Fidelity, p.23
Fidelity, page 23
After a couple of miles, she passed the interchange with the San Diego Freeway, but she didn’t turn. It occurred to Hobart that she might be driving north past Ventura all the way to the Central Valley to meet Forrest. The thought put a little hitch in his breathing. She shouldn’t try to go up there alone.
Theodore Forrest was rich, the most important member of a powerful family. If Emily Kramer went up there and tried to get Forrest to exchange his cash for her proof, Forrest was going to end up with the proof and the cash, and probably all that would be left of Emily was a couple of parts from her aging Volvo scrapped in a local junkyard. The Central Valley was his country, and she would never get near him. She would simply disappear at the hands of some hireling. It occurred to Hobart that he was the hireling. He had taken the job of killing Emily Kramer, but he hadn’t done it yet.
He watched her take the Westlake exit, and he felt relieved. When he came to it, he followed, and as he was coasting down the ramp he saw her turning right onto Westlake Boulevard. After a few minutes and a couple of turns, he came up with her in time to see her going to the door of a small brick-fronted house. As he passed, the door opened and a tall black man wearing jeans and a red T-shirt admitted her.
Hobart was sure it was the other detective, the man who had interrupted him when he had been trying to take Emily Kramer out of her house. He began to search for a good spot to park and wait.
He couldn’t let another night come and go before he had her.
29
Emily stepped in so quickly that Dewey Burns had to step backward to keep from being bumped. He closed the door.
“What’s wrong?” he said.
“I don’t know. Everything. I assume you know that the office and my house are gone?”
“Of course,” Dewey said. “Ray called Billy and me around four in the morning. There’s still the stuff we put in storage. It’s possible that we missed what we were looking for and it’s still hidden inside something.”
“If it was there, we missed it, all right. And if we look again, we’ll miss it again.”
“I’m not so sure. We moved all the records that we went through. I think we know which ones we can eliminate, but there are some that are still possible. We haven’t found anything yet, but it’s too early to say we won’t.”
“No, it isn’t. You and Ray are both professionals. You don’t miss things like that. I was Phil’s wife for twentytwo years, but that didn’t help. He hid this really well, and the information looked like something else-exactly like something else. That’s the way Phil hid things. But I think the reason we didn’t find it in the house or in the office is that it wasn’t there. I need your help.”
“What kind?”
“I was just at April’s house. She and I talked about things-about Phil, and about his plans. She knew some things I didn’t. She didn’t know all of them at the time, but she’s figured them out since. I realized that was part of my problem. Phil was a secret-keeper. Each person who knew Phil knew a different Phil. It wasn’t that he was lying to everybody. To be honest with you, the only one I’m sure he actually lied to is me.”
“Don’t do this to yourself.”
“I’m not doing anything to myself. I have a problem. There’s a man out there who is willing to murder me. He wants this evidence Phil had against a powerful man, and I still don’t have it.”
“I know. I’ve been trying to help.”
“Phil almost certainly had multiple copies. He probably gave one-or at least a taste of one-to this powerful man. He would have needed to show the man he had something, right?”
“I suppose,” Dewey said. “He would have to show a sample, at least, to get the man scared. And he would have to give him something tangible when he got paid. But he would have to let the man know he had retained something to keep the man from killing him.”
“And somehow that went wrong.”
“Apparently. He got killed. There doesn’t seem to be anything that he left for us-for you, or for me, or for anyone else-to find after he was dead. There should have been something. If not the evidence, at least a letter.”
“I think there was,” said Emily.
“And we missed it, and it got burned up last night?”
“April had it at one time.”
“What? Where?”
“Phil hid the box under her bed for some time while he was collecting the evidence.”
“Why didn’t she tell us she had it?” She could see that Dewey was angry.
“She wasn’t about to tell me my husband hid anything under her bed. At first she didn’t even know what it was. She didn’t figure that out until after Phil was dead, and the man came to my house to get it. By then, she didn’t have it anymore.”
“Well, where is it now?”
“Phil came over to her apartment one day and picked it up. He took it away, and moved it to a place that he knew was safer.”
“What was safer than that?”
Emily spoke quietly and carefully. “Dewey, you said Phil would have known he was doing something dangerous, and that he would have left the evidence for you, for me, or for April to find. But there’s somebody important that you’re leaving out of this. She might be the most important one of all.”
“No,” he said. He was irritated, uncomfortable.
“Yes. She would be the perfect person, the one of us no stranger would know was connected with Phil.”
“She isn’t involved in this. It’s blackmail. It’s dishonest. It’s probably the worst thing he ever did in his life, just a momentary lapse when he was having some midlife crisis-maybe financial trouble. She would never have gotten involved in that, or in anything he did.”
Emily said, “I need to meet her.”
“No.”
“I have to talk to her, Dewey. Phil had the box at April’s because that was safer than our house or the office. But there was somebody much safer than April. The only person who knew about her was his only living son.”
“She doesn’t have it.”
“Let me talk to her. Please. I have a right to know her. And she has a right to know me. If I have to go through all the files in storage to find her name and address, I’ll do it. If I have to, I’ll hire a detective to investigate you.”
