Jupiter's Bones (37 page)

“But the arsenic didn’t kill Jupiter.”

“Big Bob doesn’t know that,” Decker said.

“But a jury will.”

“We’ll worry about that later.”

“And if the lab doesn’t have any unopened bottles?”

“Then maybe we’ll be extremely lucky and find some unopened, untampered bottles lying in the rubble. Most likely, the bottles are now dust and ashes. In that case, we’ll never know which Bob did it.”

“So one of the Bobs got away with poisoning Jupiter.”

“Neither Bob got away with anything. Presumably, Little Bob’s dead. That means Senior Bob lost his only son.” Decker thought a moment. “Actually Senior lost Junior to Jupiter a long time ago. And even if the father had exacted his judgment on Jupiter, in the end, the cult destroyed his boy.
Midah k’neged midah
. That’s a Hebrew term. The English law equivalent is measure for measure, but what it
really
means is what goes around, comes around. And that, my friend, is the whole damn story of life!”

He felt her
eyes burning a hole in his back. He could hear her voice even before she spoke. She said, “You must have played high school football.”

His eyes still on the photographs, Decker answered, “Yep.”

Silence.

She said, “God, that was terrible of me.”

Decker’s eyes shifted focus, from the stark moonscape to Europa sitting behind her desk. She seemed smaller than he had remembered. It was probably her posture. Her shoulders were stooped, and her head jutted forward and downward.

“What was terrible?” he asked.

“My elite-snobbism bias. Summing you up based on physical appearances.”

He analyzed
her
physical appearance—pale skin bordering on wan. She wore a charcoal skirt suit with a white blouse. In just a few weeks, her short-cropped hair seemed to have sprouted tufts of gray.

She appeared depressed, and who could blame her? According to the news, her lunatic father—the fallen angel of astrophysics—had spawned a society of maniacs and devil worshipers. The rumors weren’t all that far from the truth. Europa had to feel angered by her father’s legacy, burdened by it as well. All the crap she had taken from
colleagues when Ganz had become Jupiter. Once again, she was taking crap now that Ganz’s group had been annihilated. The newspapers tarring and feathering her father even though he had died days before the Order’s holocaust.

Decker said, “You made an educated guess based on my build, Doctor. I look like an ex-football player.”

“That’s not it. I said
high school
football instead of college football. Because you’re a cop, I assumed you didn’t go to college. Sorry.”

Decker smiled. “Now we’re playing true confessions?”

“I amaze myself,” she answered. “We say that the space taken up by a human body is finite, but I seem to have an infinite capacity for guilt.”

And didn’t that tell it all
. Decker said, “I didn’t go to college actually…well, not until much later on. By then, I was too old to play football.”

“What did you study?”

“Poli sci. Then I trudged through three years of law school—night school. Actually all of my higher education was night school. Anyway, I graduated with honors and passed the bar. First try. Not bad for a cop, eh?”

She smiled weakly. “It’s good for anyone.”

“I worked with my ex-father-in-law,” Decker went on. “Estate law—wills and trusts. I lasted six months, deciding to go with my strengths.”

“Law’s loss is law enforcement’s gain.”

“Thank you. I think I’m good at what I do.” Decker took a seat opposite Europa. “Still, I keep wondering if I handled the Order properly. Specifically Bob.”

“What do you mean?”

“Maybe if I had been more skilled, I could have talked Bob down.”

“For what it’s worth, Lieutenant, I don’t think there was anything anyone could do. Bob was determined to make his own notorious place in history.”

Decker asked, “Why’d you ask me about football, Doctor?”

“I don’t really know why.” A pause. “Maybe because my father liked football.”

“Did he play?”

“I don’t know. Shows you how close we were.”

“But you know he liked the game.”

“He’d watch the big games—the Rose Bowl and the Super Bowl. When I was real little, I’d sit with him, although I never understood all the rules.”

Decker smiled. “No one does. We’re all faking it.”

Another weak, fleeting smile. Her eyes were tired and sad.

“So when you were little,” Decker said, “you watched the games with your dad?”

“The Rose Bowl mostly. It was a New Year’s Day tradition. Once, when my brothers were just babies, he took me down to his office at the university. Just me. I remember watching the parade from his vantage point on the sixth floor. That building is long gone since they put up the Space Sciences Center. But back then, we saw everything. The visibility was amazing. After the parade, we watched the game on TV.”

