J is for Judgment (35 page)

“Wait a minute, Mac. Someone took some shots at us Thursday night. Wendell made it home, but suppose they flushed him out the next day? Maybe they caught up with him and killed him.” I picked up the check and glanced at it casually. The amount was twenty-five hundred dollars, made out to me. “Oh, thanks. This is nice. I usually don’t bill until the end of the month.”

“This is final payment,” he said. He folded his hands in front of him on the desk. “I have to admit I wasn’t in favor of hiring you, but you’ve done a very nice job. I don’t imagine Mrs. Jaffe will give us any more trouble. As soon as you submit your report, we’ll turn the matter over to our attorney and he can see to the affidavits. We probably won’t need to take the matter to court. She can return any remaining monies and that will be the end of it. In the meantime, I see no reason we can’t
do business together in the future, on a case-by-case basis, of course.”

I stared at him. “This can’t be the end of it. We don’t have any idea where Wendell is.”

“Wendell’s current whereabouts are immaterial. We hired you to find him and you did that…quite handily, I might add. All we needed to do was show that he was alive, which we’ve now done.”

“But what if he’s dead?” I said. “Dana would be entitled to the money, wouldn’t she?”

“Ah, but she’d have to prove it first. And what’s she have? Nothing.”

I looked over at Mac, feeling dissatisfied and confused. He was avoiding my gaze. He shifted on his chair, clearly uncomfortable, probably hoping I wouldn’t make a fuss. I got a quick flash of his complaints about CF in my office that first day. “Does this seem right to you? This seems weird. If it turns out something’s happened to Wendell, the benefits would be hers. She wouldn’t have to give back any money.”

“Well, yes, but she’d have to refile,” Mac said.

“But aren’t we in business to see that claims are settled fairly?” I looked from one to the other. Titus’s face was blank, his way of disguising his perpetual dislike, not just of me, but of the world in general. Mac’s expression was tinged with guilt. He was never going to stand up to Gordon Titus. He was never going to complain. He was never going to take a stand. “Isn’t anybody interested in the truth?” I asked.

Titus stood up and put on his jacket. “I’ll leave this
to you,” he said to Mac. And to me, “We appreciate the fact that you’re so conscientious, Kinsey. If we’re ever interested in having someone go out and establish the company’s liability to the tune of half a million dollars, you’d be the first investigator we’d think of, I’m sure. Thank you for coming in. We’ll look for your report first thing Monday morning.”

After he left, Mac and I sat in silence for a moment, not looking at each other. Then I got up and walked out myself.

I
hopped in my car and headed for Perdido. I had to know. There was no way in the world I was going to let this one go. Maybe they were right. Maybe he’d run off. Maybe he’d been faking every shred of concern for his ex-wife and his kids, for his grandson. He was not a tower of strength. As a man, he possessed neither scruples nor a sense of moral purpose, but I couldn’t make my peace with events as they stood. I had to know where he was. I had to understand what had happened to him. He was a man with far more enemies than friends, which didn’t bode well for him, which seemed ominous and unsettling. Suppose somebody had killed him. Suppose the whole thing was a setup. I’d already been paid off with a check and a handshake. My time was my own, and I could do as I pleased. Before this day was over, I was going to have some answers.

Perdido’s population is roughly ninety-two thousand. Happily, some small percentage of the citizens
had called Dana Jaffe the minute news about the finding of the
Lord
came to light. Everybody likes to share the misery of others. There’s a breathless curiosity, mixed with dread and gratitude, that allows us to experience misfortune at a satisfying distance. I gathered Dana’s phone had been ringing steadily for more than an hour by the time I arrived. I hadn’t wanted to be the one to tell her about Wendell’s possible defection. News of his death would have cheered her no end, but I thought it unfair to share my suspicions when I had no proof. Without Wendell’s body, what good would it do her? Unless she killed him herself, of course, in which case she already knew more than I did.

Michael’s yellow VW was parked in the driveway. I knocked on the front door, and Juliet let me in. Brendan slept heavily against her shoulder, too tired to protest the discomfort of a vertical rest.

“They’re in the kitchen. I have to get him down,” she murmured.