Dewey turned away from her and walked to the kitchen. She heard him rustling around out there, putting dishes in the dishwasher, then standing silent for thirty seconds.
Finally he came back into the living room. “I’ll call her.”
30
Lee Anne Burns was beautiful, with smooth caramel skin and light brown eyes flecked with gold. She had to be Emily’s age, but she looked thirty, with long, thin limbs and a graceful neck. Emily fought to keep the jealousy away. She had expected someone else, someone she could pity, but this woman was formidable.
Lee Anne said, “You look at me and you see the other woman, don’t you?”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to look at you strangely,” Emily said.
“I’m not the other woman, you are.”
Emily drew in a breath. The words didn’t seem to mean the same thing to the two women. “What do you mean?”
Lee Anne Burns held her eyes on Emily. She hesitated, as though she were deciding how much to say. “He wasn’t married to you when I knew him. He hadn’t met you yet.” This time Emily understood. Lee Anne was revealing a secret that she had kept for a long time, a secret so familiar to her that she was sick of it. And getting sick of it had affected nothing, because she still had been required to live with it and think about it.
“Oh, my God,” Emily said. “I didn’t know. He never said anything, never mentioned…” She knew how much it must hurt Lee Anne to hear that. Lee Anne had known, as she’d known everything, so well that it was probably like being punched over and over on the same spot, so the bruise, and the hurt, never went away.
Lee Anne gave her a look of sympathy. “Don’t feel bad for me. This isn’t news to me, the way it is to you. Didn’t you ever look at Dewey’s personnel file?”
“No. I wasn’t working in the office when Dewey was hired. I went to the office one day on an errand, and there was Dewey. Phil hired a lot of young men who wanted to work with him to get their licenses. I just didn’t have any reason to look.”
“He’s twentyfour.”
“Twentyfour?”
“Born two years before you were married.”
“I didn’t know that Phil was his father. I didn’t suspect until a few days ago. Dewey was the one who came to see me, and saved me from that … the man who broke into my house. And while I was watching him check the doors and windows, it just hit me. He had some of the same mannerisms. I had the feeling I was looking at Phil. It was like a switch turning on. I couldn’t see before, but all of a sudden I could.” There was a silence that made both women uncomfortable. Emily spoke to fill it. “So you were with Phil at least two years before I met him.”
“About three and a half years.” Lee Anne Burns sat primly in her chair for a few breaths. “I should explain something. I know the things that you want me to tell you. And in a way, I think you have a rightor at least a legitimate wish-to know. But at the same time, you don’t. And I’m sitting here thinking that I’m probably about to tell you some things that I’ve never even told Dewey. He has a better claim to a right to know than you do. But maybe he knows everything already, just from having lived with me, and from whatever Phil told him, and from the other ways of knowing that he had. He was always that kind of boy, even when he was little. He seemed to figure out everything by himself, as though he could look at one tiny detail and grow the rest of it in his mind. There have been lots of times when I found out that what I thought he was too young to know he had known for years, or what I thought had been hidden was plain to him.”
“The others all say he has the gift for being a detective,” Emily agreed. “But he also has a gift for secrets. I can’t tell you what he knows because he never told me anything. And I didn’t come here to claim some right to know things. Maybe I already know everything about Phil that I ought to.”
“I loved him,” Lee Anne said. “That’s the main thing, I guess. It wasn’t some kind of fling or something. I was living at home with my parents up in Oakland while I went to nursing school. My older brother Eldon was in the marines. He always had an orderly plan for his life. Even when he was young, he knew he was going to graduate from high school, go into the marines, then go to college. To me it always seemed like an invitation to fate, a sure way to have a disaster just to teach you that things aren’t that simple. When he went in the marines, I was terrified because that seemed to me to be the time for it, but it didn’t happen. Eldon served his enlistment, had a good tour, and made some good friends. One time he came home from a big navy base in the Philippines, and he brought a close friend home with him on leave.”
“Phil?”
“Phil. It was an odd situation. I think about it a lot, even now. It was as though my brother Eldon brought something into the house that I would never have run into otherwise-some substance, like a drug-and it was something that I had no immunity against.”
“You were attracted to Phil right away?”
“It caught me by surprise. I had a guy I was interested in at the time, and I was busy with nursing school, working long hours and studying. But I came home one evening, and there he was.” Her eyes seemed to lose focus for a moment, as though she were seeing it again, and then they sharpened and returned to Emily. “I don’t need to tell you. He had that sense of humor that made you start laughing when you knew you shouldn’t, and then you would remember afterward and start laughing again, and people would look at you and wonder.”
“I know,” Emily said. “You would want to tell him, and wanting to tell him something was the same as missing him, and then you could hardly wait to see him.”
