Faithful Unto Death (25 page)

“Oh, yeah?” he said. “Jo said the last time she got her mom to read to her, you came bursting into her room and told Mrs. Wells to stop treating Jo like a baby, and ‘let her get on with it.’”

I spread my fingers across my knees again, trying to keep my voice level.

“Alex, Jo’s not going to be able to get through college if she has to have someone do all her reading for her.”

“You think?” Alex’s tone implied that I had made a miraculous observation. “Mr. Wells,” he continued, “Jo’s not going to get through
high school
unless someone does all her reading for her, and if that someone is me, then I’m screwed. Because there’s no way she’s going to stay with me if she can’t break up with me.”

“Okay, I think I missed something . . . run that by me again?”

Alex waved off my objection. “It’s like, if Jo was blind, you’d get her Braille books or audio books or you would read all her school stuff to her, you and her mom. But because you can’t see what’s wrong with Jo, you don’t believe anything is, so you don’t help her and you won’t let Mrs. Wells, either. Or you know what I think? Maybe if you’ve got a kid who’s not perfect, maybe that means God’s favorite quarterback isn’t perfect, either. What do you think?”

“I was a lineman,” I said.

“What-freaking-ever. You know what? I start reading to her, not that much at first, but it makes this huge difference in her grades—you’ve noticed that, right? The more I read to her, the better her grades get, and Jo looooves that. You think she doesn’t care about her grades? That is so wrong. You completely don’t know your own kid. Jo is mortified . . .” Alex stopped and checked the word in his head. “No, I’m right, ‘mortified’ is not too strong a word. Jo is mortified when she gets lousy grades. She acts like it’s no big deal, but damn, she is red from here”—Alex touched his hairline—“to here.” He put a hand at the neck of his shirt. “Even her ears go all red.

“So I’m reading to her and she gets better grades and that makes Jo all happy, so I’m happy, too, because, I’m in love with her, man, I really, really am. But we’ll have a fight over something stupid, just nothing, and in the middle of the fight, Jo will go all still and get quiet and then she’ll apologize, even when I know she’s not sorry, even when I know I’m the one who’s in the wrong.

“And I finally figured it out. Jo is afraid to make me mad because she needs me to read to her.” Alex shook his head, exasperated. “Well, I don’t want her to need me that way. I want Jo to love me back; I don’t want her to be grateful to me.”

He said “grateful” as if it were a curse. There will be a day in his future when he’ll be looking for gratitude from the women in his life, but I got his point. I think I did.

I said, “Son, don’t you think you and Jo are a little young to be tossing around a word like ‘love’?”

Alex gave me a hard stare and then dropped his head to his folded forearms—very dramatically, I thought. Had some of his mother’s genes.

“Uh, Mr. Wells? Did you hear anything I said?”

I shifted in the chair. Baby Bear was doing more waiting than I had expected him to have to.

“Alex, I heard you. But I don’t want to talk to you about Jo right now. Or maybe ever. I do promise I’ll discuss with her mother what you’ve shared with me. That will have to do for now, right?”

He gave an eloquent shrug.

“Alex, remember what you told me about your dad meeting a young girl? A girl you thought was Jo?” I said.

Alex shot his head up.

“I want to tell you what I’ve found out.”

And then I told him. I didn’t give him names, and I didn’t tell him how the affair had started; mainly I wanted to communicate that he had seen a woman with his dad, not a girl, not Jo.

Alex listened stone-faced until I’d finished. Once I had, he covered his stricken face with his hands and wept silently, his shoulders shaking. I got up and went to the bathroom that opened off his bedroom, found a clean washcloth (with a flag appliquéd to a corner), wet it, wrung it out, and then went back and handed it to the kid. He scrubbed his face violently. I laid my hand on the back of his neck for a moment, and then I sat on the end of his bed.

“This is what I want to do now, Alex,” I said. “Tomorrow I’d like you to tell Detective Wanderley what you saw the night your father was killed.”

Alex jerked.

“Not that I’m saying I think this woman had anything to do with his death”—I didn’t want the kid getting all vigilante on me—“but she may well have been one of the last people to see your dad, and I think Wanderley needs that information.”

“No freaking way,” Alex said. His words were measured and decisive.

“What?” I said.

