I can’t help but drop my gaze, afraid that he’ll see the doubt in my eyes.
“I wish I could say the same for the rest of the force and your blue wall of silence,” Silas mutters. “It’s no wonder the public doesn’t trust the police.”
“Now don’t get all riled up with that hogwash,” George warns through another puff.
But Silas is never one to back down. While the two of them bicker over police politics, I hide behind the terrible burn of this bourbon, picking through my mother’s final words. It’s funny . . . I can still smell the acrid stench of her Marlboros, can hear the crackling buzz of the radio, can see her lifeless body hunched over the table, but the most important part of that night—all the seemingly nonsensical rambling—is swimming loose in my mind, testing my memory.
I do know that she spoke of honesty that night, of Abe being a good, honest man and, if I were to read between the lines, not guilty of what he had been accused of. So what exactly is the truth? The version I’ve believed for the past fourteen years? Or what might have been a deeply hidden confession that forced itself to the surface in her final moments?
Silas’s cell phone rings. He checks his screen and sighs. “I’ve got to take this. Maybe while I’m gone, you can talk my nephew into staying in Austin. The DA’s office can’t afford to lose him.”
“Stay with a bunch of liars and crooks? You’re two sandwiches short of a picnic if you think I’m gonna help you with that,” George hollers after Silas as he ducks out the door. “Heck, if I’m convincin’ you of anything, it’d be to apply for the academy. If you’re half as determined as your mother was, Austin PD would be lucky to have you.”
“Yes, sir.”
His eyes narrow, studying me. “That ain’t something you’re interested in, though, is it?”
“No, sir.” I grew up thinking I was going to be a cop. After I finished my stint in the NBA, of course. But when it came time to make those big life decisions, the last thing I wanted to do was apply to the police academy. I had too many bad associations with it already.
“Oh, to have your whole life ahead of you . . .” he says wistfully. “I didn’t have no choice but to retire, heart issues and all. Both the doc and the wife insisted it was time. But you know, Jackie’d call me almost every week, askin’ for advice. It was nice; made me feel like I was still of some real value. And she’d talk about you, plenty. She was so proud of you. Of the man you’ve become.” He pauses. “You two were close, weren’t you?”
“She’s the reason I applied to UT.” I wanted to come home.
His forehead furrows with his frown. “And she never gave you any clue, hey? Just out of the blue up and did that? No warning at all?”
“I mean, she said things, but I didn’t think anything of it at the time.” All those nights of drinking, mumbling to herself about making better choices . . . how did I not take it more seriously? “She told me she wasn’t good enough to be chief.” That seems innocent enough to admit.
He snorts. “That there’s the biggest load of bull crap I’ve ever heard. She was one of the best damn officers I’ve ever seen, and believe you me, I saw a lot over my forty-odd years on the job. I was groomin’ her to take over my spot. She should have had it when I was forced out, but that spineless city manager Coates put Poole in. Took me a few years of meddlin’ to get both of them out, and your mother in there. But she knew the job of chief inside and out long before she ever accepted it.”
I’d love to take his high praise at face value.
“What’s the matter? You look bothered.”
I smooth my expression. “No, nothing. It’s good to talk to someone who knew her well.”
George takes a long puff of his cigar. “My oldest son, Wyatt, was a police officer. He came home one day and said, ‘Dad, they gave me a female partner. Can’t you do somethin’?’ I said, ‘Sure I can, son. I can move you to the graveyard shift of the drunk tank, if I hear you sayin’ another word about having a woman partner.’ Just three shifts later, Wyatt found himself starin’ down the barrel of a pistol at a routine traffic stop. This guy was all cracked out on somethin’, ranting and raving, with two little kids in the backseat. He wasn’t goin’ anywhere with the police. It was that female partner—your mother—who talked him down from pullin’ the trigger. Her and her level head. She never panicked, not once. Didn’t even raise her voice while dealin’ with him, from what I hear. Cool as a cucumber. I knew right then and there that I had a good one. I kept a close eye on her after that. Mentored her some.”
