Sandra Brown - Smoke Screen

“Did they get a confession out of Jones?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did your dad mention that Jones had two skull fractures when they arrested him?”

“No.”

“Did he call you with progress reports?”

“No. I didn’t hear from him again. Just that once when he told me they would be interrogating Cleveland Jones until he cracked.”

“What happened while they were interrogating him?”

“Nothing!” Then he repeated it with a firm shake of his head.

“But you suspect-”

“I don’t suspect anything.”

“That’s bullshit, Pat,” Raley said, with heat.

“I was in the hospital for weeks. I was on painkillers. Groggy. My recollections of the fire aren’t even clear, so how would I know what took place before it started?”

“You don’t want to know.” Raley’s accusation struck hard. The other man lowered his head to avoid Raley’s piercing gaze. “You don’t want to know, because then you’d have to acknowledge that seven people died because you got blown in a public men’s room.”

“Raley.” Britt’s softly spoken chastisement went unheard because of Pat Jr.’s harsh sob. His shoulders shook. The raw, choppy sounds of his weeping were heart-wrenching.

“You’re right. I didn’t want to know,” he said miserably. “I heard that guy didn’t die because of the fire, but I never asked Dad about it. I can’t tell you any more because I don’t know any more. If they knew I’d told you this much, they’d kill me.”

Raley pounced on that. “Who? George McGowan? Was he there when your dad interrogated Cleveland Jones? He and Jay Burgess?”

“I don’t know,” Pat Jr. sobbed.

“Fordyce was there, too, wasn’t he, Pat? He’d come over to the police station to throw the book at Jones if he didn’t confess. Wasn’t that the plan?”

“I told you, I don’t know. I swear!”

Raley eased up and sat back against the passenger-side door, staring hard at the other man but giving him a moment to collect himself. When the crying had subsided into an occasional sniffle, Britt asked, “Why did you get married, Pat?”

Raley answered for him. “For the same reason he became a cop. It’s part of his cover.”

Pat Jr. looked over at Raley, obviously impressed that he had guessed so accurately. “I made a pact with Dad.”

“After the fire?” Raley asked.

He nodded. “He made me swear that nobody would ever know about the incident in the park. My attacker was dead, and he was nobody’s loss. It was over, he said. But it could never happen again.

“He told me to enroll in the police academy. He and his friends would make certain I got a spot. He told me to get married and have kids. He told me I had to stop…stop being a fag.” He gave a caustic laugh. “As if being gay was something I could reverse or turn off.”

“Why did you agree to this pact?”

“I owed him, didn’t I? Even though I had disgraced him, he and his friends had come to my defense. So whatever Dad said to do, I did. It would have been selfish of me not to.”

“It was selfish to deceive a woman into marrying you,” Britt said.

He looked back at her and nodded forlornly. “She was a girl from my mom’s church. Brought up very strict. She was younger than me, and innocent. She didn’t know exactly what to expect from a husband, so I wasn’t a disappointment to her.”

“The children?”

“I can do it when I have to.”

“She doesn’t know?”

He shook his head, looking at her imploringly. “She can’t find out, either. I can’t do that to her.” Then to Raley, he said, “Please. She’s great. Truly. I don’t want to hurt her.”

Britt felt that the lie he was living was more hurtful to his family than the truth would have been, but that was a conversation for another time.

Raley said, “You told us earlier today that Pat Senior didn’t enjoy being a hero.”

“He didn’t. That fire ruined his life,” Pat Jr. said with vehemence, showing more mettle than he had up to that point.

“How do you mean?” Britt asked.

“Just that. He was never the same after, and it was more than what happened to me in the park that changed him. He didn’t like all the attention heaped on him. The commendations, the praise, the spotlight. Burgess and McGowan got off on all that. Fordyce used it to get himself elected AG, but Dad just wanted it all to go away. It didn’t. Things really got bad after-”

He stopped and looked nervously at Raley, who asked, “After what?”

“After the business with you and that girl.”

“What do you know about that?” Britt asked.

“Only what everybody else knows. What the newspapers said, what you reported on TV.”

“Did your dad talk about the Suzi Monroe case?” Raley asked.

“Not in my hearing, but I knew he was investigating it. That was the last big case assigned to him. After that, he became depressed. More so every day. Drank a lot, alone, late into the night. Most mornings I think he woke up still drunk. He started missing work. Nothing Mom said seemed to get through to him.”

“Did she know about you, Jones, the park?”

Pat Jr. shook his head. “She believed the bicycle story because that’s what Dad told her. But I think she always suspected there was more to it. I guess she wanted to think I’d been cured after being caught in bed with my friend. Don’t ask, don’t tell.”

There had been a lot of denial going on in the Wickham household. Britt thought that was a terrible way to run a family.

“Okay, go on,” Raley told him.

“Well, Mom could see that Dad was getting more depressed by the day. She begged him to get counseling, but he refused, said he could work it out by himself, but he never said exactly what ‘it’ was.

“George and Jay tried to boost him. Took him fishing. Stuff like that. But nothing they said or did helped. He sank lower and lower. One night I woke up to a strange sound. I found him sitting out on the back porch, crying his heart out. I’d never known him to cry before. Never. But I’ll never forget the awful sound of it. I crept back to bed. He never knew I had witnessed that.” He paused to wipe his nose again. “The very next night, George and Jay showed up at our door to tell Mom that he’d been fatally shot.”

After a short silence, Raley said, “I knew your dad. Only slightly, but I knew he was a good and conscientious cop. Why did he place himself in such a dangerous situation that night, Pat? Why did he break the first rule of self-preservation by not waiting for backup?”

“To prove to himself that he was the hero everybody believed him to be.”

It sounded like a stock answer, something he might have heard a therapist say. Raley picked up on it just as Britt did. “That’s not what you really think, is it?”

Pat Jr. seemed ready to take issue, then slowly shook his head. “I’ve wondered if maybe he was just tired of it all and wanted it to be over. I know that feeling.” He looked at his reflection in the rearview mirror. “I know how it feels to just want out of your body, out of your life.”

He paused for several moments before continuing. “Maybe Dad went into that alley hoping that he wouldn’t come out, but knowing that, if he didn’t, Mom could still collect on his life insurance policy.”

Britt had never actually heard anyone admit to suicidal feelings, and it shook her. Apparently the confession subdued Raley, too. For at least a minute no one said anything, then Raley spoke.

“I have another theory, Pat. I think maybe the crying jag you heard was your father’s surrender. He’d reached his breaking point. He’d decided to unburden himself of the guilty secret he’d been keeping along with his buddies.” After a significant pause, he added, “Maybe one or both of them wanted that secret protected at all costs. Your dad could have been lured into that alley and killed to make certain he wouldn’t rat them out.”