MANIPULATED by a sixteen-year-old kid. I’m about to become known as the man who changed the course of politics in Las Piernas county on a setup by a teenager.” Mark Baker, usually one of the more easygoing members of the staff, was in a foul mood the next morning.
“You wrote it as fairly as you could.” Even as I said the words, I knew they would be little consolation.
“I waited around as long as possible, and they were still questioning her when we hit drop-dead deadline. I had no reason to believe she’d be released. I never said she was charged. I was careful, Irene. But you know no one reads anything as carefully as you write it.”
“Forget it, Mark. Every reporter has had something like this happen to them at least once.”
“Aw, crap, I should have known. But nobody here wanted to wait on it.”
“Understandable. Her timing was impeccable. She must have found out from somebody what time we…” An awful feeling came over me. I picked up the phone on Mark’s desk and called down to Danny Coburn. Sure enough, she’d asked him about deadlines and printing schedules when she was here on Thursday.
Mark, who had heard only my side of the conversation, was furious. “You saw her here on Thursday? And you didn’t say anything?”
“Hold on, hold on. I talked to her after I talked to you. And she wasn’t confessing to murder then. That surprised me as much as it did you. And I sure as hell didn’t know she had talked to Danny about our deadlines.”
He wasn’t completely mollified, but I didn’t have time to smooth his ruffled feathers. I went back to my desk and started working on election stories, which had now been made vastly more interesting by a couple of high school students. I thought about Julie. Monty Montgomery must have wanted to throttle her. In Jacob’s case, he could go to his father saying he was wrongly accused. Julie was responsible for her own predicament; I couldn’t picture her father being very understanding.
Not an hour had gone by when the phone rang. It was Pete, sounding frantic.
“Look, something’s happened to Frank.”
I let out a little cry, and he immediately knew what I was thinking.
“No, no, no – God, Irene – no, he’s not hurt or anything. I’m sorry. Bad choice of words. But look, something’s wrong with him.”
“I know, but he won’t talk about it.”
“Damn. I was hoping he was talking to you. He seemed to be doing better until this morning.”
“What happened?”
“He’s been suspended.”
“What?!”
“Bredloe suspended him for a couple of days.”
“Why?”
“Well, he sort of punched somebody out.”
“Sort of punched somebody out?”
“The guy had it coming. We’re sitting around this morning and Frank walks in, and Bob Thompson makes a crack and Frank punches him.” Pete laughed. “Knocked old Thompson flat on his ass. We had to hold them to keep them from going at it.”
“Frank punched somebody? Another detective?” I was having trouble getting all of this to sink in. Frank is not someone who goes around punching people.
“Yeah,” said Pete, more subdued.
“You said Thompson made a crack. What kind of crack did he make?”
“A wisecrack.”
“Pete. Don’t.”
“Okay, okay. The guy made a crack about you. Satisfied? Some stupid remark about the paper not getting to bed on time.”
“Oh no.”
“Oh yes. And Frank would probably have let it pass any other day, but I’m telling you, since this Fremont thing, he’s been impossible. Impossible. He’s a powder keg. That’s why Bredloe suspended him.”
“Pete, why was Bredloe so angry down at the harbor?”
There was silence for a moment.
“Shit, Irene, don’t tell me you were there.”
“I was there.”
“You poor kid. Damn, that shook me up. Bredloe wasn’t really angry, just concerned. He knows Frank isn’t happy with Carlson, but he keeps hoping they’ll work things out. Besides, Frank hasn’t been himself lately.”
“No, he hasn’t.”
“You can’t really blame him. It would be too much for anybody. He’s been bothered by the Gillespie case; he’s let it get to him. I don’t know if he told you, but he’s done almost all the contact with the little girl’s parents. Kid’s father just sits in front of the TV, watching videotapes of her, crying. Hit Frank hard, I guess.
“And back on Halloween night, when Mrs. Fremont died, he was losing it – Carlson picked up on it and told Frank he knew her too well to work on the case, and that he had enough on his plate with the Gillespie case. So that was bad, but Frank seemed to take it okay.”
“Not really.”
“Well, he seemed like he took it okay at the time. The next morning he was a wreck. That’s when the call came in about Tanner. He moved a little fast on that, but I understood – no telling how long Tanner was going to hang around. Besides, at that point, we just thought we were going to be questioning someone who had been in the park; we didn’t have much at all on the guy. We didn’t expect him to be armed, but you always kind of have that in the back of your mind. The guy started shooting before we got anywhere near him. Carlson thought we had put a bunch of civilians in danger.
“Anyway, I told Carlson off about that. There wasn’t anybody else in the room – Tanner took off running, pulled out a gun, and everybody else ran outside. We didn’t fire on him until he fired on us, and we were the only ones in the building by then. Frank did pull a stunt so that I could get out, but I’ll be damned if I was going to tell that to Carlson. I’m telling you, Irene, Frank scared the living hell out of me in there.”
I couldn’t say anything.
“Sorry – I shouldn’t be telling you all of this.” He sighed. “The job might not even be what’s eating at him. It’s November, and that’s Frank’s bad month anyway.”
“What do you mean?”
“You don’t know?”
“Pete! Would I ask you if I did?”
“No need to get nasty, Irene.”
“Sorry. Just tell me why November is a bad month.”
“His dad died in November. Thanksgiving.”
I thought back to what Frank had told me about his dad’s death. I knew he had died about three years ago, from a heart attack.
“Frank has been upset every year in November for the last three years?”
“Well, it’s always hard on him, but this year is the worst I’ve seen him. Maybe just too many other things happening. I don’t know. I think he blames himself for his dad’s death.”
