Homicide Related (14 page)

“How would I know?” Dooley said. “Like I said …”

“Right. She never told you that you had an uncle. What about your father?”

His father? Boy, one of Dooley's least favorite subjects. “What about him?”

“Where is he?”

And there it was—the reason Dooley hated the subject.

“I don't know.”

“When was the last time you saw him?”

“I don't remember.”

“You don't remember the last time you saw your father?”

“I don't remember if I ever saw him. If I did, it was when I was a baby.”

“He doesn't come around?”

Dooley shook his head. Why were they so interested in his father?

“Did he keep in touch with your mother?”

“Not that I know of.”

“You know his name?”

“Dooley something,” Dooley said. “Or something Dooley. I don't know.” Lorraine had told him he was named after his father—the Dooley part, anyway.

“Did your mother ever talk about him?”

He shook his head, even though that wasn't quite true. Sometimes, when she was fucked up or weepy, she bawled about him. But Dooley had stopped listening years ago.

“You don't think that's strange?” Randall said.

Boy, what he didn't know about Lorraine.

Randall pulled something out of his jacket pocket and slid it onto the table in front of Dooley. “What do you know about this, Ryan?”

Dooley glanced at the photograph, determined not to be interested, then, despite himself, he stared at it. What the hell?

What
was
that?

He picked it up and took a closer look.

Three stones.

Three names.

Three sets of dates.

He squinted at them, double-checking that he was seeing what he thought he was seeing. He looked up at Randall.

“What are those?” he said.

“What do they look like? They're headstones, Ryan.”

Dooley looked at them again. “Where are they?”

“Where do you usually find headstones?”

In a cemetery. But: “Which one?”

“You know that big one uptown, right near where the subway goes? They're in there.”

Dooley couldn't take his eyes off the picture.

“I don't get it,” he said.

“Have you ever been to that cemetery, Ryan?”

“No.”

“Have you ever seen these stones before?”

“No.”

“Your uncle never took you there?”

“No.”

“Your mother?”

“No.”

“Did either of them ever mention those stones?”

“No.”

Randall looked across the table at him.

“It's a family plot,” he said. “But your uncle didn't see to it that your mother was laid to rest there.”

Dooley looked at the stones again, at the names and dates.

“Why do you think that is, Ryan?”

“How would I know?”

Randall gazed at the photo for a moment. “Makes you wonder, doesn't it?” he said.

If it wasn't cops sitting across the table from him, Dooley would have agreed.

“Maybe you should talk to your uncle,” Randall said. “Maybe he can clarify things for you.” He threw some money onto the table to pay for the coffees. He left the photo. He and his partner slid out of the booth. They were sitting in their car outside of the video store when Dooley went in to work but were gone when he looked out the window half an hour later.

Dooley closed the store with Kevin, impatient with how long Kevin was taking, cursing under his breath as Kevin fumbled to lock the door. Then he was off, striding home. He let himself in the front door. Jeannie's purse was on the little table in the front hall. Dooley didn't care. He took the stairs two at a time and hammered on his uncle's bedroom door. Inside, his uncle yelled: “Jesus Christ!” Dooley heard his bare feet thump down onto the floor. A pause. The sound of a zipper—his uncle doing up his pants. The bedroom door flew open and his uncle's angry face appeared. He came out into the hall, closed the door softly behind him, and hissed, “What the hell do you think you're doing?”

Dooley thrust the photograph at him.

It took his uncle a moment to stop glowering at him and to focus on the photo.

“Where'd you get that?” he said.

“What is it?” Dooley said.

His uncle glanced over his shoulder at the closed door. He went back into the bedroom, shutting the door behind him. Dooley heard his voice, soft, talking to Jeannie. Then he was back again, brushing past Dooley and padding down the stairs. Dooley followed him.

His uncle went into the kitchen, heading for the scotch again, Dooley thought. But, no, he opened the fridge and pulled out some soda water, which he offered to Dooley. Dooley shook his head. His uncle poured a glass for himself and carried it to the kitchen table. He dropped heavily onto a chair. Dooley sat opposite him and slapped the photo onto the table between them.

“What is it?” he said again.

“Where'd you get this?” his uncle said again.

“The cops.”

“When did you see them?”

“This afternoon. They were waiting for me when I got to work. A cop named Randall and his partner.” He nudged the photo across the table to his uncle and watched him look at it again. “That's my grandfather, right?” he said, pointing to the first stone, the first name, the first set of dates. The second date on the stone matched when his uncle had said Dooley's grandfather had died. “And that one,” he said, pointing at the second stone. “That's my grandmother, right?” She had died earlier than his grandfather, before Dooley was born.

His uncle nodded.

“What about this one?” He pointed to the third stone.

Dooley's uncle ran a finger lightly over the name on the stone.

“My sister,” he said.

“Your sister Lorraine,” Dooley said. That was the name on the stone.

“Yes,” his uncle said, but it seemed to Dooley that he didn't want to talk about it.

“Your sister Lorraine who died”—Dooley tapped the second date on the stone—“thirty-five years ago.”

“Yes,” his uncle said.

“Not your sister Lorraine who died last week,” Dooley said.

“No.”

“So you had two sisters named Lorraine?” What kind of sense did that make?

“Yes.” Pause. “No.” Pause. “Sort of, I guess.”

“Sort of ?” Dooley said. “You guess?”

“I had an older sister.”

