The Ophelia Cut (12 page)

Her daughter’s voice was a whisper, fragile as glass. “Mom?”

The one syllable told Susan that something was seriously wrong. All the anger leached out of her. She felt a wave of vertigo and had to put a hand down on the counter to steady herself. “What’s the matter, babe? Are you all right?”

“Not really,” Brittany said. “I’m not too good.”

“Where are you?”

“St. Francis Hospital,” she said. “The emergency room.”

T
HAT NIGHT
, S
USAN
sat at her kitchen table, ignoring the cup of tea she’d made for herself five minutes before. She ran her hand down the back of their black cat, Fuji, who had jumped up on the table as soon as she sat down and now, all stretched out, purred like a generator. A fitful, wind-driven rain pattered against the west-facing window.

Her husband’s footsteps sounded in the hall. She straightened up, although the events of the day had left her feeling beaten down and bone weary. She was reaching for her teacup as Moses appeared in the doorway. “She’s down and out in drug land. Thank God for Vicodin.” He motioned at the stove. “Is the water still hot?”

“Should be.”

Susan watched him cross the kitchen, put a tea bag in a mug, and pour slowly from the kettle. They kept a small jug of honey on the counter, and Moses lifted the hand-carved wooden dipper and held it over the mug, letting it drip, then placing the dipper back in the jug. He got out a spoon and stirred with studied deliberation.

A gust threw a torrent of rain against the window. Susan jumped a little, but Moses didn’t react in any way.

“Mose. What are you thinking?”

He let out a breath that he seemed to have been holding. The spoon tinkled against the mug as he kept stirring. “Nothing.”

She said, “It just took you two minutes to fix yourself some tea.”

“It was a difficult cup to get right.” He lifted it to his lips, blew on it, took a sip. “And worth all the effort.” He sat down across from her.

“Are you worried?” she asked.

“About whether she’s going to be all right? No.”

“It looked pretty terrible.”

He shrugged. “Head wounds bleed. They look scarier than they are.”

“Also the bump.”

“Yeah, but no concussion. And no stitches, so no scars. She’ll heal up.”

“So what are you thinking about?”

“How it happened.”

“Well, we know—”

He held up his hand and stopped her. “We know what she told us, that’s all.”

“You think she lied?”

“I wouldn’t rule it out.”

“What do you think happened?” she asked.

Moses tapped his fingers against the mug. “Her story is that she’s talking to this guy and she realizes she’s going to miss her bus, so she runs and slips on the wet pavement, falls, and bangs her head.”

“Right.”

“Maybe not so right. How did falling give her two separate head injuries? And why is one such a big bump? It’s a goddamn Ping-Pong ball. A bump like that—I’ve got some experience, you may remember—something flat hit her head. The sidewalk, a building. And where did she get the scratches on her face? Also, did you notice that she’d lost the top two buttons on her raincoat?”

“No. I never looked.”

“You can check any time you want. The coat’s in the closet. They’re gone, but the thread’s there, like the buttons got ripped off.”

“So, a couple of buttons? They popped off when she fell.”

“Popped off? All by themselves? Then explain about her arm.”

“What about her arm?”

“She couldn’t stop rubbing her left arm, high up.”

“I thought she was cold.”

“It could have been that,” Moses conceded. “But when I was back in there, I pulled the blanket down and checked. There’s an obvious black-and-blue bruise.”

Susan sipped at her tea. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying I want to talk to this guy who disappears, leaving my daughter bleeding on the sidewalk.”

Susan’s hand went to her mouth. “Oh, my baby,” she said.

Moses nodded. “Just sayin’.”

M
OSES WALKED IN
the rain the seven blocks to the Little Shamrock, where Tony Solaia was turning into a godsend. Moses had called Tony as soon as he got the call from Susan about Brittany being in the ER. The young man had driven down on his motorcycle and shown up at the bar within fifteen minutes, ready and even eager to pull another shift.

Moses had told Tony that he could shut the place down early if he wanted, but at the moment, fifteen visible customers were contributing to his livelihood, with maybe a dozen more throwing darts in the back. Standing outside for a last perverse second, he watched Tony behind the spotless bar, drying glasses to a high shine.