“Nice memories.”

“One of the few.”

“It stayed with you all these years.”

“Yes, it did.”

“Guided you through some pretty dark times.”

She regarded his face. “You’re not the type to play shrink. Exactly why
are
you here, Lieutenant?”

“Tying up some loose ends,” Decker said.

“What kind of ‘loose ends’ are you talking about?”

“After the destruction of the Order, I was given some time off. Not that much time, but enough to poke my nose into other people’s business—”

“What does
that
mean?”

She had turned testy. He felt she knew what was coming.

“Does the name
Harrison
ring a bell?” Decker asked.

She continued to stare at him, then averted her eyes.

Decker said, “Remember we told you about the Order’s chicken ranch…which I guess is yours now. Anyway, Benton, the farmhand who we initially had questioned for Nova’s murder, used to work at Harrison. Matter of fact, that’s how your father met him. According to Benton, he just showed up one day.”

She didn’t answer.

“It’s now a halfway house,” Decker continued. “But during the Reagan/Bush years, it was used as a community mental health facility after most of the major psychiatric hospitals had been shut down because inpatient funding had dried up. Harrison was cheap to run. Back then, it had some live-in mental patients. And since it was given federal grants for rehab work, it generated all kinds of paperwork.”

Her shoulders stooped farther. “Can you cut to the chase, Lieutenant?”

“The current administrator is a woman named Florine Vesquelez. She’s worked there for over twenty years, and is very organized with the files. She allowed me to peek at some of the past cases. Guess whose name showed up as an inpatient resident?”

She sighed. “Keith Muldoony.”

“Any idea who the
real
Keith Muldoony was?”

“Haven’t a clue.”

“It’s Pluto.”

“Oh.” She scratched her nose. “That makes sense.”

“Was it Pluto’s idea to register your father in Harrison’s care under the name Muldoony?”

“Beats me. At the time, I was kept totally in the dark.”

Decker nodded.

Europa sighed with resignation. “You don’t believe me. That I had nothing to do with it.” A shrug. “Well, sir, that’s
your
problem.”

Decker thought a moment. “Doctor, can you ride this one out with me?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“You can tell me to leave,” he answered. “I have no legal right to be here.”

She regarded his face. “You did all this poking around on your own?”

“Yep.”

“And you want nothing from me?”

“Pardon?”

She was quiet.

Decker smiled, but he was disturbed. “You think I’m trying to blackmail you, Doctor?”

“Are you?”

“Is that what Pluto did?”

She was quiet.

Decker said, “I’m just a curious fellow with time on my hands. What we say goes no farther than this room.”

“I’m supposed to believe you?”

“Well, Doctor, if you don’t, that’s your problem.”

She smiled weakly. “Go on. Get it over with.”

“First off, I’m wondering how Pluto convinced you to bring your dad back to Los Angeles from West Virginia.”

“He didn’t convince me of anything. I told you I had no idea what was going on. Bringing Daddy back to L.A. was all my mother’s doing.”

“Your
mother
brought your dad back?”

“Yes, although I didn’t know it at the time.”

“Why would your mother suddenly bring your father back to Los Angeles? I’m assuming she was the one who committed him to that tiny mental hospital in West Virginia in the first place.”

“I assume.”

“To get him out of the way.”

“More like to keep him out of public view. Prevent him from making himself a total object of ridicule. When in fact he was an object of pity.”

“So why would she risk exposing what she’d been trying desperately to hide?”

“I don’t
know
why, Lieutenant. And Mom’s dead. So I guess we’ll never really know why.”

Decker was silent.

Europa said, “Again, this isn’t firsthand knowledge. But I think Pluto threatened to expose Dad’s mental problems if she didn’t cooperate.”

“Ah!” Decker nodded. “So I wasn’t far off. Blackmail was Pluto’s kind of thing.”

“I’m sure you’re right.”

“You must have been angry at your mother when you found out the truth. That your father hadn’t disappeared, but was wasting away as a mental patient.”

“A bit miffed.” But her expression spoke of fury, not of irritation. She got up from her desk chair and went over to the coffeepot. “You like yours black, right?”

“Good memory.”

She took out the coffee urn and began busying herself in mundanity. “Actually, I didn’t talk to her for a long time. So in a sense, there were years when both my parents were lost to me. Then afterward…a long time afterward…when I saw firsthand who or
what
my father really was…I began to calm down.”

