The Lacey Confession (32 page)

Washington, that was where Walter was headed. Headed to Devereaux. To Devereaux, whose arrogance had so unhinged him in Atlanta. And now—the sonofabitch sent someone into his home! There was a late flight out of St. Thomas he could still catch. It would take him to Miami. He'd stay over there and fly to Washington in the morning. He knew he would be calm by then, calmer anyway. Passing the cruise ships, on the long cab ride from the St. Thomas ferry dock to the airport, the sight of those massive floating resort hotels, all done up in pastels, blue and sea green, yellows and light shades of red, towering like buildings many stories above the water, he realized his blood pressure had gone from a boil to a simmer sooner than he expected. A few minutes later his cell phone rang as he waited in the airport.

“Yes,” he said.

“Walter, Walter,” came a familiar voice, with an unfamiliar tone. It jolted his awareness to a sharp point. The frustration and anger he felt about Devereaux and his hired girl was counterproductive. He knew that and was grateful for the intrusion. It was Isobel Gitlin's voice he heard.

“Yes,” he said, hoping his hurt pride was not showing too much.

“I had no choice,” she said. Was she crying or coughing? Did he hear the sound of a stuffy nose, a simple cold or something else? “It was Otto. Otto.” Definitely crying, thought Walter. He decided to let her cry it out. He waited.

“Walter, I'm sorry. There was nothing I could do. They took Otto and threatened to c-c-cut off the fingers! B-b-break his hands. His arms. His elbows. Oh, my god! I'm sorry, Walter. I'm sorry. Otto, he could never play again. They came to our house, into our house. Walter. I had to.”

“Had to what, Isobel?”

“Had to tell them. Tell them where. Where it is. They knew it was somewhere. They just didn't know where.”

“Where what?”

“Where Leonard was, before. In New Mexico.” Walter closed his eyes. He was getting lightheaded. He felt cold sweat across the back of his neck. His arms and legs tingled. His stomach growled in disgust, tightening with newfound fear. He was a deer, alone on a dark lonely road near Rhinebeck, in upstate New York. He saw the truck come barreling around the turn. The headlights blinded him. He was unable to move, every inch of his body paralyzed. He shuddered as the truck ran over him, bone and blood and soft tissue pushed together like a pasty soup. He saw his brain shut down.

“Who?” he said, breathing deeply, slowly. “Who are they?”

“I don't know,” she answered. “The one who came to see me was in his forties, tall, lean, light complexion, light brown hair, well dressed, well spoken. I thought I detected an accent, but I'm not sure. Very confident. He was very confident.”

“Name?”

“He said his name was Christopher Hopman.”

“Oh shit!” said Walter.

“He knew you. He knew who you were. I think he's afraid of you. I think so. He said he wanted something somebody named Harry Levine had. You too. He knew you were involved.”

“He thought Harry Levine was in New Mexico?”

“Yes. He didn't know it was New Mexico. He said they thought you had taken him to wherever Leonard had been.”

“They? Who's they?”

“He just referred to them as ‘his employers.' I remembered what you said, where you said it was.”

“I know,” Walter said. “You've been paying the bills there since Leonard Martin disappeared.”

“How did you know? Oh, my God!”

“Yes, that's right, Isobel. That's where I took him. And that's where I left him.”

“Oh, m-m-my God!” she mumbled again. “I'm so sorry. Otto . . .”

“Goodbye,” said Walter.

Today's call from Harry wasn't due for another ninety minutes. He knew there would be no call. It would never come. Never. He went to the ticket counter and changed his flight plans. No matter where he was going, he had to fly to Miami first. He dropped his Washington flight and found a late-night opening, Miami to Houston. It was an awful flight, turbulent over the Gulf, and local thunderstorms in the Houston area. He felt like crap and took two antacid tablets as soon as he landed. A six-hour layover in Houston and then on to Albuquerque. Four more hours after that to Albert. Twenty minutes to the cabin.