When he stepped inside, Moses hung his waterproof beret and his raincoat on the old-fashioned wooden rack by the front door, then took
an open stool. Tony came down and took his order—club soda—after which some regulars came over, asking about Brittany.

“She’s fine,” Moses found himself repeating. “She slipped and fell down. She’s going to be all right.”

When they’d all gone back to their places, Tony came down across from him. “So how is she really?” he asked.

“Sleeping. Drugged. Pretty banged up.”

“That must have been quite a fall.”

Moses crossed his arms and exhaled. “I’m trying to keep an open mind. Not jump to conclusions. I keep trying to picture it, and it won’t come into focus, at least not the way she described it. She’s running in the rain, she slips, she falls on her face. She doesn’t put her hands out to stop her fall?”

“What do you think?”

Moses ran down the scenario he’d described to Susan and finished up by saying, “I need to have a talk with Brittany.”

“You think she’s covering for somebody?”

“That kind of follows from the rest of what I think, doesn’t it?”

“You know who it was?”

Moses shook his head. “I need a scorecard to keep up with her nowadays.”

Tony seemed about to say something.

“What?” Moses asked. “You know something?”

“Not really,” Tony said. “Let her tell you, if there’s anything to tell.”

A
T TWELVE-THIRTY
, T
ONY
went home, and now, near one, Moses sat on a stool at the far end of the bar. He’d locked the door fifteen minutes ago. Outside, a steady, wind-driven rain continued to strafe the windows. Every minute or two, a lone vehicle would go hissing by on Lincoln. Inside, the only meager light came from a sixty-watt Tiffany lamp on a low table set in the back.

He spun a half-empty glass of ginger ale in front of him. On the bar next to his glass was the Shamrock’s shillelagh, a two-foot length of iron-hard Kentucky ash with a fist-sized knot at one end and a leather thong at the other, that Moses had used several times when mediating melées in his career as a publican. It was a formidable weapon of persuasion. He
had no actual memory of having lifted it from the place where it hung behind the bar and bringing it with him out front.

His mind seemed to be jangling with white noise.

Somebody had, at the very least, manhandled his daughter. The more he thought about it, the more obvious it was. But her assailant was someone whose identity, in her misguided wisdom, Brittany was choosing not to reveal. Moses had a feeling that Tony might know who it was, but he wasn’t talking, either.

The inchoate knot in the center of his gut that had accompanied his dawning recognition of what actually happened to Brittany had flowered into a black rage that was threatening to consume him.

Some cowardly punk had hurt his daughter badly enough to send her to the hospital.

He kept having to fight down images of Brittany as a helpless baby, his baby now in pain, with her lovely face swollen, bloody, and battered.

In his younger and even not so younger days, back when he’d been setting some drinking records, Moses had not let his Ph.D. in philosophy keep him from being a serious brawler. His nose was permanently disfigured from all the times it had been broken. He still worked out with a heavy bag a couple of times a week to keep up his hand-eye. As a teenager, he’d fought Golden Gloves; he knew how to handle himself in a fair fight. If your pleasure was street fighting, he could kick and gouge and jam elbows and knees. If a target presented itself, he’d even been known to bite.

Anything to win.

Now he wanted to fight as badly as he’d ever wanted anything in his life. He wanted to pound flesh, to smell copper-fresh blood, to crack bone.

His breath came in ragged gulps.

He would have a drink, goddammit. He
needed
a drink, and it made perfect and absolute sense. What had he been doing, denying his true self for all these years? He was an avenging angel, in a pure and righteous rage, and he wanted a drink.

He went around the bar and took down a bottle of the Macallan from the top shelf. He free-poured to the lip of the glass, then brought it up to his nose to smell it.

God
.

The power of the smell slowed him for a second and, the Scotch untouched, he set the glass next to the shillelagh and stared at it.

For a moment, the fury subsided.

He knew who he was. He was Saint Augustine, bringing a concubine to bed so he could deny himself sex with her and thereby, upon conquering the temptation, please the Lord.

Just pick it up and swig it down. Feed the rage. Be who you are.

His hand reached for the glass.

