How long they lay there, Beth would not later remember. Perhaps only minutes. Then the front door opened and closed, and she heard Candy pick up the kitchen phone. Beth raised herself and rolled off the bed; Pat had fallen, with automatic grace, asleep. She sat on the bottom step until Candy saw her.
“They want a fucking subpoena,” she said. “I’m on hold for Brainard.” Beth said nothing.
When Candy finally finished, she turned back to Beth and said tersely, “I have no patience for this. I’m sweating like a pig. They did let me look at the yearbooks. He’s been there since kindergarten. His name is Sam Karras. We couldn’t get the parents’ names, but Beth…” Candy came and sat beside her on the step. “He’s an only child.”
CHAPTER 22
At Parkside, the longtime chief’s last name was Bastokovitch. Over the years, Candy had often told Pat and Beth, the troops had created a whole dictionary of obscenities based on it. But Beth had never met him before his unmarked slid up the driveway next to Candy’s.
He’d come, Candy warned, to counsel caution. “There was a belief,” she said, flicking back the curtain and watching the big man’s slow progress up the drive, “that if he ever got up, he’d learn his butt had got stuck to the chair. This is evidently a fallacy.” She opened the door.
“Chief.”
“Detective.” Then, “Candace.”
“I’m glad you came. It’s time to proceed. I know you agree.”
“Bliss, the kid is in protective custody; he’s not going anywhere,” Bastokovitch said softly, accepting Beth’s offer of coffee with a sad smile.
“But that construction van is in the driveway, Ed,” Candy pleaded. “That probably means the parents—forgive me, Pat—the suspects are there. You know me, Ed. I don’t arrest first and talk later. But who can figure what the goddamn principal has done already? Called them? You have to know he’s called them. They could be getting out the passports right now.”
“There’s an unmarked sitting right in front of the driveway, Candace,” Bastokovitch sighed. “They’d have to tunnel out. We’ve looked up the people, Candace. They’ve lived in that house for seven years. Man, his wife, the kid. The wife’s got…she’s got cancer or something. Sick all the time. The husband works this business out of the house, every day. This case is big and long, Candace. We don’t want to go off half-cocked. Every move we make is going to be scrutinized. You know it. So I say, let’s go down there nice and quiet, one car of uniforms, maybe, and us, and we say, ‘We need to ask you some questions. Sir. Madam.’”
Bender walked in the front door then, without even ringing the bell. “It’s a house, Bender,” Candy said, disrespectfully. “You know—knock, knock?”
He ignored her and nodded to Pat. “Is it true?”
“We don’t know,” Candy said. “How very solicitous of you to come.”
“You are a very hostile woman, Detective Bliss.”
“Yes, I am, Agent Bender. I have grown hostiler with age. By the time I’m sixty, I’ll be spitting tobacco on your shoes.”
Pat went out into the garage to get more chairs, the aquamarine folding chairs they used at the Wedding in the Old Neighborhood when there were real weddings or overflow Saturday nights.
“Where’d you get folding chairs that color?” asked Bender.
“There wouldn’t be any harm in having a warrant,” Bastokovitch mused then. “Can you get something?”
“I already talked to the DA’s office. I talked to Kelly Clark. He’s ready.”
Bastokovitch looked long at Beth and Pat. “Good grief, you folks…you poor folks. Are you ready for this?”
Beth said, “You don’t get to be ready for it.” She sounded, to herself, coplike; she had a weakness for falling into Candy’s rhythms whenever she spent more than fifteen minutes in her light.
“We’re going to do this right.” The chief sighed again. Beth heard Candy make a sound, hoped Bastokovitch hadn’t. “We’re going to take them,” he said, again, this time holding out his hands, as if wishing for Pat or Beth to drop the flag and let the games begin. Then the front door banged open, and Vincent slouched into the hall.
“This is my son,” Pat said quickly, jumping up. “This is Vincent. Vincent, you know Candy. This is Chief Bastokovitch.”