“Older ?” Lorraine—Dooley's mother, Lorraine—had been almost fifteen years younger than Dooley's uncle.

“A couple of years older. She died. It was an accident. My mother, your grandmother, took it hard.” He looked at the glass of soda water on the table. “She took it really hard. By then she couldn't have any more kids. So they adopted a baby girl.”

Adopted.

Dooley thought that one over, conscious of his uncle's eyes on him.

His uncle.

He thought that one over, too.

“Your parents adopted a baby that just happened to be named Lorraine?” he said finally. What kind of weird coincidence was that?

“I don't know what the original name was. My mother named her Lorraine.”

“You're kidding,” Dooley said. How fucked up was that?

“She was grieving,” his uncle said. “If you ask me, she was clinically depressed. She didn't get out of bed for eight, nine months. Back then, they didn't have the kind of drugs they do now. My father thought …” His uncle looked him in the eye. “Look, I know it sounds …” He groped for a word, came up empty, and shook his head. “But that's what happened. They adopted a baby. It gave her a reason to get up in the morning.”

If that's what it took, Dooley thought, it didn't say much about his grandmother's feelings for the rest of the family. Maybe that was part of it.

“How did Lorraine”—this was going to get confusing—“how did the new Lorraine take it when she found out?”

There was a long pause before his uncle said, “To the best of my knowledge, they never told her.”

That didn't make sense. “How could she not know? Someone must have said something. There must have been pictures,
something
.”

His uncle shook his head.

“You have no idea what it did to my mother when Lorraine died. No idea.”

“So … what? You all just pretended the first one never existed?”

His uncle's eyes flashed.

“It wasn't like that. We just … we just tried to make it easy on her. I never forgot my sister. And I've never pretended she didn't exist.”

“But no one told Lorraine—
my
Lorraine? No one told her she was the second one?” The replacement.

“Not that I'm aware of.”

Dooley couldn't decide if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

“Is that why you didn't like her, because she was adopted, because she made your mother happy when you couldn't?”

“I never said I didn't like her.”

Technically, Dooley had to admit, that was true. But: “You never said anything good about her. You always told me how screwed up she was and that I was better off with her out of my life.”

His uncle straightened up in his chair, bristling again. “You going to tell me you don't think that's true?”

“
You
going to tell me you liked her?”

His uncle looked at him for a few moments. “No,” he said. “No, I'm not.”

“Were you jealous of her? Is that it?”

His uncle snorted. “No. I didn't
like
her because she killed my mother.”

“
What?
What are you talking about?”

“She was one of those girls, they're fine when they're little, then they hit puberty and all hell breaks loose,” his uncle said. “She was wild—crazy wild. She ditched school more than she attended. Got kicked out regularly, too. She lied—about everything. If she didn't like someone, she made trouble for them—other kids, teachers, you name it. She was into partying—booze, drugs, whatever. She came home in the middle of the night when she bothered to come home at all. She'd disappear for days, sometimes weeks, and never call, and there would be my mother, frantic with worry, crying, not sleeping, sending me out there to look for her.” By then, Dooley guessed, his uncle had been a cop for a while.

“Then when Lorraine would walk through the door, what would my mother do? Would she yell at her, tell her she'd better smarten up? No. She'd hug her and cry when she saw she was safe, she wasn't lying in a ditch somewhere. Did Lorraine care? No. She only ever came home to pick up some clothes, grab some food, steal some money or something she could sell to get money. She'd be home maybe a couple of days, sometimes just a couple of hours. Then she would pick a fight with my mother”—
my
mother, not
our
mother—“and off she'd go again. She didn't care. She was fifteen, sixteen years old and she just flat out didn't give a damn about anyone.”

Dooley wasn't sure he wanted to hear this, but: “You said she killed your mother.”

Dooley's uncle was sitting right there in the kitchen with Dooley, but he was staring at something that had happened a long time ago. Something he still felt. Something that was sharp enough that it still hurt.

“Lorraine hadn't been home in weeks. We had no idea where she was. Then she calls my mother, crying. She's sick, she's broke, she's sorry; she wants to come home. My mother asks her, where are you? Turns out she's up on some guy's farm north of the city and she's got no way to get back. My dad's not home. I'm working. So my mother takes the car and goes to get her. Lorraine's standing out on the side of the road waiting for her. They start back home. It's late. My mother is tired. She wasn't well, your grandmother. She had heart problems. She tired easily. She wanted to pull over for a few minutes, but Lorraine told her, no, she wanted to get back to the city; she said she would drive and my mother could rest. By then she had her license—one of the things my mother tried to get her to settle down. Let her get her driver's license, promise her if she's good we'll buy her a car. I don't need to tell you that never happened. Anyway, my mother let her drive and she closed her eyes to take a nap. Next thing you know, the car crossed the center line and hit another car head-on. Lorraine walked away with a couple of scratches. The other driver suffered non-life-threatening injuries. My mother died on the way to the hospital.”

Jesus.

“It was an accident, right?” Dooley said.

“Both the cops and the ambulance attendants thought there was something not right about the way Lorraine was acting. They had her tested. She was high.” He looked directly at Dooley. “She was high and she was driving. If she hadn't been high or she hadn't been driving, if she'd had even a sliver of common sense, it never would have happened.” His uncle looked over at the cupboard where he kept the booze, but he didn't get up. Instead, he fiddled with his glass of soda water.