Harry Levine's body lay crumpled, face down on the floor near the small refrigerator. A single shot in the heart had killed him. Walter noticed powder burns on Harry's shirt. The hole was small. Someone must have held Harry very close, perhaps right up against him. Whoever it was had reached in with a small caliber pistol, pushed it hard against Harry's chest and fired. There was no exit wound. The bullet had not been very powerful, just deadly. It would take a coldhearted bastard to kill this way. The body was otherwise unmarked. Whoever killed him didn't have to beat him to find the document. Harry wouldn't have hidden it. After all, Walter told him he would be safe here. “Damnit!” Walter said out loud. On the floor, not far from Harry's feet, Walter found a cigarette butt. The ash was only halfway down and it had been stepped on, apparently casually ground into the kitchen floor. Something about it looked familiar. When he picked it up he saw it was not a regular cigarette, certainly not an American cigarette. The paper was unusual. He slid it around between his fingers. It felt like rice paper. And the cigarette itself came with its own cardboard holder. The brand name had been smudged. All he could make out were the letters MOPKAHA.

The cabin was freezing. The fire was dead, burned to cold ash. The space heaters were not turned on. The killer was long gone. Walter's coat was all he had. He could see his own breath, still he felt a sweat come over him. A dull pain grew in his chest, his stomach gone sour again. He sat down at the table, in the same wooden chair he dragged out to the porch when Harry marveled at the stars and the purity of the night sky. The horizon was much closer now. Walter felt suddenly overcome by fatigue. His eyelids closed. They balked at his feeble attempts to raise them open. Sleep. He needed sleep. He couldn't help himself. He fell asleep right there, in the chair, still in his coat. He awoke about five. It was already dark and colder than before. He thought back to everything he had touched, now and when he had been there earlier and wiped all of it clean until there was no trace he was ever there. This was not the first time Walter had covered his tracks this way. He made no mistakes. He looked for any sign to tell him who did this—who killed Harry Levine. He found nothing. He, who could find anything, found nothing. The anger rose within him. He shivered, the cold radiating into his chin, down his left arm. “Harry,” he said although no one could hear him. Walter wondered, was
the Cowboy
in him?

It was the beef and the greed that killed Leonard Martin's family. Walter remembered, better than most. Bad beef, born of corruption and venality, deception and disregard. Hamburgers. And where was Leonard Martin when he was needed? Where was he? Walter remembered that too. While Leonard's wife, daughter and grandsons were joyfully broiling the poisoned meat, he was with another woman. When his family needed him most, he was absent, cheating, fucking. The only reason Leonard Martin lived was because he skipped that poolside barbeque, skipped it to have sex with a woman who was not his wife, not the mother of his child or grandmother to his grandsons. For Leonard, getting laid that morning gave an evil twist to
getting lucky
. He always felt his affair was manageable, acceptable so long as Nina didn't know, so long as no one got hurt. He never thought the hurt would come like this. Afterward, when he held Nina's lifeless hand, and then tried to comfort his daughter, Ellie, as she died, frantically worrying about her boys, Leonard's cowardly soul burned in Hell, charred from head to toe with dirty ash, the filthy soot of his guilty fire. His life became an inferno, the flames quenched only with the blood of vengeance. Walter accused Leonard of that, confronted him with the charge that his revenge was not so righteous after all. “Where were you?” Walter shouted at him. And now. “Where were you?” he screamed at himself. “Where were you?” He saw Michael DelGrazo,
the Cowboy
, Leonard Martin, each pointing an accusing finger. “Where were you?”

He made three phone calls before driving away, this time for good. He would never set foot upon this place again. He swore it. The first call was to Isobel. “It's Walter Sherman,” he told the receptionist, and when Isobel picked up the phone, before she could speak, he said, “He's dead.” He shut the cover on his cell phone before Isobel said a word. The second call was to the New Mexico State Police. There was a body, he told them, in a cabin . . . He told them where, then hung up. His final call was to Billy. “It's Tuesday, isn't it?” he asked the bartender.

“Yeah,” said Billy.

“I need a few more days. I'll be back Friday. Everything all right?”

“Yeah.”

“No problems?”

“None.”

“Turn her loose.”

“You sure?”

“I'm sure. You tell her I know she had nothing to do with it. Tell her if I ever see her again, I'll kill her. She'll understand.”

“Understand what?”

“Just tell her.”

“Okay, I'll tell her.”

PART THREE

And I can hear the devil whisper,

“Things are only getting worse.”

–Alan Jackson–

Walter didn't stop in Santa Fe this time. He had no desire to walk among the Indian women sitting around the Plaza, fat women, younger than they looked in their layers of warm clothing bundled against the cold, selling their jewelry, keeping their spirits up with hot tea and little flasks filled with whiskey. No gifts today. No pendants changing shape in the wind and sun. He made it straight through, all the way to Albuquerque, took a room at an airport motel and booked an early flight to Atlanta. He didn't sleep. How could he? He took a couple of Mylanta he carried in his travel bag. Tylenol too. Didn't help much. He must have dozed off for a few minutes here and there because somehow the morning came. He slept on the plane.

