“You want me to stay in this elevator?” he asked.
“The one you’re in doesn’t go to my floor,” she said, and hung up.
When he had retraced his steps to the other elevator, it was standing open. He rode up, got out when it stopped, gave a glance to the snarl of wrought iron as he passed underneath it, and went to the door directly ahead of him. It opened smoothly.
Gina was in her living area, making coffee. The television was playing on CNN, but before the rattle of the coffee grinder took over, the big room was silent but for the perpetual low hum of machinery. Gina rolled over to the low sink to fill the pot; her hair was spiked, the right side of her face pink. She was wearing the same black jeans, yellow high-tops, and orange sweater she’d had on when he’d last seen her.
“Did I get you up?” he asked.
“Sleep is a waste of time,” she said, which didn’t answer his question—or maybe it did.
“Sorry,” he said, but she merely nodded at the stack of paper on the low table, dumped the grounds into the filter, and switched on the machine.
The pile of paper was a good two inches thick—there must have been nearly three hundred pages. Allen thumbed through it, astonished. Back in May, he’d spent two weeks and come up with maybe a tenth of this. In less than twelve hours, some of which she’d spent asleep, the woman had assembled a dossier of everything that touched on the lives of the O’Connell family, from the wife’s birth certificate to the husband’s latest credit report.
“Damn, girl. Have you got a dozen elves living in those machines?”
He couldn’t be sure, but he thought Gina looked pleased at his response. All she said was, “You want a bagel?”
“Thanks, I ate.”
“Yeah, and I notice you brought me some.” She began to saw away at what appeared to be a very firm object.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t think you’d care much for cold pancakes.”
“Makes for a change,” she said. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Next time,” he promised.
She shot him a look over her shoulder. “Why would there be a next time?”
She had a point, he thought, looking at the material in front of him; there couldn’t be a whole lot more she could do for him. “In order to bring you cold pancakes?”
“That’s really okay,” she told him. “I’d rather have a stale bagel. Take your file and go, Allen. I’ve got work to do.”
“Aren’t you going to offer me some coffee?”
“Oh, right.” The sarcasm grew ever thicker in her voice. “First you bring me none of your breakfast, then you guzzle my coffee.”
He stood and went past her chair, opening cabinets and looking at their contents. Without a word, he began to take down packages and search for bowls and pans. She watched, saying nothing; after a minute, she picked up her mug and disappeared behind the room’s sole partition. He heard water running, and looked in the sleek brushed-steel refrigerator, taking out a loaf of rather stale bread, some eggs, and an orange. The woman might not get out a lot, but someone kept her well provided.
She came back just as the French toast hit the table, her short hair wet against her scalp, wearing a blue T-shirt above the black jeans. Because he was watching closely, he noticed the slight quirk of a smile as she saw the table, but that was her only reaction. The forgotten bagel sat where she had left it in the toaster, and she put away more food than Allen had that morning. At the end of it, she polished her plate with the last bite and said merely, “How’d you make the syrup?”
“You had sugar, so I caramelized it and watered it down. If you had any maple flavoring, it would’ve been easier.”
“This was better.”
He took that for a thanks, and carried her dishes over to the dishwasher.
“Tell me,” he asked. “How do you get things off those high cabinets?” It had puzzled him, since he hadn’t seen any kind of reaching stick.
In response, she wheeled out from behind the table, fiddled with one of the chair’s controls, and the wheels rebuilt themselves, the body of the chair elongating until her head was at the same level as Allen’s. She grinned at his reaction, and said, “Watch this.”
She rolled across the floor to the raised platform on which the machinery sat, coming to rest in front of the step. More fiddling, and the chair reshaped itself again. The wheels tipped, rested on the edge of the step, and lifted her up. She pivoted to face him, and smiled at his pleasure.
“I’ve never seen one like that.”
“It’s experimental. I’m helping the designers get rid of the bugs before they put it on the market. At first, it tended to do a little hip-hop and dump you on the floor. Pain in the ass.”
“A little more work, you could get it out on the dance floor.”
At that she actually laughed aloud, and said, “I’ve already given them the modifications.” She set her wheels at the platform’s edge, and the chair felt its way down to the lower floor with the ungainly precision of a camel settling to its knees. She rolled over to the living area, raising the chair enough so she was more or less level with him as she handed him the thick file.
“Thank you for this,” he told her.
“Your man’s hiding something,” she said abruptly, her smile vanishing. “I don’t know what it is yet—nothing in that stuff gives him away—but I’m going to keep digging until I find it.”
“What kind of something?”
“Don’t know that yet. But it’s got to be illegal—he’s way too clean. It’s a well-built façade, but I can smell something rotten behind it. And I should also tell you, I got the feeling there’s someone else out there interested, probably law enforcement. Nothing direct, but it’s like seeing, I don’t know, a broken twig or something. You need to watch your step so you don’t walk into anything.”
Allen smiled at her imagery, and mused, “Jungle instincts.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, nothing. Just, you get to know the terrain, when you’ve lived there long enough. Hunted there for a while.”