“Thanks, Juliet.”

She crossed the room and went upstairs, probably grateful for the excuse to escape. Some woman was in the process of leaving a telephone message in her most solemn tone. “Well, okay, hon. Anyway, I just wanted you to know. If there’s anything we can do, you just call us now, you hear? We’ll talk to you soon. Bye-bye now.”

Dana was sitting at the kitchen table, looking pale and beautiful. Her silver-blond hair looked silky in the light, gathered at the nape of her neck in a careless knot. She wore pale blue jeans and a long-sleeved silk
shirt in a shade of steel blue that matched her eyes. She stubbed out a cigarette, glancing up at me without comment. The smell of smoke lingered in the air, along with the faint smell of sulfur matches. Michael was pouring coffee for her from a newly made pot. Where Dana seemed numb, Michael seemed to be in pain.

I’d been around so much lately that no one questioned my unsolicited presence on the scene. He poured a mug of coffee for himself and then opened the cabinet and took out a mug for me. A carton of milk and the sugar bowl were sitting in the middle of the kitchen table. I murmured a thank-you and sat down. “Anything new?”

Dana shook her head. “I can’t believe he did it.”

Michael leaned against the counter. “We don’t know where he is, Mom.”

“And that’s what drives me insane. He makes just enough of an appearance to screw us up and then he’s off again.”

“You talked to him?” I asked.

A pause. She dropped her gaze. “He stopped by,” she said, her tone faintly defensive. She shifted on her chair, reached for the pack of cigarettes, and lit another one. She’d look old before her time if she didn’t knock that off.

“When was this?”

She frowned. “I don’t know, not last night, but the night before. Thursday, I guess. He went to Michael’s to see the baby afterward. That’s how he got the address.”

“You have a long talk with him?”

“I wouldn’t call it ‘long.’ He said he was sorry. He’d
made a hideous mistake. He said he’d do anything to have the five years back. It was all bullshit, but it sounded good and I guess I needed to hear it. I was pissed, of course. I mean, I said, ‘Wendell, you can’t
do
this! You can’t just waltz back in after everything you’ve put us through. What do I care if you’re sorry? We’re all sorry. What horseshit.’”

“You think he was sincere?”

“He was always sincere. He couldn’t hold on to the same point of view from one minute to the next, but he was always sincere.”

“You didn’t talk to him after that?”

She shook her head. “Believe me, once was enough. That should have put an end to it, but I’m still mad,” she said.

“So there was no reconciliation.”

“Oh, God, no. There’s absolutely no way I’d do that. Sorry doesn’t cut any ice with me.” Her eyes came up to mine. “What now? I guess the insurance company wants their money back.”

“They won’t press for what you’ve spent, but they really can’t let you walk away with half a million bucks. Unless Wendell’s dead.”

She became very still, breaking off eye contact. “What makes you say that?”

“It happens to everyone eventually,” I said. I pushed my coffee mug away and got up from the chair. “Call me if you hear from him. He’s got a lot of people interested. One, at any rate.”

“Would you walk her to the door, babe?” Dana said to Michael.

Michael moved away from the counter and walked me to the front door. Lean and brooding.

“You okay?” I asked.

“Not really. How would you feel?”

“I don’t think we’ve gotten to the end of it yet. Your father did what he did for reasons of his own. His behavior was not about you. It was about him,” I said. “I don’t think you should take it personally.”

Michael was shaking his head emphatically. “I never want to see him. I hope I never have to see his face again.”

“I understand how you feel. I’m not trying to defend the man, but he’s not all bad. You have to take what you can. One day maybe you can let the good back in. You don’t know the whole story. You only know this one version. There’s far more to it—events, dreams, conflicts, conversations you were never privy to. His actions are coming out of that,” I said. “You have to accept the fact that there was something larger at work and you may never know what it was.”

“Hey, know what? I don’t care. Honest to God, I don’t.”

“You don’t maybe, but one day Brendan might. These things tend to drift down from one generation to the next. Nobody deals well with abandonment.”

“Yeah.”

“There’s a phrase that runs through my head in situations like this: ‘the vast untidy sea of truth.’”

“Meaning what?”