“I thought Abe was her first partner.” He’s all I remember.
“No, sir-ee. Jackie and Wyatt were partnered for three years.” George peers into his drink, his mood suddenly somber. “Then Wyatt got caught in the middle of two gangbangers on some drug-turf-war issue. He was mindin’ his own business, walkin’ out of a corner store. Bullet hit his throat. He died right there on the sidewalk. That’s when she got paired up with Abraham Wilkes. And, well, we all know how that turned out.”
“He was a good, honest man.”
“We are bad, bad people.”
George shakes his head while I struggle to ignore the way my stomach tightens. “Lord knows I’ll never lose that name. One cop goes rogue and I’m left scrubbing filthy fingerprints off the whole dang department for years. Forget that I spent years before that all up in everyone’s asses with more task forces than anyone else in the state of Texas, trying to rid this city of the kind of drug runners who killed my son.”
I hesitate. “My mom never talked about Abe after he died. She wouldn’t answer my questions.” I don’t want to sound too eager, but I’m desperate to know what George Canning knows. Did my mom tell him what she admitted to me?
“I remember her sayin’ something about you havin’ a rough go of it afterward. She didn’t know what to tell you.” George studies me for a long moment. “What was he, again? Your baseball coach? Or was it football?”
“Basketball.”
“Right.” George pauses. “You still have questions about him? Because if you do . . .” The chair creaks as he leans back. “I’m all ears.”
I should say no. I should pretend that what Abraham Wilkes was or wasn’t doesn’t matter to me after all these years. My mother’s cloudy confession might be safer that way. But the truth is it has mattered to me, since long before the night my mother died.
Abe wasn’t just the guy who taught me how to dribble a ball like a pro. And he may have been my basketball coach for five years, but he was never just my coach.
Every time I scored in a game, no one cheered louder than Abe.
My dad didn’t come to most of my games. He said it was because of work, but Abe was a cop on shift work, and he managed to work his schedule so he could coach my team.
Abe taught us how to lose with grace, and to treat all players with respect. Two or three times a year we’d volunteer as a team at a soup kitchen. Other times we’d come out and run drills with young kids from low-income areas. All this was a mandatory requirement for being on his team. More mandatory than playing in the actual games.
I was eleven the first time I kissed a girl. Her name was Jamie, and Abe was the only person I told. He patted me on the back with a knowing smile.
Then he took me for a drive through one of the rougher parts of Austin, slowing past a community center ripe with teenaged girls pushing around baby strollers. Even though schoolyard gossip had already taught me the basics, I got “the talk” from Abe. The one where he stared me down with those penetrating chocolate-brown eyes and told me if I got a girl pregnant and the thought of walking away from my responsibility even crossed my mind for a second, he’d beat my ass because I’m better than that.
Abe was like a father and a big brother and the man I wanted to be when I grew up, all rolled into one.
Yeah, Abe’s death left a lasting impression on me.
The void was gaping.
And the betrayal I felt from this father-figure, this
moral god . . . it was crippling. At first, I didn’t believe what the news was saying; I couldn’t. How could someone so focused on doing the right thing do something so wrong?
But my mother didn’t defend him, didn’t discredit what the newspapers were saying. Didn’t deny it. She just drank and let her marriage and our family fall apart.
Before long, it became easier to believe everyone. To believe that Abe was guilty, as much as I didn’t want to.
There’s not a lot that’s worse than finding your mother dead in your kitchen with a gun in her hand. But having that happen on the same night she alludes to having something to do with the death of your childhood idol . . .
Now the one person who would have seen all the evidence against Abe is offering to give me answers.
George leans over. “Boy, you’re as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. What gives?”
After forty years on the police force, it’s not a wonder he can see right through me. “I still have a hard time believing he did it,” I finally admit.
