Eyes of a Child (35 page)

Caroline made her own smile puzzled. ‘Then why walk it at all? After all, Christopher Paget is the least likely killer this side of James Colt.'

Brooks looked startled; for a moment, Caroline thought she had gone too far. ‘Explain that,' he said with an air of puzzlement. ‘About Chris, I mean.'

It was time, Caroline knew, to shift the focus. ‘Just this: Christopher Paget has wealth, political promise, a considerable public reputation, and a son he treasures above any of that. He'd never throw it all away on a piece of scrofula like Ricardo Arias.'

‘Scrofula?' Salinas put in. ‘Here's a broke young guy in a custody dispute, with a little girl he's worried sick about, up against his lawyer wife, a boyfriend who's got more money than God, and a kid who may be a child molester. And yet, somehow, Arias manages to fight for what he thinks is right. Talk about an underdog – if there's anyone to feel sorry for here, it's a guy like that who ends up dead.'

Caroline was momentarily startled. Salinas, she realized, identified with Ricardo Arias. But what bothered her was something more – he was already thinking about his opening statement and had begun auditioning for McKinley Brooks. And that Salinas's version of Richie was a fun-house mirror of the real man was a depressing reminder of how completely a courtroom can distort reality.

‘Nicely done,' she said to Salinas in her dryest voice. ‘And very populist. If only the late Ricardo were fully worthy of your talents.' Turning back to Brooks, she added, ‘If you have something better, enlighten me, and then we'll talk.'

‘Your
client
has already talked,' Salinas put in. ‘To the police, on tape. Does he have anything to add?' A brief but pointed smile. ‘Or change?'

Brooks tapped his chin, looking from Caroline to Salinas. ‘Victor's right,' he said finally. ‘What do you have to offer us that's new?'

The word ‘offer,' elliptical in itself, might suggest some sort of deal. But Caroline could not know. ‘Right now,' she said in a matter-of-fact voice, ‘your complaint against Chris is that he had reason to dislike Ricardo Arias. Frankly,
I
didn't like Ricardo Arias, and I only met him at cocktail parties. And if Richie
wasn't
trying to blackmail Chris but was the saintly single father you describe, then it's all the more likely that he killed himself in despair over Elena and the plight of children everywhere. Who, I might add, he supported in about the same proportion as he did his own daughter.' Turning to Salinas, she smiled again. ‘No matter how you play him, Victor, Ricardo's sort of a tar baby. I suggest that you consider him more carefully before you imagine the jury weeping.'

Salinas's eyes flashed his combativeness. But Brooks's body began to rumble with a suppressed chuckle, all the more theatrical for its silence. ‘Lord, Caroline,' he said finally, ‘you
are
entertaining. And you
do
make me think. So let us think alone for a while.'

Caroline stopped smiling. ‘Mac,' she said in her most clipped tone, ‘you haven't told me a damned thing. Except that – for whatever reason – you'd rather vamp than talk. Which is the strangest part of all.'

Brooks's face went cold. ‘What I've told you,' he answered quietly, ‘is that we have an investigation, and that it's ongoing. Until
you
tell me something better than that Chris is too pleased with life to shoot someone – no matter how good his motive – that's all I have to say. Although, as always, it's a real treat to see you.'

Caroline gave him a small smile. ‘As always,' she said, and turned to Salinas. ‘You too, Victor.'

Standing, Salinas flashed a smile so wide and quick and lacking in warmth that it lent his spectral eyes an eerie deadness. And then he excused himself, and she and Brooks were alone.

Caroline nodded toward the door. ‘He's an impressive lawyer, Mac. Remember Richard Nixon when he used to smile?'

For a brief moment, silent but intimate, Brooks permitted himself a smile of his own. ‘Very well,' he said finally. ‘And he became President.'

‘Only for a while.'

Brooks was watching her now. ‘Speaking of politics, Caroline, not in front of Victor. He might not know when we're just chewing the fat.'

‘Of course,' Caroline said. For the next fifteen minutes, riding a cab to her office, she pondered the meaning of that.