Vincent looked straight at his mother. “Does Kerry have Girl Scouts?”
Beth thought a moment, ruffling a card file that had fallen all over the floor of her head, facedown. “Uh…I think.”
“So she won’t be home until after five.”
“Right.”
Vincent whipped his head once around the breakfast room, taking in the folding chairs, the stacks of photos still littered among the coffee cups on the table, the murmurs and bursts of laughter from the kitchen where the uniforms were traipsing in and out the back door to smoke among the roses.
“The picture,” Vincent said then.
Beth led her son out into the hall. “You saw the picture, and you know that I think it’s Ben,” she said softly.
“You think. Yeah. Well, it’s Ben,” Vincent said. “You know it is.”
“Did you recognize him?”
“When?”
“When he came here to mow. You said you didn’t see him.” Vincent looked out the window, up the block; he could easily see over Beth’s head, though he was no more than an inch taller than she.
“Is he the kid in the red house?”
Beth’s hand flew up before she reckoned what she intended to do with it, which was slap Vincent’s face. She had never—not in all the vicious fumblings, the hair pullings, the time she’d pushed him down on the lawn after he casually lobbed not one but two baseballs through two glass windows, or the times she’d locked the door and gone to bed, forgetting he was in the library or at a basketball game, all those manifest atrocities, significant and negligible, neglects and abuses—for all those, never had she slapped his face. She didn’t now, but Vincent’s head jerked sideways. It was just as if she had.
“You saw him? You saw Ben?”
“I didn’t…know it was Ben.” He dropped his knapsack, anvil-heavy, in the middle of the floor, where it would lie unopened all night, as it did every night. “I just used to see this kid goofing around, and I thought he looked like Ben. I mean, I guess I thought he looked like Ben. I never really thought about it much.” Beth watched his face reconfigure then, as if a front were passing over Lake Michigan, watching the restoration of his bored, cocky sneer, his Reese face.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
He started to turn, to go for the stairs. Beth asked again, “Why didn’t you tell me? Or, for God’s sake, your father?”
“I told Tom.”
“You told Tom. Why didn’t Tom tell us?”
“I don’t think he got it. I don’t know if I got it. He will now, I guess. I didn’t make a big deal out of it.”
“But why didn’t you say something?”
“I don’t know.”
“Vincent, our whole life was…” He gave her a murderous look, and Beth tried to back-pedal. “You knew what was at stake! Why didn’t you say something? Why didn’t you tell me yourself?”
“Say something? Tell you? Tell you what, Mom?” he spat it out then. “That I’d found my long-lost brother down the street? Would you have believed me? Would you have even goddamn heard me?”
“I would have believed you. I would have listened.”
He smirked.
“Vincent.” Her voice stopped him, one foot on the bottom stair. “When did you first see him?”
“How long have we lived here?”
No, God, Beth thought, no. Her finger ends pounded, one, two, three, four years.
“It doesn’t matter now, Vincent,” she said, thinking, Of course it matters, nothing else but this matters, and why, what, how he could have been possessed to keep it a secret? Or was it possible, even remotely, that her son to whom computers sang and chemistry released its riddles had truly believed it w
asn’t worth mentioning? It was too un-Vincent. There was something else. There had to be.
But, struggling to breathe evenly, she said, “There isn’t anything we can do about it. And…I should have told you this morning. It was stupid that I didn’t.” She stopped. “I’m sorry for it. But they took this boy out of school without knowing for sure. They think it’s Ben. The boy you…saw in the picture. They think it’s your brother. That he’s alive.” She added, fumbling. “That’s why all the cops are here.”
“Oh, thanks,” Vincent said. “I thought it was, like, a fire drill or something.” He shook his head. “Jesus. May I please go upstairs now and go to the bathroom? Mom?”
