Pale Kings and Princes (17 page)

"My husband never betrayed that uniform," Caroline said. "My husband was an honest man."

Susan made her little head movement again. Hawk came silently back into the room and leaned against the jamb of the archway behind the wing chair where I sat.

"He wasn't being paid by Esteva?" Susan said.

"No, absolutely not. He was . . . he was too fine a man." Her voice shook a little. "He was too fine a man to ever sell out. He cared about that job almost as much as his family. He was too fine."

"Do you know who was selling out?" Susan said.

"No, I don't. No one . . ." Her eyes wandered away from Susan. Outside the windows the snow was coming a little harder than it had, still and gentle, but persistent. "Bailey was a wonderful father," Caroline said. "A wonderful husband. He would never betray us." Her voice shook again and she paused and the room was quiet. None of us moved. Susan was looking at her steadily, neutrally. Behind me I could hear Hawk's breathing. I could hear mine too.

"He loved Brett when he was little, he was always carrying him on his shoulders. He loved me. He would have stood on his head for me. He loved his little family." Caroline's voice was stronger now. Flattened by medication, but firm.

"But Esteva hired his son," Susan said.

"He didn't. I mean he didn't do that because of Bailey."

Susan was quiet.

"He hired Brett ... Brett needed a job. Brett was a good boy. He hired him. I don't know why he hired him. Just that Brett was a good boy. Like his father."

Caroline was barely there with us. She was talking about people we didn't know, about a Bailey and a Brett I'd never seen. The ones I'd seen were alike. They were both a mess, and getting messier. Until the process came to a sudden end.

"Bailey would never betray me," she said. The snow collected in the corners now of the window sash in little picturesque triangles. Fa la la la la.

"Who did he betray?" Susan said. Caroline shook her head. Outside on the road a town truck went by pushing a plow, making the distinctive rattle and scrape that plows make, with the clatter of chains mixed in.

"Brett was slow," Caroline said. She shook her head again and looked at her lap. "He tried so hard, but he was slow. He could never be the man that Bailey was, that Bailey wanted . . . that Bailey deserved. We tried, but . . ."

"It's hard living someone else's definition," Susan said.

Caroline looked up at her and frowned. "Excuse me?" she said.

"Trying to be exactly what someone else thinks you should be must be very difficult," Susan said.

"Oh, yes. Yes, it is, damned hard. I tried for fifteen years."

Susan made her little neutral nod again. "As hard as I could, so hard," Caroline said, and shook her head. She looked in her lap again. She was wearing a light gray flannel skirt and a dark blue pullover sweater. A green silk scarf was knotted at her neck, and her thick hair was carefully brushed back, and tied with a green silk ribbon.

"He wanted, he wanted everything to be right. He was so fine a man. He deserved to have it right."

"Umm," Susan said.

Caroline shook her head again, this time more quickly as if to shake away something. "But it wasn't. I couldn't. I couldn't live that way anymore."

"Yes," Susan said. "That would be too hard."

Two tears started in Caroline Rogers's eyes and ran down her cheeks. Two more followed. She wasn't boohooing, the tears merely came as she sat there. She wiped her right eye with the knuckle of her forefinger. "I'm sorry," she said.

"Let the tears come," Susan said. "See what comes with them."

She wiped at the other eye, then she put her hands back in her lap and the tears came faster. Then she put her hands up to her face and her shoulders hunched as she really cried.

"I begged him," she said. "I begged him to think of us. To think of Brett, if he didn't care about me."

She seemed to speak only during moments of breath catching, moments of clarity in a murk of sobbing. Susan seemed to understand the pattern.

"What did he say?" Susan said at the right moment.

"He said Brett was lucky his father had connections, he couldn't get a job by himself." Her breathing was very short.

Susan nodded. Caroline sobbed, struggling to talk at the same time.

"A job," she gasped. "As if a job with a dope dealer was a good thing."

She was panting now and crying and talking in a burst as if she couldn't wait to get it all said.

"As if having a father who was a dope dealer was a good thing . . . as if a whoremaster was a good thing . . . as if Brett should grow up and be like him . . ." Caroline stopped, she seemed almost to be choking. ". . . to be like him," she gasped. She slipped from the chair onto her knees on the floor. "LIKE HIM," she gasped. She had doubled over, her face in her hands, her body rocking.