“You’re doing that a lot, ‘What?’ You heard me. No. I mean, yeah, it’s better than if Dad was having an affair with a girl, and . . .” Alex teared up again. He swallowed, his throat making a clicking sound, and he took some time to control himself. “But Mom doesn’t know anything was going on at all, and that’s how I want it to stay. It’s not as if this is going to be good news to her. And what about Jenasy? We’re not real close—she can be a total ass. But she’s my sister. She doesn’t even know Mom and Dad have been fighting! She’s been at school!”

Alex stood suddenly and his desk chair went over backward. He leaned over me, his fists clenched tightly by his side. His eyes were slits and he was talking through his teeth.

“You think my mom needs to deal with something like that right now? My dad having an affair with another woman? Your promise still stands, man; you gave me your word.” The cords on the kid’s neck were as prominent as a weight lifter’s.

I stood up from my chair and Alex took a step back. If he hadn’t, the top of my head would have cracked his chin—that’s how close he was standing to me.

I haven’t felt physically intimidated since I gave up football; I’m a big man, and I spent years getting pounded by some of the best. A good number of the guys I came up against went on to play pro ball. That this half-a-glass of skim milk thought he could loom over me was a joke. The expression on his face, however, was not funny. It was creepy.

I kept my voice gentle.

“Sit your butt back down, Alex, and that little bit of business you just tried? You want to wait four or five years and fifty-plus pounds before you even think to work that one again, you hear me?”

Alex backed into his easy chair—the intensity in his face and muscles releasing at once. He looked flustered and embarrassed.

“I’m only telling you—” he started.

“You’ll find most people can hear what you’re telling them without you pulling that psycho-on-the-edge crap. You don’t have to remind me of my promise. I’m over here talking to you, right? I didn’t go all 911 on you, did I?”

“No, sir.” Alex sounded like a different kid.

“Here’s the thing, Alex. This business with another woman? That’s going to come out. Detective Wanderley isn’t a fool. The only reason I know about this before he does is because I fell into it, understand? Wanderley is going to find out, and so are your mom and Jenasy. You have to release me from my promise, Alex. It’s time.”

He wouldn’t, though. He was just as set as ever. I wasted another half an hour trying to argue him out of his position. He wasn’t having it.

Irene Hayden’s lemon chiffon pie was long-past history before I gave up on getting Alex to do the right thing. Cruz had tucked away a few of Gina Redman’s white rolls for me and had filled them with slices of honey-baked ham, ubiquitous at Texas funerals. I thanked her, made my good-byes, and left, frustrated in spite of the ham-filled rolls.

Baby Bear sat in the driver’s seat, front paws against the dash on either side of the steering wheel. He looked like a large black bear in a circus act. He was terrifically glad to see me. He would have acted the same if I’d been gone ten minutes instead of over an hour. The dog has no sense of time. But twilight had turned to evening while I was in the Garcias’ home, and Baby Bear doesn’t like being left alone in the dark. I let him out to water the azaleas, which he did with the professional ardor he always gives to the task. After Baby Bear finished his business and I finished wiping the pool of drool off my seat, I gave him one of the ham-filled rolls. I ate the other two.

I was uneasy. The Jekyll and Hyde turn Alex had done had thrown me. I mean, the kid needs to put some weight on, but he’s tall enough and strong enough to swing a Big Bertha, no question.

Alex had seen his father passionately kissing a strange woman. Alex thought it was Jo, and he thought he was in love with Jo. He was protective of his mother and Jenasy, even though Jenasy seemed to think he was useless. Could such a sight push a tightly strung teen over the edge? If you watch the news, you know a lot less can undo some people. According to Wanderley, unironed sheets could do the trick. Who the heck irons sheets anyway?

I had given my word to Alex that I wouldn’t disclose what he had told me. Now I’d gotten the information from another source, but it was, essentially, still the information Alex had given me. I was tied by my promise.

One of my lawyer friends told me to never, ever make a promise without having a lawyer look at it—that verbal contracts were binding in Texas unless they involved real property. I don’t know why I hardly ever take lawyers’ advice. Almost all the lawyers I know are good and intelligent people and they are always right.

But what was I supposed to have done at the time—tell Alex to wait a minute while I got my lawyer on the phone so the lawyer could explain the possible ramifications of my promise?

