It was the older detective who’d said that to me as I’d sat, dazed and unmoving, in the rainy driveway that night. But now, when the words returned to me, I realized that they were carried on a different voice, the one which had guided Rebecca before me, and which, after so many years, so much brutal evidence, still dared to suggest that something didn’t fit.
It was easy to find him. Swenson, after all, was not hiding from anyone.
A woman met me at the door. She wore a green dress dotted with small white flowers, and her hair was pulled back into a frazzled reddish bun.
“My name is Steve Farris,” I told her.
It was a name she clearly recognized. She stepped back and eyed me with a keen vigilance from behind a pair of large, tortoiseshell glasses.
“I guess you want to see Dave,” she said.
I nodded. “Is he here?”
“Sure he is,” the woman said. “He can’t get out anymore.” She stepped away from the door. “Come on in,” she said. “He’s in the back.”
I followed her down a short corridor, then into the shadowy bedroom where he lay. His condition seemed worse than Rebecca had described. Propped up by three large white pillows, he sat in a small metal bed, his lower body covered by a worn, patchwork quilt, the air around him little more than a cloud of medicinal fumes. There was a cylindrical orange oxygen tank at his right, and as I entered, he drew its yellow plastic mask from his mouth and watched me curiously.
“This is Steve Farris,” the woman said.
Swenson nodded to me, then swung his head to the right, as if trying to get a somewhat better look at me.
“You need anything, Dave?” the woman asked.
Swenson shook his head slowly, his eyes still leveled upon me.
The woman walked over to his bed, drew the blanket a little more snugly over his stomach, and disappeared out the door.
During all that time, Swenson’s eyes never left me.
“The son,” he said finally in a breathless, ragged voice.
“Yes.”
He motioned for me to take a seat near the bed, then returned the mask to his mouth and took in a quick, anxious breath. The face behind the mask was pale and ravaged, though his green eyes still shone brightly from their deep sockets.
“Rebecca thought you might come by here,” he said, after he’d withdrawn the mask again.
“She did?”
He inhaled a long, rattling breath, lifted the mask again, then let it drop. “She said there were things you might want to know.” His pale skin seemed strangely luminous in the gray light, as if a small candle still burned behind his eyes. But it was the eyes themselves that I could still recognize from that moment he’d turned to face me so many years before, those same eyes settling quietly upon me as I’d sat stunned and silent in the back seat of his unmarked car.
“Smart woman, Rebecca,” Swenson said shakily, his head drifting slightly to the left. “Very smart.”
“Yes, she is.”
The green eyes bored into me, a young detective’s eyes, swift and penetrating, but now embedded in a slack, doughy face. “What do you want to know about your father?” he asked.
It was a question which, as I realized at that moment, had never actually been asked of me, and which I’d never actually asked myself. What did I want to know? Why had I come so far in order to know it?
“I want to know what really happened,” I told him. “I want to know exactly what my father did.”
“That day, you mean?” Swenson asked. The mask rose again, the great chest expanded beneath the patchwork quilt, then collapsed. “November 19, 1959,” he added, as the mask drifted down and finally came to rest in his lap.
He’d said the date not to impress me with his memory, but to suggest how it had remained with him through all the passing years, how he’d never been able to rid himself of his own, gnawing doubt, the persistent and irreducible presence of something in that house that didn’t fit. And yet, at the same time, he seemed reluctant to begin, as if still unsure of where it might finally lead.
“My father had planned it for a long time, hadn’t he?” I said.
Even as I said it, I saw our lives dangling helplessly over the fiery pit of my father’s dreadful calculations. One by one, it seemed, he’d weighed the separate elements of our lives and deaths. Like a Grand Inquisitor, he’d heard the evidence while staring at my red-robed mother from the smoky fortress of his old brown van, or tinkering with his latest bicycle in the chill dungeon of the cement basement. One by one, we’d come before him like prisoners naked in a dock. Day by day the long trials had stretched on through the months, until, in a red wave of judgment, he’d finally condemned us all.
After that final condemnation, as I supposed at that moment, it had been only a matter of working out the technical details. Perhaps he’d considered various weapons for a time, carefully weighing the advantages of knives, guns, poisons, before finally deciding on the shotgun for no better reason than that he’d bought it years before, that it rested quietly in the green metal cabinet in the basement, that it was ready-to-hand.
“How long had he been planning it, do you think?” I asked Swenson, coaxing him forward, as one might nudge a man, ever so subtly, toward the edge of a cliff.
Swenson shrugged. He started to speak, but stopped abruptly, and returned the mask to his mouth. He took in a long breath, then let it out in a sudden, hollow gush. “If he planned it early, then he must have changed his plans,” he said.
I said nothing, but only waited, as it seemed to me I had in one way or another been waiting all my life.
“Did Rebecca think he had a plan?” Swenson asked.
It was odd how far she seemed from me now. I saw her poised over her black briefcase, withdrawing papers in her usual methodical manner, showing me only what was relevant at that particular moment, concealing all the rest. I could recall the tension of my lost desire, but only as something remembered by another man, a story told by someone else, so that now when she came forward in my mind, it was as little more than a messenger sent to me by my father.
“I think so,” I told him.
He looked vaguely surprised to hear it. He stared at me quietly, his breath coming in long hard pulls and quick exhalations. “Well, maybe he did,” he said. The mask lifted, lingered for a moment at his mouth, then fell again. “But maybe he didn’t.” He tried to go on, but his breath could not carry the weight of another sentence. He took a quick inhalation, then added, “He got away, that’s for sure.”
“All the way to Mexico,” I said.
Swenson nodded. “Using nothing but back roads,” he said, “or we’d have picked him up for sure.” He coughed suddenly, a hard, brutal cough, his face reddening with the strain. “Sorry,” he said quickly, then returned to his story. “He left all his money in the bank.” He looked at me pointedly as he drew in another aching breath. “Does that sound like a well-thought-out plan?”
I looked at him, puzzled, my eyes urging him to go on.
Swenson shifted uncomfortably, the large head sinking and rising heavily, its little wisps of reddish hair floating eerily in the veiled light. “He left the house at around six o’clock.”
In my mind I could see him go almost as clearly as Mrs. Hamilton had seen him, a figure in a gray hat, carrying nothing with him, not so much as the smallest bag.
“He went downtown to the hardware store after that,” Swenson said. A short cough broke from him, but he suppressed the larger one behind it. “Several people saw him go in, but since he owned the place, nobody made anything of it.”
“What did he do in there?” I asked.
“He cleaned out the cash register,” Swenson answered. “Took every dime.” The mask rose again, then fell. “Then he went to that little store near your house.”
“Oscar’s?”
Swenson nodded. “He bought a lot of food and stuff for the trip.” He stopped. The mask climbed up to his mouth, settled over it for a long, raspy breath, then crawled back down into Swenson’s lap. “And he made a phone call.”