Gregg Hurwitz - Prodigal Son

Veronica filled another flute and then flopped down on an endless curved couch that formed a parenthesis across the savanna-tan carpet. He took a seat opposite her at the edge of a silver-gray chaise longue.

She gestured with her glass. “You’ll have to forgive the nouveau riche mishmash of … can we call it ‘styles’? Barry’s a movie producer. He’s on location now. It’s just me and his staff and these awful little dogs.”

At the mention the dogs sat and gazed up at her needily, panting.

A majordomo floated into sight in the vast doorway, wearing a black button-up with an Asian collar. His shiny bald head reflected the muted light of the kitchen. “Girls, come now,” he said, in some kind of a Slavic accent. He patted the thigh of his dark linen pants, and the dogs padded out after him, the trio vanishing.

For a moment Evan wondered if the man had been an illusion.

Veronica tucked her legs beneath her, folding them to one side, and ran a fingertip absentmindedly around the rim of the champagne flute. “I assume by now you’ve done some digging on me.”

Evan had indeed spent a few hours in the Vault prying into Veronica LeGrande. What she’d told him had checked out, and he’d unearthed a bit more. An only child, she’d grown up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Veronica’s father, the grandiosely named Bernard LeGrande, had been a structural-steel fabrication magnate. Her homemaker mother, Maryelizabeth, had spent years in and out of psychiatric hospitals for crippling phobia disorders before early-onset dementia had taken her out in her late forties.

Veronica had lived a privileged life, spending her high-school years at Linden Hall—the oldest all-girls boarding school in the country, established a full three decades before the nation’s birth. Three years of college at Vassar before dropping out and then patchwork records showing a gypsy lifestyle. Her father’s profligate spending had drained much of the family money before his death. Veronica had run through the rest rather quickly, it seemed, leaving her to rely on the kindness of strangers. Lots of passport activity, no mortgages, decent credit rating.

No children on record.

“Not really,” Evan said.

“I have a long history with not much to show for it.” She knocked back the rest of her drink and stretched her arms overhead. Firm neckline, smooth skin, youthful hazel eyes.

“Are you really sixty-two?” he asked.

She smirked. “Parts of me.” She brushed a lock of chestnut hair from her eyes. “Were you really trained to kill people?”

“I was.”

“I didn’t call you to do that.”

“You called me to help Andre.”

“Andre? I thought it was Andrew.” She rose to refill her glass. “I want you to help him. Not do whatever horrible things you’ve done in your past.”

He hadn’t considered wanting her approval, and yet her words twisted something inside him, something with jagged edges. “People are trying to kill him.”

“I’m not sure I believe that . He just needs a hand to get himself out of trouble. Got tangled up in the wrong situation. Maybe he owes some money. Needs some legal counsel.”

“You don’t understand anything about me,” Evan said. “What I do, what I don’t do.”

She kept her back turned, her hands resting at the bar, but he could see her shoulder blades tense. She paused a moment. Poured champagne without the OJ this time and downed it. When she turned around, she’d collected herself.

She replenished her glass once more, glided across the thick carpet, and set herself down on the cushions again a bit more heavily.

“How do you know Andre?” Evan asked.

Her eyes stayed low, on the rim of the flute. Hint of lilac in the air, the faintest trace of her perfume.

“Veronica. This is where you give me some answers.”

He could see a flutter to the side of her throat, her heartbeat making itself known. She looked into her glass as if the bubbles might tell her something.

“I went to an elite high school,” she said. “But we did have a few underprivileged students. There was a Puerto Rican girl I was friendly with. My father gave a lot, scholarship funds, that kind of thing, so there was some overlap. I wouldn’t say we were friends, but we were friend ly . And we stayed in touch vaguely after graduation, a letter now and again, a card at the holidays. She wound up studying at Union a hundred miles or so up the Hudson from me.” She pursed her lips. “I was in my junior year at college when she showed up at my dorm room. I supposed she had nowhere else to go. No one she trusted. She’d been…”

“What?”

Veronica shook her head, an etchwork of lines surrounding her tense mouth showing her age at last. “She had bruises around her wrists where they’d been held down.” Her own hands rose and mimed gripping someone. “And she was still wearing the shirt, torn at the collar where it had been…” Her lips trembled, though barely. “Broken fingernails from trying to fight back. A clump of hair missing where it had been yanked out. It was brutal. Savage.”

Evan swallowed. Kept perfectly still.

“And she was worried that … that she could be expecting. And she stayed with me, and she took those damn tests every day, like playing a lottery you don’t want to win. But sure enough she won. And even though this was a child born of violence, it was still a child. People don’t always understand that these days. It’s not some political statement, but it’s different when it happens to you, I suppose. And she decided she wanted to bring this child to term.”

Evan remembered Andre’s skipping out every chance he could to search for his birth parents. And how he’d returned empty-handed time and again. A kid seeking a truth that would wreck him if he ever found it.

Evan said, “Jesus.”

“Well, she didn’t have much money. And there was school debt, too. And when the baby came…” Veronica cleared her throat, straightened up. “When Andrew came, she didn’t have the resources to support him. And I told her that sometimes, sometimes with children, your desire to care for them can ruin them.”

The words came before Evan could stop them. “How would you know that?”

The depth of feeling beneath the words caught him off guard.

She shook her head. “You’re right. Bear in mind I was a twenty-two-year-old kid myself. But she didn’t follow my advice, not initially. She tried to raise this baby who’d done nothing wrong, who deserved so much more. But she found she didn’t have the strength to look in that child’s face every day. I remember her telling me that she could see in his features the face of the man who’d attacked her. Imagine living with that.”

“So she put him up for adoption.”

“Not at first. She fought herself for a year. And gave this child care. But she also detested him. And it was tearing her apart. I’ve never seen a person so conflicted. So yes. But by then he was a toddler, and the problem with that is—”

“The older a kid is, the less anyone wants him.” Again Evan’s words came sharper than he’d intended.

She blinked at him a few times, her eyes glassy from the alcohol. “Yes.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this?” he said. “At the Recoleta Cemetery?”

“It was more than I could get out,” she said. “With the police closing in and all. And I was worried you wouldn’t help. That you wouldn’t want to go back to that time.”

“So you thought you’d manipulate me instead.”

“I suppose if you frame it that way…”

“Does Andre know this story? About the rape?”

She shook her head excessively, like a little girl. “It would destroy him.”

“Where’s his mother now?”