I looked at Hawk. He had no expression. I looked at Susan. She was watching Caroline. The force of her concentration was almost palpable.

"Did Bailey have an affair?" Susan said. Caroline nodded without ceasing to rock, doubled over on her knees on the floor. "Did he work with Esteva?"

Caroline nodded again.

"Who did he have an affair with?" Caroline stopped rocking and raised her face toward Susan, a look of amazement on her face. As if Susan had asked her which way was up. Her voice was suddenly clear. "Emmy," she said. "Emmy Esteva." Who could not know that?

"That was painful," Susan said. Caroline nodded.

"How did you deal with it?"

"I tried, I tried to be a woman he would want, to live up to what he expected . . ." "That's hard," Susan said. "Isn't it?" Caroline nodded again.

"Too hard," Susan said.

"Yes."

"So what did you do?" Caroline shook her head.

"Did you have any help?" Susan said.

"Not for a long time," Caroline said. "Finally I told Dr. Wagner."

"Yes," Susan said. "What did you tell him?"

Caroline looked horrified. "Not about Bailey," she said. "Just about feeling depressed and that there was some trouble in the family."

Susan nodded.

"And Dr. Wagner sent me to see a social worker at the hospital," Caroline said. There was a moment of silence while the snow drifted against the windows in the living room.

"Who?" Susan said.

"A young Hispanic woman," Caroline said. "Miss Olmo."

"How often did you see her?"

"Once a week for about three months."

"And you told her about Bailey?"

"Not at first," Caroline said. "But Miss Olmo said if she was going to help me she had to have my trust."

"Of course," Susan said.

"So I told her everything."

Susan nodded again. "Did you tell anyone else about Bailey?"

"Oh, my God, no," Caroline said. "No one." I glanced at Hawk, leaning on the doorjamb with the shotgun. He was glancing at me. "The thing is," Caroline said, "even after I told her, it didn't help. Now it's too late."

"It's not too late," Susan said. "And it will take longer than three months."

"Until what?" Caroline said.

"Until you look forward to morning," Susan said.

Caroline shook her head.

"Yes," Susan said. "I'll help you. He'll help you. You don't believe it now, but it will get better."

Caroline said nothing. She simply sat and stared out the front window at the snow sifting lightly down through the darkness outside her house.

Hawk drove and I sat beside him with the shotgun. The snow was still gentle and there were pauses in its fall as if it were deciding whether to be a blizzard.

"I come out here to whack a couple of dope pushers and I end up in encounter therapy," Hawk said. "Like hanging out with Dr. Ruth."

"You'll get your turn," I said.

" 'Spect I will," Hawk said.

Juanita Olmo's house was a ten-minute drive through the casual snowfall. We saw nothing but one town truck sanding the plowed road, and a young man and woman pulling a child on a sled. The child was so bundled up that its gender was a mystery and in fact its species was only a logical guess.

We pulled up in front of an old frame duplex in the valley behind the mills along the Wheaton River. The siding was red asphalt shingle. There were three cars dusted with snow parked in the unshoveled driveway.

One of them was Juanita's Escort. She answered the door in jeans and a Mickey Mouse T-shirt. She looked at me and then at Hawk. Hawk was carrying the shotgun. She looked quickly back at me.

"Ptarmigan," I said. "My friend is a ptarmigan hunter."

"What do you want," Juanita said.

"We want to come in and talk," I said.

"And if I say no?"

"We come in anyway," I said.

"And if I call the police?"

"We won't let you," I said.

Juanita's face got a little red and her eyes seemed larger.

"Really?" she said.

I stepped into her living room, Hawk followed me and closed the door.

"There are people next door," she said.

"Yikes," Hawk said.

Juanita kept glancing at Hawk and glancing away. The flush on her face remained. "Shall we sit?" I said.

Juanita stared at me. "Yes," she said. "Of course. We can sit."

I sat on a tweed chair with wooden arms that rocked on springs against a solid wooden base. It was ugly but it was uncomfortable.