Instead, he grabbed the shillelagh. With an inarticulate roar, he brought the heavy club across in a wild sweep, breaking the glass and sending its shards and the whiskey out into the room. Every swing punctuated by profanity, he brought down the head of the shillelagh time and again with all his might, smashing it against the bar. Again and again and again.

Until, at last, he was spent.

He let the shillelagh fall to the ground. He gripped the edge of the bar, his body sagging with exhaustion, his breathing that of a horse that had galloped to the absolute limit of its endurance.

H
ARDY HAD TWO
seating areas in his office. The one in front of his desk was formal, with a Persian rug on which two Queen Anne chairs flanked a lion’s-claw mahogany coffee table. The other, off to the side and taking advantage of the corner windows overlooking today’s blustery Sutter Street, consisted of two brown leather chairs and a matching love seat.

The office door closed behind Moses McGuire. He stood for a moment, taking it all in. “I don’t think I’ve ever been here,” he said.

“Sure you have.”

“I think I’d remember. It’s pretty fancy.”

“I’m glad you approve.”

“I’m not sure I do. If I were a client, I’d be worried that you were charging me so you could buy this kind of furniture, keep up appearances.”

“If you were a client,” Hardy said, “you’d be worried about going to prison, and you wouldn’t give a damn about the furniture. You’d be thinking you didn’t want a cot and a toilet for the next twenty years.”

“There’s that, too, I suppose.” Moses glanced around again. “So where do I sit? Is there a protocol?”

“Whatever makes you more comfortable. Meanwhile, you want some coffee? Water? Anything?”

“I think I’m good.” He eased himself down into one of the leather seats. “Now I’m better. And where do you sit?”

“Same as you. We’re all about equality here. You sit where you want. I sit where I want. Like here.” He sat in the other leather chair. “What’s brought you down here for the very first time? You don’t look so good.”

“I didn’t sleep much last night. I was having a wrestling match with the devil.”

“Who won?”

“I think I did, but it was close.” Moses cleared his throat, looked around some more, came back to Hardy. “I wanted to ask if you could lend me Wyatt Hunt for a day or so.”

“You need a private eye?”

“I don’t know for sure. I’d like to talk to him and see.”

Hardy sat back in some surprise. “You can get Wyatt any time you want. He doesn’t work for me exclusively. What do you want him to find out?”

“Who beat up Brittany.”

At once, Hardy’s face hardened. He sat forward in his chair. “When did this happen?”

“Yesterday.”

“How bad is it?”

“She’s banged up but okay. She’s back at our house, in bed.”

“Conscious, right?”

“Yeah, in and out of sleep. They gave her some pain meds.”

“But you’ve talked to her?”

“Oh, yeah.” Moses raised a hand. “And I know what you’re thinking: why don’t I just ask her who did it? Well, I did. Nobody hurt her. She fell down, that’s all. That’s her story, and she’s sticking to it.”

“But you don’t think so?”

“Let us say I am certain beyond a reasonable doubt.” Moses shook his head. “I want the son of a bitch thrown in jail, Diz. No, that’s not true. What I really want is to beat the shit out of him. Failing that, I’d settle for him spending some time in the slammer.”

“I don’t blame you. But if Brittany’s not going to testify, you realize that’s not going to happen, right?”

“I’ll talk her into it after she thinks about it a little more. She’s smart. She’ll give up wanting to protect him.”

“When that happens, she’ll give you his name, so you won’t need Wyatt. But maybe it’s not about protection,” Hardy added. “Maybe she’s afraid of him. Have you thought about that? In either case, protection or fear, she won’t help with any prosecution, and you still won’t have a name.”

“That’s why I want to borrow Wyatt. Just to find out who he is.”

“And then what? If Brittany won’t ID the guy.”

“Then I go to Plan B. ‘B’ as in ‘beat the shit out of him.’ ”

“Good idea, Mose. Then you get to go to jail.”

“Bullshit. I’m justified. Worst case, I’ll pay a fine and get back to my life.”

“You know when I just said ‘Good idea’? That was sarcastic. I meant it’s a bad idea. You know why? Because depending on the damage you do, you could go to prison for years, which—grizzled old man that you are—you don’t have to spare.”

“I don’t think so. He’d have to testify against me, and you want to talk about fear? I’ll put the fear of God in him.”