No Time to Wave Goodbye (16 page)

Along with the letter was a package containing Stella’s little satin shoes—embroidered with stars on the toes and her name on the heels by Candy’s sister, the baby’s great-aunt. It was mailed from Vancouver by priority mail and the security footage in the post office seemed to show a pleasant-faced woman, dressed like a grandmother in her fifties or sixties, wearing an oversized wool hat, smiling at the postal worker. She signed the register “Patricia Fellows” and gave her address as 1060 West Addison Street in Chicago—which was Wrigley Field. There were no fingerprints. The woman, said a Vancouver police officer, could have been anyone. In any books in Canada, or any computer files, there was no trace of her under any name. And, they added, after analyzing the tape, despite her cloth coat and old-fashioned orthopedic shoes, the woman actually walked like someone in her twenties.

Although the false name of the murdered child in Chicago was used again, that proved nothing to Detective Humbly except that Candy might be right: This was personal.

The letter itself was strange. Although it was obviously written by someone with a brain—which was some comfort—it was convoluted and drew no real conclusions, which was no comfort at all. Smart people could snap their caps as easy as vagrants.

——

“The letter is goofy,” Candy said, as Humbly drove her, Ben, and Eliza to a little guesthouse in Venice, near where Beth and Pat were staying with Vincent. Beth and Pat had come back to help, offering the trunk of their rental, which Ben had used to stow a couple of garment bags, without saying a word.

Rosie and Angelo had gone home that morning.

“Bethie, my daughter,” Angelo said. “I am an old man but I never wanted to be old enough to see this. We thought life might be kind now.” For the first time, Beth saw her vital, mischievous in-laws as truly old, even frail. They leaned on Pat as he escorted them to the car that Charley Seven had summoned by phone call. There was nothing she could say to comfort them, nothing to soften the splinter wedged hard into the contentment of their age. Angelo was right. They had seen too much, all of them. More than was possible to comprehend or intellectualize.

The only one who chose to stay at the Paloma was George, whose wife and six-year-old son had flown out to join him.

“Pat,” George said as the Cappadoras left. “You’ll let me know….”

“Of course, everything, George,” Pat said. “No hard feelings. I know that what Ben said didn’t have anything to do with you.”

Ben said nothing. He said nothing on the ride, although because of the dimensions of the squad car, he had to ride in the backseat of his father’s rental car.

The management of the Paloma had offered to put the Cappadoras up … forever if need be; but no one wanted to stay anymore.

At the end, that morning just before they left, Candy and Beth were lost in skeins of memory as they watched the command center in the hotel dismantled, as the command center in the Tremont Hotel lobby in Chicago had been dismantled after the first few days following Ben’s kidnapping—when it became apparent that they were in for a long haul rather than a short and ugly solution.

Hauling Eliza’s things, along with Ben’s few things, into the guest house gave Pat and Candy something to do.

Alone with Vincent, who was inert, Beth was frantic. Hope seemed close at one hand. Destruction seemed to have the other hand pinned. She decided to arrange her son’s home—since rearranging it would have been a misnomer. Vincent had basically moved some elements of furniture into his cinder-block space, which was maybe twenty by twenty feet divided into two cubes, and shoved everything against the wall. The living room was basically a futon and a huge table—the table holding a laptop surrounded by at least ten stacks of paper three inches thick and a corkboard covered with thicknesses of slides and still photos. In the kitchen portion of the “big” room, a sink and stovetop stood like bookends on either side of the refrigerator. A piece of Formicaed planking jutted out into the room. Beth supposed this was counter space.

On the floor and against the wall were a large 7UP sign and a huge yucca plant beyond the sincerest hopes for survival. Behind the screen in the bedroom were a mattress with clean sheets and one pillow, a few transparent plastic storage bins labeled
SOCKS
and
SWEATS,
and a dentist’s chair pointed at two TVs and two stereos.

There was a bag containing an unopened shower curtain. Beth strung that together with the rings and put it up. Trolling through the refrigerator then, Beth threw out a bulging trash bag filled with grisly Styrofoam boxes of takeout and dumped some milk that was on the verge of cottage cheese.

She folded the sleeping bag where Kerry had lain and topped it off with the pillow. Kerry, who’d said she needed to move, had walked the mile or so to see Candy.

