Liar (39 page)

“You’re right about Richmond and his photos, but I’m not so sure what you just said about Gerald is true.”

“What do you mean?”

“Something occurred to me while I was talking to McCain, telling him where he could count on finding Richmond. Earlier today, I had been asking myself some of those same questions-how could Gerald know where Richmond was going, and when he’d be there? Richmond might not have noticed that he had a tail on him, but Gerald wouldn’t be able to follow him around night and day. He works. And Deeny works, too. But I had forgotten a couple of pieces of information-failed to put them together until I was talking to McCain.”

I flipped to the page of my notebook that had the numbers from Margot’s caller-ID display written on it, and, next to them, the information Jerry Chase had looked up for me on the
News-Express
computers.

“I want to test a theory,” I said. I dialed the phone number. The number hadn’t answered the last time I called it-from the pay phone near Rivo Alto. I had called after closing time that night.

Travis looked on, puzzled.

“I’m calling a bar in Los Alamitos,” I said. “One that Harold Richmond frequents on a regular basis.”

After three rings, a gruff voice answered, “Wharf.”

“Hi,” I said. “Is Deeny there?”

Travis’s eyes widened.

“Naw, she won’t be in until five,” the voice answered, “but she’ll be working-no personal calls. Call her at home, all right?” He promptly hung up on me.

I repeated the conversation to Travis.

“So Richmond gets drunk at this bar and brags about his progress in the case,” Travis said. “And she goes home and tells Gerald.”

“Right.”

“Wouldn’t Richmond make the connection?”

“Not unless he sees her with Gerald; if she drives herself to and from work, probably not. And how many men in a bar ever learn a cocktail waitress’s last name?”

“I see your point. How did you know she worked there?”

“Our informant in the trailer park told us she was a cocktail waitress.”

“Trudy Flauson! Yes, now I remember.”

“Richmond the braggart,” I said. “Not hard to imagine him telling her about his obsession, especially when there’s some exciting news: Arthur is seeing his son again; Arthur is in the hospital; Arthur has legally married Briana Maguire.”

The phone rang. Travis answered it, then looked over at me. “It’s Mr. Brennan. He wants to give you directions to his house in Lake Arrowhead.”

We were on the Riverside Freeway, stuck in traffic, when the fight started. It began with what was supposed to be a compliment.

“I have to admit,” Travis said, “I’ve been surprised by the Kellys.”

“Finding out we aren’t such a bad bunch after all?” I said, trying to keep my tone light, but in retrospect, I’ll admit I failed to do so.

“I’m not ready to forgive Patrick, of course,” he said.

“Oh, of course not!”

He didn’t miss it that time. “Look, I’m sorry, but you weren’t living in Las Piernas when all hell broke loose for us. Your father completely turned his back on us.”

“Travis, that back had been turned on your family for years. I don’t say it was right-it obviously grew out of a terrible misunderstanding. But have you ever thought that your father could have explained what was going on?”

“Oh, right! He’s going to tell Patrick Kelly, who has scowled at him from the moment he met him, that he can’t read!”

“I’m not saying that what my father did was wonderful. But how hard did anybody on your side of the family work to patch things up?”

“Because he was known to be so forgiving? Look-forget about how he felt about my father. Do you realize how hard life was for my mother, after she split up with my dad?”

“Did she try to make contact with my father?”

“Did Patrick try to contact her?” he shot back.

I tried to count to ten. I got to three, and said, “A moment ago you said I didn’t know what was going on in Las Piernas then. You were only eleven. You didn’t know what was going on in my father’s life then, did you?”

“How could I? He wasn’t speaking to us. Besides, it couldn’t have been as bad as what was happening to her.”

“Oh, no? Well, listen to this, Your Honor, Judge of the Family. He had cancer. How’s that for an excuse?”

“He didn’t tell us,” he said, but he wasn’t shouting now.

