Duncan Delaney and the Cadillac of Doom (27 page)

“That’s enough,” Harkanian said.

Benjamin released her and her arm flopped uselessly to the floor. Benjamin knelt beside Duncan while Harkanian cuffed Sheila.

“Are you okay?”

It seemed like a stupid question and Duncan laughed. Benjamin touched Duncan’s forehead and his hand came away covered with blood.

“I don’t think so,” he replied.

As his arms grew numb, Duncan wondered if he would dream. He hoped so. He wanted to see his father before he died. The ceiling grew black and fell down to meet him and he wondered no more.

The first thing Duncan saw when he opened his eyes were the flowers. The room was filled with bouquets of rainbow petals and a floral smell. He tried to sit up, but his head spun and he sagged back against his pillow.

“He’s out of it,” a voice said.

“Thank god,” another replied.

He closed his eyes and dreamed he was with his father on the Circle D. Both were on horseback, the air was steam in their mouths, and Duncan knew it was that terrible winter’s day in his youth. Duncan and Sean watched a jet fall from the clouds to crash on the range. Just before his father spurred his horse to the rescue, Duncan saw a parachute floating slowly down.

“Dad, look! You don’t have to go this time!”

Sean smiled sadly and said, “if only it were that easy.”

The pilot landed and put his hand on Duncan’s shoulder. “He was a brave man,” he said.

Sean reached the plane. “Only as brave as I had to be!”

The pilot waved and called, “thanks anyway, Mr. Delaney!”

Sean waved back and said, “don’t mention it!” To Duncan he called, “always remember, she was a wonderful girl who loved you very much.”

He climbed onto a wing and reached for the cockpit. The jet exploded around him, pummeling Duncan with metallic wind and thunder.

How pointless,
Duncan thought in his dream.

“Not at all,” the pilot said as he walked away from the burning jet. “He never knew I got out.”

Duncan cried then, tears of relief that his father never knew the folly of his death and tears of pain at his last words.

“Look,” a voice said, “he’s crying.”

“Do you think he knows?” another asked.

“How could he?” the first voice said.

He opened his eyes. Benjamin and Angela stood by his bed. They looked sad and worn. Woody and Fiona stood behind them. She turned her face into Woody’s shoulder. Benjamin gently pushed Angela aside. He bent and kissed Duncan’s forehead and grasped his good hand.

“Pris didn’t make it,” Benjamin said.

Duncan gripped Benjamin’s hand with all his feeble strength.

“I know.”

“The first bullet,” the man with the stethoscope said, “passed cleanly through your shoulder. It did no lasting damage. The second sliced a piece off your earlobe. The third grazed your temple and fractured your skull, resulting in a hematoma that caused pressure on your brain. Which is why you were in a coma for two weeks.” He smiled brightly. His name was Dr. Norbert Franklin, he was Los Angeles’s pre-eminent neurosurgeon, and he was enjoying talking about Duncan’s hematoma. “Any questions?”

“Tell me about Pris.”

“I wasn’t her doctor. That was Dr. Phillips.”

“Could you tell Dr. Phillips I’d like to see him, please?”

Franklin hung Duncan’s chart on the base of the bed and left. Duncan touched his skull. Half his head was bald. A bandage covered a hole drilled in his skull to relieve the pressure on his brain. He painfully swung his legs off the bed and stood. He shuffled into the bathroom and urinated. He flushed and rinsed his hands. He looked in the mirror. His face was thin and white, the hair gone from the left side of his head.
The last of the half Mohicans,
he thought. He almost laughed but then he remembered how sad he was. He limped back to bed. The door opened and a tall man came in.

“Here,” he took Duncan’s arm. “Let me help you.”

Duncan got into bed. He felt horribly tired. The tall man opened the drapes. Duncan squinted against the light.

“I’m Dr. Phillips.” He sat in a chair by the bed and wiped his glasses on his coat. “You wanted to see me?”

“I want to know about Pris.”

Dr. Phillips breathed a ragged sigh. “We thought it was only carbon monoxide poisoning. We had her on oxygen. We expected her to open her eyes every minute. Then the police called and told us they found an empty Valium bottle in the car and we knew why she wasn’t coming out of it. We pumped her stomach but it was too late. She never woke.”

