He found an airline-size bottle of Scotch in his mini-bar and handed it to me. He took nothing for himself.
“There’s a lot I can’t tell you yet,” I began. “And even more that I can’t tell Gianelli.”
“Why?”
“Crimes were committed. By me. And a man whose help I enlisted.”
“And as a result the man who killed David is dead,” Ron said.
“Yes. His name was Sean Daggett. He’ll be all over the news tomorrow.”
“He killed David himself?”
“No. He hired whoever did.”
“And you know why.”
“Yes. He was selling organs on the black market.”
“And David was involved in this?”
“Very briefly. And completely against his will. He wanted to report Daggett to the police, but Daggett struck first, tried to abduct him. Made him run.”
“And you won’t tell the police any of this?”
“I can’t without incriminating myself. Just know that Daggett and his men are dead.”
“Did you kill him, Jonah?”
My neck muscles tightened as if a giant hand were bunching them together. “A sequence of events that he himself set in motion ran its natural course.”
“And that’s all you have to say?”
“For now.”
“How can you expect me to leave it at that? What do I tell Sheila?”
“That’s up to you.”
“Knowing the man is dead-that he’ll never come to trial-I don’t know what to feel. My first hope was always that you would find David alive and well and bring him home. My last hope, I suppose, was that if you didn’t, and someone was held responsible, that I would attend every day of their trial and put on public record what a life they had wasted. I’ll never get the chance to do that now. I feel very conflicted.”
I couldn’t tell him how I felt without telling him more than he could know. All I could offer was the lame, “What had to happen happened.”
“None of us knows what has to happen, Jonah. That’s the exclusive province of Hashem.”
“I just wanted you to know that no one got away with killing David.”
“Of course they did.”
Ron walked over to the mini-bar, knelt in front of it and took out a bottle of Scotch, unscrewed the cap and drank about half of it down. Then he sank heavily into a club chair. “What I’ll always wonder,” he said, “is why Hashem wanted David to come to Boston. I mean, I know why David wanted to come. ‘It’s the hub,’ he’d say. ‘The hub of medical research.’ This was where he was going to make his mark. One of the last times I spoke to him, he told me the donor in the first-ever kidney transplant had passed away. He had given a kidney to his twin brother back in the fifties, in Boston, just up the street from Sinai. David said, ‘Dad, can you imagine the courage it took to donate a kidney when it had never been done before?’ ”
“David had more courage than you can imagine,” I said, thinking of how he’d protected Sandy Lerner on the beach.
“More than you can tell me now,” he said.
“Yes.”
He drank down the rest of the bottle and stared at the fridge as if deciding whether to have another. “You know Micah still doesn’t know his brother is dead? I wanted him to come down here with me and help me get the body home. But he’s off work for the weekend, out at some cabin without cellphone reception, playing guitar with his friends. That’s what I’m left with now, Jonah. A pot-smoking hippie who plays dumpy coffee houses. David is gone and Micah is left.”
Everyone counts, I wanted to say. Even we second sons, who sometimes disappoint our parents, frustrate them as we fail to live up to the achievements of our dominant older siblings. I sipped my drink and watched Ron’s face contort in grief, his chin puckered and shaking, eyebrows pulling down, tears falling anyway. I could only imagine what my mother would go through if Daniel died prematurely and she was left with just me. Would she howl and curse God for taking away the great lawyer and family man, leaving only the bachelor with the rent-controlled apartment and undistinguished life?
He doth bestride the world like a colossus, Cassius said of Caesar, and we petty men walk under his huge legs, and peep about to find ourselves dishonourable graves.
A dishonourable grave. That was about all I’d been able to do for David Fine. Took me all of five days on the job.
When I got back to the hotel, Jenn was still asleep. Ryan was on the other bed, watching TV with the sound off: a local news report that showed firefighters battling to contain the inferno in Wellington Hill. There’d be no word yet about any victims inside, of course. It would be hours before it would be safe enough for anyone to get into the crumbling structure.
He went down to the desk to book another room for himself. I laid my tired body down and wondered how well Ed and Sandy Lerner would hold up under police questioning. They were bound to get a visit, once the Boston cops linked the Coopers’ island residence back to them. He had been an actor once; he’d need every last bit of that skill to stay out of the spotlight. His daughter would simply follow his lead, I guessed, as was her custom. I had no doubt Chuck Stayner could lie his way through a police interview; it would be a simple matter of slipping on his professional mask.
I channel surfed awhile to help me relax, maybe drift off, settling on an outdoor network showing men in hip waders fishing a deep, rushing river treed on both sides, a blue sky behind it, just a few white clouds in friendly shapes. Jenn woke up and asked me to lie beside her and hold her and maybe find some godawful movie or reality show. We rested against each other on the one clean bed and searched the channels until we found a sixties flick that combined surfing, singing and a monster from the Bad Prop Lagoon. We laughed at every dumb scene and song. It was only during the commercials that Jenn would start to weep.
EPILOGUE
The temperature in Toronto has been above freezing the last ten days. Green shoots of crocuses are poking through the dark fragrant mud in the flower beds around my building. A lone whippoorwill has been perched on the telephone wires across the street, singing its plaintive notes. The Blue Jays open at home next Monday.
Jenn is still away.
I got a postcard the other day from Cuba, where she and Sierra have been holed up. It showed a huge marlin breaking free of the surface of the ocean, blue black against a clear sky. “This will be me again,” she wrote on the back.
I don’t know when she’s coming back to work. Or even back home. We haven’t talked about it at all. I imagine the reality of what happened to her while she was at Halladay’s is still sinking in. I suggested she get counselling but she said, “I used to work on a rape crisis line, remember? I know exactly what they’d say.”
She hasn’t told me yet whether she is pregnant. She did go for a full exam before she left for Cuba but she didn’t offer the results and I didn’t ask. There are other risks, of course: that her rapist might have infected her with HIV or something else. She doesn’t even know if it was only one man. Those results will take longer to know.
It’s still sinking in for me too. Ugly dreams raid my sleep, including one where a man in a surgical mask starts to cut away my face with a scalpel. Waves of depression roar up on me without warning. It’s not the same depression I experienced after the concussion. It’s something else entirely.
On the plus side, my brother the lawyer, my colossus who doth bestride me, has been helping me stay out of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, despite the fervent efforts on the part of authorities to have me deposed there regarding the deaths of Sean Daggett and numerous others found inside Halladay’s and painstakingly identified. And the deaths of David Fine and Carol-Ann. And the disappearance and presumed death of Harinder Patel of Somerville.
“Do not set foot in that city,” Daniel said. “I don’t care if they ask you to throw out the first pitch at Fenway. Don’t even go to Buffalo. The minute you cross the border, you’re theirs.”