When he landed in Atlanta, Walter rented a car and made the drive to Roswell. Sadie Fagan was not expecting him, and when she saw the pain written on his troubled face, the misery in his eyes, she knew something terrible had happened. She didn't hear a thing he said. It only took a few minutes. She did not invite him in for a cold drink. Harry was dead. He told her, then it was plain he had to leave. All the Levines were gone now. David, Elana and Harry. Long ago Sadie became a Fagan. She cried for her father. Walter had no part in Sadie's grief. No part except that her torment was his fault. They both knew it. When he got back in his car he was feeling no better. He hadn't eaten since—he couldn't recall. Perhaps something in his stomach would make a difference.

Walter was alone, in a booth at a Waffle House restaurant in Roswell, Georgia, just at the entrance to the GA 400 highway, when he collapsed. He felt the bottom fall out, the air in his lungs desert him, his strength disappear, draining from his head to his feet like water in a flushed toilet. That's where it all was headed. Into the toilet. At the same time fatigue swamped him, the pain in his chest took a gargantuan leap from a bothersome ache to a brutal squeezing pressure, gripping his upper body in a vice-like nutcracker, pushing out from within and in from without, threatening to crack his body like the fragile shell of a walnut, while simultaneously an unseen hand pulled the pin on a grenade buried deep inside his chest. His left arm hurt so bad he couldn't lift it. A lump the size of a softball crawled up his throat. Perspiration, warm and chilly at the same time, swept over him. He could feel his balls shrivel up, his knees weaken, his hips give way, his head spinning. Even fear could not save him. He passed out leaning forward, his last conscious act a desperate effort to get up. He fell with his face in his eggs, knocking a glass of Diet Coke to the floor.

First there were the lights, zooming swiftly by. One at a time. One after the other, straight above his head. Bright dots, headlights in the window, reflections in a darkened sky. Then there were the hills across the river. The hills that never changed. Frozen in winter, lush in summer, always the same. When he was a boy, Walter saw them for the first time. The hills across the Hudson. They never moved. They were always there just as they had been before. Today, yesterday, forever. They rolled north from Kingston, beyond the bridge, surely all the way to Albany and then to who knows where, past the known world, to other mysterious places. No matter what, he knew he could go to the river, look to the other side and find comfort. And now, his father came to see him. How could that be? Snow was everywhere. There was nothing but snow. No trees. No shoes. He had no shoes, yet his feet were not cold. How could that be? Maybe it was he who went to visit his father. Which was it? Who cared. He didn't. But he couldn't visit his father. His father died when he was six. For a while his mother used to go to the cemetery. For a while. Sometimes she took him with her. He remembered the long rows of gray stones, the place where she finally stopped and cried. She always said they were going to visit his father. But Walter never saw him. Was that a visit? Not like this one. How old was he the last time? Nine? Ten? Who cared? He didn't. The pain and the warmth swam together, one overlapping the other, then separating, then joining again in wave after wave. The pain. The warmth. The pain. Where was the warmth? Where was it? Come back!

Johnny Sherman, Walter's father, was right there waiting for him, sitting in an old wooden chair, open on the left with a wide, desk-like area sticking out by the right armrest. It was a place big enough for a tray of sandwiches and hot chocolate or maybe beer and sausages, a newspaper or magazine, even big enough for a child to sit on. It was empty now, only his father's arm resting there. Those chairs had a name. What was it? The chair was in the snow, encircled and surrounded by snow as if set down in the middle of a great open field. The sky was bright, white and cloudless. Johnny Sherman wore a green t-shirt, like Army green except he was never in the Army. He had on jeans, the sort that used to be called blue jeans, heavy, dark blue, coarse denim with the cuffs rolled up two or three times showing the material's lighter underside. Walter was sure nobody had worn jeans like these for fifty years. His father had no shoes. They both had no shoes. How could that be? Snow was everywhere. His father's legs were crossed, right over left, at the knee. Was he smiling? Was he? He said nothing. He didn't move in any way. His eyes looked at Walter, into Walter, through Walter, but they never blinked. He made no motion with his head. He was silent. Yet Walter heard him, understood him, knew perfectly well what his father was telling him. There was no mistaking him.

