“Plan on seeing Dr. Guidry anytime soon?”
“Why?”
Don and Rick exchanged glances.
“When you do, you might ask about Danny Eskew.”
“Yeah,” Don said. “Ask him how his son’s doing.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“Let me assure you, Mr. Griffin, there’s absolutely no way, no way at all … this young man … could be involved.”
This young man.
“Dr. Guidry first learned of his existence,” Catherine said after a moment, “when Danny was fifteen, and then only because the boy had come onto such trouble. The mother was at wit’s end, with nowhere else to turn.”
“And she is …?”
“A former secretary.”
Guidry’s face was turned towards the window. He could have been remembering this woman he’d briefly loved so long ago. Or watching dark angels of regret gather out on the schoolyard.
“He’s never felt any connection or kinship to the boy. Why should he? But he has, from the moment he learned of the boy’s existence, taken full responsibility for his care.”
“Removing all authority from the mother-”
“At her express request, yes.”
“And committing his son for life.”
“What else was he to do, Lewis? The boy is incapacitated, profoundly ill. This isn’t some prime-time TV show where he’s going to snap out of it in the last five minutes and head over to the mall on a shopping spree.”
“Yet he seems to have been normal up till what-fourteen, fifteen?”
“That’s often when mental illness begins to manifest itself, especially schizophrenia.”
“No indication of deficiency, retardation.”
“At that point, no.” Giving me her full attention, she also managed somehow to keep an eye on Guidry, whose head again had lowered onto his chest, coaxing forth soft snores.
“Danny’s first serious hospitalization was in a satellite clinic in Oak Cliff, one of a dozen or more communities thronging around Dallas to make up the Metroplex. Six weeks, by court order. Fifth week, he took the meds he’d been hoarding all that time, fifty, sixty pills, maybe more. They didn’t find him till morning, just after seven, when an orderly went through bouncing beds and calling out. His head lay in a pool of vomit. Respirations were shallow, down to six or so, barely visible. The orderly screamed for help and started mouth-to-mouth. Danny came back, but he’d been down a while. His brain had gone too long without adequate oxygen. It was shortly after that that the boy’s mother got in touch with Dr. Guidry.”
“Did Guidry visit? Actually see Danny face-to-face?”
“Once. He never spoke of it afterwards.”
“So the boy’s care fell to others.”
“To the same group of lawyers and advisors who oversee all his financial affairs, yes.”
“Then he would have received regular reports.”
“He did.”
“Did he read them?”
“I can’t say. They were passed along to him.”
“Up the food chain. By?”
“Myself, for some years now. Others before I came.”
“Secretaries, you mean. Personal assistants.”
“Yes.”
We’d been speaking as though he were no longer in the room, which, in a sense, he wasn’t. But now Guidry’s head rose. He turned his gaze to us, eyes clear.
“I can say, Mr. Griffin.” He grimaced as pain thrust and withdrew. “I read every word, many times over. If words could be used up, those would have been empty shells, nothing more. Hundreds upon hundreds of them. Empty shells.”
I watched as something else, something in its own way as substantial as the pain, arrived.
“One summer, long ago, my parents rented a cabin up in Arkansas, a place called Maddox Bay. Near your homeland, I believe. Beautiful country.”
“Others think so. I could never see it.”
“Often one doesn’t…. Generally we vacationed on Grand Isle, where my grandparents owned a cabin, or over in Biloxi. One of my earliest memories is of Biloxi, green trees and grass, then a low wall and nothing else but sand to water’s edge-sand they had to ship in truckload by truckload from somewhere else, though of course I didn’t know that at the time. They had two or three of these squat, blocky, ugly things called Ducks, aquatic landing vehicles left over from the war, and they’d take tourists for rides in them.
“Nothing like that on Maddox Bay, though. Nothing for tourists. Just a lot of thrown-together shacks, porches and patios tacked onto cheap aluminum trailers set up on blocks. Boats with outboard motors the size of oil drums coursed in and out from rough docks or slid directly down muddy banks into scummy water. I loved the way they’d slow, cut back to almost nothing, whenever they passed other boats with people fishing, then rev back up. Fishermen cleaned their catch on the bank, tossing scales, fins, heads and intestines back in the water.
“One late afternoon I came walking out of the woods, bank neither dull, dirt nor mud here but heaped with seashells, hundreds of them, thousands, that glinted powerfully in late sunlight, crunching as I walked into them. They appeared whole at first, but when I bent to pick one up and looked closely, not much was left: only the overall form, a patchwork of narrow bridges between round holes.
“Buttons, my father explained when I told him of my discovery. They’d punched out holes in all those shells to make buttons, then dumped them there, in mounds.”
His eyes strayed again to the window, back to us.
“There was a point to all this. Really there was.”
“You need to rest now,” Catherine said.
“You’re right, my dear. One of many things I need. Most of which I’ll never have.”
She took him off to bed and, twenty minutes later, returned, sinking down beside me on the steel-gray leather couch.
“I had to let him tell you, Lewis. It wasn’t my place to do so.”
“I understand.”
For a time then, we sat without speaking.
“I’m so tired. I can’t even begin to imagine how he must feel.”
“Someday you have to tell me how you came to be here, doing this,” I said.
“Does it really seem that strange to you?”
“Ever the more, as I get to know you.”
“Then someday I will.” Her head rested against my shoulder. “I’ve always been a sucker for men who say ever the more.”
Moments later, she was asleep.
“I’m faxing through a list of employees from that period. To Assistant Superintendent Santos at NOPD, right?”
“Right.” My own fax hadn’t worked in years. Don suggested Santos, who agreed over the phone with a verbal shrug.
“This is all … unorthodox, Mr. Griffin.”
“I appreciate that, Dr. Ball. And I thank you for your help.”
“I do have assurances from my colleague Richard Garces and from Captain Don Walsh-”
Captain Emeritus, I’d have to start calling him.
“-both of whom vouch for you personally, and for the legitimacy of your request. They explained what was going on here. God knows women in our society are prey to enough, without this sort of thing. I can only hope the information will help you.”
“Yes, sir. I’m sure it will.”
“The list should at any rate be with Officer Santos now. I’ve alerted my secretary, Miss Eddington-”
For a moment I thought he said Errington.
“-that you may call back. She should be able to help you with any further information or assistance you need.”
“Once again, doctor, thank you.”
The line stayed open.
“Is there anything else?”
“Look, I know this is a long shot. You couldn’t possibly be the same Lewis Griffin who wrote Skull Meat and The Old Man, right?”
“Right.”
“Right you couldn’t?”
“Right I am.”
“My God. I have a first edition of Skull Meat.”
“Not many of those around these days.”
“Tell me about it. Took me years to find one. And I gave up a few dinners for it.”
“The thing sold for sixty cents.”
“Exactly. Look, there’s no reason you’d remember me …”