The Abortionist's Daughter (20 page)

From out in the kitchen came the banging of pots. Hastily she tucked the handkerchiefs back and closed the drawer. Not that she’d done anything wrong. Everyone looked in other people’s drawers. Still, she had the feeling she’d violated his privacy—not because she’d snooped around in his girlfriend’s makeup but because she’d found this gift, this labor of love by someone important in his past, someone who had sent a loved one off into the wide world, secure in the belief she’d outfitted him with the proper essentials.

She flushed the toilet and returned to the kitchen and saw that the pizza had arrived. She’d lost her appetite. Huck was stirring a pot of ramen noodles.

“Call your father,” he told her.

Megan dialed the hotel, but there was no answer. She tried his cell but found it still turned off, which now made her feel rejected even though she didn’t want to talk to him.

“Noodles or pizza?” Huck asked.

She wanted neither. There was an open bottle of Dos Equis on the table, and without thinking she picked it up and took a swallow. Only afterward did she realize she’d just committed a crime right in front of a cop. Oh well, she thought, at least the jail had beds.

Huck didn’t seem concerned, however. He set a bowl of steaming noodles on the table, got a folding stool from the broom closet, and sat down across the table from her. The stool was too high, and his knees bumped up against the table.

“Have some pizza,” he said.

“I’m not hungry.”

Huck shrugged and slurped his noodles.

“This is a nice little place,” Megan offered.

“Thank you.”

“How long have you lived here?”

“Five years.”

Megan did the calculation in her mind. “So I guess that means you moved in here when I was fourteen.”

“I guess,” said Huck.

“I’m nineteen now,” she added. “So.”

“So,” he agreed.

“So how old are you?”

Huck eyed her as if to say, You gotta be kidding.

“Thirty?” she asked. “Thirty-one?”

Huck allowed a smile to flicker in his eyes. “I’m twenty-six.”

“Where’s your girlfriend?”

“She’s in Minnesota right now,” Huck replied. “Her mother’s been sick.”

“That’s too bad.”

“Not really sick,” added Huck.

“Oh. Good.”

Huck ladled more liquid into the bowl.

“What does she do?” she asked.

“She’s a software analyst.”

“Must be smart.”

“She’s smart,” Huck agreed.

“Was she the one who put up the dried flowers in the bathroom? I wasn’t snooping,” she added, noticing his quizzical glance. “They’re hanging right over your toilet.”

Huck did not reply. What was wrong with this man? she wondered. Did he not know how to carry on a conversation? “So what’s her name?”

“Her name,” said Huck, “is Carolyn.”

“Where does she live?”

“Across town.”

“How’d you meet her?”

Huck set down his spoon. “Megan,” he said, “you can ask me about the case. You can ask me about police procedure. You can even ask me how I decided to become a cop, if you want. But don’t ask about my personal life. Try your father again.”

Megan felt ashamed, insulted, and angry all at once. She dialed the hotel again. Still no answer. She hung up and took another sip of his beer, no longer caring that she was in the presence of an officer of the law. Truth be told, she thought he was rude not to offer her one of her own.

“Bet you’re pretty curious about me,” she said, pausing with the bottle at her lips, “after that little scene with Bill.”

“I’m only curious about what Bill might know,” said Huck.

“Sure. I’ll bet you’re curious about the pictures,” she said. “Who wouldn’t be? What a dumbass thing to do. Talk about doing things on a whim. Did you ever do something on a whim?”

Huck glanced up.

“You should, sometime,” Megan continued. “Nothing wrong with a whim. Just don’t make it be something as dumbass as posing for pictures with a guy you shouldn’t trust.”

Huck smiled. “We all do things on a whim, I guess.”

“Including you?”

“Sure. I guess. I’m human.”

“Can’t really see it,” she said. Then, in the midst of the ensuing silence, she added, “What’s a whim, anyway? Just something you know you shouldn’t do, right?”

She looked at him then, and this time their eyes locked. In the next millisecond, they both reached for the beer, and when she felt the dual sensations, the dry warmth of his fingertips mingled with the cold glass bottle, she felt a wild spark shoot up her arm, as though she’d shorted out a wire within. She looked away, not believing what she had just done. And then just as quickly looked back at Huck, who had not broken his gaze at all. For a minute she thought he was angry with her, his eyes were that intense, but then they softened, and he shifted his legs and ran his fingers through his hair.

