I called out, “Max!”
He came out the back door with a phone to his ear. As he walked toward me, he held up a finger for me to wait while he finished his call.
“I’m afraid to ask,” he said, pocketing his phone. “But what now?”
“Tell me what you see?”
He shrugged, surveyed the yard. “Grass, flowers, green beans and tomatoes.”
“I should have asked, what don’t you see?”
Looking around again, he said, “I need a hint.”
“White,” I said. “You don’t see white.”
I pointed to the closest flower border, raging with midsummer color, and said, “R, O, Y, G, B, I, V.”
He threw back his head and laughed. “Okay, I get it. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet-the colors of the visible spectrum. And no, of course you don’t see white. White has no hue, it is the sunlight itself.”
“Dad put you through the color drill, too, did he?”
“Yep, first year physics in high school. You can’t have thought I’d be spared the Al Duchamps lesson on optics can you? Who do you think he practiced that stuff on before he subjected you to it? Me, his baby brother, that’s who. Did he make you read Newton, too?”
“Of course he did. I left Dad’s copy of Opticks on a shelf in the den for the edification of the tenants and their children.”
“Fat chance anyone will pick it up.” He looked around, puzzled. “What brought that up?”
“Dad didn’t plant white roses, or white anything else.”
“I see that.”
“But every year he took white roses to the Bartolinis’ Hungry Ghosts party as an offering to Mrs. B’s spirit.”
“A good Catholic boy like your father taking offerings to a ghost?”
“Aha!” I whapped him on the back a little harder than I intended to and rubbed the place to make any sting go away. “The flowers came from someone else. But Bart always thought they were from Mom and Dad. This year Beto and I told Bart that Khanh Duc sent the flowers. And they got tossed out.”
“By Bart?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Jean-Paul and I saw the bouquet, still in its vase, on the trashcan when we left the party. It was around that time that, according to Beto, Bart had a meltdown and got sent to bed. Later in the night he had a sort of mini-stroke.”
“Where are you going with this?”
“I have no clue.”
“Don’t tell me that.” Max wrapped his hand around my upper arm the way he had when I was little and was intent on launching into some stupid daredevil stunt that Max was equally intent on stopping. “You have something in mind, and no matter what it is, I know and you know that I’ll get dragged into it.”
“That would be up to you, though, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes, my beloved. Yes. So, what’s up?”
I looked into his bright blue eyes, Dad’s eyes. “Max, what I know is, you all-you, Mom, Dad, Gracie, Dr. Ben, Mr. Sato, Father John, and I don’t know who else-have a great capacity for keeping secrets.”
“Are we talking about Isabelle now?”
“In part,” I said. “My friend Beto’s mother was murdered in a terrible way. A very terrible way. Dad and Ben, I believe, knew something. Mom is protecting someone or something. And Gracie, I think, is protecting Mom. Larry may have died because he owned some part of that secret. And you? You told Father John that you are weighted down by all the crap you have to keep to yourself.”
“I said that?”
“All but,” I said. “Help me, Max. What do you know?”
He shook his head. “When Tina died, I was practicing law in Los Angeles. I was out of that loop entirely.”
“Entirely?” I said, very skeptical.
He thought for a moment. “Mostly. I knew Tina, of course. Your mom had me volunteer for a couple of Legal Aid shifts at the refugee camp in the Presidio and Tina was my translator. I don’t remember seeing much of her after that.”
“Did you do any legal work for Mrs. B?”
“Yeah, some,” he said. “I don’t remember all of it, but the big issue was her sister, Quynh. A lot of people were worried about relatives that stayed behind in Vietnam, lots of rumors that the relatives were being punished because of them. I helped them go through the International Red Cross-la Croix-Rouge-and the Swiss Embassy to get information. She needed help finding Quynh.”
“And you found Quynh?”
“I didn’t,” he said. “We traced her to a re-education camp up near Hue, but then she disappeared. There was a kind of information underground among the refugee community that could sometimes get news out of Vietnam, or into Vietnam. But Tina didn’t trust them. She said they were spies for the communists, so we kept searching through official channels, but she died before Quynh was located.”
“How did Quynh get out?”
He held up his empty palms. “One day she called Bart from a refugee camp in Hong Kong. I have no idea how she got there.”
I said, “I think it’s time to go see Bart at the hospital.”
“Just to pay your respects, I hope. He’s a sick man.”
“Of course, just to pay my respects. Beto asked me to stop by the house and get some things Bart wants.”
“Later though, okay?” He looked at his watch. “Look, sweetheart, Maggie, I need you to focus on more pressing business right now. Lana has dodged my calls all day. So has the head of her division. I checked your network account and no funds have been released to you.”
“What are the odds the network will come through by tomorrow?”
“They get longer every minute that passes without word,” he said. “I went ahead and scheduled a phone conference with the folks at Canal Plus for five minutes past noon, our time, tomorrow. And I’m working on a backup, in case they both fall through.”
“Good idea.”
He furrowed his brow. “Where’s your phone?”
I pulled it out of my pocket and showed him the dark screen. “Out of juice. I forgot to put it on the charger.”
“Go give Guido a call,” he said. “He’s been trying to reach you. He asked me to tell you that he made the revisions on The Crooked Man you two talked about. He put what he hopes is the last draft of the film in the Cloud for you to look at. In his opinion, it’s finished. I think it’s best that you go take a look at it now, as in right now. Guido’s headed for the airport. If you think the film’s ready to go, I want that project submitted and signed off by end of business tonight so that, come noon tomorrow, there’s one less thing the network can jerk you around about if they still haven’t released funding for Normandy.”
“Good thinking.” I handed him the broom. “I’m on it.”
As I went inside, I heard Max sweeping the driveway. Bless his heart.
I called Guido as I waited for our film to download from the Cloud file where he had stowed it. He was at the San Francisco airport waiting to go through security. Before he had to drop his phone into a plastic bin with his shoes and go through the scanner, he explained the changes he had made. While I waited for him to get re-assembled and call back, I fast-forwarded to the segments we thought needed some tweaking, saw what he had done, admired his technical skill for maybe the thousandth time, and relaxed. Before Guido boarded his short flight to Burbank, we agreed that the project was finished, and it was good. Very good, indeed.
When he was buckled into his seat, he made a last call before he had to turn off his phone for takeoff.
“What if Lana balks, and won’t sign off?” Guido asked.
“Smile enigmatically and tell her that’s exactly what we hoped she’d do,” I said. “Drop a hint that the other folks we’re talking to would love to have The Crooked Man , too. She’ll call Uncle Max and he’ll explain how many different ways he’s going to sue her.”
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