She poured water into the machine.

“I started putting myself in Mom’s place. During Dad’s disappearance…”

She made quote signs with her fingers at the word
disappearance
.

“During his disappearance, Mom was still being honored as the wife of Dr. Emil Euler Ganz. Southwest was still paying her a stipend, which helped care for her three children. After all, no one had really known what had happened to Dad. And he had received threatening letters over the years. So foul play didn’t seem out of the question.”

“Like those letters in the newspaper after he died?”

“I suppose. Although as a child, I never read the contents. But I knew that they existed.”

“So that thing you told me about your mother hiring detectives was a lie?”

“No, she did hire detectives to keep up the pretense.” She smiled. “None of them found Dad because Mom had done a remarkable job of hiding him. West Virginia is a long way from Los Angeles. Since he was an inpatient, he didn’t generate any paper trails. And I imagine, he was either too crazy or too zonked out to reveal his true identity to anyone. He was truly lost to the world for years…until Pluto came along.”

“Your mom should have hired me. I could have found him.”

Europa managed a moribund chuckle. “I believe you.”

Decker thought a moment. “I guess your mom didn’t want to lose the few benefits left in her marriage.”

“Exactly.” She nodded. “She had already lost Dad to insanity. Why lose everything?”

“Then Pluto discovered your dad’s true identity while working there as an orderly.”

She turned on the machine and the coffee began gurgling. “They say that mental patients are always pretending to be people in famous professions. Even if Dad had said he’d been a famous scientist, I doubt most of the workers would have believed him. But somehow Pluto had seen the truth. He must have been perceptive on some level.”

“Extremely perceptive and extremely crafty. So when he told your mother to bring Dad back to L.A. she cooperated.”

“She must have.”

“Whose idea was it to bring your father specifically to Harrison? Hers or Pluto’s?”

“Don’t know.”

“And your mother had your father committed there at Pluto’s behest?”

“You saw the records, you must know the details better than I do.”

“Under the name Keith Muldoony.”

She shrugged.

Decker said, “That’s the name you found him under.”

“This is true.”

“And all of this was kept secret from you.”

“Kept secret from me, kept secret from the world.” She poured him a cup of coffee. Decker formulated ideas as he sipped the black goo.

She took a swallow and asked, “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know a thing about West Virginia law. I know in California, it’s hard to have a person committed without his permission.”

“Maybe Dad had himself committed voluntarily?”

“Doesn’t sound like your father.”

“No, it doesn’t. But perhaps Mom had been medicating him to keep him quiet.”

Her reasoning made sense. Decker asked, “And after your mother committed your dad to Harrison, Pluto never contacted your mom again?”

“Not that I know of.”

“No contact until he called you up anonymously and told you about this man named Keith Muldooney over at Harrison, claiming to be the great scientist Dr. Emil Euler Ganz.”

“It came in a letter actually.”

“On your twenty-first birthday.”

This time, Europa’s mouth dropped open. She shut it quickly. “You certainly did your homework.”

“No, I just figured that Pluto had contacted you the moment you reached your majority.”

“Ah!” She nodded. “Yes, of course. That would be the whole point. My being old enough to take responsibility for my father.”

Decker said, “Because your mom had refused to have your father released to her care.”

She was silent.

He asked, “Did you show the letter to your mother?”

“Yes.” A long pause. “She became physically ill…almost passed out. When she recovered, she tore the sheet
into tiny, tiny pieces and told me to ignore it. At that moment, I knew the whole thing had to be true.”

Decker waited.

“I went down to Harrison…saw him…” Tears in her eyes, she turned suddenly irate. “They had him working as a
janitor
, for Chrissakes! He was totally blitzed out on Thorazine! He drooled when he talked. His hands shook. He was a goddamn zombie! He was swallowed up by fear! This was my
father
! I owed him something for my genetics alone. I
couldn’t
allow such a great man to continue to live under such demeaning conditions.”

“Your mother had no problem with it.”

She bolted up from her seat. “My mother had three kids to raise and Dad had been scaring her with his crazy thoughts and theories.”

“But you weren’t aware of it?”

“As a child, you have the tremendous capacity to deny reality. Sure, he had crazy ideas. But he was always a man with crazy ideas. And he got lots of scientific recognition for some of his
crazy
ideas! How was
I
, at twelve or thirteen or fourteen, supposed to know which of his ideas were brilliance and which were insanity?”