“Let’s not even go there, Megan,” he said quietly.

“Right,” she said. “Why not?” she said.

“Because I can’t.”

“Because of her?”

“Because of her. Because of work. Because of a lot of things.”

Megan folded her hands in front of her. He was right. She felt her face turn hot as her heart began to pound. She stood up, then, to get her cell phone from her backpack in the living room. But as she passed him, he suddenly reached out and hooked his fingers into hers, stopping her, and before she knew it he’d slid off the stool and pulled her against him. She felt the warmth of his broad chest, the shivery lightness of his fingers on the back of her neck. They both hesitated. He kissed her once, tentatively. And then he kissed her long and deep, and she stirred within, and the only thing she could think was, I’ve overstepped the boundaries, I’ve gone where I shouldn’t go, and at the same time, I want this, want it and can’t stop it. She didn’t know who was playing with whom, or even if they were playing at all.

It was Huck who pulled away. Head bowed, eyes looking everywhere and nowhere all at once. He pressed his hands heavily upon her shoulders and finally sucked in a deep breath.

“Call your father,” he said hoarsely.

—————

But she could not reach her father. She lied, finally, and told Huck she suddenly remembered a friend who was home. He said okay, sure, that was a good thing. And so before either of them could change their minds, she slipped into her shoes and pulled on her sweatshirt and gathered together her books, her backpack, and her car keys. Outside it was cold and clear and she felt both unshackled and disconnected. On empty streets she drove around for a while, trying to think of someone else from high school she knew well enough to drop in on unannounced at this hour. But she could think of nobody. Finally she drove to her dorm and parked her car and got out and walked around the old brick building. In the back was a dirty basement window to the laundry room. She squatted down on the frozen dirt and pried open the aluminum frame. It opened easily. There was a screen on the inside, which she pulled off. Squeezing through, she dropped down into the darkened laundry room and felt her way to the door, then to the stairs; and with a fist punching her chest she climbed three flights to the safety of her own room, where she was, and he wasn’t, and where she could punish herself for all the things she’d done or said that might have tripped things off, making two unsuspecting people want something they simply couldn’t have.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

——————

THE NEXT MORNING
Huck managed while shaving to cut himself twice. Then while making coffee he poured a carafe of water all over the counter. On his way to work he ran a stop sign. You fool, he thought. At headquarters nobody seemed to suspect anything out of the ordinary, which gave him some confidence, so that by seven-fifteen he’d taken care of a mountain of paperwork and sketched out a list of questions for Steven O’Connell, whom they were going to interview today. When Ernie came in at a quarter to eight, Huck was able to greet his partner with the wide-eyed grin of a man who has slept like a baby all night long.

“You look like shit,” Ernie remarked as he set down a bag of pastries.

Huck realized he’d left the two little clots of tissue on his chin. He peeled them off.

“That girl isn’t still at your place, is she?” Ernie demanded.

“No,” Huck murmured, in a way he hoped would suggest distraction by more important matters. But he felt Ernie’s eyes scrutinizing his face, so he raised his eyebrows and shrugged. “Go see for yourself. She found another place to stay. What’s in the bag?”

“Danish,” growled Ernie.

“Gimme one.”

Ernie handed him the bag, and Huck took out a huge pastry topped with loose streusel which, when bit into, rained crumbs all over his desk.

“You’re late,” Huck noted.

“One of us has a teenage daughter, and it’s not you.”

“What’s going on?”

Ernie scowled. “Just a boyfriend who’s two years older than she is. Do you remember what you wanted when you were eighteen? Yeah. Okay then. And does my daughter comprehend what she is doing when she wears these little spaghetti-strap tops with jeans that don’t even come up to here? Does she have any clue?”

“Boarding school?” Huck suggested.

“Don’t get me started,” said Ernie glumly.

“You know, I didn’t lose my virginity until I was eighteen,” Huck remarked.

“
That
helps.”

“I’m just saying it doesn’t always happen when you’re underage, is all.”

“Well,
I
was underage,” moped Ernie.

“Does she know that?”

“Are you nuts?”