There wasn’t any escaping that Wanderley needed the information I had. It might be possible to convince Mai to speak to Wanderley on her own. If I explained that Alex was under suspicion, she might tell Wanderley that she had been with Graham after Alex left—but since she never knew Alex was there, it didn’t make sense to hope she could clear the kid. The very fact that Mai was still keeping their affair a secret after Graham had been murdered seemed suspicious to me.

On impulse I turned left off Alcorn Oaks, toward Mai’s house.

Thirty-two

T
he sixth house from the corner was a large redbrick vaguely traditional something. By which I mean that, as with almost every house in First Colony, it was not any specific architectural style. Early-Executive, maybe.

The yard was perfectly groomed by one of the many companies owned by second-generation Mexicans, operated by their college-educated sons and labored at by newly arrived Mexicans. The house had elaborate landscape lighting, which made it glow like a theater set in the early evening. I parked in front of the house, rolled the Volvo’s windows down, and refilled Baby Bear’s water bowl. I left a console light on to keep Baby Bear company.

The porch had one of those carriage lanterns with a flickering electric bulb that is supposed to simulate a gas lamp. There wasn’t a doorbell next to the door. Instead, on the door, there was a well-polished brass knocker in the shape of a pineapple. The pineapple is a symbol of hospitality—who knows why. Pineapple sets my teeth on edge.

The door knocker gave a nice, resounding “Bang!” when I whacked it, and before long, I could hear someone making their way to the door, their shoes shloping across the floor. The door was opened by Dr. Malcolm Fallon, pages of the
Houston Chronicle
clasped in one hand, backless black leather slippers on his feet. His eyebrows went up and I’m pretty sure I looked surprised, too. I tried not to look like a salesman or a Jehovah’s Witness. How had I gotten the house wrong? Sixth house from the corner . . . wasn’t this the sixth house from the corner?

I said, “Well, hey, Dr. Fallon!”

I stepped back from the porch far enough so that I could count the houses to the end of the street. This was the sixth house. I looked back at Dr. Fallon, who stood, unsmiling, in his doorway.

I said, pretty sure I was looking as foolish as I felt, “Uh, hey! Do you know a Mai Dinh?”

Something flickered over Fallon’s face. The man stood there for a long, uncomfortable moment, taking me in, and then stepped to the side.

“Come in,” he said, and I stepped into the two-story foyer (every two-story house in First Colony has a two-story foyer—they may look grand, but they’re a waste of space and makes it impossible to heat or cool these houses with any kind of efficiency).

The man shut the front door and I followed him through a dimly lit hall back to a masculine study, all hardwoods and leather upholstery and sepia prints of golf courses on the walls. He clicked on lamps with amber shades that gave the room a soft, golden glow. The large plate glass window looked out on a postage stamp pool surrounded by a terrazzo patio, and beyond, the ninth hole of the Bridgewater Country Club golf course.

The man said, “Have a seat, Mr. Wells.”

I sat on one of his overstuffed leather chairs near the big window, and then, still not answering my question, the man took the seat across from me.

Fallon’s head of thick, wavy hair reminded me of meringue it was so white and shiny. Like I’ve said, Fallon was trim and conditioned for an old guy, on the rangy side, nearly as tall as me, but looking gray and old and ill. He wore expensive-looking dress slacks, a white business shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and those soft-looking leather slippers. Even his old feet looked frail.

Fallon said, “I’m Mai’s father.” He leaned back in his chair, his hands resting loosely on the arms of the chair.

I said, “Is that right?” trying to hide my surprise. I mean, I’d been picturing a short, slim, dark-skinned, a, well . . . someone who looked Asian. I tried to recover. “I’ve never seen her at church. She’s come to live with you then? Left California for good?”

I was trying to put all the puzzle pieces together: Fallon’s California daughter who had finally gotten him running; Mai telling Graham, “My dad will take care of me,” because her dad was, in fact, a doctor.

“How long have you and Mai known each other?” Fallon asked without responding to my question.

“Oh! We met today. We, uh, we shared a glass of wine at the Vineyard.” I couldn’t mention that Mai had been at the funeral—I didn’t know if her father knew about her and Graham, and I didn’t have to be sworn to secrecy to know that it wasn’t my place to be telling the old gent that story.

He nodded his head. “A glass of wine, I think you said?” He put special emphasis on the “A.”

I colored. “I had a glass of wine. Mai may have had, ah . . .”

He nodded in a confirming sort of way. “Yes,” he said, “she may have. I presume you bought the wine?”