Duncan looked to the courtyard outside his window. Orderlies arranged children in wheelchairs in a circle around a brightly dressed clown. Two children were bald and one’s arm was in a cast but the others did not look ill. The clown lost control of five juggled rubber balls that fell sequentially onto his head. The children laughed and clapped. Duncan looked away.

“This was in her pocket,” Phillips gave him a folded note. “I should have given it to the police but in all the rush I never did. Just as well. She obviously meant it for you.”

After Phillips left, Duncan held the paper to his nose. He wanted to smell her perfume but all he detected was Phillips’ wool coat and residual exhaust. He unfolded the note.

Duncan,
it said,
I’m sorry for the pain and grateful for your patience and love. Because of you, I was whole for a while. But I can no longer make love to you without thinking of him and what he did to me. I will always love you. But it just hurts too much
.

Duncan stared at the note until the children and the clown left and the courtyard beyond his window filled with shadows. Getting up was easier this time. He took off his hospital gown and dressed. There was a hole in the shoulder of his shirt, but it had been washed, and the blood was gone. He sat on the bed and pulled on his socks and tennis shoes. His shoulder was agony but he went on. He finished dressing, put the note in his pocket, picked up the phone, and called Benjamin.

Twenty

Duncan stayed with Benjamin and Angela. Fiona and Woody moved out of the hotel and into Bolo’s with Duncan’s permission. Both house and restaurant had passed from Bolo to Pris and were now Duncan’s by virtue of his brief marriage. Fiona had herself declared conservator and took over the daily operation of
Café Bella
while Duncan was comatose. Her first management decisions were to hire Sven as omelet chef and Roscoe as bartender. Duncan approved because he liked Sven and Roscoe. Otherwise he could care less what she did with the restaurant.

The first morning out of the hospital he noticed how ridiculous he looked in the mirror, so he cut the rest of his hair. He wore baseball caps while his brain healed. He sat by Angela’s pool for near a week, drinking an occasional beer and staring past the horizon.

Aided by Armstrong’s positive review in the
Times
and the negative news of his shooting, his paintings had greatly increased in price. Angela and Benjamin practically lived in his hospital room that first week and she had no time to sell any. But she visited her office one morning and by the time she left she had sold two Delaneys for twenty-five thousand dollars each. The next day she sold three more at thirty thousand a piece. A Japanese investor offered sixty thousand for
Sleeping Pris,
but she intuitively refused to sell without Duncan’s consent. The investor was lucky. Duncan woke and the price of a Delaney dropped to a paltry ten thousand.

“Too bad you couldn’t have stayed in a coma longer,” Angela joked one afternoon by the pool, “you would have made us rich.”

“Relax,” Benjamin said, “it’s not like he’s given up painting.”

Duncan did not reply and that worried Angela more than anything.

Fiona and Woody visited every day, but Duncan was put off by her hovering, and he finally asked her to attend to the restaurant full time. It was what she wanted anyway. Duncan said she could have both restaurant and house, he wanted neither.

“You’ll change your mind,” Fiona said.

“Tell you what,” Duncan replied, “I’ll trade you both for the Circle D.”

Fiona immersed herself in the restaurant and settled for telephonic progress reports. Duncan appreciated her solicitousness, but he preferred to be alone with his sorrow. But she persisted calling and one time foolishly commented,
God does things for the best
. Duncan hung up on her. The phone rang again and Duncan let it ring. The next time Fiona called, she carefully avoided speculating on God’s intentions. One morning Detective Harkanian found Duncan by the pool. Duncan offered him a beer, and despite being on duty, Harkanian took off his coat and accepted.

“I would have come earlier,” he said. “But Norris died a week before you came out of it and it kind of lost its urgency.”