“Have you thought of telling her?”

“Why would I do a thing like that?”

“I don’t know. Make yourself seem human. You could shed some light on what it was like.”

“It sucked.”

“See? Maybe if she heard it from you—”

Just then the phone rang. Ernie picked it up. He spoke briefly, then hung up. “Finally. The DNA report’s in.”

“And it’s Frank’s?”

“Yup.”

“Which we knew, of course,” said Huck.

“Yup.”

Huck frowned, recalling Megan’s initial reason for coming to his apartment.

“What, you’re surprised?” asked Ernie.

“No,” said Huck, “but I still wonder if we’re jumping to conclusions on Frank.”

Ernie shook out the newspaper and disappeared. “Guy comes home screaming at his wife and throws a glass across the room and there’s enough skin under her fingernails to suggest some kind of a struggle, and you really don’t think it was him?”

“It could mean other things.”

“Like what?”

“Maybe they had sex.”

Ernie tipped his head back and roared with laughter.

“What?” said Huck, wounded.

“Oh, Arthur,” said Ernie, “you are just too fucking young sometimes.”

“Who says you can’t be passionate after twenty years?”

“Ha ha,” said Ernie. “Ha ha ha ha ha. You fool.”

Huck balled up the greasy paper bag and shot it straight into the wastebasket. “Plus, I got a list from that guy named Bill.”

“List of what?”

“Meth dealers and their customers. He claims Diana owed some people some money. Which could give us a motive.”

“You think he’s credible?”

“I think we have to check it out.”

“Fine. You do it,” said Ernie.

Huck, who didn’t relish the idea of talking to meth dealers, made a mental note to delegate this to the guys over in Narcotics. “What about the voice on the answering-machine tape? Did we get a positive ID yet?”

“Nope. A total long shot too.”

“And we still don’t know who Diana’s patient was in the hospital that morning,” Huck pointed out.

“We’ll find out. Aren’t we supposed to talk to Steven this morning?”

“Eleven o’clock.”

“Think he’s going to volunteer much?”

“You never know,” said Huck.

“You really look like shit, you know,” Ernie remarked. “What were you doing last night?”

Having phone sex, Huck wanted to say. “Sleeping. Alone. How about you?”

Ernie sighed. “Wondering how to convince my daughter that it’s not normal to go around baring your midriff in the middle of January. You’ve got it so easy.”

Huck stood up and writhed into his sweatshirt. He swallowed the rest of his coffee and tucked a notebook into his back pocket. Walking out, he congratulated himself for putting up enough of a front that Ernie suspected nothing.

Which was how it was supposed to be, given that there wasn’t anything to suspect.

—————

Shortly afterward, the two men parked their car on the side of a tree-lined residential street and walked up the sidewalk to Steven O’Connell’s house. It was a large old house, built of wood and stucco, and it was well kept, with clean-swept eaves and unstreaked windows that neatly reflected the low January sun.

The thing that had always bothered Huck about Steven O’Connell was the fact that he called himself a reverend but had no church. Huck had to wonder about a man who lived so well without an apparent source of income. Exhibit A, the house. Exhibit B, the Mercedes. Exhibit C, the fact that he could take his entire family to Costa Rica. Where did he get his money? As they walked up the steps to the house, Huck struggled to remind himself that a person’s independent wealth did not a criminal make.

Ernie knocked. Momentarily the door was answered by Steven’s wife, Trudy. She was a small woman with a poodly perm; dressed in gray sweats, she looked tired and puffy, not at all like someone who’d just returned from a few weeks in Costa Rica.

“Steven!” she yelled over her shoulder. “You guys,” she said, shaking her head. “Can’t you even wait until we’ve had a chance to unpack and take a shower?”

She led them into the living room, where she removed bundles of leaflets from the sofa to make room for Huck and Ernie. The room had a parlorish feel, like it wasn’t used very often; it was painted yellow, with cream-colored trim and brocade drapes in the windows. As they waited for Steven, Huck perused a cluster of family photos on the wall, amused by one of a very young and very long-haired Steven playing a guitar in a geriatric ward.

Then, like a draft of air, Steven himself seemed to materialize from nowhere. He was dressed in khaki pants and a pink button-down shirt.