“Wait,” Beth told him. She didn’t know how to do it; she almost had, this morning, when she laid her head on his shoulder. “Vincent, I…it could be all right, Vincent.” She took his hand, marveling at its clean warmth, its huge size—how long since she had really held his hand? Not to scrub chocolate from it or snatch from it a hammer or an Exacto knife, not to grip it to cross a street, but really felt it, felt the supple palms, the emergent man’s knuckles that had, outside her notice, replaced the indented dimples of childhood—long, tapered fingers exactly like her own, the “piano hands” her mother had cherished such admiring hopes for, even when Beth bashed away at the keyboard with all the grace of a drill-press operator.
She raised his hand; he let her, neither yielding nor withdrawing, and laid it against her cheek. “Vincent, we’ve all been through so much. You’ve been through so much. Oh, Vincent, please forgive me.”
She heard him say, “Don’t,” and imagined him looking up the hall, humiliated; they were not twenty feet away from the group in the breakfast room. She should have stopped, right then.
But she said, once more, “Can you ever forgive me?”
“Forgive you?” he asked. “What the hell did you do?”
She couldn’t help it. A flute of anger.
She looked up and saw then, in her son’s eyes, plain as the exquisitely backlit detail in a Karsh portrait, not anger, not affection. Pity. Unalloyed pity. No other thing.
“I’ll call you…when…they…I’ll tell you,” she blurted.
“Fine,” Vincent told her, slowly pulling away his hand.
Candy was calling her. Beth turned back into the kitchen.
“Is he all right?” Candy asked, and Beth, not trusting her mouth, nodded.
Pat spoke up: “I have to call my mom and dad,” and it had the gratefully galvanic effect of restoring Beth’s attention.
“No!” she and Candy nearly shouted at the same time—but, Beth would think later, for vastly different reasons.
“Pat, we need to go down there as quietly and unobtrusively as we can. This guy could have…anything in there. Another kid. An arsenal. We have no idea what’s happening in that house,” Candy said.
“She’s right,” said Bastokovitch.
A young officer bounded up the front steps and in the open door, placing a sheaf of papers, embedded with carbons, in Candy’s hands. She thanked him.
“I’m going to go up with my buddy Bender here,” Candy said. “Righto, Bob?” Bender got up, actually adjusting his muted paisley tie. Beth watched Candy take her gun out of her satchel and stick it carefully in the belt of her slacks, behind her back, just over her right hip. “You got?” she asked Bender, and he tapped his breast pocket. “Okay, then.” Candy stopped, and briefly hugged Beth, hard. “Now we go.”
Beth saw the brake lights of Candy’s car blink to a full stop at the corner, and then she began to run. She didn’t look back to see if Pat was following; she simply ate the blocks, forgetting to breathe, arriving at the turn to the red house just as Candy and Bender were crossing the parkway to the front stoop. Behind the van neatly stenciled with the words “Karras Construction,” two officers crouched with drawn guns.
Jimmy grabbed Beth’s arms. “Don’t,” he hissed, surprised. She shook him off and bounded across the lawn after Candy, who shot her a look of unvarnished fury.
“I’m coming.”
“Bullshit,” said Candy. “I told you we don’t know…shit, Beth, go back down there. He could be aiming a rifle at your head right now. Don’t be an ass.”
“Mrs. Cappadora—” Bender began.
“I want to see him.”
“No.”
“What are you going to do, arrest me?” Beth asked.
“Oh, fuck,” Candy said. She turned her back, shoving Beth slightly behind her, and rang the doorbell.
He was little. A handsome, slender-hipped man with smooth Mediterranean skin, almost teen-looking except for two identical wings of white hair that framed his face. It was good hair, Beth thought; it was a vanity.
“Are you George Karras?” Candy asked.
“Yes,” he said, smiling, opening the door wider. “What’s wrong?”
“I am Detective Candace Bliss and this is Agent Robert Bender of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Mr. Karras, do you have a twelve-year-old boy named Sam who lives in this house?”
“I…my son,” he said, and then stumbled, sagging against the outer frame of the door. “What’s happened to my boy? Is Sam hurt? Are you the police?”
“Mr. Karras, Sam is unhurt, and he is in custody of protective services of Cook County.”
