Jan Burke - Remember Me, Irene

“Those are clean!” he said.

Clean socks. No wonder he called it the treasure room.

I used them as a bandage, the belt to hold them and put pressure on the wound.

“Why do you call them magic spells?” I asked, trying to distract him as I picked up the gun again. But he had little interest in the weapon now.

“The Prof kept them in the altar. He hid them there.”

“He wasn’t a professor!” Lisa said angrily.

“I don’t like you!” he said, just as angrily.

“You know what, Lisa? I don’t like you much, either,” I said, moving to the window. Sooner or later that security guard would have to cruise by again. I didn’t want to leave Two Toes with Lisa, so I would need to signal the guard from here. Taking Two Toes down the stairs with me was out of the question; it would be asking too much of a bandage made of socks and a belt.

“He was a professor!” Two Toes insisted, still glowering at her.

“Oh, what do you know!” she said.

“The Selmans know all kinds of things, don’t they? Three post-graduate degrees in the family, and at least two murderers.”

“Just two,” she said. “Leave Jerry out of this.”

“So you do know,” I said.

“About Nadine? Let’s say I’ve had a strong suspicion for years. It doesn’t matter, really. I was cleaning up after Andre’s other transgressions-cheating the public. I wish Lucas had just left things as they were. I didn’t want to have to silence him. I really didn’t. But I guess it was going to come to that, anyway. Until I took a look at that fax ribbon, I didn’t even know he suspected the truth about Nadine.”

I was stunned. This was too much to take in. “I’ve learned some horrible things about your father today, but the idea of him using you to help-”

“Using me? Using me to help?” She laughed hysterically.

“She’s crazy,” Two Toes said.

“Andre doesn’t even suspect that I know about his bogus statistics! Oh God! All those years I spent in that attic, that furnace vent like an intercom-and the brilliant Dr. Selman still has no idea what I know about him. That’s how smart he is!”

Two Toes acted like he wanted to smack her one again.

“You’d better rest,” I said to him. “You’re hurt.”

“I’m hurt, too,” she said. “He hit me hard. And my wrists hurt. Could you loosen these straps a little?”

“You really don’t have much respect for my intelligence, do you?”

“That’s not true.”

We were silent. Two Toes started humming a melody I couldn’t place at first, then I realized I had heard it outside St. Anthony’s. The “Our Father.”

I watched for the security guard.

My pager went off again.

“I’ll get it!” Two Toes said, stumbling to his feet.

“Be careful!” I said, but he was already on his way into the bathroom.

“You made a mess in there!” he said to Lisa, as he came back out wearing my purse. He plopped down against the wall, still clutching the purse. He busied himself looking through it.

“Gimme the light,” he said.

“I need it.” At his sullen look, I added, “There’s a little light on my keychain. Use that.”

Good enough.

“You wouldn’t understand,” I heard Lisa say.

“As I said before, you don’t have much respect for my intelligence. I’ll admit I don’t understand this. I thought you were trying to pin Lucas’s murder on your father. But this isn’t about Andre, is it? Not about loving or hating him.”

“I don’t love him.” She stated it as fact. “He never gave me any love, I never gave him any. He doesn’t love anyone. And hate? I don’t feel enough for him to do that, either. This isn’t about what Andre is, or how I feel about him. It’s about what people-certain people-believe him to be.”

“Especially Barton Sawyer.”

She was quiet, then said, “Yes, especially Barton. Don’t you understand? Who was I when Barton first met me?”

“A young campaigner.”

“No, that’s not all. I was the daughter of a great social science statistician. A man who was making a big splash as an expert in the field of urban populations in transition. That’s the Andre the public policy-makers know. There’s quite a bit of truth to that. Just not enough truth.”

“Lucas Monroe was about to prove Andre to be an academic fraud, and perhaps a murderer,” I said. “Neither of which makes good press for a future assemblywoman.”

“Do you think anyone would trust someone whose father bilked the public the way Andre has?”

“You keep talking as if that’s his big sin, not the murder of a woman who was younger than you are now. I’ll tell you the truth, Lisa. If Nadine’s murder didn’t come to light, I’m not sure the studies would matter much. I don’t think very many people would understand how they had been cheated. Most don’t care enough about the poor to worry about whether they’ve lost their housing.”

“Barton Sawyer would understand it. It would matter to him.”

“Oh, and there goes your money.”

“More than money!” she said fiercely.

“Oh?”

“Barton would never have anything to do with me. I couldn’t stand that. He thinks I’m like he is. I’ve tried to be, but it’s not enough. He prides himself on trying to clean up politics. Do you think he’d be associated with the daughter of a murderer? Even if I withdrew my candidacy, he wouldn’t keep me on staff. The daughter of a man who falsified redevelopment studies for his own gain? Don’t you understand? If Andre’s reputation was ruined, mine would be ruined, too. I couldn’t let those papers be made public. I had to make sure you never had a chance to study them. Now-oh God, don’t you see how disappointed Barton will be?”

“Yes,” I said. “I think I know exactly how disappointed he’ll be.”

She didn’t answer.

“You know what, Lisa?” I said after a moment. “To some extent, reputations are like statistics. They stand for something larger. They aren’t necessarily the facts, they’re just a way to represent the facts. Poor samples, faulty methods of correlation-they all apply, don’t they? Sometimes, you think you know someone, but you’ve based your judgments on small, carefully displayed samples of their behavior. The whole person may be different. You, for example. I’ve never really known who you are.”

“What I said upstairs,” she said, “was true. This wasn’t about you and me. I didn’t like hurting Roberta or Lucas. And you-you did so much for me. Try to believe that much of me, that I regret what I’ve done.”

For once, I kept control of my temper. I actually thought before I opened my mouth.

“Prove it,” I said.

“What?”

“Tell what you know to the police.”

“About what?”

“Everything. Nadine, Lucas’s degree, the studies. Everything.”

“I don’t know all of it,” she said slowly.

“Your political reputation is shot. You’re going to go to prison for what you did to Lucas and Roberta. If you don’t want the entire focus of the publicity to be on what a little shit you are, then turn in that father you claim not to love. Turn in Andre. Maybe Barton will come to forgive you.”

“He’ll never forgive me.”

“All right, then, suppose he doesn’t. He’s not God, Lisa. There are other people who’ve cared about you, too. Maybe later you might feel as if you did something for someone other than yourself. Maybe your mother might come to believe she had some influence on you, that you didn’t turn out to be just like Andre.”

“I’m not like him!”

“God help Marcy when she hears what you’ve done.”

She started crying. “Leave my mother out of this.”