“That’s why, Alexander, it’s better that you stay here and do nothing and get well,” Pat says.
“Pat, I have nothing there, I have nothing here. The reason I’m getting well, the reason I’m quitting junk, is so that I can fucking shoot Charles Mulholland, the killer of my two friends. Don’t you see, man’s crazy. Gotta be stopped. I’ve got to do it before the announcement on August sixth, before he gets to run for Congress. If I can do it, I can wipe the slate clean.”
Pat wipes my brow and cleans me with a sponge. Spoons tea into my mouth and shakes his head.
“Alex, the announcement was yesterday. You’ve been here for ten days. It’s too late. Congressman Wegener has already announced that this will be his last term. The mayor of Fort Collins isn’t entering the race. It’s a coronation. Charles Mulholland will be running for the GOP nomination unopposed. It’s all over. It’s too late. Let it go.”
“What? Too late? Oh yeah, I forgot, I forgot, that’s not the plan, new plan, kill him at the fund-raiser, kill him then.”
“Madness,” Pat mutters. “You didn’t listen to me before, listen to me now.”
I owed Pat a lot. He had operated on my leg to remove a shotgun pellet and then kept me alive despite the fact that I’d been suffering hypothermia, shock, blood loss, and then junk withdrawal. Pat was no surgeon, either, a paramedic, and paramedics aren’t trained for that kind of thing. But he’d done enough. And in any case, I didn’t hear him. I was taking advice from a higher authority. The verse of the Gita echoing in my skulclass="underline" O Arjuna. Why give in to this shameful weakness? You who would be the terror of thine enemies.
The terror of thine enemies.
It had taken several more days until I felt confident about walking the streets of Fort Morgan again. I had kicked heroin and my leg was healed and I could walk and run. We had looked out for dodgy characters, but there were none. The hired guns had seen me sink in the South Platte and, as Pat says, but for the two years of drought and the river’s historic low level, I surely would have drowned.
But, anyway, I was in the clear. They thought I was dead for the second time. You can’t ignore a chance like that. My next move was the story on Channel 9. Charles was having a fund-raiser, a summer “white attire only” ball at the Eastman Ballroom in Denver. It showed Charles’s savvy. The historic Eastman Ballroom hadn’t been used for several years, everybody said a big event like this might help keep away the developers. Regardless. That’s where I would set the world to rights.
And I was certain about Charles and I knew it was him, but one thing troubled me still. What had happened in the cemetery made no sense. Charles would never have hired contract killers to ambush me. First of all, how could he have met them? Every third hit man in America is an under-cover FBI special agent. Second, as I’d thought at the time, what was to stop them blackmailing Charles once he became famous?
Something wasn’t right.
So, free of junk for the first time in nearly a year, I told Pat, “We have to go back to Denver.”
He protested, raged, refused.
We packed our stuff. Rode the bus, arrived at Denver, took a taxi to Pat’s old apartment building. The Ethiopians were gone, the lobby smelled of urine and was filled with garbage. Someone had tried to break the new locks on the inner door but fortunately had not succeeded.
We settled into Pat’s place. I couldn’t go back to the apartment where John had been killed….
And the world harsher. Denver, a big, hot, unpleasant city, and I got hungry now and I could read people when they were angry and I couldn’t ignore filth and dirt. Ketch softened the edges of everything, soothed you, blurred things like an impressionist painting. With ketch, Streisand was always singing and Vaseline was always on her lens.
I researched the stories of Robert, Charles, and Amber Mulholland. Old-fashioned police work. Phone calls to Harvard, to Cutter and May law firm, to the Mulholland Trust. Legwork at the Denver Public Library.
Robert and Charles checked out. They left traces all over the papers. Well known. The kids of a multimillionaire. Father divorced, the trust funds, the private schools, the Ivy League education, both PhDs in economics/political science. There were no surprises.
The surprise reserved for Amber Mulholland.
Hardly any information at all under that name. Her wedding in The Denver Post and The New York Times, but very little else. I remembered that photograph in the yearbook in her apartment. During her first year at Harvard, she had changed her name from Amber Doonan to Amber Abendsen. Now, why had she done that? She had mentioned some kind of problem with her father. But it had puzzled me at the time. Which was her real name? There was an easy way to find out….
I put on a shirt and tie and showed up with a dozen white roses at the nursing home Amber’s mother was housed at on Pennsylvania Street.
A very young security guard with a buzz cut.
“Yeah, maybe you can help me, I’ve got roses for a Mrs. Doonan, but then that’s crossed out and it says Mrs. Abendsen?” I said in my best approximation of an American accent.
The guy barely looked at me.
“Room 201,” he said.
“What name is it?” I asked.
“You had it the first time,” he said.
The home was upscale. Plush carpets, a mahogany handrail, nurses in crisp white uniforms. I knocked on 201. I went in. A frail, silver-haired old lady, sitting in a chair, looking out the window, stroking a sweater curled in her lap like a cat.
“I’ve got some flowers for you,” I said.
She didn’t turn around. Didn’t look up.
“Flowers,” I said again, but she didn’t even appear to be aware of my presence in the room. How old did Amber say she was? Sixty-eight? She seemed just a little older, but clearly, the disease had hit her hard. There was no way I could ask her anything but there was no point in wasting an opportunity. I put the flowers down and scouted the room. A few pictures, prints. Cautiously at first, I opened her chest of drawers. Amber’s mother didn’t move.
Old-lady clothes, adult diapers, nothing special, but in the top of a cupboard that she couldn’t reach — personal effects. China figurines, Hummel characters, bits of crystal, a few postcards. Several from Amber. Nothing of interest until I found an envelope filled with papers. The mother lode. Literally. Her birth certificate, born Louise Abendsen, Knoxville, Tennessee, 1927, her high school graduation certificate, her marriage license to Sean Doonan on October 31, 1955, and divorce papers from him on January 1, 1974, when Amber would have been about eight or nine.
Louise stared out the window, not stirring as I looked at this, the most significant piece of information so far. For on the divorce papers it said “Custody to the father, Sean Doonan, on the grounds of Louise Doonan’s present incarceration at the Huntsville State Correctional Facility.” The divorce papers made a big play out of the fact that Mrs. Doonan had gone to prison three times in the previous ten years for shoplifting, petty theft, drunkenness, and other crimes that the papers said “were signs of an unbalanced temperament.” The papers also made a point of explicitly denying “Mrs. Doonan’s claims that Sean Doonan was in any way involved in organized crime.”
“Flowers,” Louise said, not moving from her spot at the window.
I said nothing.
“Flowers,” she said again.
She was getting agitated. Time to go. I had plenty here to work with anyway. The information almost made me feel sorry for Amber. Screwed-up mother, dodgy father. I put the envelope back. I looked at Louise. I knew I couldn’t leave the flowers, in case someone wondered where they’d come from, so I took them with me and dumped them in a trash can down the hall. I felt bad. The guard didn’t look up as I walked out.