Cold Springs (19 page)

Race scowled, but he had to blink to keep from crying.

Chadwick picked up a bullet from the tangle of clothes, turned the brass in his fingers. “You prefer guns over knives, Race?”

The boy hugged himself tighter.

“Your mother was stabbed to death,” Chadwick continued. “Six- or seven-inch blade.”

By the front door, the radio kept playing—Marvin Gaye, ridiculously happy music in the big empty space of the building.

“You think it was me?” Race asked. “That what you think?”

“Police found two people's blood at the scene. Attacker and victim. DNA says they were related.”

Race put his forehead down, rubbed it against his knees. “No. No, no.”

“Mallory's dad says he's been getting blackmail letters from your brother Samuel. That true?”

The boy was shivering.

“Hey, little man,” Jones tried, her voice softer now. “Come on. Just answer him.”

Race said something into his knees.

“What?” Chadwick asked.

“I said yeah. Samuel sent those letters. Said Zedman was gonna get his.”

“Get his. For what?”

Race glared up at him. “You know for what . . . your kid. She used to come around. Slumming and shit. Samuel didn't want to fall for her, but he did, and then you go and keep them apart. And she kills herself, and the police are all like—she was infected. She was poisoned. How you think that made him feel?”

Chadwick felt Kindra Jones staring at him.

Out the open window, the sun flooded from behind a cloud, cutting a yellow arc of light down the side of the next building. A jackhammer pounded a five-beat cadence. The loose fire escape bobbed and swayed on its bent ladder, ten feet out from the window.

“Why the Zedmans, then?” Chadwick asked. “If Samuel was mad at me, why take it out on them?”

“You left, man. Not so easy to get to you. You didn't have nothing left to steal. Zedman—that was different. You all a piece of the same world, man—Laurel Heights. All that shit. Samuel hates all of you.”

“And yet he sent you there.”

The look in Race's eyes wasn't anger, exactly, but a memory of anger, as if he were hearing a story whispered over a telephone. “He used to say it was my duty. Show them up. Improve myself. But he hated the place. After they kicked me out—he said fuck it. Those kids—I used to come home crying. They'd ask me what kind of car my momma drove. And what was I supposed to say? My momma take the bus? She drive whatever her boyfriend's driving? They used to ask why I wore the same shoes every day. And I got to look at them like, ‘This is the only pair I have.' And they just stare at me, okay? And then they talk over me, the rest of the day. Improve myself? So I can be like them? Hell with that.”

“What'd that Zinn book say about the Revolution?”

“Said it didn't have nothing to do with freedom principles and Locke and Hume and all that shit. Said it was rich white landowners escaping their debts from England and setting themselves up to get even richer and more powerful.”

“What'd you think of that?”

“I think the book was written by a rich white man. So the Revolution must've worked.”

Chadwick smiled in spite of himself. “You must've had some interesting discussions in history class. Mrs. Zedman was right.”

“'Bout what?”

“You. She believed in you. Still does. Told me you were one of the smartest kids she'd ever had at the school.”

He dug his finger against the cement, sketching invisible cursive letters.

“You really hate Laurel Heights?” Chadwick asked.

“Said so, didn't I?”

“Then why did you warn Ms. Reyes?”

He lifted his finger, as if the floor were suddenly hot. “What?”

“You showed up at Ms. Reyes' house last week, told her to check on the school's money. The next day it was gone. Why did you try to warn her?”

“She's lying.”

“Eight years of your life, Race. Mrs. Zedman was always in your corner. Maybe you were mad at her for expelling you—maybe that's why you went to Ms. Reyes instead, but I don't think you wanted the school destroyed. Whoever did that, get away from him. You don't owe him any loyalty.”

“Samuel protected me. He was good . . .”

“Thirty-two stab wounds, Race. Your mother was murdered and no one protected her. The truth.”

“Mr. Chadwick,” Kindra said.

Her expression was hard, full of angry sympathy for the kid. “We got that other appointment, you know?”

Chadwick glanced around the loft, trying to recapture his feeling that Race was a dangerous person. He had needed to believe that, almost as much as he needed to believe Samuel Montrose was dangerous. But he saw only a young man who needed less help than most of the kids he worked with each year—whose circumstances were harder, maybe, but not because of anything he had done.

