Laura Lippman - The Most Dangerous Thing

“That we know of. But he would disappear, remember? Why did he disappear? I never really thought about it, but chances are that a family member would intervene from time to time, if his health was jeopardized. They’d get a judge to put him in a hospital for his own good, but then he would sign himself out. I know it was easier to institutionalize people then, but if he was considered sane, he couldn’t be kept anywhere against his will.”

“OK, so maybe he had family. So what? He fell down in the woods, he hit his head, and bled out or drowned. It was an accident. Mickey didn’t mean to-well, you know. It was just easier not to explain that part, or to tell our parents how well we knew him, how we created the circumstances that ended up with Go-Go being assaulted. Those omissions don’t change the basic facts.”

“I know. I was there. And if we had told the full story at the time, it wouldn’t have made a difference. But if it were your relative, if he was found in the woods without his guitar, his single most precious object, a day or so after a horrible hurricane, based on an anonymous call-would you think it was an accident?”

“He had the guitar.”

“When we saw him. My father told me he hiked back to make sure if the EMTs had found him and there was no body-and no guitar.”

“Paramedics probably stole it. Besides, why wait thirty years to pursue it? Why now?”

“I don’t know. But who else from Go-Go’s childhood would think he could do him a favor?”

“You said ‘need,’ not a favor.”

“Yeah, well, a smart private investigator isn’t going to say, ‘Hey, I’m looking into a suspicious death of which you might have knowledge.’ She’s going to set you up to think it’s something good, then lower the boom.”

Their food arrives, but the gyro, which Tim had been looking forward to with almost pathetic anticipation, is tasteless. If the guy does have family, if there are suspicions-well, there goes any chance of political office. He’ll be lucky to keep the job he has. But how would anyone know to look for Go-Go? Someone else would have blabbed. Not him. Not Sean. Not McKey. Gwen? She’s a journalist, and they’re a little too free with information in Tim’s experience. It’s their currency, they can’t help it.

Then he thinks of Go-Go, on a bender. Not the most recent one, but a year or so ago, the next-to-last time he fell off the wagon. Go-Go was not good with secrets, and his feelings about Chicken George would have been understandably confused. No one had shown him greater kindness. No one had betrayed him more thoroughly. Go-Go drunk was capable of saying anything to anyone. And now he’s dead.

“So what do we do?” he asks Gwen.

“That’s why I called you. You’re a prosecutor. Can’t you make the PI talk to you? I mean, I have no standing, but you’re his brother and an officer of the court-”

He shakes his head. “Gwen, that would be a horrible violation of my office. And, by the way, PIs, if retained through legal counsel, can’t be forced to give up information about their clients. They enjoy almost the same privileges as lawyers. I mean, yeah, if you subpoena someone, but-no, no way. Even if this PI would talk to me, I don’t want to put us in play. Does he still call Lori? Has he called you?”

“She,” Gwen says. “The PI is a she. And, no, there’s no evidence she’s tried to get in touch with anyone else.”

“So drop it.”

“But-”

“Drop it, Gwen. You’re overthinking this. I understand the impulse. I’m on intimate terms with it. You’re worried that something’s going on, something you can’t control. You want to get out in front of it. You can’t. Leave it alone. Let me tell you this much: Among the three of us, the brothers? We never spoke of it. Neither did my parents. They thought it was for the best. It probably wasn’t, and maybe Go-Go ended up telling someone he shouldn’t. But there’s nothing we can do about it, and the minute you start poking around, you’re more apt to stir things up.”

Gwen sips her Coke. For all her big talk about seizing the day with an open-face turkey sandwich, she’s barely touched her food, only moved it around on her plate, a trick he knows from his daughters.

“It’s not just this. My father-”

“How is he?”

“He’s doing okay, all things considered. Breaking a hip at his age is no small thing. Anyway, the day he fell? He claimed it was because he saw a chicken on the stairs.”

Tim can’t help himself. He laughs, an all-out guffaw. Gwen looks genuinely hurt.

“I’m sorry, Gwen, but-what do you think this is, some horror movie, where a relative bent on revenge stalks us and our parents? Hires a PI to pressure Go-Go, then surreptitiously places a chicken on your father’s steps? Forces Go-Go to drive into the barricade? What about you, Gwen, do you hear steel guitars in the night? I mean, come on.”

She tries to act as if she’s in on the joke, but he can tell she’s not entirely persuaded. “OK, I’m a little paranoid. Go-Go’s accident, then my father’s accident-”

“Gwen, it’s fucking middle age. Parents die. People die. I lost my dad fifteen years ago, you lost your mother before that.”

“She wasn’t even fifty, and I was in college. There was nothing middle-aged about that.”

“My dad went young, too. I’m just saying-we’re in our forties, and this is when the bullshit begins to mount. Just when you think you’ve got things figured out-boom, boom, boom. We start losing our parents, then we start losing our friends. Your father fell down the steps? He’s in his eighties. I’m even less surprised that Go-Go’s gone. The shocker there was that he made forty. Look, my brother broke my heart. You don’t think I haven’t asked myself again and again if a more open, touchy-feely family would have been better equipped to deal with what happened to him? You don’t think I suggested psychiatrists, even offered to pay if that’s what it took? I found that AA meeting for him. Sean tried, too. So sure, I’m racked with guilt, but about that. Not about that monster dying in an accident.”

Gwen stares out the window at York Road, and Tim follows her gaze. It’s one of those places that seem to have changed very little over the years. It’s ugly now, but it was always ugly.

“I’m going to go talk to her.”

“Her?”

“The PI.”

Tim shakes his head. “Don’t. This is about my family, not yours, Gwen.”

“It’s about all of us. There’s no hierarchy.”

“Really? Were you sexually molested in the woods? I mean, nonconsensually?”

She blushes. “That’s a little crude, Tim. Even for you.”

“Sorry, I don’t mean to take the bloom off your first love, the tender memories of dry-humping and second base.”

He has been too specific. She shoots him a look. “I always thought you watched us.”

“Only once,” he admits. “And not out there. In the basement.”

She looks down at her plate. “That summer, when Chicken-when he-disappeared that last time, Sean and I started using the cabin. Only a few times. It smelled so bad. I felt dirty there.”

“And not in the good way.”

“Tim.”

God, they are their young selves again, him teasing Gwen because he’s so insanely jealous of his brother, having a willing girlfriend when Tim can’t find one. It’s not that he wants her, or ever really wanted her. It’s that his brother leapfrogged ahead of him. Later, Go-Go got more pussy than the two of them combined. You don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to figure that one out.

“Did you ever go back?” she asks. “After?”

She doesn’t have to specify back to where. “No.”

“My dad did. He went back again and again. He doesn’t know I know this. He would set out for these long walks on weekends and he wouldn’t invite me, the way he used to. I’m sure that’s where he went.”