me to tell you?” Greta asked her husband. “That my son came to the house and I turned him away? He won’t be back. He was here yesterday and gone again in half an hour. I gave him enough to last quite a while this time.”

“What happens when the money runs out?” I asked. “And it will run out, possibly much sooner than you expect. What happens the next time he shows up on your doorstep?”

“An excellent question.” Gerald shot me another glance; then his eyes went back to Greta. “How much did you give him?”

“Yes, how much?” Christine was perking up beside me, as if the show she’d been waiting for was finally about to start. She took a sip of her drink and moved her hand up my thigh. The skin of my leg twitched and crawled.

“Enough,” Greta said.

Gerald chopped the air in disgust and stalked from the room.

“We might as well go in,” Greta finally said. “There’s no point waiting for your father.”

The food was in a pair of warming dishes on the sideboard in the dining room. The first warming dish held grilled salmon. The second, roasted potatoes and sliced beets.

It made me increasingly uneasy to know that Keith had been here since our encounter.

“She’s lying,” Christine whispered as her mother served the food. “Keith’s still here.”

I gasped. “How do you know?”

Her mother was coming toward us from the sideboard with a steaming plate in each hand.

“His shoes in the closet,” was all Christine had time to say as we parted toward opposite sides of the table.

Greta took her place at the head of the table. She sat thoughtfully for a moment, then looked up at me with a completely changed face, a look of resignation. Her voice when she spoke was also changed. “I’ll write you a check now for two hundred thousand dollars.”

I raised my eyebrows. “If?”

“If you agree to annul the marriage and stay away from us. Christine included.”

“You could have bargained me lower, but all right. Two hundred it is.”

“Wait, don’t I have a say?” Christine asked. But her heart wasn’t in it.

Greta rose. “I’ll write you a check immediately.”

“I don’t get to stay for supper?”

She sounded almost happy. “You’re welcome to eat all you want before I come back.”

I looked across the table at Christine as the door swung closed behind her mother. “Presumably that includes you,” I said. “One last kiss and good-bye?”

She flushed, frowning.

“What’s she think she’s buying with the two hundred thousand?” I mused. “Surely she doesn’t give a damn one way or the other about me and you. She must know it’s a sham.”

“She’s afraid of something,” Christine said. “She doesn’t like having you here. It makes her nervous.”

“At least your father knew what he was paying for. I told him about the disk. About the photos. But Greta hasn’t heard any of that. As far as she knows, I’m just some rude kid who wormed his way into her little girl’s heart.”

She gave a curt laugh. “Not into my heart. You’re getting your money, more than you could ever have bargained on. I want the disk.”

“What’s Keith doing here, though? It would be a shame if we left without seeing him.” Then something shifted in me, like an iceberg rolling over, and I saw everything in a new light. “He did it. It wasn’t Santorez, and it wasn’t your father. Keith shot Teddy, and now he’s scared. He came running to Mommy and begged her to fix it. She knows, and she thinks I know, too. She thinks I have proof. That’s why she’s so eager to buy me off.”

I rose from my chair just as Greta came in.

“Here’s your check, Mr. Maxwell,” she said, holding it out to me. “Now if you’ll permit me, I’ll show you the door. My lawyer will be in touch to confirm the terms we discussed.”

I looked down at the check in my hand. Two hundred thousand dollars. An incredible sum. “There’s no marriage,” I said and looked back up at her. “It’s just a little joke we were playing. Maybe that changes things.” I made to hand the check back.

She wouldn’t take it. “I want you to have the money. Please. Just leave.”

“What if money wasn’t what I came for? What if I want something else?”

“Please,” she said again. “Just take it and go. It’s all you’re ever going to get from this house. Perhaps if it does you some good—”

From somewhere above us there came a shout, then a thump. Followed by the sound of a heavy object rolling very fast down the stairs.

Christine was first through the door to the hall, and I was right behind her. We found Gerald Locke lying unconscious on the landing, bleeding from a gash in his forehead. At the top of the stairs stood his son.

Keith had a gun in his hand down at his side, a nine-millimeter automatic like the one that had been used to shoot my brother. As soon as he saw me he raised it in our direction.

“See, I told you he would come,” he said to Greta. “We can’t ever get rid of him.”

“You didn’t expect to see me?” I asked.

“Mother, what should I do?”

“Put the gun down,” Greta said.