Chadwick could understand Ann's desire to help him—he could understand why she'd wanted him at Laurel Heights. But he wondered if Ann had done Race any favors—if Asa Hunter wasn't right about the boy being corrupted by the girl, and not vice versa.

“Your grandmother said you saw too much,” Chadwick said. “What did she mean?”

“Nana don't know what she's saying, half the time.”

“If you want to talk,” Chadwick said, “if you want to get out of here, you want anything—call.”

He took out his business card. He kept it extended until Race took it.

The boy looked up, his eyes red, but the look of defiance was starting to re-form. “What's this Cold Springs place like?”

“Strict,” Chadwick said. “You go through levels, have to learn survival skills out in the woods. Learn a trade on the ranch. Most kids get their GED. Some get college credit.”

“Mallory out in the woods?” Race wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “I can't see that. Texas—I thought that was like desert.”

“Not this part. Green and hilly. There's a river. Rainy and cold this time of year.”

Race seemed to be imagining it, stretching his mind around a new alien planet.

“Keep the card,” Chadwick said. “Call me.”

Race glanced at Jones. “Whatever, man. Fuck you, anyway.”

But Race called them before they got to the door. “Hey, Chadwick. You asked why Samuel didn't come after you? Ask yourself what would hurt you worse than leaving you the way you were, okay? See how gifted you are.”

Back at the car, by silent agreement, Chadwick took the wheel. His hands were numb, his vision tunneled to the stripe in the road and the feet of pedestrians in the crosswalk. He didn't look at Kindra, didn't pay much attention when she took out her cell phone and had a hushed conversation with somebody named Clarisse, something about whether or not King Hunan still served coconut chicken. Blocks later, after she'd hung up and they were well into Berkeley, she said, “Pull over. You're dropping me here.”

“What?”

“Just do it.”

He wedged the car into a loading zone on College and Ashby. Kindra opened her door, put one foot outside, turned back.

“I got some friends in Teach for America,” she told him. “They live right down the street. We're going out to dinner now—that'll give you a few hours to yourself.”

“Why?”

“Because it beats me slugging you,” she said tightly. “What were you thinking—messing with that boy's mind?”

“I wasn't.”

“Oh come on, Chad. ‘You want anything, call.' Please. His mama's dead. You saw his grandmother. That kid has been jerked around enough without your false sympathy.”

“I meant what I said.”

“I liked you better when you were honest—when you were worried you'd turn him in and feel good about it.”

Down the street, the distant white Campanile of UC Berkeley glowed in the afternoon light. Chadwick wished he could explain to Kindra, but he knew he couldn't. Race Montrose and his dead mother tore at his soul, his conscience.

“Race wasn't telling the truth,” Chadwick said. “I had to press him.”

“You think—” Jones stopped herself, bit back her words.

“What?”

“Forget it.”

“What were you going to say?”

“You pushed that kid until he told you about his brother. You get what you want—you get to take the guilt for your daughter. All the guilt you can eat. You push him and now you think he's lying. Maybe you should've pushed your rich friend as much as you pushed that kid.”

“Zedman?”

“You left him, Chad. He told you to leave, so you did. Real question you didn't ask the kid—what the fuck is the blackmail about? They been messing with Zedman for years, haven't they? And I think you got an idea what your friend was into. The man wanted to tell you, too, but he couldn't do it with me and that crazy asshole, Pérez, there. You ask me, you ran from the hard choice, and you're a fool if you don't go see him again, try to get him alone. That's why I'm going out to dinner. Give you a chance to do something right for a change. Now get lost. I'll meet you—what, about nine. Montgomery Street station.”

Chadwick waited for his stomach to stop twisting. She was right, of course. He was starting to understand, and he didn't want to.

“You all right on BART?” he asked.

Jones sighed. “Yeah. Of course.”

“Ashby is the closest station from here,” Chadwick offered.

“I know that.”

They stewed in silence.

“Look,” Kindra said. “I come from a big family. I got little brothers, too, okay? I guess seeing Race just tugged at me a little more than I realized. I didn't mean to razz you.”

“That's okay.”

“You could come to dinner with me and my friends,” Jones offered, without enthusiasm. “Forget what I said.”

“No thanks.”

“All right.” Jones' voice was suddenly tight again. “No problem. Nine o'clock.”

She got out and slammed the door.

