Alarm Call

Chapter 26

The man I’d been hunting had a permanent smile on his face; whatever was going on inside his head, it looked as if it was happy. I found myself smiling back at him.

‘He can’t see you,’ John told me. ‘His vision went with the stroke, along with just about everything else.’

‘How long have you known he was here?’

‘For a couple of days, that’s all. There’s one thing you can’t run away from in America, Oz, and that’s your social-security number, if you have one. After we had our talk on Wednesday, I contacted the SSA and told them I had a missing-person enquiry. They came back to me on Friday, and told me he was here. I flew down as soon as I could, and got here yesterday.’

‘What is this place?’

‘It’s a charity nursing home, run by the Blessed Sisters of Our Lord. It’s ironic that he should wind up here, since he spent half his life laughing at my beliefs and at those of our parents.’

‘What happened to him?’

‘As I said, he had a stroke, a cerebral haemorrhage.’

‘Here in Santa Fe?’

‘No. He was in Albuquerque at the time; he was appearing in a play in a local theatre, and rooming in a boarding house with the rest of the cast. As near as I can piece together he collapsed during a performance, on stage. They rushed him to hospital, where his condition was stabilised, but there was no hope of recovery. The hospital kept him for as long as they had to, then found this place. The sisters agreed to accept him, and he’s been here ever since.’

‘Ever since when?’

John looked at me; his sombre expression was in contrast to his brother’s permanent goofy grin. ‘He’s been here for over two years,’ he replied.

Two years? I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, but the evidence was in the chair before me. The man’s body looked completely wasted.

‘So how come this is the first you’ve heard of it? Didn’t they try to trace his family?’

‘His social-security card was in the name of Paul Patrick Walls. The listed address was somewhere in Palo Alto, but that was long out of date.’

‘What about the theatre company? Couldn’t they have helped?’

‘The play was almost at the end of its run when Paul took ill. At first all the hospital staff cared about was saving his life: when it came time to ask who he was, the company had all left town.’

‘What about Roscoe?’

‘Who?’

‘Roscoe Brown; he was your brother’s agent.’

‘I think they tried that, but there was nothing in his records that led back to us.’

‘Hell, man, my detective was able to trace him on the Internet in ten minutes.’

‘Sure, starting with the name Wallinger. Not so easy if you don’t have that.’

I wasn’t sure that was true; I guessed that someone hadn’t tried that hard.

‘What you have to realise, Oz,’ John continued, ‘is that when he was transferred here, Paul brought nothing with him. He had no papers, only his social-security card. He must have had some effects at the boarding house, but either they stayed there or another cast member took them. What you have to realise also is that nobody at our end was looking for him. Paul was an outcast from our family. His lack of respect for our values, his, forgive me, but his choice of profession, they drove a wedge between him and my father and me. When you add in his gayness. .’

‘He’s gay?’

‘Since high school. My father was a career soldier, Oz, until he was invalided out. He had pretty inflexible views on that sort of thing; I have to admit that he passed them on to me.’

‘What about your mother?’

‘Paul never had anything but contempt for our mother. That’s why the idea of him going to her for help was preposterous to me.’

He was hitting me with a lot of information: the way it was coming across, Prim had been conned even more spectacularly than she’d realised. She’d had a child by someone, had lived with someone without knowing not just what he was but who he was.

John must have keyed into my thoughts. ‘This guy,’ he asked. ‘What do you know about him?’

‘I know that he fixed it for Prim and me to be sharing a room in Minneapolis, then bugged it and took some candid photographs of her in her skin. I know that he sent them by e-mail to my wife, which does not make me her favourite husband at the moment. I know that he did fly from London to Minneapolis with Prim’s kid, and that he was there at the same time as us. I know that he diverted her money to a Canadian bank, to this side of the Atlantic, set up so that she can use it to buy Tom back from him. There’s only one thing I don’t know about him.’

‘What’s that?’

‘I don’t know who the bloody hell he is.’ I paused. ‘No, there’s one thing more. He flew as Paul Wallinger, and before that he took Paul Wallinger’s passport to the US Embassy in London and had Tom Wallinger’s name added to it.’

I could feel the fire in my eyes as I looked at him. ‘John, can you use your badge to ask questions in the passport office? This guy’s got himself a passport in your brother’s name. I know that Paul must have had one of his own, at some time, because he had a part in a movie in Scotland a few years back. The phoney may be using that one; it may have come from the stuff at the boarding house. But if he is, he’s had to change the photograph, and I don’t see him taking a doctored passport to the embassy. Can you find out when, and even where the last application was made for a passport in the name of Paul Wallinger? If he does have a new one, the passport office will have a copy of the photo that’s in it. Get hold of that, and at least we’ll know what he looks like. We might even know who he is.’

‘Get hold of that, buddy,’ the detective rumbled, ‘and I can loose the full might of the FBI on him: I do not believe that applying for a passport in someone else’s name is in accordance with federal law. More than that, since the child is travelling on a false passport also, he can be taken into custody.’

The day seemed brighter somehow, and then it dimmed.

‘That leaves one problem,’ I said. ‘We still have to flush him out. Even now, he might be setting up the trade with Prim in Las Vegas, with me out of the way. John, if you can bring in the Feds that will be great; but meantime, I have to get back there.’

‘You do that. I’ll make some calls from here.’

I nodded, then smiled at the chair again. ‘What are you going to do about Paul?’

‘I think I’m going to leave him here. If I take him back to Minneapolis will he even know? Not a chance. The Mother Superior told me that the medical staff don’t expect him to live more than another year or two, at most. She’s anxious that he should stay, so he will. I’ll come and visit him when I can; I may even bring Mom. Blood’s blood, after all.’

I was with him on that; I remembered how much my brief estrangement from my father had hurt us both. ‘Good for you,’ I told him.

I was ready to leave. He saw it and waved me towards the door; I was almost through it when another piece of the obvious forced its way into my addled brain. ‘There is just one last thing,’ I said. ‘Whoever we’re looking for knows Paul. He knew that he’d been ill, and that he wasn’t getting better. We could well be looking for someone who was in that touring company, or who knew about it and was a close associate of his at the time. I know it’s a long time since you saw him, but if you or your mother can recall anyone he might have mentioned in the past … you never know.’

‘I’ll try, but don’t die waiting. Now get on your way.’

I left him there and walked back the way we’d come, across the river and down to the Cowgirl. Jesus was there, waiting for me; when I arrived I thought he looked relieved that I wasn’t carrying a briefcase I hadn’t had before. ‘Back to the airport,’ I ordered. ‘I have to leave town in a hurry.’ I suppressed a smile as I saw the ‘hit man’ scenario reappear on his face.

Leaving Santa Fe seemed to be easier than arriving; soon we were on cruise, heading down Highway 85, towards the airport. I leaned back against the leather upholstery and thought about the family skeletons I’d stirred up for John Wallinger the Second. When we’d parted I’d decided that he was glad of my intervention; now he’d be able to give them a decent burial. I thought about him, his mother and the attitudes that had torn their family apart. I thought about Martha, about our time in Minneapolis and about the things that had happened there.

And as I did, slowly but surely the realisation came to me that in all of my going-on-for-forty years on the Planet Earth, I’d never been so unbelievably fucking stupid.