Finally, there was nothing left for Beth to do.

“No one wants to eat, but we can go get a few things,” said Vincent. “Maybe coffee and bread and milk and bologna and frozen pizza.” Beth fought the urge to gag at the mention of lunch meat. “I can’t believe that Pop went in there with them given what Ben said.”

“You will someday,” Beth told him quietly.

As they drove along in Vincent’s ancient Citroën, Vincent said, “Ma. It’s bugging me. Something about that letter. I have this sense of something about it. But I don’t know what. If I could talk to Rob or Emily …”

“Emily?”

“The editor, Emily Sydney…. I know something’s in the film. A link. Somewhere.”

The telephone in the office vibrated, like some kind of little insect trapped in Rob Brent’s hand. He dropped it and nearly hit the floor after it: He had been asleep in his desk chair and his leg was numb.

For so many hours, it had toned the old Blondie song “Call Me” nonstop, with other calls breaking in on the first calls, which, when he switched over, were interrupted by other calls, until his jaw literally ached from answering questions he had no answers for. No one knew Vincent’s number but Pieces by Reese was listed for both of them, two lines. Finally, Rob had switched off the tone and set the phone to vibrate.

He sat up and rubbed his stubbled jaw. He was going to put this phone down, once and for all, take a long shower, and fall in his bed for eight or fourteen deep ones. There was nothing he could do. Nothing.

He laid the phone on the table. It brrred again, spinning in its insistence. At the same moment, the fax machine erupted with a waterfall of sheets that spilled onto the floor. Rob picked up the first. It said the same thing as the second and the third and all twenty that came after.

PICK UP PICK UP PICK UP IT IS VINCENT I NEED TO FIND EMILY WE WILL COME TO THE STUDIO IT’S A LEGAL TERM IT’S A LEGAL TERM
.

“T
hey’ll check it out, thoroughly,” Candy said. “They’ll go through the whole film. Humbly and the FBI guy.”

“Thoroughly enough for you?” Vincent pressed her.

“Vincent, it’s never thoroughly enough for me,” Candy said. “Not ever and especially not now.”

“Let’s make sure, then,” Vincent said. “Then we’ll call Humbly. It’ll take what … a few minutes to find the exact place he said something like that?”

It took eleven hours. And that was after Vincent got Emily to California from Canada.

Vincent called everyone he knew and it was finally the production company that had purchased
No Time to Wave Goodbye
that found a charter to fly Emily the editor down from Vancouver. By 6 p.m., she was in Venice. Candy and Vincent drove to the studio, the majority of
which was in Rob’s house, with Beth and Pat following. Vincent’s genial partner, Rob, met them there. They all went into the studio with Emily and watched as, with absolute efficiency, the small, quiet girl pulled her dark hair back into an elastic band without a thought for how many ends poked out. As Pat watched, he thought, This is definitely not a Hollywood chick.

“Where do you want to start?” she asked.

“Well, of course with the Whittiers. Like I told you, the kidnapper used legal language. The part about Jackie’s depression or Blaine’s perspective before and after … I don’t think those could have any bearing,” Vincent said. Where exactly had Bryant Whittier mentioned the fixation on the tragedy of others as a form of something … something bad, like pornography, but that wasn’t the word? Was it Bryant for sure?

Or had it been Walter Hutcheson? Hutcheson too was articulate. He had a degree. He resented intrusions on their privacy in Laurel’s name….

But no. It had to be Whittier: No one else was so pompous or verbose. No one else had used that phrase about cause and effect. But when? Where in the film?

Slice by slice, they searched the rough cut. Vincent’s head ached, and the little room seemed to fill with a mist of exhaled anxiety.

There was an extraordinary amount of footage. The Whittiers had been first; Vincent had had no idea how much film they would need for each segment, so they’d spent the most on the Whittiers—nine hours. After Emily had set up her own programs, she and Vincent were able to search by references to what was pictured on the screen or, using another strategy, to spoken words. After an hour of searching, they couldn’t find “contact compassion” or “sensationalism.”

“What if he used another word?” Emily asked.

“Are you sure it was that word?” Candy asked. “That was in the letter. In the movie, it was ‘voyeurism.’ I think it was.”