Chadwick watched her push through the pedestrian traffic toward a Chinese restaurant, and disappear inside. He pulled away from the curb and headed back toward the Bay Bridge, telling himself he had no destination in mind, but knowing exactly where the road would take him, whether he wanted it to or not.

16

John Zedman dreamed of a blasted-out apartment building—the kind of property he would purchase only if he were preparing it for the wrecking ball.

In the dream, he stood high up on one of the top floors, the interior walls stripped away, the windows gutted so that the night wind ripped through his jacket and sweater. In the distance, the lights of the hills shimmered like birthday candles.

He was holding his .22 pistol to Chadwick's forehead—his old friend Chadwick, who had lashed their lives together like burning galleons, slept with his wife, destroyed his family.

Chadwick knelt before him, eyes downcast, waiting for John's decision.

John's trigger finger tightened of its own volition, like wet rope contracting in the sun.

He woke up and his hand hurt from squeezing on the gun, but it wasn't a gun. He was holding a Laurel Heights yearbook. He had fallen asleep looking at pictures from Mallory's kindergarten year, the only year they'd all been together—Mallory, Katherine, Ann, Chadwick. All of them alive and well at the same school. Nineteen ninety-three. Snapshots from the end of time.

John remembered thinking, in 1993,
We can take care of this.

He remembered his confidence, the giddy feeling that came from riding a wave of financial success, feeling as invulnerable as a god or a sixteen-year-old driver. But the memory was cold and empty. That had been some other man, someone who had withered and died the same night as Katherine Chadwick.

Even those last hours at the auction, buying Chadwick a drink, sparring with him on the playground, John had had a sense of foreboding. He'd known then that his life would come to this—his family disintegrated, his friends gone, replaced by hirelings.

All he cared about was Mallory, but the past nine years he'd had another child to nurture—his own guilt growing inside him, a burden so huge it sometimes flipped into anger, made him drink and smash picture frames and lash out at the only people who mattered. He had hit his wife. He had threatened his daughter. He had done much worse.

He wanted to explain to Chadwick that he didn't hate Race Montrose. He had paid for Race's tuition willingly; he'd felt almost relieved when the first blackmail letter came, years ago.

He was a father, goddamn it. He understood that the child was not to blame. He hadn't held a grudge against the boy, at least not at first.

Even when Mallory and Race got out of control, when Race Montrose had ruined his daughter, taught her to shoot up drugs and call her parents filthy names and unlatch windows at night to escape, John had tried to save her peacefully. He'd offered Talia Montrose money rather than unleashing Pérez. He'd been sure, then, that the letters were from Talia. He couldn't explain it, any more than he could explain how he knew when a buyer would close a deal, but he had sensed the voice of an angry mother behind those letters. So he had met with her face-to-face, treated her like a human being. And his plan had gone wrong. He had misjudged fatally.

He swallowed the cottony taste from his mouth, stared out his living room window at the sunrise until he realized with sickening disorientation that it was the sunset. He had fallen asleep after a Valium and half a bottle of wine—that same damn Chardonnay he'd meant to share with Norma Reyes—and after all that, he hadn't even managed to sleep the night. He'd taken a nap. A goddamn nap, like an old man.

He sat up. Someone was tapping a carpet tack into his left temple.

On the table, a silver lighter and a packet of tissues sat in a ceramic ashtray—the only piece of Ann's ceramic collection she'd forgotten to take when she moved out. Or maybe she'd left it on purpose.
You keep the ashtray, John. Figure it out.

John didn't smoke, didn't know anybody who smoked, but he kept the ashtray on his coffee table. He picked up the lighter, dug a tissue from the pack.

John sparked the lighter. He held his tissue to the flame and threw it in the air. It erupted into an orange tangle of thread and disappeared, the ashes so small they might have been dust motes.

Children loved that trick. Women, too, smiling even as they scolded him:
You'll give them bad ideas.
The problem was the tissue went too fast. Less than a second, and the show was over.

He tossed the lighter back in the ashtray and went out to the deck. The surf pounded cold and steady below. The wind was picking up. The day had been warm, but that was changing. The winter was remembering itself.

He almost called for Pérez to fetch him a coat, then he remembered Pérez was gone on his errand.