At four-thirty, her telephone rang. ‘Find out anything?' Chris asked.

‘Two things. First, you told Monk something that they don't believe. Maybe about where you were that night.'

There was a pause. In a level voice, Paget asked, ‘What do they think they have? A witness?'

‘They won't tell me that.' Caroline exhaled. ‘But the second thing, Christopher, is that you're right. Whatever Mac's doing, James Colt's fingerprints are all over it.'

Chapter
14

‘What do you remember,' Harris asked, ‘about your father's death?'

It was the question Terri had been dreading. ‘I try
not
to remember it,' she answered.

‘Why?'

Terri gave her an incredulous look. ‘Because it was traumatic, Denise. Maybe some people remember more about being young than I do. But how many of them dwell on finding their parent dead?'

Harris raised her head, as if considering Terri's question. ‘Not all of them repress it,' she said at length. ‘Which perhaps is one reason for your dream – a sort of jailbreak for your subconscious.'

Terri felt defensive again; what she had done was so natural that she resented having to explain it. ‘What do you think I should have done? Taken pictures for the family album?'

‘I'm not saying you should have done anything.' Harris smiled a little. ‘I'm just asking for whatever you recall after all these years of forgetfulness, all right?'

‘But what does this have to do with Elena? Or, for that matter, my relations to Richie and how they might have affected her?'

‘I don't know, Terri. But something, perhaps – particularly in terms of how Elena saw
you
react to
her
father. And just like Elena, this nightmare you've had is troubling to you. Perhaps it's better to think about your father's death a little less symbolically.'

Terri hesitated. She could think of it, she found, only by shutting her eyes. But when she did this, all that she saw was black; all that she felt was that she should not do this.

‘Take your time,' Harris said calmly. ‘I don't mind just sitting here.'

Terri shut her eyes again.

The first wisp of memory, breaking through the darkness, was not an image. It was a sound: the closing of a screen door.

A shiver ran through Terri's body. ‘What is it?' Harris asked.

Terri shook her head. ‘We had a screen door,' she said slowly. ‘On the back porch. When you closed it, the catch on the door made a kind of soft click. I can hear the sound.'

‘Where are you?'

The darkness seemed to change slightly: it was no longer the gray light and shadow of eyes held shut but something dark and close. Terri's chest felt tight.

‘I don't know,' she said softly. ‘I just don't know.'

An image, Rosa behind her, perhaps catching the door as it slipped from her hand. The cat, hungry, rubbed and purred against her leg.

‘What's the first thing that comes to you?' Harris asked. ‘Anything at all.'

Terri leaned back in the chair. With her eyes shut, the image was like the particles of night broken by the first light of sunrise. The chair felt as soft as the warm mattress that Terri sank into as a child. As a girl.

Terri cannot sleep.

She has the sensation of broken slumber. The rectangle of her bedroom window, once black with night, frames the first gray sheen of morning, the palm tree outside becoming a dark form, more distinct as minutes pass.

Something is wrong.

She does not know why. There is no sound from her parents' bedroom: this silence is what, when first waking, she always wishes for. Yet the quiet now has a deeper quality, as if something – or someone – is missing. There are goose bumps on Terri's skin.

To calm herself, she takes a kind of mental inventory, recalling the faces of her family the night before. After dinner, her mother had cooked soup, and then Terri had washed dishes. By Rosa's fiat, that job now fell to Maria and Eva – Terri had more homework. But last night her sisters had played Monopoly at the dining room table, laughing and quarreling a little; Rosa had let them do this because their father was not home. Washing dishes, Terri had not asked where he was. There was no need; she could read the tension in Rosa's body, the distracted way that she wiped the dishes Terri gave her to dry.

Afterward, Terri had gone to her room and finished her algebra. Some part of her listened for her father, the sound of a door opening and closing. She had fallen asleep still listening.

Now, this morning, something is wrong.

