Homicide Related (32 page)

“You talk to your uncle about that?”

“Yeah.”

“And?”

“He told me some stuff.”

Randall waited.

“He told me she was adopted. He told me about his other sister—and about how his mother died. He said that's why he and Lorraine weren't … why they never talked.”

“I see.”

He
saw
? Dooley watched him take another sip of coffee. What did he mean, he saw?

“Is that what you meant? Is that the weird shit you've been asking about?”

Randall stared at him for another full minute. Dooley hated that. He hated the way cops always acted like they were holding all the cards. He especially hated it when they were.

“Here's a mystery for you, Ryan,” Randall said at last. “A seventeen-year-old adopted girl gets pregnant, leaves home, severs all ties with her family. There's no contact between her and her big brother—who isn't really her brother—for, what, fourteen, fifteen years? Then the kid, her
son,
drops himself in the crapper and, all of a sudden, out of the blue, this respectable retired cop and all-round good citizen big brother steps up to the plate and takes responsibility for the kid.” And pays her a thousand dollars a month each and every month, Dooley thought. He bet Randall knew about that. He bet that's what the subpoena for the bank records had been all about. “What do you suppose that's all about, Ryan? Why would your uncle all of a sudden step into your life?” And pay for the privilege, Dooley thought. Jesus, had Lorraine been blackmailing him? Did she have some kind of leverage? But what? What could she possibly …

Jesus. No way.

He stared at Randall. Randall looked blandly back at him.

“Are you saying …? You don't think …?”

Randall seemed to soften in that instant. Or maybe it was all an act. Maybe he wanted to see how Dooley would react.

“We talked to some of your grandparents' old neighbors. One of them remembers overhearing a fight at your grandparents' house one night. She says your mother … well, she made certain accusations.” Accusations?

“This neighbor called the police, who asked your mother about it. She refused to talk to them. She said she'd been angry at your uncle. He never mentioned that?”

“No. What are you—”

“Did your mother ever tell you who your father was, Ryan?”

What? Where did that question come from?

“Some guy,” Dooley said. “Some guy named Dooley.”

“You know him?”

Dooley shook his head. He remembered Lorraine used to talk about the guy sometimes. Half the time she'd be crying over him:
He was the best guy, ever, Dooley. He was so fine, you would have liked him.
The other half the time she was throwing stuff, saying what a jerk he was, how he'd left her like that with a baby on her hands, what an asshole, and, big surprise, the way Dooley acted half the time, he was just like his father,
and that's no compliment, Dooley, just so you know.

“You don't remember him? You don't remember anything about him?”

“She said he took off when I was a baby.”

“
He
took off?”

Dooley looked at Randall. What was he getting at?

“Did you know that she didn't list a father on your birth registration?”

No, he didn't know that.

“Why do you think she left his name off?”

“I don't know.”

Randall contemplated him again.

“You could ask your uncle,” he said finally. “And there are tests. DNA tests. You can find out for sure.”

Find out what?

“It would explain a lot,” Randall said.

“I don't know what you're talking about,” Dooley said.

“That's the other mystery, Ryan,” Randall said. “Either you know exactly what I'm talking about, or you don't. If you don't, then think about it. Think about why your uncle suddenly dropped into your life after all those years. Or maybe you know exactly what I'm talking about, in which case … well, your uncle isn't the only one who knew Jeffie and what he did for a living.”

They were fishing on that one, Dooley thought. They already know where he was that night. If they had anything to connect him with what had happened to either Jeffie or Lorraine, he'd be sweating it out in an interview room. He stood up.

“Thanks for meeting with me,” he said.

Randall sat with his coffee while Dooley left. He went straight to Warren's house where he smiled through chocolate ice-cream cake with Alicia, her mother, Warren, and some of the kids Alicia went to school with. She was thrilled with the DVDs Dooley gave her—some new stuff, all of them about animals, that he'd special-ordered for her. At ten to three, he hugged her and wished her many happy returns.

“Thanks for coming,” Warren said. “She talked about you all morning.”

“No problem,” Dooley said.

Warren peered at him.

“Are you okay?” he said.

“Yeah. See you Monday, okay, Warren?”

He got home just as Annette Girondin's car pulled up at the curb.

An hour later, Dooley found himself talking to his uncle under conditions he never could have imagined. His uncle looked tense; his skin was gray; his eyes were tight and watchful.

“You okay?” Dooley said.

“I'll live,” his uncle said.

“I just wanted to tell you,” Dooley said. “I didn't tell them anything.”

His uncle didn't say anything.

“All that stuff you told me that night,” Dooley said. “I kept it to myself.”

His uncle didn't react the way he had expected. Instead, he leaned forward a little and said, “If they subpoena you and make you testify, do everyone a favor, Ryan. Tell the truth. Okay?”

“If they subpoena me?” Dooley said. “You're going to get off, right?”

“I sure as hell hope so,” his uncle said. “But it's complicated.”

One-thousand-dollars-a-month complicated. Not-brother-and-sister complicated.

“What do you mean?” Dooley said.

“This isn't a good place to go into it, Ryan. You got something else you want to talk about, go for it. Otherwise—”

Dooley couldn't believe it—his uncle actually stood up, making it clear what he would discuss and what he wouldn't, still assuming the in-charge position.

“Okay,” Dooley said. “Can I ask you something?”

