David Kessler - Mercy

Juanita was about to give it, when a call came through on another line. She looked at the display and saw that it was from Nat.

“I’ll have to call you back.” She pressed another button on the switchboard. “Hi, Nat.”

“Hi, Juanita. You sound harassed.”

“I’m holding the fort alone here. Where are you?”

“I’m sorry. I went home for a change of clothes.”

“A change of clothes?”

She was incredulous.

“Yes, I was feeling uncomfortable. I’m sorry.”

“Well are you coming back now?”

“Not yet. I have something else to do.”

“I don’t suppose you can tell me what this ‘something else’ is?”

“Not right now. Look, Juanita, there was an incident at my house.”

“What sort of an incident?”

“There was a burglar.”

“A burglar? What is this, an epidemic?”

“What’s that?” he asked, apparently oblivious to Juanita’s use of humor to relieve the tension.

“Nothing. So what did this burglar get away with?”

“He didn’t get away at all. I caught him.”

“Oh my God! Are you all right?”

Juanita realized now who the burglar was — and she was worried.

“Yes, I’m fine.”

“When you say you caught him?”

“He was kind of old and he didn’t put up much of a fight.”

“So what happened? Did you call the police?”

“Yes. They arrested him. And I’m supposed to go to the station to make a statement.”

“Can’t it wait?”

There was a brief hesitation. Then Nat spoke again.

“Is there anything that I can do at this stage anyway? I mean … look, I don’t mean to say this, but we seem to have run out of options.”

Juanita was silent. She was trying to read his words … and his tone. Had he really given up? Had he tried to get the medical center to give the information? Had he run up against the same obstacles as she had? And what about the burglar? It must have been Lee Kelly. Alex hadn’t been able to contact him to call it off and now he had been caught red-handed. Would he snitch on Alex? Or would Nat figure it all out? He may not be an experienced lawyer like Alex, but he’d been round the block a few times.

“Okay, look, you do what you have to,” said Juanita. “I’ll see you when I see you.”

“Okay. Wait, listen, did you say you were holding the fort alone?”

“Yes, why?”

“So did Alex go back to San Quentin?”

Juanita wasn’t sure whether to answer this. If Nat had figured out that Alex had sent Lee to spy on him, then it might be better to hold back, or even lie. But on the other hand, if their suspicions were unfounded, then wouldn’t it be better to rebuild the bond of trust by telling him the truth?

“No, he went to see Jonathan Olsen.”

“What for?”

Juanita noticed the unusual intensity in his voice.

“He thinks Jonathan knows about Dorothy’s flight to England.”

“When did he go there?”

“About forty minutes ago.”

“Has he called in yet?”

“No. And I can’t call him either. It’s like his phone’s switched off.”

“Okay. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

When Nat rang off, the feeling of desolation returned to Juanita. She wanted to do something. But they had already tried everything. She had hoped that she might get somewhere with the medical center, but had run up against the same brick wall as before.

The thing that was nagging away at her was that they had sent something . That meant that someone at the medical center was trying to help — or had at least seen fit to send them something in writing.

But the fax wasn’t there now.

So where was it? Had Nat taken it? Thrown it away? Shredded it?

Of course!

She raced over to the shredder, lifted off the grinding mechanism and began fishing out papers. She remembered reading how the Iranian students at the American embassy had spent hours sticking shredded documents together at the time of the embassy siege in 1979 after Khomeini seized power in Iran. They had hoped to find things that they could use to embarrass the United States. But most of what they found was mundane material like requisition orders for stationery.

The point was that they kept at it, laboriously re-assembling every page.

It can be done.

And if Nat had shredded the fax, then it would be among the strips at the top of the pile.

Jonathan was sitting on the bed, looking down at his hands. He was no longer crying. Whatever mixture of emotions had coursed through him — guilt, regret, fear — had all passed now. All that was left was a kind of exhausted passivity, as if he could now accept anything else that life threw at him.

“Jonathan, I can’t condemn you for what you did. I think I understand the pain and torment your father put Dorothy through. And it must have pained you no end to witness it. And to see it at such a young age yourself, must have made it all the more painful. But there are some things that I need to understand. Like, how did you shooting your father lead to Dorothy running away to England?”

Jonathan looked up.

“After I shot him, I went into a complete panic. But some kind of self-preservation instinct kicked in. I wiped the gun and dropped it near the body. I wasn’t trying to stage the crime scene or anything like that. I mean, I didn’t think to make it seem like suicide. I just didn’t want to leave any evidence pointing to me. So I just wiped the revolver, dropped it and ran.”

Something in these words didn’t quite make sense to Alex.

“Wait a minute. You didn’t stage it to look like suicide?”

“No. I didn’t think of that at the time. I didn’t think of anything other than saving my skin. I just wanted to get out of there.”

Ordinarily, Alex would have known better than to interrupt a man when he was in the full flow of a confession. But he needed clarity.

“Okay, so what happened then?”

“I ran home, terrified. And I told Dorothy what had happened. She got me to wash my hands to make sure there was no gunshot residue and throw my clothes in the washing machine to make extra sure. She also made me take a shower.

“By the time I got out of the shower I’d already calmed down and I began to think I’d got away with it. Even though the gunshot was loud, no one had come out of their apartments to see what it was. No one had seen me leaving and no cops had come knocking on the door. I’d remembered to wipe the prints off the gun and washed away any evidence that might have been on me or my clothes. I mean, I was naive enough to think I had. If I’d come under suspicion, they’d probably have found some evidence.

“I know now that there’s a limit to what you can wash away. There were probably traces of my father’s brains on the T-shirt. The trouble was, while I was over the hysteria, Dorothy had just hit panic mode.”

“Why?”

“Because she’d remembered that she’d loaded the revolver. Her prints were on the shells. And I’d left it there!”

Nat was driving frantically, trying to put it all together. Alex had decided on the spur of the moment to go to Jonathan’s place. Why? Something was going on … but what? Was Juanita holding something back? Why was she being cagey?

By this stage, Nat was panicking himself. He had to find out.

With a press of a button on his cell phone, he called Juanita again.

“I was just wondering if we’d heard any more news from David.”

A pause.

“Why do you ask?”

She sounded suspicious.

“Well the way I see it we’ve run out of options unless David can come up with something that we can take to the governor.”