The thing in his stomach—the child-sized burden of guilt—began turning, kicking its small feet. Even if Chadwick was punishing him, even if the worst was true—how could he blame Chadwick? He deserved everything he got. Why had he told Pérez to act?

The safety of his daughter, he reminded himself. That made it necessary. He had to protect his daughter.

He had already planned their escape.

He would keep the money in the Seychelles account. Pérez would rescue Mallory, bring her to him. This time, he wouldn't wait for the courts to let him have his daughter. He would take her.

Fathers kidnapped their own daughters all the time. He read the papers. And most of those fathers did not have his resources.

Why hadn't he done this years ago? Cowardice. The need to be vindicated in his hometown, to win against Ann, to show he was not a quitter. But fuck all that. He and Mallory would just start again elsewhere. They would create a new home, a new life. If Chadwick could escape the past, then so could he.

He tried to taste the impending success of his plan, the way he could have years ago, but now it was salted with doubt. The FBI had already called—a special agent named Laramie who wanted to talk to him tomorrow about the Laurel Heights fund. Just procedure, his friends in the County Sheriff's Department assured him. But the Sheriff's Department could not protect him from this. He would have to be cool. He would have to be the consummate actor, the man who unloaded worthless blocks of real estate for billions, leaving the buyers certain they had discovered the next hub of a commercial renaissance. No more slip-ups. No weakness. He just had to get through a few more days alone, until Pérez came back with his daughter and the news that an old friend was dead.

He heard the distant rock-tumbler sound of car tires pulling up his drive, and he felt a spark of hope that it was Pérez. But that was impossible. Pérez would still be on his way to Texas.

Then, a warmer sensation hit him—Chadwick was coming back to apologize. Of course he was. John had heard the brittleness in his voice when he was last here. Chadwick wouldn't let things stand the way they were. He understood now how much John was suffering—what Chadwick had pushed him to. He would come back, and they would make amends. John would say, “It's a good thing. I was about to have you killed.” And Chadwick, simple old Chadwick who always needed John to lead—he would wonder forever if John had been joking.

The doorbell chimed.

John went to answer it, a hopeful smile forming on his lips for the first time in weeks.

The begonias in front of the house had been dying for a long damn time—dried leaves and flowers crusted so thick the new pink blooms looked like insects trapped emerging from their shells.

Samuel usually wouldn't have noticed, but he'd been thinking about Katherine all week. And those begonias were the kind of thing she got jacked up about.

He knelt down, picked a few of the withered petals, broke the cobwebs between the planter and the wall. Katherine whispered inside his head, talking the way she'd talked the last night she came to the West Oakland house—about dead morning glories and palm trees freezing and how she wanted to drift away into a garden somewhere and never come back.

Was Samuel going crazy?

Way he saw it, when somebody important died—didn't matter if you loved them or murdered them—you'd better take something from them. You'd better eat a little bit of their soul. Otherwise they were just gone—couldn't help you, couldn't change their mistakes—and thinking about that made Samuel uneasy. His mind started teetering on its high wire, the safety net down below unraveling in the darkness.

He looked up at John Zedman's door, felt his anger building again.

The week hadn't been easy. Between Zedman calling, trying to weasel out of the deal. Then Race betraying him, talking to that bitch Norma Reyes. Samuel didn't like people running from him, trying to slip out from under his control. If they did that too often, the way Talia had, they'd force him to pin them down for good.

He rang the doorbell, heard it fill the house with a long, tuning fork hum.

Down in the driveway was the blue sedan he'd rented—nondescript, nice big trunk, backed up as close to the house as Samuel could pull it. Cost him a shitload of money, renting it for two weeks, letting it sit in a parking garage near his condo, but Samuel hadn't known when he'd need it, and he knew he'd need it at a moment's notice. Tonight, the investment would pay off.

He heard somebody coming to the door, saw a shadow on the glass.

He slipped the DVD disc out of his left coat pocket—in case he got John. His other hand stayed in his right pocket, tightening around the grip of his pistol, in case he got Pérez.

John Zedman opened the door. His expectant, waiting-for-his-mistress kind of smile faded quickly.

“Hey,” Samuel said.

“What are you doing here?”

John had been drinking, that bad boy. His eyes were bloodshot, his nose webbed with capillaries. The way he stood blocking the doorway—nervous and pale, glancing down the street like he was looking for the cavalry—Samuel knew Pérez wasn't there. John had sent him away, maybe, so he could have time alone to think. Or better yet—maybe John was hoping Chadwick would come back.