Watching the first light through her window, Terri can recall the hours before only as a feverish jumble, the half-light between waking and sleeping. Her eyes feel scratchy with sleeplessness, and her sheets are damp; the restless images of twisting and turning are indistinct, perhaps borrowed from some other night, or from her imaginings, the clammy feeling of the sheets on her skin. As she stumbles from bed, uncertain of her purpose, the hardwood floor is cold beneath her feet. She has left the window cracked open, and the chill of fall hits her face and body.

Terri pauses at the door of her bedroom, feeling the silent house.

It is not quite six. Terri does not know what draws her down the stairs. As she takes them, walking softly, something tightens inside her. And then, perhaps only in her mind, she hears the screen door shut.

She stops there.

It could not have been. There are no footsteps in the house, no sound of the door behind the screen opening or closing. Yet for what seems like minutes, her only instinct is to climb the stairs and plunge into a sleep so profound that she will never awaken to learn what made the noise.

Instead she sits down in the stairwell. Deprived of light, it feels like a prison in which she can neither move nor see. Her heartbeat is light and quick.

The only sound is Terri's breathing.

She tries talking to herself: fourteen is far too old for a child's fears. Standing, she continues. Yet when she reaches the end of the darkened stairs, she half expects to find her parents as they were just days ago, her mother bent over the couch, silently urging Terri up the stairs with her eyes as her mouth makes the cries that Ramon Peralta needs.

Silence. And then, as light breaks into the living room, comes the first sound that Terri senses is real. Something faint but distinct, defined more by direction than by anything it tells her. But the direction frightens her so much that she stops moving.

It is coming from the screen door, or through it: she is certain now. What she cannot comprehend is the bitter taste in her mouth, the pulse in her throat.

Instinctively, she looks around her, as if Rosa will be there for her.

There is no one. As she edges through the dining room, toward the kitchen, where the door is, she hears a sound that she knows by heart.

It is La Pasionaria, the cat. At the entreaties of Terri's sisters, Rosa had consented to the adoption of a calico female when Ramon was not there to protest. Rosa had picked the name. Her sisters thought it romantic, and Ramon had taken no notice; only Terri knew that her mother, the most conservative of women, had named the cat after a Communist heroine of the Spanish Civil War and sometimes smiled when she called it.

The sound, more insistent now, is that of a cat clawing the screen door.

Still, Terri delays going to the door.

Entering the kitchen, she fishes beneath the sink for a bowl and cat food: they have learned to feed the cat outside so that Ramon Peralta cannot curse or kick it. Pouring the dry cat food, Terri glances up: the inner door is glass, and Terri sees the outline of La Pasionaria standing on her hind legs, with her front claws digging into the screen. Spotting Terri, the cat cries out to her.

Terri goes to the door.

She opens the glass one first. Stepping through it, she speaks softly to La Pasionaria, just before unlocking the screen to find Ramon Peralta staring up at her.

The cat's dish, falling from her hand, scatters food across his chest.

Ramon does not move. A ribbon of dried blood runs from his temple past his mouth, caught in the rictus of a man gasping for air, and then onto the stone in a carmine pool that looks sticky to the touch. But her father's eyes seem as dry as the blood on his face. One hand, stretching backward, must have clawed at the screen like the cat. There is the smell of urine.

Terri does not make a sound.

It is as if some part of her has expected this. Another part, filled with horror, stares into his face; the shock of how he looks becomes a ragged shiver. Calmly, La Pasionaria eats the cat food off his shirt; then, as if in distaste, she walks across his body and into the house.

Terri begins to shake; the handle of the screen door rattles in her fingers. She does not need to touch her father to know that he is dead.

‘Teresa!'

Terri starts, heart thumping wildly as she turns toward the sound.

Already dressed, Rosa stares past her at Ramon and then into Terri's face. It is what her mother sees there that seems to make her move.

Silent, Rosa sweeps Terri into her arms. In the back of Terri's mind she hears the whisper of the screen door closing; as tightly as her mother holds her, as softly as she speaks, still she senses Rosa looking over her shoulder into the face of her dead husband.