The fake O’Malley had said that his father was supposed to have taken the file cabinet to his home. Yet his father’s wife knew nothing about it. It didn’t make sense, until the day after Kyle’s strange meeting with O’Malley at the gazebo, while Kyle was sitting in front of Kat’s TV, watching the baseball game and downing his traditional Father’s Day case of Yuengling beer, when he remembered his mother’s comment about his father telling her, in his way, that he was coming to live with them.
What would be his way? He’d bring something to the house, something to store, something most valuable. Something too heavy for him to handle alone.
“Uncle Max,” Kyle had shouted over the phone after he’d thought it through but before driving out to the old neighborhood. He was shouting because he had reached his Uncle Max at the Olde Pig Snout, and the game was on and the television was blaring. “I got a question.”
“What?”
“A question. I got a question for you.”
“Who is this? Kyle?”
“Yeah, it’s Kyle.”
“Yo, Kyle, how you doing? Wait a second. Hey, Fred, turn the sound down a sec, I’m talking to my nephew.” The smooth voice of Harry Kalas dimmed. “Okay, go ahead.”
“You ever help my father move anything into my mother’s house?”
“When?”
“I don’t know, not long before he died. I’m talking something heavy, like a file cabinet.”
“Like a file cabinet?”
“No, you’re right, not like a file cabinet. It would have been a file cabinet. Did you ever help him move a big brown file cabinet into my mother’s house?”
There was a pause from Uncle Max’s end of the line, where Kyle could still hear the game slipping away from the Phillies’ bullpen. It was illegal now to smoke in Philly bars, but Kyle heard his Uncle Max light a cigarette and take a drag.
“Your mom called me,” he said finally. “Asked for a favor. I had the truck then for my work with the funeral homes, and everyone was always calling me to help them move. That’s why I quit and got rid of the thing, I was getting too damn helpful. But I still had it then, and she called, and what was I going to do? Say no to my little sister?”
“How come I don’t remember it?”
“We did it one night when you was at that Chinese girl’s house.”
“She’s Korean.”
“You don’t say? And all this time I thought she was Chinese. Funny how easy it is to—”
“Uncle Max.”
“Okay, okay. Your mom, she didn’t want you to know, and she made me promise never to tell. She didn’t want you getting no ideas about it meaning something.”
“Though she got them herself, didn’t she?”
“She was my little sister, and I loved her, Kyle, I really did, but I never understood a thing about her. We even had to hide it once it was inside the house.”
“From me?”
“No, that was your father’s doing. He said he needed to safeguard it from someone. Toth, I assumed. But that file cabinet was so damn heavy it near gave me a hernia. You know, I never had no problem with my back until I wrestled that sucker into the basement, and since then I been no good for nothing.”
From within the 280ZX now, through teary eyes, Kyle stared at his old house, gone to hell, and the top of the basement wall under the porch, behind which, he was certain, stood his father’s file cabinet. Somewhere inside would be the O’Malley file, with a boatload of trouble on every page. But if you looked deep into Kyle Byrne’s heart, you would see it wasn’t really the O’Malley file he was after. For Kyle, the common concerns of the common world, which prized money and power over all things and was seeking mightily that selfsame file for venal ends, held little sway. But still his heart raced at the possibility of the file cabinet’s being somewhere in his old basement. Because he couldn’t help the feeling that inside that heavy brown cabinet, along with the useless detritus of his father’s legal career, somewhere, in some mislabeled file, scrawled in his father’s hand, would be the closest he’d ever come to discovering the very meaning of his life.
CHAPTER 25
THE DISCUSSION DID NOT go very well.
Of course, these discussions never went well anymore. In the beginning, when Robert was still the young and pliant striver, the glorious surroundings and the note of promise in their intercourse left him with a great, hopeful energy that was almost sexual in its power. He couldn’t wait to see her again, the way his skin warmed as she caressed him with the gaze from her pretty eyes, the way their dreams seemed to mesh into a single glorious enterprise that would carry them both higher than individually they could ever have imagined. But as they had aged, and the mansion had deteriorated, and the promise in his life had withered, their encounters had taken on an indifferent brutality. If he did her bidding, then she merely took it as her due, with nary a word of gratitude. But if he failed to carry out her wishes to the letter, even if they hadn’t been clearly communicated, then the whole inequality of their relationship was thrown into bitter relief by the vituperative nature of her rebuke.
“That’s why you’ll never amount to anything. You don’t have an ounce of initiative. But what else could have been expected? You’re a Spangler, and the Spanglers never had initiative. A clan of belching crotch scratchers, all of them. It’s a wonder that any of you ever get off the toilet in the morning.”
“I determined it wasn’t to our benefit to kill him,” he had told her. “I’ll determine what is to our benefit,” she said, her voice a drip of liquid nitrogen. “You’ve spoiled things enough already. Once you set him on the trail, it was inevitable that he would have to be dealt with.”
“I just wanted to be sure he didn’t have a copy, like Laszlo.” “It didn’t matter if he had it or not, he would find something. His father was greedy as a hyena, the son will be no different. Blood always tells. It’s why you’ve been such a disappointment to me.”
“If he was killed so soon after Laszlo, someone would draw the connection.”
“Who, the police? That pair of fools at the funeral? Perfectly adequate for servants, maybe, but not as detectives. I hardly think those two will be swift enough to catch on. If you’ll just do as I tell you, it will all work out as we hope. There are grand things afoot. I won’t have the boy get in my way.”
“What exactly do you want?”
“I want the boy gone. I want you to take care of him like you took care of the father. I will not have that Irish piece of trash confounding me from the grave.”
“The boy’s not so easy to find. He doesn’t have a set place to stay anymore. He lives out of his car.”