“No, he was sort of like your own father. He had his secrets, too. He didn’t like to appear to be weak. He was the one who had to be strong for everybody else. He didn’t let me know about it until he was too sick to work. So I came down from Bakersfield and took care of him.”

“But Barbara-”

“Barbara couldn’t take it. She still hasn’t forgiven him for knowing that, for calling me to come to him. Then again, she hasn’t forgiven herself for running away from his illness.”

There was a long silence.

“Go ahead,” he said. “Ask.”

“Ask what?”

“Ask me why I was out riding around in a purple-and-yellow camper-”

“Oh, Christ-”

“-telling children’s stories-”

“That’s not what I was trying to say!” I protested.

“Telling fairy tales, while my parents were dying.”

“You didn’t know that!”

“I didn’t know what would happen to my mother.” He paused, swallowed hard. “But I knew my dad was dying.”

“Travis-no, please. I wasn’t trying to say anything like that.”

“Let me-let me explain.” He couldn’t go on for a moment, but gradually he pulled himself together and said, “I think I’ve told you that I reached a point in my life when I wanted to get to know my father-as an adult. My mother didn’t like the idea. I don’t think, looking back on it, that it was because she hated him then. Even during the worst of it, I think she still loved him. I guess I’ve always known that.

“But I don’t think she was ever a person who found it easy to trust others. She had trusted him, though, and he destroyed that trust. After that, she wouldn’t date other men. The one man she loved had caught her up in a thousand lies, and her son was a bastard whose face was a constant reminder of the man who destroyed her life-” Travis-

“No, she said that to me once. ”Every time I look at you, do you know who I see?“”

“She didn’t mean it-”

“Yes, she did. I’ll admit she was angry, but she meant it. It wasn’t so obvious when I was younger, with a boy’s face, but as I became a man, I was a reminder.” He paused, and added, “I’m not saying she didn’t love me. She did. I never doubted that.

“But you can see why,” he went on, “the closer my father and I became, the more upset she became. She started issuing ultimatums to me. You haven’t known me very long, but I guess you can imagine how well that worked.”

I smiled. “Yes, I think so.”

“My father had already been diagnosed with cancer when I started to spend more time with him, but he wasn’t-he wasn’t an invalid. Most of the time, he did his best to make me forget that he was ill. We had a lot of catching up to do. It was clear to me that he still loved my mother. It was the way he would ask about her, the way he would look whenever he’d talk about the years when we were a family.”

He fell silent for a while. By then we had reached San Bernadino. Soon we would be in the mountains themselves.

“Once in a while he would have a bad day,” he said, coming out of his reverie, “and on those days, he’d ask me not to come over. I’d protest, and tell him that I wanted to be with him no matter what, but he could be stubborn.

“When there started to be more bad days, he sat me down and told me-well, many things. He said that the two of us had more than enough painful memories between us, that he preferred this reunion of ours not to include my seeing him helpless and sick. He said he would always feel he had taken horrible advantage of me if he had only brought me to his side to watch him die. He wanted life with me, he said, not death, and nothing but good memories of our time together to sustain him through whatever was to come.”

He was silent again. He reached for the envelope of photographs, pulled out one of the ones of the purple camper and smiled wistfully.

“During one of my earlier visits,” he said, “my father had learned that I had studied to be a reading specialist, and asked me about it. He encouraged me to talk about the things I enjoyed doing-and about the things I dreamed of doing. I told him about storytelling, which I had been involved in locally for a number of years. And another time, I told him that I had this urge to travel. That’s when I learned more about the hobo side of the family-he said I couldn’t help being a nomad, it was the Spanning vagabond in me.

“This last time I saw him, he called in Mr. Brennan, whom I had met when I was younger, but hadn’t seen in many years. My father and Mr. Brennan told me about the provisions my father had made for me. I was astounded, to tell you the truth.

“My father told me he was worried that making me this wealthy would put me in danger, and not just from the DeMonts, but he figured I would understand that, and take care of myself. He said there were members of the family who would try to convince me that I owed them big portions if not all of his money, and he wished I would tell them to go to hell, but if I wanted to hand it over to them, fine. For now, he said, he was the one who had earned it, and so it was his decision to make himself happy by imagining me doing what I wanted to do, making my own choices.