Juanita stood in the archway that led to the dining room. Hawk leaned against the door; the shotgun in his right hand hanging down against his leg, pointing at the floor.

"What kind of gun is that?" Juanita said.

"Smith and Wesson," Hawk said. "Shotgun. Pump operated, twelve-gauge. Loaded with number four shot."

"One of the things I could never figure out," I said to Juanita, "is if you were so fond of Felipe Esteva, why you told me his wife was sleeping with Valdez. It would point me right at Esteva."

Juanita took a pack of cigarettes from the top of a low deal bookcase and lit one. "And another thing I couldn't figure out is when I asked you if you were sleeping with Valdez and you looked at me like you'd just swallowed a golf ball, and bolted, leaving me forlorn outside the ladies' room."

"You want coffee?" Juanita said. "I got instant."

"No, thank you," I said. "I try to stick to one cup a day."

Hawk shook his head.

We were quiet then. Next door dimly I could hear a television set.

"Now I find out that Bailey Rogers was sleeping with Emmy Esteva."

Juanita took in a deep Iungful of smoke and held it. Then she let it trickle out through her nose. She didn't speak.

"And I find out that you knew it." Juanita's face was still flushed.

"Because his wife came to you for therapy and she discussed it with you, and she told you about his affair with Emmy and she told you how he was in Esteva's pocket," I said.

Juanita dragged on the cigarette again. It had a long, hot-looking coal formed at the burning end. She seemed to have shrunk in on herself, but her eyes were still very wide and dark.

"So?" Juanita's voice seemed to come from a deep shaft of silence.

"So now your patient has a dead husband and a dead child, and the Wheaton cops are planning to shoot me. It's time for the secrets to be told."

Juanita looked slowly around the room. She hugged herself, her left hand clamped onto her right elbow, the cigarette in her forefingers an inch from her mouth but apparently forgotten, its smoke wisping up toward the dingy ceiling. She looked at Hawk and then at me and again at Hawk.

Hawk said, "Who you tell, Juanita?"

His voice was soft but it wasn't tentative. Juanita looked at me.

"You tell Esteva?" I said.

The cigarette burned her fingers, she jumped and dropped it and stepped on it on the bare floor.

"You told Esteva the cop was bopping his wife," Hawk said.

"And Esteva killed him," I said.

"So it sorta makes it like you killed him," Hawk said.

Juanita was shaking her head, less in denial of the accusations than in denial that the accusations were happening.

"You told Esteva," I said again.

Outside the snow had stopped, for the moment at least. No flakes drifted against the windowpanes in Juanita's shabby living room.

Juanita took another cigarette from her pack and lit it. She inhaled, exhaled, looked at the tip of the cigarette, put the spent match in the ashtray.

"Not first," she said.

"Who'd you tell first?" She hugged herself tighter, clamping her right elbow against her side with her left hand.

"Eric," she said. I could barely hear her. "Valdez?"

"Yes."

I waited.

"We were . . . we were close," she said. "And he was always asking me if I knew anything that could get him a handle on the cocaine thing."

I could hear her breath as she paused. Her breath was louder than her voice. The color in her face was deeper. Her eyes seemed unfocused. Her breathing was short.

"And?" I said.

"And I told him what Caroline had told me." She said it in a rush.

"That he was taking Esteva's money and sleeping with Esteva's wife," I said.

"Yes."

"And Valdez? He was sleeping with Emmy?"

"No."

"You told me he was."

"It wasn't true," she said.

"So why you say it," Hawk said. She shook her head again and looked at the floor.

"Ethics," I said. "She didn't want to tell me what she knew from a patient she was counseling, but she wanted me to know that Emmy was sleeping around, so maybe I'd look into it and connect her to Bailey."

"And she didn't tell you 'bout Bailey 'cause of the client patient thing," Hawk said.

"Right. She told me she thought he'd done it because he was a bigot and a bully."

"But she tell Valdez, and fuck client privilege," Hawk said.

"That was love," I said.

"Hot dog!" Hawk said.

"And it got him killed," I said.

Juanita turned away, leaning against the jamb of the archway, staring into the unpeopled dining room.

"It's why I told you that Bailey Rogers killed him," she said with her back to us. "I knew Eric had approached him with the information."