Samuel Norris, Harkanian told him, was indeed Pris’s father, and a Pentecostal minister. He was a little man who used a big voice to inspire his congregation and browbeat his family. When Pris was twelve, she shot him in the back with a hunting rifle. The bullet made a clean hole in his shoulder, went through two walls, and lodged in the water heater. Despite losing a quart of blood, he survived. The water heater had to be replaced. Pris told the police she did it because her father had beat her mother longer than memory, and she wanted to make it stop. Despite her bruised face and body Shirley Norris denied any abusive behavior. Samuel was her sole support and often reminded her of it. He was also a respected preacher and community member who forgave his errant daughter at each of her seven hearings. The judge ultimately sent her to juvenile hall for three years. She was fifteen when she was released to her father’s custody. The first night home, Samuel Norris looked at her matured body and raped her while her mother sat in the den knitting with the television on full blast so she would not hear her daughter scream. Pris reported the rape to a school counselor, who notified the police, but given her past behavior, nobody believed her, and she was returned home. She ran away that night. Samuel’s soup was cold the next day, and he beat Shirley so badly because of it she ended up in the hospital for the week it took for her to die. Samuel pled guilty to involuntary manslaughter in a plea bargain and spent seven years in state prison. The police regretted dismissing Pris’s story as a vicious child’s lies. They searched but could not find her, which was unfortunate, as additional molestation charges would have sent Samuel Norris away for a much longer time.

“He would have survived,” Harkanian said, “but someone got to him in the County U.S.C. jail ward. They beat him so bad we needed fingerprints to identify him. Couldn’t have used teeth. Someone pulled them all out. Everyone on the ward said they were sleeping and didn’t hear or see a thing.

“We found your car burning in your driveway the night you were shot,” Harkanian continued. “Rascowitz must have gone there first. We charged her with attempted murder and arson. She’s out on a half million dollar bail, so watch your ass.” He stood. “We found Norris’ gun on the floor of the Cadillac. It was a five shot Smith and Wesson. Close as I can figure it, he surprised her at the front door and forced her into the bedroom. She was beat up a little, not too bad, but she must have put up one hell of a fight.” Harkanian said it admiringly. “She broke a chair over his head and got the gun. She shot the bastard five times. We figure she brought the gun into the car to …” Harkanian stopped. “Jesus Christ, I’m an insensitive pig.”

“Go on. I need to know.”

Harkanian sat down again and sighed. “She must have brought it into the car to shoot herself. But she had already emptied it into her dad. Maybe she thought it was a six shot. Maybe she thought she saved one last round. But …” Harkanian shrugged.

“Would you like another beer?”

“Sure,” Harkanian said, “why not?”

Wilson and Peewee arrived on thundering Harleys that night. Angela tentatively let them in. Benjamin led them to the pool and got four beers.

“Sorry to hear about your lady,” Wilson said. “She was beautiful.”

“Did you hear about Roscoe?” Peewee asked.

“Yup.”

“He took a different path,” Wilson said.

“Where’s Marco?”

“He’s in County,” Wilson said. “He got picked up by the Highway Patrol for possession of stolen bike parts.”

“They beat him up bad,” Peewee said. “Sent him to the hospital ward.”

Wilson took an envelope out of his pocket. “Marco sent you this.”

Duncan opened the envelope after they left. He expected to find more white powder, but instead he found a zip-lock bag with three human teeth: an incisor, a bicuspid, and a molar. Duncan looked at the teeth for a long time before he threw them over the fence and down the hillside.

Roscoe came by the next day with a small box. Inside were blonde baby hair, silver earrings, a folded paper, and a photo of Duncan and Pris taken at their wedding. Looking at the photo Duncan remembered another, the one of him and Tiffy taken at the rodeo. He compared Pris’s smile to Tiffy’s. He put the photo down. Pris won by a Cheyenne mile.

“Your mom found the box at the house,” Roscoe said. “She asked me to bring it by.”

“Thanks. How’s Sven?”

“Aw, man, he’s wonderful. He would have come but he said he would just start crying.” Roscoe could not help smiling. “He makes me so happy I feel guilty knowing what you’ve been through and what you’ve lost.”

“I appreciate it.”

Roscoe hugged Duncan. “You have to let her go, man. We all do.”

After Roscoe left, Duncan unfolded the paper. Written there were instructions on what to do after her death. It seemed she had planned this long ago. The only change on the note was at the bottom where she had directed where to spread her ashes. She had crossed out
ocean
and written
Duncan
and a question mark beside his name. He put the paper in his pocket. Benjamin came out and sat beside him.

“Think you could give me a ride?” Duncan asked.

After twenty minutes Duncan still could not find the grave, and he had to ask for assistance. A grave digger led him to the crest of a small hill overlooking the San Fernando valley. Her grave was among the first there, with a stone set in the grass. He had expected an upright tombstone, but the grave digger said those were not used much anymore.