Jonathan Kellerman - Private Eyes

“Maybe,” he said. “All I’m saying is that in a normal situation, I’d have looked at her early on.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“Hey,” he said, “I didn’t say I thought it was a probability. Just something we left out. No, not we- me. I’m the one trained to think ugly. But I didn’t. It wouldn’t have happened if I’d been working for the city.”

“Well, you’re not,” I said, raising my voice, “so why not allow yourself a vacation from that kind of thinking?”

“Hey,” he said, “don’t kill the messenger.”

“She had no opportunity,” I said. “She was here when her mother disappeared.”

“The Drucker kid could have had one- where was he?”

“I don’t know.”

He nodded, but without satisfaction. “From what I’ve seen, he digs her enough to eat her fingernail dirt and call it caviar. And he took care of the family’s cars. He’d know all about how the Rolls worked. Gina would’ve picked him up, that’s for sure. And you yourself said he twanged your antennae.”

“I didn’t say I sensed anything psychopathic about him.”

“Okay.”

“Oh, man,” I said, feeling a grinding headache coming on. “No way, Milo. No way.”

“It’s sure not anything I want to believe, Alex. I like the kid and I’m still working for her. She was just looking a little too… hardbitten, just now. Going on and on about getting the bastards. What I said to her out in the kitchen was “sounds like you’re raring to go.’ And she just stopped and fell apart. I felt shitty for making her feel bad, but also better. Because she started looking like a kid again. If I did something untherapeutic, I’m sorry.”

“No,” I said. “If it was that close to the surface it would have happened sooner or later.”

“Yeah,” he said.

Neither of us putting into words what we were thinking: if it was real.

Feeling suddenly weary, I sat down in the chair near the phone table. The paper with Suzy LaFamiglia’s number was between my fingers. “Just got a lawyer for her. Female, tough, combative- likes to take on the system.”

“Sounds good.”

“Sounds,” I said, “like someone Melissa could grow up to be.”

Melissa came back to the five-sided room looking a long way from grown up. Her shoulders were stooped, her gait had slowed, and she dabbed at her mouth with a piece of toilet paper. I gave her the lawyer’s number and she thanked me in a very soft voice.

“Want me to call for you?”

“No, thanks. I’ll do it. Tomorrow.”

I sat her down behind the desk. She gazed out blankly in Milo’s direction and gave a weak smile.

Milo smiled back and looked at his soda can. I wasn’t sure for whom I felt sorrier.

Melissa sighed and put her hand under her jaw.

I said, “How’re you doing, hon?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “This is all so- I feel like I’m just being- Like I’ve got no… I don’t know.”

I touched her shoulder.

She said, “Who am I fooling- fighting them? I’m a nothing. Who’s going to listen to me?”

I said, “It’ll be your lawyer’s job to fight. Right now you should be concentrating on taking care of yourself.”

After a long time she said, “I guess.”

Another stretch of silence, then: “I’m really alone.”

“Lots of people around here care for you, Melissa.”

Milo was looking at the floor.

“I’m really alone,” she said again, with an eerie wonderment. As if she’d run a maze in record time, only to find it led to an abyss.

“I’m tired,” she said. “I think I’ll sleep.”

“Would you like me to stay with you?”

“I want to sleep with someone. I don’t want to be alone.”

Milo put the can down on the table and left the room.

I remained with Melissa, saying comforting things that didn’t seem to have much of an effect.

Milo returned with Madeleine. The big woman was breathing hard and looked agitated, but by the time she reached Melissa’s side, her expression had turned tender. She hovered over Melissa and stroked her hair. Melissa swooned a bit, as if she’d been embraced. Madeleine leaned lower and hugged her to her bosom.

“ I sleep with you, chÉrie. Come, we go now.”

In the car, driving away from the house, Milo said, “Okay, I’m a child-abusing asshole.”

“So you don’t think her falling apart was an act?”

He braked hard at the foot of the drive and whipped his head toward me. “What the hell was that, Alex? Twisting the goddam knife?”

His teeth were bared. The spotlight above the pine gates yellowed them.

“No,” I said, feeling fear of him for the first time in all the years I’d known him. Feeling like a suspect. “No, I’m serious. Couldn’t she have been faking it?”

“Yeah, right. You’re telling me you think she’s a psychopath?” Shouting now, one big hand pounding the steering wheel.

“I don’t know what to think!” I said, matching his volume. “You keep throwing theories at me out of left field!”

“Thought that was the idea !”

“The idea was to help !”

He shoved his face forward, as if it were a weapon. Glared, then sagged against the seat and ran his hands through his hair. “Shit, this is a pretty scene.”

“Must be sleep deprivation,” I said, feeling shaky.

“Must be… Change your mind about sacking out?”

“Hell, no.”

He laughed. “Me, neither… Sorry for getting on you.”

“Sorry, too. How about we just forget it.”

He put his hands back on the wheel and resumed driving. Slowly, with exquisite caution. Dropping speed at every intersection, even when there was no stop sign. Looking from side to side and in all the mirrors, though the streets were empty.

At Cathcart he said, “Alex, I’m not cut out for this private stuff. Too unstructured- too many blurred boundaries. I’ve been telling myself that I’m different, but it’s bullshit. I’m straight-ahead paramilitary, like everyone else in the department. Need an us-versus-them world.”

“Who’s us ?”

“The blue meanies. I like being mean.”

I thought of the world he’d contended with for so many years. The one he’d be contending with again, in just a few months: being relegated to them by other policemen, no matter how many thems he put away.

I said, “You didn’t do anything out of line. I was reacting from my gut- as her protector. It would have been negligent for you not to consider her as a suspect. It would be negligent not to continue considering her if that’s where the facts lead.”

“The facts,” he said. “We don’t got us too many of those…”

He seemed about to say more, but the freeway on-ramp appeared and he clamped his mouth shut and gave the Porsche gas. Traffic toward downtown was light, but it created enough of a roar to substitute for conversation.

We reached the Eternal Hope Mission shortly after ten and parked halfway down the block. The air smelled of ripening garbage and sweet wine and fresh asphalt, with a curious overlay of flowers that seemed to travel on a westerly breeze- as if the better parts of town had air-mailed a whiff of better homes and gardens.

The front facade of the mission was swimming in artificial light. That, and the moonglow, turned the aqua plaster icy-white. Five or six shabby men were congregated near the entrance, listening or pretending to listen to two men in business clothes.

As we got closer I saw that the talkers were in their thirties. One was tall and thin and fair with waxy-looking blond hair cut frat-boy short and an oddly dark mustache that hooked down at right angles to his mouth and resembled a fuzzy croquet wicket. He wore silver-rimmed eyeglasses, a gray summer-weight suit, and mocha-colored zip boots. The arms of the suit were a trifle too short. His wrists were huge. A note pad, identical to the ones Milo used, was in one hand, along with a soft-pack of Winstons.