“Good analogy,” she said. She fiddled with one of the controls on her chair, then said, “Look—it’s none of my business, but that kid, O’Connell’s son. Are you keeping an eye on him?”
“Somebody else is watching out for him just now, but yes, you could say I’m responsible for him.”
“But is the other person watching him?” she demanded.
The urgency in her voice was clear, if the reason for it was not. “Why?”
She hesitated, then retreated with a shake of the head. “Like I said, it’s none of my business. My job’s to dig up information, which I’ve done. Take it. I suppose there’ll be stuff coming in from this plane crash—if there’s anything interesting, I’ll send a message through Alice. But I expect that for the past history, you’ve got the bulk of it.”
“It’s an amazing amount of work you’ve done.”
“It’s all in the wrist,” she replied. “And knowing the right people.”
Allen left the parking garage with less reluctance than if he hadn’t had the pull of all that information drawing him away. He’d liked Gina, he’d wanted to stay and talk to her, hear her story and explore her mind. But more than that, he wanted to know what she’d seen in that stack of paper to make her ask, “Is the other person watching him?”
He drove down the wide, busy street, past car dealerships and Chinese restaurants until the sign WASH-O-MAT reached out to snag the corner of his eye. He circled the block and returned to the parking area behind the low cement-block building, taking with him both the bag of laundry and the thick packet of papers.
He fed quarters into the slot of the heavy-duty machine, and began stuffing his clothes into its maw, patting pockets as he went. The last shirt out, the first thing he’d stuffed into the bag that morning, was the one he’d worn the previous night. There was something in its pocket: Allen’s fingers reached in, coming out with a small leather volume sta
mped DIARY.
He held it, feeling an absolute fool. How could he have forgotten it, even for an instant? You nearly tossed the thing into the machine, he berated himself, but knew it was not true. In fact, he went on, closing the lid and sorting out change for a small carton of detergent, the back of your brain remembered very well it was here; you just didn’t want to read it.
Allen grimaced, and transferred the diary to his current pocket. He shook the soap onto the clothes, pushed in the slot to feed the machine his quarters, and settled down onto one of the plastic chairs provided for the discomfort of the clients.
Gina’s material first. She had arranged it in a more or less chronological fashion, starting with the birth certificates for Jamie’s parents. His mother, born Paula Janine Whitefield, had won the school science fair prize in fifth grade, played flute in the high school orchestra, and spent two semesters at a small private college in the valley east of Los Angeles before meeting Mark O’Connell at a party. His history was a little more showy, with juvenile arrests for stealing a car and for threatening a neighbor (How had Gina pried that information from sealed juvenile records? Contacts, indeed.) and later for charges of check forgery, which were dropped, and for a bar fight, which had gotten him six months. No arrests after the age of twenty-six, which meant that either his hormones had settled down or he’d gotten smart.
Mark and Paula had married the October after she had left college, when she was nineteen and he thirty-one. Jamie was born three years later. They moved often, each time to a slightly more expensive house (Gina’s information included the county tax records and a string of title companies—it is indeed all in the contacts) despite Mark’s middle-of-the-road reported income on his tax returns.
It was like following a trail through elephant grass. Some of the papers Gina had given him were enigmatic, needing close attention to puzzle out their relevance to the case—such as the laconic, decade-old newspaper snippet noting that the investigation against someone named Thomas Church had been discontinued, and all charges against Church dropped. It took some shuffling before Allen discovered the name Thomas Church on the bottom of the O’Connell tax returns, as the accountant who had prepared them for the family. He nodded in appreciation: O’Connell’s shady financial doings went back at least ten years.
He sat on the plastic chair, his legs going numb, completely unconscious of the heat and noise, traveling through time on the paper trail left by the O’Connell family. At some point he glanced up and saw that some other patron had dumped his wet laundry into one of the wheeled baskets, so he loaded it into a behemoth dryer, threw in all the quarters he had, and went back to his reading.
Twelve years earlier, Jamie’s own bureaucratic trail began with his birth certificate. Not until four years later, when he was registered for preschool, did the papers with his name on them gain any detail, but after that, Gina’s research had expanded to include the buildings and teachers connected with the boy’s schools, even when the teachers were not his. A letter to the editor from one of the second-grade teachers about the benefits of teaching Spanish in schools, a three-year-old newspaper photograph of a sixth-grade class trip to Washington, D.C., a laconic article about a break-in to the school’s computer lab—Gina’s net had swept up anything and everything to do with Jamie’s environment, and she had dumped it all on him.
After he’d been in the Laundromat for two and a half hours, Allen became aware of a presence just in front of his knees. He raised his eyes reluctantly from the pages, and saw a small brown-eyed urchin, sucking on a stick of candy and studying him with undisguised interest.
“Mister,” the creature said, “my mama says someone’s gonna steal your clothes if you don’t take them.”