His uncle, wary, dropped back into his chair.

“How did she seem when she came by the house?” Dooley said.

“Who?”

“Lorraine. I know she came by. How did she seem? Was she clean? Was she high? What?”

He hadn't told his uncle he knew about the visit, so he was expecting his uncle to be at least a little taken back or, possibly, embarrassed. He was neither.

“She was a pain in the ass,” his uncle said. “She was all smiles until she found out you weren't home, and then she got pissy.”

Dooley sincerely hoped that his uncle hadn't taken that attitude with the cops.

“Besides that,” he said.

“To tell you the truth, she looked pretty good.” His uncle sounded surprised as he said it, like he still couldn't believe it. “Not her usual trashy self, you know what I mean? She told me she was clean, and she looked it.”

“Did she tell you why she did it?”

“Did what?”

“Cleaned up her act.”

“No. She said she wanted to see you. That's all.”

“You didn't tell me.”

“Turns out I didn't have to,” his uncle said. “You had her address and her number.”

Dooley dropped his voice a little. “What about the money?”

His uncle's eyes narrowed.

“You know what I mean, right?” Dooley said.

His uncle didn't answer. Dooley knew what it felt like to be in his position, so he didn't push it. But, boy, he had a million questions about all that cash and about what Randall had told him—and about why Randall had told him. Did he feel sorry for Dooley? Or had he agreed to the meeting and told him what he had for some other reason? Dooley ached to get into it with his uncle, but there were some things he couldn't ask, not here. Still, he couldn't help wondering, as he watched his uncle, do I look anything like him? Is it true what Randall had insinuated? Is that why his uncle had had Lorraine cremated, why he had never even suggested that she be put to rest in the family plot? Is that why, after all those years …

“You remember that first time you came to see me?” he said.

“Yeah,” his uncle said. “I'd be amazed if you remembered it, though. You were in bad shape.”

But Dooley did remember.

“I was surprised,” he said. “You remember that? I was surprised because I didn't even know I had an uncle.”

“I didn't think you were able to concentrate enough to be surprised about anything. I thought you were still focused on how you were going to score in there.”

“Yeah, well, that, too. But I was also surprised. Lorraine never mentioned you. Why do you think that was?”

“How the hell would I know?” his uncle said, irritable now. Well, why not? He was in here, wasn't he?

“My whole life I never knew about you, and then you showed up out of the blue. You said something like, you didn't know about me. Something like that.”

“I believe what I said,” his uncle said, his eyes hard on Dooley's, “was that if I'd known, maybe I could have done something sooner.”

Dooley nodded. Yeah, that was it. That was what he'd said—
If I'd known,
which, of course, Dooley had taken to mean, if I'd known about you. He looked at his uncle now. Since he'd gone to live with him, Dooley had never had to guess what his uncle was thinking. If he was angry with Dooley, if he was worried, if, God forbid, he was proud of something Dooley had done, he put it all right out there for Dooley to read. But for the past couple of weeks, it had been different. For the past couple of weeks, he hadn't been able to read his uncle. It had taken a while for him to get it. His uncle had been a cop most of his adult life. Cops, in Dooley's experience, were good at hiding what they were thinking. They were good at bluffing when they knew you'd done something but they couldn't prove it and when, therefore, they were trying to trip you up so you would hang yourself and save them the trouble. They were good at telling you that they understood exactly how it could have happened: The guy pissed you off, right, Ryan, and you got mad, right, and so you swung at him; you didn't mean to, and you wouldn't have done it if he hadn't acted like such a jerk, right, Ryan? Telling you they understood when the truth was that they were probably disgusted with you for being such a lowlife; they were stringing you along so you'd finally come clean and say, yeah, I did it and here's why, and then, there you were, hanging yourself again. Dooley couldn't see why his uncle would have been any different when he was a cop, which meant that, if he wanted to, he could probably hide what was really going on in his head just the same as every other cop Dooley had ever known.

“What exactly did you mean when you said that?” Dooley said.

“What do you think I meant?”

“I thought you meant that you didn't know about me. I thought you meant that you'd just found out about me.” Dooley had been pretty messed up at the time. Maybe his uncle was right. Maybe he hadn't been thinking straight. “But that's not it, is it?”

No answer.

“Is it?” Dooley said. He heard Lorraine's voice in his head:
You never came around.

His uncle didn't answer.

“You knew she had a kid, didn't you?” Dooley said. There was no other way to explain what Lorraine had said. “You knew about me. You knew I existed.” That had to be it. “You just didn't know what things were like.” Say it. Ask him:
Are
you my father?
That's where Randall had been going with his questions. But, Jesus, did he really want to know? “Am I right?”

“I thought it would be easier if you and I started out with a clean slate,” his uncle said. “Without any baggage.”

“You mean, if we started out without me wondering where you'd been my whole life?”

It took a few moments before his uncle said, “Something like that.”

“So, what, you just didn't care?” Or maybe he hadn't wanted to face it. Maybe he
couldn't
face it. Maybe that's what all those cash payments were about. It sure as hell was what Randall had been hinting.

“I told you, Ryan. Lorraine and I didn't get along.”

“But you knew she had a kid.”

“Yes.”

“And you never came to see me?”

He searched his uncle's face but saw no emotion.

“No,” his uncle said.

“Why not?”

“What difference does it make?”

“It makes a difference,” Dooley said.

Nothing.