MY FATHER being who he is, the circumstances being what they are, Daniel Collins Harney is unsure how to respond. “Thank me,” he says.
“I want to thank you for covering up what happened to Valerie. You were concerned that the authorities might think it was a homicide, so you steered it toward a suicide finding. Called in a favor with the medical examiner, right? He was suspicious, but you leaned on him to call it suicide.”
Pop looks at Patti, realizes she gave up that info to me.
“You were the chief of detectives, after all,” I say. “You could control as much as you wanted. So you basically hijacked the whole investigation and drove it to only one conclusion.”
Pop gives me a sidelong glance. “We wanted to protect you,” he says.
“Patti wanted to protect me. Patti did. You had someone else’s protection in mind, didn’t you, Pop?”
He folds his arms. “I don’t know what you’ve cooked up about me, son, but whatever it is—”
“Personally,” I continue, “I feel kinda stupid for not giving it more thought myself. I mean, really, how did that gun safe get opened? But, in my shoes, it never remotely occurred to me that someone murdered Valerie. Never once. I walked in and found her dead, holding my gun in her hand. After everything we’d been going through, and her depression, it wasn’t exactly a huge stretch to believe the wound was self-inflicted, was it? So I never doubted suicide as the cause of death. Which meant I must have left that gun safe open, right?”
“Right,” he says.
“Sure,” I say. “At the time, it was the only reasonable conclusion. At the time.”
A little tic plays at the corner of Pop’s mouth, a trait he always had. Maybe a tell, if I was reading him, and I’ve read a lot of people in my time, but never my father. My father wasn’t someone I read. He was just my father.
“No matter how strung out I was back then, keeping vigil at the hospital,” I say, “I never would’ve left my depressed wife alone in our house with a fucking handgun. Someone got into that safe. Someone who knew that combination. And only three people in the world knew it, because we all had the same one—Mom’s birthday. Ten twelve forty-nine.”
Pop shakes his head.
“I didn’t give it up, and Patti didn’t give it up. That leaves you, Pop.”
“No,” he says.
“Don’t worry—I’m not looking to bust you. You’re spending the rest of your life in prison as it is. You’re never getting out. I’m not wasting my time on you. You’re not worth it to me. I just wanted you to know that I know. And I wanted to see if you’re man enough to admit it.”
Balled into a shell now, eyes downcast, face reddening, my father looks up at me. “You don’t know anything.”
“Tell you what, Pop. Let’s make it easy. Invoke your right to counsel.”
“What?”
“Go ahead, invoke. Say you want a lawyer. Then anything you say to me afterward is a violation of your rights, inadmissible in a court of law.”
“Billy—”
“Invoke, Pop. Protect yourself. I’m not gonna bust you. I just want to hear you admit it.”
“This is ridiculous,” he says. “If this is all you—”
“Look what I found when we were cleaning up the house, getting ready to put it on the market.” I pick up the book from my lap, the red ledger the feds never found, where Pop kept a list of the criminals he was protecting and how current they were on their payoffs.
“I’ve never seen that before in my life,” he says.
“Course not,” I say. “Someone else must have stuck it behind the water heater in the basement, tucked into that little slot where I used to keep my Playboy.”
He works his jaw, fuming.
“Parsing through these cryptic references to clients,” I say, “I couldn’t help but notice one in particular.” I flip to the page I’ve dog-eared, including this entry:
“I couldn’t help but notice,” I say, “that Vasyl Discovetsky ran a prostitution house located at 2607 Rockwell. And I’m guessing this says he paid you three hundred dollars a month for protection. Or was it three hundred dollars a week?”
“This conversation is over.”
“Speaking of conversations,” I continue, “I had a nice one with Mr. Discovetsky last night, after I caught him.”
Pop closes his eyes.
“Disco says he killed Valerie. And you gave him the combination to the safe, so he could use my gun and make the whole thing look like a suicide.”
A lie, of course, that last part. Disco’s still in a coma. So sue me.
“How could you do that, Daddy?” Patti’s voice trembles. She gets to her feet. “You had Val…killed.”
Pop’s expression breaks at Patti’s plea. He always had a soft spot for her, his princess.
We’re doing a version of good cop, bad cop, even if Patti doesn’t realize it.
“Honey, no, it wasn’t like that,” says Pop.
“Then what was it like?” I ask.
Pop, cornered, breaks eye contact. Runs a hand over his thinning, snowy hair, the shackles clanging on the table. He takes a deep breath, blows out.
“I want a lawyer,” he says.
As always: more worried about himself than anyone else.
I get to my feet. “That’s enough,” I say. “That’s all I wanted to hear. I don’t want to hear your excuses.”
“Son—”
“I’m not your son anymore. You’re nothing to me. Live with that.”
I push through the door. I don’t look back.