“He asked if I ever thought of taking my storytelling act on the road for a time-and as he went on to describe some of his ideas about it, it wasn’t as if he was pushing me to conform to something he wanted. It was-it was as if I had told my most secret dreams to someone, and he had not only not laughed at them, but he had understood them perfectly.”

“And given you the power to make them come true.”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes.”

“But your mother didn’t like the idea?”

He shook his head. “Hated it. She would have been angry at me for taking a dime from him. She saw it as a betrayal. She even moved to that one-bedroom apartment-a way of saying I wasn’t going to find a room for myself when I came back. I guess- I had lived with her for so long, beyond the time when I wanted to move out, because I knew-I knew!-how lonely she’d be…”

“So for once in your life, you did something for yourself.”

“Oh, not for once,” he said. “She made a lot of sacrifices for me.”

“Your wanting to leave the nest-it was the natural course of things, Travis. I remember how my father-well, never mind.”

“Your father didn’t want you to move out?”

“No. But at that time, I felt as if we’d end up hating each other if I stayed. And I think we would have.”

“But you came back.”

“That’s true. It was what he wanted, what he asked for. For me to be there. I did what he asked. Your father asked for something different. You did what he asked.”

He was silent.

Ghosts, I thought, then suddenly remembered Travis’s e-mail address. “Was he your George Kerby?”

He smiled.
“Topper.
My dad and I watched a videotape of that film one day. He threatened to start calling me ‘Toppie’ because he said I was just like Cosmo Topper, confined to routine and taking life far too seriously. He said I needed to get out and do the things I wanted to do. He said he’d come back and haunt me if I didn’t start living a little. So Cosmo became my storyteller name.”

“I wonder if he was also trying to take you out of harm’s way for a while.”

“What do you mean?”

“Maybe by sending you on the road, making it difficult for people to find you after his death, your father saved your life.”

He was thinking that over when his cell phone rang.

“It’s Rachel,” he said, “but she said I should ask you to pull over before I give you the phone.”

“Oh, brother. Once a cop-” I said lightly.

“She sounds upset,” he said.

I had just started up Highway 18, so I pulled over and took the phone from Travis.

“Rachel? Is Mary all right?”

“Mary’s fine. Her house is fine, too, although there was a fire.”

“A fire! Her house caught on fire?”

“No, the Karmann Ghia.”

“The…” I couldn’t say it.

“Jack and I went over there to pick it up, there was already a fire truck on the scene.”

“Not my Karmann Ghia…”

“I’m so sorry, Irene. I know you loved that little car. I know you’ve had it for a long time-”

“Since college,” I said blankly. “Since college.”

“Can you forgive me?”

“Forgive you?”

“If I had gone straight over there, after I talked to you-”

“Oh, Rachel. Don’t do that to yourself. I’m the one who left it there. What happened?”

“Molotov cocktail.”

“We must be rushing him. The bomb on Travis’s camper was much more sophisticated.”

“Let Travis drive-you’re upset.”

“Steer a van up mountain roads with one hand? Not if you aren’t used to it. But now he’s wondering what has happened. Explain it to him, will you?”

I handed the phone to Travis and started up Waterman Canyon. He spoke briefly with Rachel, hung up, then said, “I’m sorry, Irene.”

“Just a car,” I said, which was such total bullshit, I’m surprised he didn’t call me on it. But he fell silent, which is what I needed.

I was grateful for the mountain roads; they required my absolute concentration. The sun was setting, and by the time we reached Mr. Brennan’s large, lake-view mountain home, it was dark. I parked along the road, took out a large flashlight that Jack had apparently included in the price of the van, and Travis and I stepped outside. I felt the chill mountain air, heard the crickets sing, smelled the pine fragrance and saw the stars overhead. I promptly bent over double and started throwing up.