Breakdown

Chapter 21

Kerry was waiting when I arrived at my flat, even though it was still fifteen minutes shy of three o’clock. A different Kerry than the last few times I’d seen her-not quite her old self, but with some of the old optimism and assurance. A good part of the strain had been eased. Whatever she’d done on Friday, it had had a profound effect on her.

She said after she kissed me, “My appointment didn’t take as long as I expected. I’ve been here half an hour.” She gave me a long appraising look. “You look tired, my love.”

“Not much sleep lately. I’ll be okay.”

“I wish I could help you sleep.” Gently she rubbed my cheek with her fingertips. “I’m better than calcium lactate.”

“You’re telling me? Right now, though, we need to talk. And before we talk, I need a beer.”

“I helped myself to the wine,” she said. “You mind?”

“Nope.”

“Good. I was afraid you might go all grumpy and mother-hennish on me. You do that sometimes, you know, when you’re under stress or in a bad mood.”

“I’m not in a bad mood today. Not anymore.”

She kissed me again. “Go get your beer.”

I went and got my beer. When I came back into the living room, she was sitting on the couch with her shoes off, her skirt hiked up on her thighs, and her bare feet tucked under her. She has terrific legs, long and slender, with very small and well-formed feet. Dirty old man that I am, I find her feet as erotic as the rest of her. Sometimes just thinking about them gives me urges. But not right now. Right now I was much more interested in what had brought about the change in her.

I said as I sat down, “You first. Tell me about Cybil. I can use some good news. It is good, isn’t it?”

“Well, positive. Very positive.”

“You went to see somebody?”

“Yes, and I wish I’d done it a lot sooner.”

“Geriatric doctor?”

“No. A support group,” she said.

“What kind of support group?”

“It’s called Children of Grieving Parents. One of B. and C.‘s clients told me about it. A couple of dozen people like me who have or had parents, usually elderly, that reacted to losing a spouse the way Cybil has. They’ve found ways to cope themselves, and ways to help the parents learn to cope.”

“What do they advise? In the long run, I mean.”

“Getting Cybil into a care facility.”

“But how, with her fear of being put in a home-*?”

“Not that kind of care facility. Not a nursing home.”

“What other kind is there?”

“One that’s set up as a seniors complex. There are a number in the Bay Area. They’re not hospitals or places with rooms like cells and nurses and doctors in the halls; they’re virtual condos-separate and private apartments, with recreational facilities and organized activities that are completely optional.”

I asked, “What if the individual needs medical attention?”

“Part of the facility is a clinic staffed by medical personnel and counselors. They’re there if needed, but only if needed. The resident-not patient, that word is never used-makes the decision. The staff periodically looks in on the residents, of course, to see if they need anything and to make sure they’re all right. But they don’t interfere except in cases of medical emergency.”

“Sounds fine. But will Cybil agree to an arrangement like that?”

“I think so,” Kerry said. “Not immediately, but eventually. The one thing she’s most afraid of, that almost all grieving parents are most afraid of, is the loss of self-sufficiency. That’s the first insight the people in the group gave me. She’s been in control of her own life for nearly sixty years; she can’t stand the prospect of losing that control, becoming dependent, because to her it means losing her freedom, her will, and ultimately her identity.”

“But she’s dependent on you right now,” I said.

“Yes, morbidly so, and that’s a major part of why she can’t cope. She hates it-I’ve only made things worse by pandering to it. Yet the only alternative she sees is an even more terrible form of dependency, the impersonal kind. What I have to do is help her understand that there’s another alternative, the only sensible one … and then back off and let her decide to make the move. Working with the group, I can do that. They’ve prepared literature that I can get Cybil to read. And some have recruited their surviving parents who now live in care facilities to work as support counselors; the next big step is convincing Cybil to talk to one of them. It’ll take time and patience, but underneath her grief she’s the same rational and intelligent woman she’s always been. She’ll accept the truth sooner or later. I know she will.”

She wasn’t trying to talk herself into believing it; she already believed it. And because she did, I did too.

I said, “I wish there was some way I could get involved in the process. But I guess there isn’t.”

“Not until she realizes you’re not to blame for your feelings about Ivan. Then she’ll stop hating you.”

“I hope so. I not only like her, I admire and respect her- you know that. I always have.”

Kerry smiled and squeezed my hand. “You couldn’t like me if you didn’t like Cybil,” she said. “I’m my mother’s daughter.”

“I wouldn’t want you to be anything else.”

We sat for a while without saying anything. It was good companionable silence, the kind we used to share all the time. The awkwardness, the tension between us was finally gone.

At length she stirred and I looked over at her, and her eyes were moist. I asked, “What’s the matter? Are you crying?”

“A little.”

“Why?”

“Women cry sometimes,” she said, as if that explained it. “It doesn’t have to mean anything bad, you know.”

“… If you say so.”

“God, you sound so dubious.” Now she was laughing as well as crying. “You really don’t understand women, do you?”

“Not a lick,” I said.

She got up, still laughing and crying at the same time, and said, “I love you, you big goof.” Then she said, “I’ll be right back,” and went off to the bathroom.