Christine straightened as her father groaned and sat up, holding his head.

“I’ve written him a check for two hundred thousand dollars,” Greta said, going to her husband’s side and putting her hand on his shoulder. “I should think that would be more than sufficient to keep him quiet. Now put the gun down, Keith.”

Instead, he aimed it at my chest. “I thought you were dead for sure. That’s what I told Christine. I said, ‘He’s dead, we’ve got nothing to worry about, you’re in the clear.’”

I was frozen, staring at the barrel of the gun, wishing it in my own hand.

Christine scoffed. “You’re such a liar,” she said. Then to me: “He’s lying.”

“Your father’s going to be okay,” Greta said. “He didn’t know you were here. You surprised him, that’s all.”

“I’m okay,” Gerald said in a gravelly voice. “I’ll be fine.”

“He was going to throw me out. Right down the stairs. Instead I threw him down the stairs.”

“Let’s at least go in and sit in the living room,” Greta said. “Can we do that?”

Keith came down. Gerald got to his feet with his wife’s help, and we all went into the living room. Christine and I sat on the couch as before. Gerald sat in one of the armchairs, Greta in the other. Keith stood.

I was still holding the check in my hand. I looked down at it for a moment, then tore it slowly in half, put the pieces together, and tore again, repeating until there was nothing but tiny shreds. I let them snow down on the carpet.

Keith addressed his mother: “What are we going to do?”

Gerald frowned. “We?” Greta didn’t have an answer.

Keith glowered at his father; then his look settled on Christine. He stepped forward and slashed her viciously across the face with the pistol. “You’re such a whore.”

Blood ran from the gash on Christine’s cheek. Her eyes blazed.

“You think you can buy me off just like him?” Keith said, his anger returning to his mother. “There isn’t any difference for you between your own son and that—person?”

“The difference is you take her money and I don’t,” I said.

Keith pointed the gun at me. “Fuck you.”

“You’ve got two choices. One, you shoot me dead and make a better shot than you did when you shot my brother. Yeah, I know you’re the one who shot him. Two, you walk out of here with your mother’s money and do a better job of disappearing than you did the last time.”

He walked toward me, holding the gun straight-armed. To reach me he had to pass Christine. She stuck out her leg and tripped him, and he came crashing down onto the coffee table. The gun fired. I didn’t see where the shot hit. I looked down and saw the gun on the carpet at my feet. I scooped it up.

Nobody seemed to be hurt. I let out a deep breath. “Get up,” I told Keith. “Sit on the couch with your sister.”

He sat.

Still holding the gun, I took out my phone and dialed Detective Anderson’s number. I told him where I was, that I’d been attacked by one of my brother’s former clients, that I’d disarmed him, and that the gun appeared to be the same one that Teddy had taken a bullet from.

I ended the call and turned to Greta. “Gerald was having an affair with my mother. You found out, and shortly afterward Caroline was killed. Do I have that much right?”

She wasn’t stupid. She knew better than to talk. We weren’t in a court of law, and there was nothing in the world I could do to make her.

“You must have become suspicious and hired a private investigator to follow Gerald and take those pictures,” I said. “You wanted the children to know the truth about their father. Keith must have been, what? Sixteen? Maybe you drove him by the house, maybe he went there on his own or followed his father. My guess is that he wanted sex and thought he could get it from the mistress. Isn’t sex what all sixteen-year-old boys want? When she wouldn’t give it up, he raped and killed her.”

“Shut your filthy mouth,” Keith said.

“I was ten years old. I was the one who found her. Afterward you didn’t know more than you had to know. You bought off the private investigator to keep his mouth shut, and you sent Keith away to school. That should have been the end of it, but Keith flunked out. He came home and started getting into trouble. And when my brother became a lawyer, Keith looked him up. Became friends with him. Started whispering in his ear. Eventually he pulled out the investigator’s pictures.

“Teddy must have realized Gerald couldn’t have been the killer. He figured out that Keith killed my mother. Caroline. And Keith shot him for it. Martha drove the car. Keith shot her, too, once he figured out I was on his trail.”

Greta’s hand was at her throat. Something I’d said seemed to have stricken her, maybe that I’d been the one to find Caroline. I was right, I saw. She’d covered for Keith all these years. She and her husband.

“For God’s sake, Greta, don’t talk to him,” Gerald said.

Greta glanced at her husband, then bowed her head.