“The truth isn’t always nice. It isn’t always small enough to absorb at once. Sometimes the truth washes
over you and threatens to take you right down with it. I’ve seen a lot of ugly things in this world.”

“Yeah, well, I haven’t. This is my first and I don’t like it much.”

“Hey, I hear you,” I said. “Take care of your kid. He’s really beautiful.”

“He’s the only good thing that’s come out of this.”

I had to smile. “There’s always you,” I said.

His eyes were hooded and his return smile was enigmatic, but I don’t think the sentiment was lost on him.

I drove from Dana’s to Renata’s house. Whatever the flaws in Wendell Jaffe’s character, he’d managed to connect himself to two women of substance. They couldn’t be more different—Dana with her cool elegance, Renata with her dark exoticism. I parked out in front and made my way up the walk. If the police were still running surveillance, they were being damn clever. No vans, no panel trucks, no curtains moving in the houses across the way. I rang the bell and waited, staring off at the street. I turned back and cupped a hand to the glass, peering in through the front door panes. I rang the doorbell again.

Renata finally appeared from the back of the house. She was wearing a white cotton skirt and a royal blue cotton T-shirt, white sandals emphasizing the deep olive tan on her legs. She opened the door, pausing for a moment with her cheek against the wood. “Hello, I heard on the radio they found the boat. He isn’t really gone, is he?”

“I don’t know, Renata. Honestly. Can I come in?”

She held the door open for me. “You might as well.”

I followed her down the hallway to the living room, which was built across the back of the house. French doors opened onto a view of the backyard patio, which was small, mostly concrete with a fringe of annuals. Beyond the patio, a slope led down to the water. The
Fugitive
was visible, still moored at the dock.

“Would you like a bloody Mary? I’m having one.” She moved to the wet bar and opened the lid of the ice bucket. She used a pair of silver tongs to lift cubes of ice, which she dropped, clinking, into her old-fashioned glass. I always wanted to be the kind of person who did that.

“You go ahead. It’s a little early for me.”

She squeezed lime over the ice and added an inch of vodka. She took a jug of bloody Mary mix from the minirefrigerator, gave it a whirl to shake it, and poured it over the vodka. Her movements were listless. She looked haggard. She wore very little makeup, and it was clear she’d been crying. Maybe she’d only pulled herself together, answering the door when I rang. She gave me a pained smile. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“I was at Dana’s. As long as I was down in Perdido anyway, I thought I’d ask if I could go through some of Wendell’s belongings. I keep thinking he might have forgotten something. He might have left some piece of information. I don’t know how else to get a line on him.”

“There aren’t any ‘things,’ but you’re welcome to have a look around if you like. Have the police been over the boat, dusting for prints or whatever it is they do?”

“All I know is what I heard this morning from the
insurance company. The boat’s apparently been found, but there’s no sign of Wendell. I don’t know about the money yet.”

She brought her drink with her, crossing to a big upholstered chair. She took a seat, gesturing for me to join her in the matching chair. “What money?”

“Wendell didn’t tell you about that? Carl kept three million dollars hidden somewhere on the boat.”

It took about five seconds for the information to register. Then she threw her head back and started laughing, not exactly a happy sound, but better than sobbing. She collected herself. “You are
kidding,”
she said.

I shook my head.

Another brief laugh and then she shook her head. “Well, that’s incredible. There was that much money on the
Lord?
I can’t believe it. Actually this helps me because it all makes sense.”

“What does?”

“I couldn’t understand his obsession with the damn boat. The
Lord
was all he talked about.”

“I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

She stirred her drink with a swizzle stick, which she licked elaborately. “Well, he loved his kids, of course, but he’d never let that interfere with his life before. He was low on money, which was never an issue as far as I was concerned. God knows I have enough for both of us. About four months ago, he started in on this talk about coming back. He wanted to see his boys. He wanted to see his grandson. He wanted to make it up to Dana for the way he’d treated her. I think what he really wanted was to get his hands on that cash. You
know what? I’ll bet he did it. No wonder he was so fucking secretive. Three million dollars. I’m amazed I didn’t guess.”

I said, “You don’t seem amazed. You seem depressed.”