“I wasn’t on my guard because he started out being just some marine, one of Eldon’s friends, not somebody who was there to see me at all, just a guy sleeping over on his way to spend the rest of his leave at his own home. But I started to like him. When they got their orders, he and Eldon were both transferred to Camp Pendleton next, and I found that as soon as I had a break in nursing school, I had an irresistible urge to fly down to San Diego and visit Eldon. I spent most of my time with Phil. One night after a couple of evenings out, we found ourselves in my hotel room in Oceanside, and the obvious happened.”
“And you got pregnant?”
“Oh, no. Didn’t I tell you that it wasn’t that simple? This part of it was simple-that night. Neither of us planned it. I needed a ride, and he walked me to my hotel room. After that night, everything sped up and changed. I was in love with Phil.”
“Was he in love with you?”
“I think he was, but you have to see that love was what I wanted it to be at the time, and later on, what it had to be to make my life a tragedy and not just a sad little story about a stupid girl who didn’t know how to behave and got what you’d expect. He said he loved me, and he acted as though he did. But Phil was a man who kept a lot to himself.”
Emily said, “What happened?”
“I kept going down to visit Eldon in Oceanside. Only I would come a couple of days early, then pretend to leave for home, and spend a few days in Escondido or Capistrano with Phil before I actually left for Oakland. My mother and Eldon would talk on the phone now and then, and she would say something like, `Did you and Lee Anne have a nice visit?’ It was never `Did Lee Anne come to visit you?’ because that would have meant she was checking up on me. I think that even if Eldon had suspected something, he would not have said anything to her. We were so close, and he knew what it was like to be living at home and trying never to disappoint our parents. Sometimes Phil would get time off and show up at my school in San Francisco. I would come out of class or out of the hospital, and he would be there waiting for me. It went on for a long timeabout a year and a half-and then I missed a period. I didn’t need a test, but I went out and got one.”
“Did you tell Phil right away?”
“Not exactly. I had to have some time to think. Then I waited until the next week, when I was going to see him in person. I drove down to Oceanside.”
“What did he say?”
“It was as though we both had been in a dream-a soft, beautiful one-and we woke up on the same day. I had been in college in San Francisco, maybe the most tolerant city in the country, and I was in medicine, where there are lots of people of every shade from every country-patients, nurses, doctors, technicians. When I went down to Oceanside, everybody we knew or saw was a marine or the family of a marine. One of the things about the military is that racism doesn’t play. It’s one of the reasons why there are so many black people. If you’re a gunnery sergeant you’re treated like every other gunnery sergeant-better than a corporal, but not as good as a lieutenant. Phil and I had both been in places where people were people, and nobody had much time or reason to think about color. But as I said, when I got pregnant, we woke up and everything looked different.”
“How?”
“Race. I told my mother, and it nearly killed her. She begged me to break up with him. The thought of having a white man in the family and a half-white baby just made her sick. She cried so hard, rocking back and forth, with her arms wrapped around herself. From the morning when I told her until nearly five in the afternoon, she didn’t stop. Then, at quarter to five, she stopped, took a bath, and pulled herself together so my father wouldn’t know anything was wrong.”
“Did it work?”
“It did. She was afraid my father would hurt somebody-maybe me, maybe Phil, maybe himself-and that would be the end of our family. That meant everything to her. When he went off to work again, she started in on me again. She wanted me to get an abortion, which I could have done practically that day at the hospital. Nobody would have asked any questions or anything.”
“Did you consider it?”
“Not at first. I was a nurse, so I wasn’t intimidated or anything. I just resented the idea that my own mother would think I wasn’t strong enough to handle my own problems.”
“Which ones?”
“Any of them. Being the wife of an active-duty marine stationed five hundred miles from my home. Taking care of my baby while I went through the hardest parts of the nursing program. Working to pay back my loans while my husband got shipped away somewhere. I was tough, and I told her so. I’d get through the hard time, and things would get better. But it was the story that bothered her.”
“The story?”
“The story everybody has heard a million times. The smart, pretty black girl has a big future ahead. She gets through nursing school, and maybe after she works a few years she’ll try to get through medical school, too. But something happens. She ends up with a baby-in this case, a white man’s baby-and there’s no way for her to have her future.”
“Did you want to go to medical school?”
“I had thought about it. The main thing was that she and I saw what I was doing differently. I thought I was considering getting married and having a family. She thought I was setting myself up to be just another black girl with no money raising a child alone. I said it wasn’t that way. She said I was living in a dreamworld. It wasn’t that easy to be the black wife of a white man. I said I was strong enough. She said, But is he?”’ Lee Anne stopped and held Emily with her eyes, and all at once, Emily knew.
“That’s right. While my mother was talking to me, his family and friends were talking to him. He was trying to imagine the future, just as I was. And when he was through thinking, he had a different answer than I had. I remember so clearly the day when he told me. He had the foresight to have the conversation with me in Oakland, so I would be two miles from my family, at my apartment, near school. All I had to do was shut the door when he left, lie down on my own bed, and cry. If I had been nine or ten hours from home, among strangers in a cheap hotel in Oceanside, I don’t know what I would have done. By then my brother Eldon had been promoted and shipped to Camp Lejeune in North Carolina for some kind of special training, so I couldn’t have gone to him.”
