Т Паркер - The Fallen

“I’d be happy to help you look for it.”

“It’s something I want to do alone. I’m sorry, Robbie. I fell out of love with you. I was planning to call. I’m going to file the papers and I don’t want anything — you can have it all. I don’t want it to be expensive for either of us.”

I could barely formulate a reply. Something inside me took over the task of communication while my heart withered and died.

“Everything we have is community property,” I heard myself say.

“But I don’t want any of it. Not one thing.”

She bent her face to her hands and the orange fountain pitched forward. She reached up, yanked out the jeweled ornament and her lovely hair spilled down. She put her face into her hands again. Her back heaved but she made very little sound.

“Got another guy?”

She shook her head and her back heaved faster.

I sat for a while, feeling the rhythm of her crying relayed to me through the couch springs and the frame and the cushions. Because her face was buried in her hands, I was able to stare at her, as I’d been wanting to do for some time. I can’t accurately describe her beauty in that moment, but to me it was unique and entire. I wanted to take her in my arms until the tears stopped but I understood that they wouldn’t. I could smell them from where I sat, the same humid perfume of the Sonoran thunderstorms that sometimes towered over and burst upon Normal Heights early Septembers when I was a boy.

“Was it something I did?” I asked. “Or didn’t do?”

She shook her head again.

“I know I’ve got my faults.”

“No, you’re perfect. You really are.”

We sat without talking for a long minute or two. During that silence my thoughts organized themselves and I could tell that my heart was not dead, just wounded. A great relief began to spread inside me.

“Look at me,” I said.

She uncovered her face, wiped her tears and held me with her bloodshot green eyes.

“I’ve never told you this before, Gina, but I lost something in the fall, some kind of purchase or traction that other people have, and I used to have. What I have now is the opposite of those things. I’m not even sure what to call it — the power to let go, maybe. Because, you know, at the very end of that fall, that’s what I did. I just let go. I gave up and I understood that my own life was out of my hands. I never told anybody that, because I was too busy being a hero. Heroes fight all the way down. They never give up. So I wasn’t really a hero at all. But now I see that sometimes letting go gets you just as much as fighting does. I don’t know why that’s true, and I can’t explain it, and it goes against everything I was taught. There was only one thing I knew I’d never let go of, and that was you. But I’m going to do it now, Gina. I can’t keep you. I can’t give you what you need, because I don’t know what it is. So good-bye. Please don’t worry about me. I’ll start over.”

I stood and took a step and sat down close to her. As the cushion under me compressed with my weight, the cushion under Gina lightened with her departure, and she swept around the end of the couch and ran into the bathroom. The door slammed and the lock clicked.

I stood, as my parents taught me to do when a woman enters and leaves the room. I looked around the apartment once. I lifted my nose to gather in the smell of her. I locked her door from the inside and tugged it closed behind me.

A week later I gave closed-session testimony to the San Diego Grand Jury. They had assembled at my request. I told them what Garrett Asplundh had discovered in his work as an Ethics Authority investigator, and I documented it with his reports, his sex videos, and my own discoveries. Talk about a hush falling over a room. I was thanked and told that I might be asked to testify again to the grand jury and perhaps subsequently in a court of law. Two days after that, I was back in the grand jury room again, this time with McKenzie and Captain Villas, going over the evidence in more detail.

I met with Carrie Ann Martier for lunch one day down in Seaport Village. We sat outside in the spring sun and watched the tourists go by. I told her that trouble was brewing and she would be a part of it. I told her that if she wanted to leave town and save herself from the theater of a trial, I wouldn’t stop her.

“You’ve got my bare ass on DVD with all those clowns,” said Carrie. “That’s my testimony, and thanks for the tip-off. I missed two days of work for the pinch up at Eden Heights, so I figure I’ve done my duty.”

“Got enough for a down payment on the Hawaii place?” I asked.

“I’m about eleven thousand shy,” she said. “Want to loan it to me? I can work it off. First night’s free because you’re a good guy. You’d be one happy man till I paid you off.”

“You think like a whore,” I said.

She smiled, a little coolly.

In mid-April the indictments started coming down — Anthony Rood and Steve Stiles, Fellowes and Mincher, and of course Jordan Sheehan. The headlines in the U-T were three inches high. There were more news crews downtown than there were for the Super Bowl back in ’03.

It was interesting to see not only who fell but who escaped.

By the end of that month, Jance Purdew issued a “stable” rating for San Diego municipal bonds. In spite of the turmoil brewing in our fine city, Trey Vinson had come through with a one-word rating that would save us scores of millions of dollars in interest payments over the years. I wondered if he had rated us “stable” in spite of being caught on video with a Squeaky Clean or because of it. The news media editorialized about the importance of “cleaning house” and how such painful diligence had already given San Diego a fresh new face on Wall Street.

Abel Sarvonola and the Budget Oversight Committee had glowing things to say about the new rating and San Diego’s future. The mayor unveiled a budget that would include funds for a new library and eighteen new patrol cars for us, without raiding the pension fund. That same week the Padres did a big trade with New York, which brought us two badly needed medium-length relief pitchers and stole the headlines from Sarvonola and the mayor, which is exactly what everybody wanted. Our city loves sports.

On behalf of Garrett, I went down to the National City apartment one evening and checked in on April Holly.

April had gotten a shorter haircut since I’d seen her at the funeral. Her wavy dark hair framed her face smartly and she looked even more like Stella Asplundh than before. She said SeaWorld was treating her just fine. She liked the people she worked with and had changed her major to biology in order to become a dolphin or killer-whale trainer someday. She told me that the first time she’d seen the Shamu show at night, she had realized what she wanted to do with her life.

Later I went to Miranda’s show at the Zulu Grill in Ocean Beach. It wasn’t a formal show. She had hung her twenty paintings around the restaurant that morning, and I sat with her at the bar that night as the patrons came and went.

Her paintings looked solid and humorful. She had taken the time to get the lighting on them right. Each work was a bright jewel that occupied its small space with surprising depth and authority. The longer I looked at them, the more comedy I saw taking place between the muscled men and curvy women on Miranda’s audaciously colored beaches. In one a surfer knelt in front of a seductively posed young woman. The woman was working her hands through her flowing yellow hair, ignoring him, and the surfer was scratching his head as he looked out at the waves. To me it was an illustration of the perfect disconnection between people who are together in a nice time and space.