“Sit,” his father said without a word, without a gesture. “Sit here, on this chair by my right arm. Sit down with me and all your pain will go away. Be with me, my son. I love you.”

The struggle between what is and what will be, between darkness and the light, between the flashing lights and the clear sky. “Sit down,” his father beckoned. “I've been waiting.” The struggle between life and death. Goodbye Gloria. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. No! Walter would not sit.

Dr. William Byron, Dr. Willie to anyone who knew him and every patient who had seen him more than once, looked down into Walter's face. Dr. Willie's was a friendly presence made up of smiles and good cheer. The joke among the Cardiac staff at Crawford Long Hospital in Atlanta was that Dr. Willie could tell someone they had six months to live and they would be happy to hear it. From him, that is. The first time Walter saw him was when he opened his eyes.

“Must be my magic touch again,” said Dr. Willie. Two residents and a nurse, standing just behind him, politely laughed and nodded to one another. Walter failed to comprehend. “You've come about, Mr. Sherman. Opened your eyes to the world. And you've done it with me right here, standing in your room, next to your bed. My magic touch, I tell you.”

“Where . . . am I?”

Dr. Byron told him. Further, he told him, pay no attention at all to the nameplate on his white coat. “Call me Willie,” he said. “Everyone does.” As for Walter, Dr. Willie said he'd had a heart attack. Paramedics saved him. The emergency doctors and nurses at North Fulton Regional Hospital, up in Alpharetta, stabilized him—somewhat, that is, since he never really regained consciousness while with those folks—then transferred him by ambulance to the Coronary Intensive Care Unit at Emory University's downtown hospital.

“What day . . . ?”

“It's Friday, Mr. Sherman. You had your MI on Wednesday and you've been out of it pretty much until now. But I think you're gonna be fine. We did an angiogram, a cardiac cath procedure, yesterday.”

“What's that?”

“We inserted a long, thin tube in your groin—you might feel a pressure bandage there—and slid it up into your heart. Shot a little dye into your coronary arteries, took some pictures and got a pretty good idea of why you had so much trouble the other day.”

“What happened?”

“You had an infarct—that's a heart attack—because a branch of your right coronary artery closed off.”

“Big heart attack?”

“Well,” chuckled Dr. Willie, “the only minor heart attacks are those that happen to someone else, if you know what I mean.”

“I think so,” said Walter.

“You need a bypass operation, Mr. Sherman. We've been waiting for you to come out of this, regain consciousness, get strong enough to undergo surgery. You have widespread artery disease. You'll have another heart attack—and the next one you might not be so lucky with—if you don't get some plumbing work done. I'll schedule you for tomorrow with Dr. Ortega—great surgeon, the best. It'll be four or five days . . .”

“No,” Walter said. “No surgery. Not tomorrow anyway. How soon will I be well enough to leave?”

“Without a bypass operation . . .”

“How soon, doctor? Please.”

“Monday. We'll keep you the weekend. It's a big mistake, Mr. Sherman. How old was your father when he died?”

“How do you know my father is dead?”

“Forty? Maybe younger? You talked about him, the day they brought you in. You're nearly sixty, Mr. Sherman. You're on borrowed time and your loan could be called any day. You understand?”

“How long will it take me to recover from bypass surgery?”

“Well, we can get you home—wherever that is—in four or five days, end of next week if everything goes well. Follow up and recovery, rest—four to six weeks. A man your age and weight, in the sort of physical shape you're in, a couple of months. You may think you can't spend a couple of months this way, but there's a big upside to this.”

“What's that?”

“Staying alive. You do want to stay alive? You don't have to answer that. I know you do. I've been watching you. You do want to live, Mr. Sherman. You want badly to live. You need a bypass and you need it now.”

“I . . .”

“By the way, who is Gloria?”

“My wife.”

“Oh, well then,” said Dr. Willie, turning to look at the nurse holding Walter's chart, “That's good. We don't have any contact individual for you. Nothing in your personal belongings to tell us where your family can be reached. We should call Mrs. Sherman immediately.”

“My ex-wife, doctor. No need to call.”

“As you wish.”

Saturday morning, Walter underwent quintuple bypass surgery. The following Thursday, a week after arriving at Crawford Long Hospital and eight days after his heart attack, he flew home to St. John. Dr. Willie gave him the name of a cardiologist on St. Thomas.