I nodded. This is Texas. Men still pay. At least, guys my age do.

“Tell me, Mr. Wells, is that a wedding ring you’re wearing on your finger?”

I looked down at what was obviously a gold wedding band on the ring finger of my left hand.

I said stupidly, “Yeah.”

I did not see where this was going, which means that the college IQ test I took may have been seriously skewed in favor of big dumb linemen. I mean, Fallon knew Annie Laurie; everyone knows Annie Laurie . . .

“So you’re still a married man? I haven’t missed an announcement in the church bulletin?”

“Oh! No, I’m married, I—”

“But I suppose, in this day and time, it’s archaic of me to expect that ring, or that marriage, to mean anything to you?”

“Gosh, no! I—”

“Mr. Wells.” Dr. Fallon steepled his fingers in a way my UT coach would when he was sitting across his desk from you, preparing to give you one of his “The game of football is like the game of life” speeches. “Mr. Wells, I’d like to tell you a story. May I tell you a story?”

The situation I found myself in was ludicrous; we’re going to have a good laugh over this, me and Dr. Fallon, I thought. Might could work it into a sermon, kind of a funny preacher story. People would get a kick out of it, seeing their preacher so wrong-footed.

“Dr. Fallon,” I began, smiling at him so he wouldn’t think he had offended me. I hated to embarrass the old guy. I thought his being so fatherly with a woman around my age was kind of touching. “Let me explain . . .”

He held his hand up to stop me and his face grew severe.

“If you don’t mind, it’s my house. I’ll do the explaining.”

I leaned closer to him and held my palms up. “It’s just that you’ve misunderstood—”

He stood and leaned over me, his finger pointing at my face, his voice harsh. “That’s what the other one said, ‘You misunderstand me, Dr. Fallon.’” His voice took on a mocking, wheedling tone.

“But
he
was the one who misunderstood. Not me. Not me. Now”—his voice went back to his normal range—“are you going to let me tell you my story? It didn’t make any difference to him, but maybe, just maybe, there is some shred of character left in the men of your generation.”

I was leaning my head back, looking up into this furious old man’s face. My head had gone still and quiet.
That’s what the other one said . . .

I said, “Yes, sir, I’d like for you to tell me your story.”

He stood a moment longer, finger inches from my nose. Then he tucked his finger under his thumb and stood straight.

“Right. That’s good,” he said. He stepped back a pace and folded himself back into his chair. “Mai is in bed asleep. I don’t know how much you managed to make her drink . . .”

I started to interrupt; again he held his hand up to stop me.

“But it was enough to make her ill when she got home. I’ve given her something for the nausea, and something to help her sleep.”

“Are you sure that was wise?” I said—the combination of alcohol and sedatives . . .

His lip curled. “Excuse me, Mr. Wells, I am a doctor. Now then. Am I to be allowed to tell my story, or not?”

I nodded.

“Yes. Good,” he said. He seemed to relax a little.

“I don’t suppose you ever served your country?” he said. Oh, good. This question again. I shook my head.

“No, that’s right. I’ve already asked you that, haven’t I? After that memorable Memorial Day sermon. You told me you had ‘missed the draft.’

“I chose to serve my country. I enlisted. And I didn’t enlist to pay for my medical school bills, either. I left a budding practice, and a family, in San Rafael to become a doctor with the Air Force in Vietnam,” Fallon said. “Men who don’t serve don’t have a clue about the sacrifice. You reap the benefits of freedom without ever understanding the price that’s paid, much less paying part of that price.”

I hoped that “you” was a generic and all-inclusive “you” and not a personal statement about my own patriotism, but that seemed overly optimistic. My fingers had found a button in the upholstery and I realized I had been worrying at it. I clasped my hands to keep them still. I once pulled a button off the family room couch after worrying it, and that had made Annie Laurie really mad. I don’t think Fallon had noticed the slightly loosened button. Might even have been loose before I started on it.

“I worked alongside Mai’s father, and her grandfather—they were doctors, too, fine men, good doctors. My wife and children were back in the States, and I didn’t have much in common with most of the servicemen. For one thing, I was a lot older than the others; even the other doctors were mainly in their twenties. I was on my own a good deal, missing my family. I was lonely. Trung, Mai’s father, often had me in his home. His wife, well, his whole family, they were lovely people.