Allen looked over at the dryer he’d been using, saw a bright flash of pink and orange tumbling around within, and finally located his own more drab possessions in a mound on one of the high folding tables. He slid the stack of papers back into their envelope and got to his feet, letting out an involuntary exclamation in the process. The chair had crippled him for life, he thought, stomping his feet to get the circulation going. “Thanks for the warning,” he told the child, who to his surprise stuck out a hand. Allen obediently shook the sticky palm, but the kid rolled his eyes and left the hand where it was. Oh. Allen dug a dollar from his pocket and gave it to the clothes guardian. This earned him another roll of the eyes, but it wasn’t as if the child had actually driven off a gang of furious trouser thieves. He folded up the clean clothes and put them into the string bag, carrying them, the papers, and the diary out to the tropical swelter of the car.
On the way back to the motel, he went through a hamburger drive-in for the day’s second dose of grease and sugar, and carried clothes, information, and lunch into the cool room. He paused only to hang the shirts in the closet before settling barefoot onto the bed with the file and his food spread out around him, skimming briskly through the unbound sheets.
First grade had been a hard time for Jamie O’Connell. The school itself was located two blocks from the O’Connell home (Gina had sent a computer-generated map of the area, with the addresses highlighted in yellow). The year seemed to have started out well, and Jamie’s name appeared (along with about thirty others) in the cast of the Christmas play. Then over the winter break, the wing of the school in which his classroom was located caught fire. Although the damage was not extensive, portable classrooms were brought in for the next weeks. Arson was suspected, aiming possibly at the computer lab that was in that wing, but no arrests were made.
Repairs were hurried along, and in March the classes were moved back into the building, the portables taken away, a picture appeared in the local paper of the principal cutting a ribbon across the door of her freshly painted, and planted, new wing. At the end of the month, the school had its spring recess, when many of the children joined Parks and Recreation programs designed to keep them busy while their parents were at work. Jamie, although his mother was at home and available, was registered for the day camp program. On the Thursday of that week his group spent the day at the park, playing baseball and being taken for rides in the rowboats. At the end of the day, when the parents arrived to pick up their exhausted children, one of the first-grade boys was missing. After a brief search, before the police had even arrived, two of the parents found young Able Shepherd, drowned in the weeds at the lake’s edge.
The grainy newsprint photograph, taken by one of the Parks and Rec employees earlier that day, showed Able standing with some friends. The child’s hair was so pale blond, it looked white, and the camera had caught him laughing aloud in gap-toothed high spirits.
At his side, a contrast in color and mood, was the thin, dark, subdued child who would become deadboy.
Memorial service, legal proceedings, charges and countercharges against school district and Parks department, until things faded with summer vacation. The O’Connell family moved again, and in September, Jamie entered a private school just half a mile from his new home. His teacher’s written evaluation from October (How on earth had Gina gotten that!) suggested that the boy was bright enough, but did not try hard, that he was not as sociable as she would have liked, and that occasionally he was, in her word, “inclined to be moody.”
On November sixteenth, Paula O’Connell had died in her second-floor bedroom. The flurry of official forms and newspaper articles generated to cover the event accounted for nearly half the stack of pages Gina had given him, from the initial police report to the coroner’s verdict. Sifting methodically through them, Allen gradually formed a picture in his mind of how the case had progressed.
It began with a call to 911 from the O’Connell house, a child’s panicky voice saying that his mother was shot and bleeding. The dispatcher tried to keep the child on the line, but the boy hung up before she could get his address from him. She identified the source of the caller’s number and sent both police and ambulance to the scene. At the house, the police pounded for approximately two minutes
before the door was opened, by a child with blood on his shirt and hands. The police ushered the boy out to their car, although he insisted that there was no one else in the house, and they went through the house for a possible shooter before they would allow the paramedics inside.
It was clear at a glance what had happened, equally clear that Paula O’Connell was beyond anything the paramedics could do for her. Crime-scene photographs (extremely indistinct—they’d been pixilated by a fax machine) showed a figure slumped into an overstuffed chair, a shotgun on the floor a few feet from her body. The father was in Las Vegas on business (he owned real estate there) and the housekeeper had the day off. The boy’s mother usually met him at school to walk him home, but that day she had not come, so he had set off by himself, since he knew the route and there were crossing guards and lights all the way. He let himself in with the key he’d been given at the beginning of the year, went through the house looking for her, and found her. He’d gotten blood on him, he said, when he tried to shake her awake.
The medical examiner had taken some care with the investigation, since it is notoriously difficult to pull the trigger on the far end of a shotgun barrel, but the gun’s position was consistent with having been placed on the floor at the victim’s feet, and there was gunpowder residue all over Paula’s legs and feet. They had even found a short stick that she could have used to depress the trigger; although there was no being certain, since it along with everything else was spattered with blood and it had been crushed under someone’s shoe. And since the husband was away (this was confirmed by a speeding ticket he’d received, going through an infamous speed trap in Nevada at thirty over the limit) and Paula had no enemies other than the depression that had plagued her life, her death was judged suicide.
The ME’s main source of discomfort, reading between the lines, was timing: Why would a woman whom everyone described as a loving mother shoot herself in the head the day before her son’s birthday, and knowing that the boy himself would find her? But in the end, the investigators had decided that her timing was of a piece with picking her husband’s most valuable gun in order to do the deed. Paula O’Connell had committed suicide. The only powerful act of the woman’s life was the way she had left it.