“He’s at school,” Karras said. “How did he get hurt?”
“Mr. Karras, you are under arrest for aggravated kidnapping in connection with the June 3, 1985, abduction of Benjamin Cappadora,” Candy said evenly. “You have the right to remain silent. If you give up the right to remain silent, anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law…”
“What?” Karras said, turning to Beth. “My son’s at school. Who’s Benjamin—?”
“If you give up the right to remain silent, anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to have an attorney present at any time you choose. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed to represent you. Do you understand these things, Mr. Karras?”
He said, then, “I get it. You got the wrong house. The people who lost the little boy, that kidnap case a long time ago, they live down over there. You can ask my neighbor lady—she knows the dad.”
“Mr. Karras,” Candy said, “may we please come inside?”
“Sure,” said the man, smoothing his flannel shirt. “I was just doing the bills. But I don’t think I can help you much. Because I don’t know the family. You got the wrong house is all.”
“They’re not arresting us,” Beth said.
“Huh?” Karras stared at her. “Are you a cop?”
“No,” Beth said.
“We’re his parents,” Pat said then, puffing, dragging himself up the steps behind Beth. “We’re Ben’s parents, you sonofabitch.”
“That’s enough,” Bender said.
“What?” Karras asked again. “Where is this kid? Is my boy hurt?”
Candy moved into the living room, where a large card table was set up next to a low corduroy-covered couch. There were stacks of invoices piled on one end next to an adding machine with a long tail of tape. “Mr. Karras,” she said, “please slowly raise your hands—”
“What?”
“Raise your hands so that the officer can make sure—”
“I don’t have a gun.” The small man smiled, then, at Beth. “I was doing the bills. I don’t have a computer.” One of the younger patrolmen quickly patted Karras’s sides, the inside and outside of his trouser legs. “Please, I don’t know what’s going on. This is my house. I didn’t do anything.”
Beth wanted to get down on her hands and knees and examine the fiber of the carpet, where a tiny pile of ground-in potato chips dotted a corner, to untie and explore the two huge pairs of boys’ tennis shoes she saw neatly standing side by side just inside the door, put her fingers in the pockets of the Bulls jacket tossed on a hook. A well-oiled mitt snuggled deep into the cushion of a fat maroon chair, near the f
ireplace; on the television, a photo of a boy, crouched grinning in a green silk baseball uniform, was framed in wood and gold. There were a pair of ceramic candlesticks at each end of the mantel. Only one had a candle. There was a vase with silk gladioli, white. And above that, a painting—no, Beth thought, in quick correction, a retouched photograph. The woman looked straight into the camera with an antelope’s shy grace and wide-eyed intensity; she wore a high-necked gray dress, a gown nearly, with a line of pearl buttons at the throat, and her pale hair haloed away from her forehead as if it were being lifted by invisible fingers. Blown, thought Beth; they had used a fan in the shoot. She reached for the edge of the couch, missed it, and sat down hard on the floor.
“Beth!” Candy turned, distracted, one eye still on Karras as he instinctively reached out a hand to help Beth.
“That’s Cecil,” Beth gasped. “That’s Cecil Lockhart.”
“Oh,” Karras said, “Cecil. Sure. She’s an actress. Did you see her on TV?”
Beth fought for a normal breath. She began to get up, settled for kneeling. “Why,” she asked then, “do you have a picture of Cecil Lockhart?”
George Karras drew himself up, nearly proudly, then nodded, his lips pursed with a wistfulness, a sorry rue Beth would never forget.
He said, “That’s my wife.”
CHAPTER 23
They could not make Candy stop apologizing.
When she thought about that first week, years later, it was Candy’s utter despair that Beth remembered most, the coruscating blame she heaped on herself and Bender and even the devoted officers from her Parkside staff, blame in fistfuls, even after Beth begged her to stop, even after Rosie, for God’s sake, put her hands on Candy’s shoulders and said, “This is not right. You did everything. This family owes you its life.”