“Americans, when Americans think of the Vietnamese, they picture peasants in coolie hats and Mao pajamas. The Dinhs were an educated, cosmopolitan family. They lived in a big, old French town house—the whole extended family together. Grandparents, parents, aunt and uncle, Mai’s two brothers, and little sister. Mai was twelve, Trung’s oldest. She was in a Catholic boarding school in Paris—both Mai’s parents and three of her grandparents had attended the same school—it’s the Stanislas College. I can’t ever get the pronunciation right.

“So Mai was in France the whole time I was in Vietnam and I never saw her there. In Vietnam.”

Fallon got up and walked over to his desk. There was a carafe of water on his desk, one of those where the lid to the carafe is an upside-down glass. He took the glass off, and I heard the clinking of glass against glass. He filled the tumbler with water, drank it all, and then upended the glass on the carafe again. Fallon came back to the sitting area and sat down heavily. He hadn’t offered me any water. Not that I wanted some—it was interesting, that’s all.

What I wanted was for Fallon to get to the part of his story that included “the other one.” He might have been talking about Mai’s first husband, Jonathon; but again, he might have been talking about Graham Garcia. Fallon could have known about Graham. Knowing what I did about Fallon, he wouldn’t have been at all happy about the affair. I sure as heck wouldn’t be happy if one of my daughters let herself get caught up in such a situation.

There wouldn’t be any use in trying to hurry the old man. An old soldier has earned the right to tell his story.

Fallon fiddled with the angle of a crookneck floor lamp until he had adjusted it to his satisfaction—I couldn’t tell that the fiddling had made a difference.

He said, “Skip to 1975. How old were you in ’75?”

“I’d have been in junior high,” I said.

Fallon frowned as if being born too early for the draft was just what should be expected of a slacker like me.

“Did you read the papers back then?”

I said, apologetically, that I had not. I had discovered football and girls and those two subjects had occupied my mind to the exclusion of nearly everything else, war or no war. I didn’t say that last part out loud.

Fallon sighed at my ignorance.

“In brief, then. In 1975, without ever having made a full-out effort to win the war, the U.S. government no longer finds it politically expedient to support the South Vietnamese, regardless of promises made. We are packing up and moving out. I get Trung Dinh and his entire family secure seats on a transport plane. I mean everybody: his parents and in-laws, his brother and his sister-in-law, the kids, everybody who lived in that house and more than a dozen who didn’t but were closely related. I called in every favor I was owed and pulled strings I didn’t have any business pulling. I was determined that at least one God-damned American was going to be true to his promise.”

I had no idea where this story was going. It didn’t appear to be going anywhere near the Bridgewater golf course last Sunday evening, but Fallon had my complete attention.

“Trung called the Stanislas College and arranged for Mai to be flown to California to meet them. He wanted the family to make this new start together. Mai’s flight was, I think, three days before the evacuation transport. There is a Catholic boarding school in Monterey, the Santa Catalina, and it was arranged that a nun would pick Mai up from the airport and she would stay at the school until Trung and his wife came to get her.

“I was at the house while he made the call. All around me the women were rushing, trying to decide what to pack. They had to leave almost everything, all that gorgeous antique furniture, the rugs. Trung’s dad was walking through the house cutting paintings from their frames, layering the paintings in silk and wrapping them into scrolls. Family pictures and jewelry, that’s about all they were able to take with them.

“Trung has Mai on the phone, he’s speaking Vietnamese—Mai didn’t speak English, she spoke Vietnamese and French—but I’d been in Vietnam for three years and I could understand him a little. He was saying, ‘Mai, we’re all going to go live in California near my friend Malcolm. Malcolm says you will love California; it’s always sunny, and there are fruit trees in every yard.’ He explains about the Sister from Santa Catalina who will pick her up from the airport. Trung says, ‘Two nights you will go to bed in Santa Catalina, and then you will wake up and Mommy and Daddy will be there to take you to your new home. Be brave for a little while only. Daddy is coming. I promise.’”

Fallon put a fist to his mouth to still his lips. I knew enough to realize this story wasn’t going to have a happy ending.

He cleared his throat roughly. “We get to the airport. Marines are clearing the way for us, there are desperate people clawing to get through, screaming for help. You know, these people were our allies, they had helped us, risked their lives for the American forces, and now, now we were leaving them behind to face the enemy alone. I couldn’t save them all, but I’d made a promise to Trung and I was doing everything I can.