“I'm with the prize patrol,” Samuel told him. “Invite me in.”

“Why the hell should I?”

He raised the movie disc. “It's about Chadwick.”

John's eyes latched on the DVD—not understanding, but hungry to, like an addict, like Katherine, the last night she'd visited.

He stepped back from his doorway.

There was a faint burning smell in the living room—the back windows were open to the sunset, the ocean turning the color of beer.

“Well?” Zedman demanded.

“Talk to me about the money.”

Zedman stole another glance at the DVD. He rubbed his fingers on the tail of his dress shirt. “You've got bad information. I don't know—”

“—what I'm talking about? Not what you said when you called Friday, John. Not what you said at all.”

Disbelief took over Zedman's face slowly, gripping it like a shot of novocaine. Samuel knew what he was thinking:
This
couldn't be who I've been afraid of.

Samuel had expected that. He was used to being underestimated.

“Chadwick sent you,” John said. “Is that it?”

“Sorry, John. Working this solo, and you don't even get why, do you?”

Zedman looked old and bent in that wrinkled tank top, those baggy pajama bottoms—like he should be using a walker.

“I'll see you buried,” he said. “I'll call the police—”

“And tell them what, John—how you stole twenty-seven million? How we know each other?”

Zedman's fists balled, his face turned the color of his dying begonias. “You couldn't do this alone. You wouldn't have the first clue.”

“You know, for a millionaire, you're a stupid fuck.”

Zedman charged him, but Samuel had been expecting that, too. His gun was already out of his pocket.

He pistol-whipped John across the left cheek, slammed him into the side of the fireplace.

John clawed his way up, but Samuel smashed the butt of the gun into his mouth, sent him back to the carpet.

Shit,
he told himself.
Slow down. Not here.

Zedman was kicking his legs feebly, trying to get up again. His upper lip had split open, blood making a stalactite down his chin, spattering the white bricks of the fireplace.

Samuel stared at the spots of blood, but he wasn't thinking of John Zedman. He was remembering Talia's house on a cold night with his little brothers yelling and stomping in the bedroom, Talia's music going in the kitchen while she argued with Ali. And Katherine coming in the door, crying, her lips cold when she kissed his cheek, saying: “This has to be the last time. Please. The last time, I promise. They found my stash.”

She told him why she was crying, why her father had gone to Texas, why she wanted to die—and Samuel tried to keep his anger from showing. Not just anger at Chadwick, but at Katherine, too. She was leaving him, after all that had happened. So he got her what she asked for, but something special, the uncut Colombian white, telling her, “This batch is a little weak.”

Standing on the porch, telling her goodbye, he had looked down at the little blue Toyota, dented up and smoking like a two-dollar pipe bomb, and saw the little girl's face in the window, just for an instant—the little girl who was Race's age. Samuel thinking,
They get to leave. They drive across the bridge and leave us like a zoo exhibit.

Samuel and Race and the rest of his family alone—unprotected, with Ali treating their mother like a side of beef to be tenderized, and ripping down his real father's metalwork, then coming around at night to Samuel's little sister, same way Elbridge used to do, only this time, who would take the gun out of Johnny Jay's toolbox? Samuel had to. If he didn't, who would?

So he watched Katherine and the little girl drive away in the old blue Toyota, and he was thinking,
No. You will not leave me behind. I will never let you go.

John Zedman had made it to his knees. He hunched over the fireplace, his smashed mouth swelling, his lips red and wet as a whore's. “I'm b'eeding. You hit me.”

“Get up,” Samuel told him.

“Won't get . . . the money.”

Samuel scooped a pack of Kleenex from the table, tossed it at Zedman. “Put that on your mouth. Then get the fuck up.”

Zedman pressed the whole wedge of tissues to his lip. Samuel watched the blood soak through, knowing that he should be moving things along, that time was not on his side, but Katherine's voice was still in his head, talking about flowers coming back after you tried to kill them, pleading with him that Zedman had paid enough already. Samuel should get the account numbers and leave. He could be on a plane tonight, him and Race. They could watch the sun come up tomorrow over Puerto Vallarta. Why add more voices in his head?