George presses his lips together. “What do you remember?”
“Just what was in the news.” Over the past few days, I’ve spent hours reading old articles online to refresh my memory, unable to shake my mother’s words.
Abe died in a sketchy motel, along with another guy. Two bags—one of drugs, one of cash—sat on the bed between them. In the beginning, the only statement the police would release was the one confirming that a police officer and a man known to police were found dead, and that they were investigating. The media got hold of Abe’s name quickly, though, along with the details about the crime scene and the fact that Abe was alone and not on duty at the time. They also learned that the “man known to police” was Luis Hernandez, a drug dealer released six months prior. One thing led to another, and soon the public was screaming that the APD was trying to cover up a crooked cop.
George stares hard at his drink for a moment, his lips twisted in thought, before taking a sip. “Did you know that Austin is now the eleventh-largest city in the nation, and one of the fastest growing?”
“I read that somewhere.” Or maybe Silas told me, right after he said not to sell the house.
“It was less than half of what it is today back then, but we all saw it coming. This population explosion. And yet so many people still have a hard time seeing how it’s changing. They expect us—the mayor, the police department, your uncle, all of us—to keep it the same.
“Everyone wants to continue living in their happy little bubble. They want to drink their fancy lattes and go to their music festivals and restaurants and ‘keep Austin weird.’ Sure, we look like a fairy-tale city next to Houston or Dallas or San Antonio. But make no mistake, there’s crime here and it is damn ugly. I mean, for God’s sake, we’re some two hundred and thirty miles from the Mexican border, where they’re funneling through a million pounds of marijuana and who the hell knows how many tons of cocaine every single damn year!” George’s face is turning red with anger. He takes a few breaths to calm himself.
“We started noticing a big problem with the drugs coming into Austin. Our patrol divisions were stumbling on it all over the place; they couldn’t keep up. I knew I had to take the bull by the horns before Austin turned into another Laredo.”
That’s being a little bit dramatic, given that Laredo borders Mexico, but I can appreciate his point. Like he said, we are only a couple hundred miles away—and some days, the distance feels even shorter.
“So I assigned four officers to a narcotics field unit. Their job was simple—to hit the streets and bust as many dealers as possible. Big, small, didn’t matter. Uncover the stash houses and labs, seize everything. Shut ’em down. Don’t let them get comfortable in my city.
“And son, let me tell you, these guys were good. They were dogged, churning through tips, securing informants. They were sniffin’ out dealers like bloodhounds.” Canning chuckles. “That’s what I called them—my hounds. Dumbest thing Poole coulda done when he took over for me after my heart attack was shut them down. Budget cuts, my ass.
“Anyway . . . they caught wind of a patrol officer who was emptying the pockets of dealers he’d come across on routine calls and reselling at a discount. They didn’t have a name. All they knew was this guy was of African descent.” He stares into his drink. “Not long after, Abraham Wilkes turns up dead in a motel room with Hernandez. Wasn’t too hard to connect the dots.”
“What do you think happened the night Abe died?”
“Who knows? Maybe Hernandez wanted more drugs for less money. Maybe he didn’t know Wilkes was a cop and panicked when he found out. Maybe Wilkes threatened him with somethin’. These guys . . . they’re lowlife criminals; some of them are dumb as dirt. There ain’t no rationalizing with them.” He takes another long puff of his cigar. “But it was all cut and dry what was goin’ on in there—a gym bag full of a bit of this, a bit of that . . . a brown paper bag with piles of twenties. No sensible explanation for why Wilkes would be in that seedy motel that night. Still, I hoped for another reason, for my own sake as much as the department’s.
“But the evidence against Abe quickly piled on. We traced a call from Hernandez to him earlier that night. We found cash and drugs stashed away in his house, taped to the back of furniture, in the vents, under the mattress. We were able to link the drugs to batches checked in to the evidence room, from busts he’d been at over the last month.” He shakes his head. “It’s a damn shame that he lost his way like that.”