“I don’t remember him saying that when we interviewed him, though. And even more, I don’t remember that whole sequence. Maybe it was out of sequence. It has to be at the beginning or the end.
It sounds like a wrapping-up thing—you know, ‘in conclusion….’ I could never have imagined that I’d ever forget a word anyone said,” Vincent marveled. “Now it all seems like a lifetime ago.”

“Excellent illustration of the theory of relativity,” Emily murmured. “Time really is flexible.” She downloaded a larger thesaurus. She tried other words—“lasciviousness,” “obscenity,” “voyeurism”—straining the words, one by one, through the opening and closing segments. They found nothing.

“Try them all in segment four,” Vincent suggested. “The one tagged Social Responsibility.”

Emily plugged in each of the key words. On “voyeurism” they got a hit.

“Is this it?” Pat asked and began to cough.

“I hope so, Pop,” Vincent said. “What’s the matter? Did you choke?”

“No, I, uh, I forgot to breathe.”

“Don’t have a heart attack, Pop. It’s rush hour in Southern California. You’re dead two hours before an ambulance gets here.”

Pat said, “I’m fine.”

“Turn it up,” Vincent told Emily.

They heard Bryant Whittier say, “For one thing, people have compassion fatigue. The instant dissemination of every piece of tragic footage, worldwide, has worn out genuine personal concern. We’re a global society. Our eyes can’t be on every sparrow. A child is safe in a hospital after an earthquake but then is stolen by a sexual slavery ring. It batters the mind. It’s not like it was with Ben. Do we weep for the child who drowned on the beach in the tsunami or the one who was saved and abducted?”

“Shit,” Vincent interrupted, as Emily hit pause. “Does he ever stop yakking?”

“Shhhh,” Emily told Vincent.

Bryant went on, “Or the child left in the car while her mother went into the store to buy diapers, who died of heat exhaustion? Her mother was a client of mine. Responsible for the death, yes, but criminally negligent? No, simply a young, very young woman left holding the bag by her simpleton boyfriend. The only people who stay obsessed with
these things are people who are awake far too late at night or in front of the television far too …”

“Where is it?” Vincent asked.

“Wait,” Emily said. “Be patient.”

“I’m not.”

“Right,” she replied.

Bryant Whittier continued, “For them, it’s a form of addiction. It’s like people who chase tornadoes. They think knowing about something can change it—after which, therefore because of which,
ad hoc ergo propter hoc
…”

“That’s the thing Tom said. The phrase in Latin…. That was what it was,” Vincent said.

Rob looked up from his laptop.
“Ad hoc ergo
whatever. Play it again, Emily, please.” Emily did.

Then, on Emily’s screen, Bryant went on. And on. “People who like to get excited over other people’s triumphs, like sports fans, or weep for the tragedies of people they will never meet … it’s almost voyeurism.”

“Bingo,” Emily breathed.

“So it has to be him,” Vincent said. “He said both things. He said they were voyeurs and that just caring didn’t influence or change anything. He said the same thing that was in the letter. There’s a legal term …
Ad hoc
something something …”

Vincent continued, “I never heard the phrase until last night. I wouldn’t have even thought of it if Tom hadn’t mentioned it. And it’s the connection.”

“You talked to Tom, your old therapist?” Pat asked. “That’s good.”

“I’m glad you were listening when you talked to him,” Emily said. “So we know that this footage wasn’t in the final cut. And it can’t be something a person could pick up from watching the movie.”

Vincent asked, “But was it in the first cut? The one that was screened in Chicago? Oh, Jesus.”

“Search the term,” Rob suggested, squeezing his bulk into the group surrounding Emily.

“I would, but I won’t know the exact phrase until I hear it or even something like it,” Vincent said. Backing away, Rob sat down on the floor against the wall and opened his own laptop.

“No,” Emily said, her fingers flying over the keys. “Wait. Let’s be sure. Let me check.” She reached out for a cup of coffee on which the milk had gone to greasy film and looked down at it doubtfully. Pat replaced it with a fresh cup.

“Beth bought new milk,” said Pat. “It’s safe, Emily.”

Emily said then, “Thanks, Mr. Cappadora. It’s good coffee. You make good coffee. Not like Vincent.”

“He doesn’t measure it,” Pat said. “He just eyeballs what looks like it should make the right number of cups.”

Emily asked, “You
measure
it?”