“What? I thought his dad had a heart attack.”
“Yeah, well, I guess Frank had been talking to his dad, then he went outside to play with his sister’s kid. He was only out there a minute when his mom started screaming. Frank ran in, and his dad was on the floor, clutching his chest. Frank did CPR, but his dad died anyway.”
“Jesus.”
“You know how many times I’ve told him there was nothing he could have done if he had stayed in that room talking to his dad?”
I sat there, suddenly not caring a damn about the election, the newspaper, or anything else. Except Frank.
“Where is he now, Pete?”
“Home, I guess. He won’t talk to me. Could you try?”
“Sure. I don’t know if it will do any good, but I’ll try. Thanks for telling me all of this.”
I found Lydia and asked her to call me at Frank’s if anybody needed me. Then I located Stacee.
“Something’s come up, Stacee, and I have to leave. Lydia knows how to get in touch with me.” I listed some of the things I had planned to do that morning; she was excited to take on the responsibility. I was a little afraid to give her so much, but that Monday night would be busier than the day, with the last of election eve to deal with. The next night would be endless.
I raced down to Frank’s house. He didn’t answer the doorbell, but his car was in the driveway, so I pulled out my key and let myself in. I called to him as I opened the door, but there was no response. I kept calling all the way through the house, then saw he was sitting out on the back patio. A bottle of scotch sat next to him.
“A little early in the day, isn’t it?” I said as I walked out into the backyard.
He didn’t answer me or look at me.
I moved around to where I could see his face. He looked like hell.
I sat down next to him.
“If you’re gong to defend my questionable honor with your bare knuckles, the least you can do is look me in the eye.”
“Pete has a goddamned big mouth,” he spat, but at least he looked at me.
“How long do you think this would have been a secret, anyway?”
“With that bunch of hens, not long.”
“Pete’s just worried about you. So am I.”
“I’m fine.”
“Sure you are.”
Silence.
“Look,” he said angrily, “I don’t need you to hold my hand every time I have a problem at work. Don’t you have an election to cover?”
“A problem at work? Is that what this is? Face it, Frank. Something’s really wrong and you know it.”
“It’s my problem.”
“Our problem.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“Goddamn it, Irene, do you always have to have the last fucking word!?”
“When it matters, yes.”
More silence.
“Go back to work.”
“Talk to me.”
He threw his glass against the wall of the house. I jumped, but I wasn’t going to back down.
“Break every last piece of glass in the house if it makes you feel better. But talk to me, Frank.”
“I told you, I can’t.”
“Bullshit. You won’t.”
He got up and walked into the house. I followed.
“Give me my key back,” he shouted.
“No way.”
“I don’t want to be with you anymore, Irene. It’s not working. Go on, get out.”
“You are a lousy liar, Harriman. And I don’t take orders from you.”
“Goddamn it, get out of my house.”
“Like I said, I don’t take orders.”
He drew his hand back and took a step toward me, but the action seemed to startle even Frank. He backed down immediately and sank to the couch, as if defeated. I sat next to him.
I lowered my voice, trying to ease things down a notch. “Wednesday morning, when I saw Mrs. Fremont, I told her you had invited me to Thanksgiving.”
He put his head back and looked up at the ceiling. His jaw flexed with tension. I hated seeing him feeling like this, but not enough to let things stay as they were.
“I was worried about meeting your mother, feeling afraid that she wouldn’t like me. Mrs. Fremont asked me if we loved each other.”
He swallowed, but didn’t say anything.
“You know, even though we’ve never said it to one another, I told her yes. Maybe I presumed something. Anyway, she said that if we did, then we had everything we needed in life, with or without your mother’s approval.”
I took his hand. He didn’t pull back, but he let it lie lifelessly in my own, not responding.
“Was I wrong, Frank?”
He looked at me then, and after a moment he whispered, “No.”
“Then let me hold you.”
He did. I held his head against my shoulder, stroking his hair, not talking. He seemed to relax, and after a while I wondered if he was falling asleep.
“If I had listened to you, she wouldn’t be dead,” he said in a low voice.
“What?”
“You wanted to come here that night. I insisted on going out.”
“And you think she wouldn’t have been killed anyway?”
“I would have been here. I would have heard her.”
“Frank, three other neighbors were home, they didn’t hear a thing. And if we had been here, we probably wouldn’t have noticed anything was wrong until the next morning. Because we went out, you were able to get an investigation started within a couple of hours of the murder.”
“Lot of good it did her to live next to a cop.”
“You’re not God, Frank. You can’t be everywhere, watching over everybody. And besides, it did do her a lot of good to live next to you. She was crazy about you. Bragged on you all the time. I saw her earlier that same day, and she showed me what you did for the shelter. She told me you were a ‘keeper.’”
“A what?”
“A keeper, you know, a fish you don’t want to throw back.”
Unbelievably, a small, fleeting grin crossed his face. But in the next moment, his eyes clouded up. “She was one of a kind.”
I laughed. “I’ll never forget the first day she asked me to go running with her. Here I am expecting to jog-walk, and I end up winded before she’s even warmed up.”
In spite of himself, he laughed, too. We sat quietly for a while, remembering Mrs. Fremont.
“God, I’m tired,” Frank said. Maybe he was commenting on his life in general.
“Come on, I’ll tuck you in.”
That earned another small smile. He washed his face, then met me in the bedroom. I undressed him and pulled back the covers. He crawled in, then turned and reached up, taking the nape of my neck in his hand and pulling me to him gently. He kissed me, then said, “What, no bedtime story?”
What the hell. My ass was in a sling at work anyway. I undressed and lay down beside him.
Like Mrs. Fremont said, we had everything we needed in life.