The steady tick of the old grandfather clock is the only sound in Silas’s study for a long moment, as I take in all that Canning has told me. It makes no sense when it’s laid out next to what my mother said. But, then again, she was drunk and in a poor state of mind. Still, I’m confused. “So, how was my mom involved in all this?”
George frowns. “Jackie? She wasn’t involved. I put together an investigative team with my very best people, but she didn’t have nothin’ to do with that. I never would have allowed that, what with her being close friends with him—partners, too—for years. She didn’t want to believe it, but the evidence was impossible to ignore. That was a hard pill for her to swallow.”
She washed that hard pill down with plenty of booze. “What about his family?”
George clucks. “It was just his mother, and the only thing she was ever gonna accept was a report that said Abe Wilkes was framed and murdered. She wanted a lie. She refused to believe the truth, even when it was finally there in front of them, in bold black ink.” He shakes his head. “And his wife, well, she up and took off with the kid. I guess she decided that all would come out in due time. Hell, she probably already knew what was comin’. She was his wife, after all. If there was extra money under their mattress, I have to think she’d have noticed it while she was tuckin’ in the sheets. Probably turned a blind eye. Given where she came from, it wouldn’t surprise me one bit.”
Where she came from? The Dina I remember was pretty and gentle and slight. She spoke softly. She wore floral dresses and baked chocolate-chip cookies and delivered her husband bottles of beer at barbecues, with a kiss. She was everything my mother wasn’t.
“What happened to her?”
“Started her life over elsewhere, I reckon. Can’t say I blame her. Being the wife of a cop who got himself into selling drugs won’t earn you no prize at the county fair, that’s for damn sure. As I recall, she didn’t even bother comin’ back to ask for the report once we released it.” His brow tightens. “It’s odd, don’t you think? Wouldn’t she want to see it, for closure?”
“Unless she already knew he was guilty.”
“Exactly.” George levels me with a somber look. “And unfortunately, Abraham Wilkes was as guilty as they come. Of course, we can’t try a dead man, but any jury would have seen it for what it was.”
“Seen what for what it was?” Silas asks, stepping back in.
“Jackie’s old partner, Abraham Wilkes.”
; Silas’s eyes dart to mine, and I see the warning question in them: Did I tell George what my mom said?
I give him the slightest shake of my head, and I can see him exhale. He reaches for his drink. “Some people can’t help but abuse the authority they’re given.”
“Jackie sure didn’t. To one helluva cop.” George toasts the air. “And one of the hardest-working people I ever met. Not like this blister here, who don’t show up ’til the work’s done.” He nods toward Silas, flashing a smile to go along with the gentle ribbing.
Silas clanks glasses with him.
It finally dawns on me that this last-minute supper was Silas pulling his puppet strings. I can see what he’s trying to do—discredit my mother’s drunken rambling and give me something else to believe.
Manipulative, yes, but I appreciate it, because it’s given me the courage to face whatever sits folded in my back pocket. In fact, I’m now desperate to read what my mother had to say. I set my barely touched glass down on the desk.
“That’s good bourbon!” Silas scolds.
“I have to drive.”
“Right. Of course. So you’re going to pack up your things this weekend? Judy will have your room ready for you by Saturday.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you.” Silas made a compelling case before George Canning and his wife arrived. I should move in with them rent-free—I’ll get home-cooked meals and can commute into work every day with Silas. I’ll borrow against the house’s equity and have the kitchen renovated. Give it a different feel, so my skin doesn’t crawl every time I walk in.
When the renos are done, I can either move back into the house and rent the two extra bedrooms out to my friends, or rent the entire house out for enough income to pay bills and a mortgage on a second property. Yup, Silas has made easy sense of my life for the next few years. I’m not sure if I’m sold on it—maybe I should start over fresh in Seattle, or somewhere completely new—but the thought of leaving behind everything I know isn’t appealing, either.