I sat there wondering why I was such an ignoramus when it came to women. Sex shouldn’t make that much difference; people were people, right? All of us Homo sapiens under the skin. I understood men, sometimes too well, so why didn’t I understand women? The fact that I didn’t and never had made me feel inadequate and somehow ridiculous, as if I were the butt of some secret cosmic joke.

Kerry came back pretty soon. She was no longer either crying or laughing; she’d fixed her face and the expression on it now was serious and businesslike. She sat down, drank some of her wine. “All right,” she said, “now it’s your turn. What happened to get you written up in today’s paper? The Lujack case?”

“The Lujack case.”

“Talk,” she said.

I talked. She already knew some of the facts; I generally confided in her about what I was working on, to keep things open between us and because now and then she came up with an insight or a piece of information that proved useful. I filled in the details, then went through the events of the past few days. I did not want to tell her about the incident with Rafael Vega, but it was bound to come out in the media eventually; so I settled for whitewashing it a little, making it seem less deadly than it had been. I didn’t say anything at all about being shot at last night. She didn’t need to know how deadly that had been either.

She sat through the whole recital without interrupting. Her face was grave when I finished, but whatever she was feeling was hidden away inside. And when she spoke she had nothing to say about Vega or the shooting of Coleman Lujack. Experience had taught her just how dangerous my profession could be sometimes, and that there was no point in carrying on about it. I was still around, still in one piece; that was what mattered.

Quietly she said, “It’s not over for you yet, is it?” She knew me so well-so much better than I could ever know her.

“It won’t be over until whoever killed Coleman is identified and locked up. It has to come full circle; there has to be a closing.”

“But why do you have to close it? Why not the police?”

“It’s not that I have to be the one,” I said. “It’s that I have to keep trying until somebody does it. You understand the distinction?”

“I think so.”

“I thought you would. Eberhardt doesn’t.”

“That’s because he’s uncomplicated.”

“I wish I were too, sometimes.”

“But you’re not.” She smiled-a little wistfully, I thought. Then she asked, “Who shot Coleman, if it wasn’t Paco Vega or Teresa Melendez? Thomas’s widow?”

“Probably not. She just isn’t the type.”

“Any woman is the type, if she wants revenge badly enough.”

“I suppose so. More likely it’s somebody mixed up in the smuggling racket. Pendarves would be a good candidate too … if he’s alive.”

“But you don’t think he is?”

“Everything I know about Coleman and Vega says they plotted Pendarves’s murder along with Thomas’s.”

“Maybe they did, and something happened to prevent it.”

“You mean there was an attempt on Pendarves’s life and he got away? Sure, it’s possible. It would give him another reason for hiding out, and an even stronger motive for shooting Coleman. But if that’s it, where has he been holed up since Tuesday night? He has few friends, none close enough to risk prison on an accessory charge.”

“No woman in his life?”

I shook my head. “I thought for a while he might’ve been having an affair with one of the women regulars at the Hideaway, but that idea didn’t pan out.”

“Why not?”

“According to Lyda Isherwood, who claims to have once been a madam in Nevada, he’s been paying for his sex ever since his divorce five years ago. Plus there’s the fact that he’s a hard-core sexist and a psychological abuser. Women don’t seem to want to have much to do with him.”

“Then why did you think he was having an affair?”

“The shape his house was in. I had a glimpse of the kitchen; it was spotless. Pendarves is or was a slob, and much too cheap to hire a housekeeper. Somebody had to do the cleaning up for him.”

“Why does it have to be a woman?” Kerry said.

“What?”

“The person who cleaned his house for him. Why does it have to be a woman? Why couldn’t it be a man?”

“… I don’t know, I just assumed …”

“Men clean houses too. And cook and wash clothes and change diapers … all sorts of things like that.”

“Okay, okay. But in this situation … hell, Pendarves isn’t gay, I’m positive of that….”

“Who said anything about gay? It doesn’t have to be a sexual relationship. You said he’s a psychological abuser. Why couldn’t he have a male friend, somebody weak and easily manipulated, that he could have bullied into doing his housecleaning for him? And bullied into hiding him from the police?”

I stared at her without speaking. Then I got off the couch and took a couple of turns around the room, working on what she’d said. Somebody weak and easily manipulated. Well, why not? Another Hideaway regular; the tavern was the most likely place for Pendarves to have formed such a relationship. But why hadn’t anybody there mentioned it?

They don’t know, I thought. Pendarves is close-mouthed, keeps to himself. The friend could be that way too. Either that, or …

Weak and easily manipulated-and withdrawn, uncommunicative. A man who had expressed a deeper concern for Pendarves’s well-being than any of the other regulars the night of the abortive hit-and-run … a man fastidious in dress and habits, who would undoubtedly keep a fastidious house and could be talked into keeping his friend’s house the same way … a man who, now that I thought about it, hadn’t been present at the Hideaway during my last few visits, even though he usually came in every night to play chess.

Douglas Mikan.

The sad-eyed, painfully shy mama’s boy-Douglas Mikan.

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