For the first time I could feel his anger, not just at Mr. Harwick but at the world. I think I would probably have felt the same. If he was telling the truth, his father’s selfishness had triggered a chain of events that led to his mother’s suicide. He had already grieved away his childhood over the drowning of his father, and now it looked like he was going to have to do it all over again.
I said, “What did you say to him?”
“When he answered the phone I said, ‘Mr. Harwick, my name isn’t Kenny. It’s Daniel. Daniel Imperiori. I’m your son.’”
The human brain is such an amazing thing. It’s constantly absorbing new things and adapting and changing. Scientists have even proven that a person’s intelligence isn’t some static constant, like an IQ number, but something that can be improved just by giving it the right combination of food, rest, and exercise. It’s like a kitten—but kittens can be very predictable. I guarantee that if you wiggle the tip of a peacock feather in front of a kitten, some magical unseen force will immediately take over, and that kitten will pounce on that feather without a moment’s thought.
It’s kind of the same with the human brain. It can be pretty predictable, too. As a cop, I learned to recognize certain signals that people give off when they’re being less than honest. For example, if you’re making something up that’s not true, nine times out of ten your eyes will wander to the right without your even knowing it. But if you’re telling the truth, trying to remember something that actually happened, most of the time your eyes will wander to the left. As Kenny remembered his conversation with Mr. Harwick, I noticed his eyes. He wasn’t lying.
“What was his reaction when you told him who you were?”
“Nothing at first. I started to think he was going to hang up on me. Then he said, ‘What do you want?’ I told him I wanted to talk and that it couldn’t wait, so he said to meet him at his house that night. He was whispering, so I knew he didn’t want Mrs. Harwick to know about it.”
“What time did you meet him?”
“Late. When I left it was almost midnight.”
His words hung in the air. I knew Ethan and I were both silently thinking the same thing: And where exactly was Mr. Harwick when you left?
He looked from me to Ethan and then back again. “Look. I didn’t kill him. I know what you must think, but it’s not like I planned it to happen this way. I admit—it was totally cool to be able to watch him, to be right there under his nose. But once I saw what kind of person he was, the way he treated people, the way he made his money, I didn’t want anything to do with him. I was sorry I ever met him. Dixie, you have to believe me.”
I said, “I understand, but you’re going to have a tough time convincing the police of that. Mr. Harwick was a very wealthy man. You show up, his only living son, the abandoned heir to his fortune, and then all of a sudden he’s found dead in the bottom of a swimming pool and you were the last person to see him. It’s a little hard to believe you wouldn’t want all that money.”
“Yeah, that’s what he said, too. But I’m not stupid. I know what Sonnebrook is, and I don’t want anything to do with that crap. I told him he could take his money and rot in hell—” He stopped himself and took a deep breath.
I glanced over at Ethan, and he looked at me out of the corner of his eye.
Kenny regained himself and said, “So that’s why I gave him everything.”
“Gave him what?”
“A big envelope with all the letters he sent me. All the letters where he admitted he was my father, where he said he wanted to leave everything to me. All of it. There were even checks he sent me that I never cashed. The only thing I kept was this photo, just to remind me of what could have been. He said he didn’t care. He could still leave his money to me and I couldn’t stop him. I said, ‘If there’s anything I learned from you, it’s how to disappear. So good luck with that.’ Then I left.”
I said, “Okay. Kenny, or Daniel … what am I supposed to call you?”
He shrugged. “Doesn’t matter anymore. Just call me Kenny. I’m used to it now.”
“You’re going to leave here, and you’re going straight to the police. I’ll back your story up. If you tell them everything you’ve told us, they’ll believe you.”
Kenny nodded. “You have to promise me one thing, though. That message I left on your machine. When I said I was about to do something big, I was talking about leaving town. I was going to leave those letters, say good-bye to Becca, and disappear.”
“It’s okay. I figured that out.”
“That’s why I wanted to talk to you. If the police get ahold of that tape, they’ll think it’s a confession. They’ll think I planned it all along. They can’t ever hear it.”
I wasn’t sure what to say. I believed everything he had told us, or at least, I believed he believed everything he had told us. I believed his father had disappeared in the ocean when he was a child. I believed his mother had committed suicide on the beach where his father had disappeared a decade earlier. I think I even believed that his father was in fact Mr. Harwick. Still, there was a rage in Kenny, bubbling just beneath the surface, that I had never seen before. I couldn’t be sure that even he was aware of the kind of power that rage might have over him—the kind of power that could make him capable of murder.
Ethan cleared his throat and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “Okay, this is where I come in. As an attorney, I can tell you without a doubt that you won’t be doing yourself any favors if you try to hide anything from the police. I’m sure Dixie would love to make that promise to you right now, but you’ve got to face the facts: If the detectives don’t already have a record of every phone call you made in the days leading up to the murder, they soon will. They’ll see right through it. You’ll just be digging yourself in a hole that you can’t get out of.”
Kenny looked at me, and I tried to reassure him with a smile and a nod, but inside I was thinking, Yeah. What he said.
* * *
By the time Ethan and I watched Kenny descend the stairs down to the driveway and disappear into the night, it was just after 4:00 A.M., my normal rise and shine. I looked up at the moon and said a little prayer of thanks to the powers that be for giving me the forethought to ask Pete Madeira to cover my pet visits for the morning. We stepped back inside and shut the French doors. I looked at Ethan and he looked at me, and we both let out a huge sigh of relief.
I said, “Well, there’s not much point in you going home now. The sun will be up soon.”
He collapsed onto the couch. “I have to be at work in a few hours, and we still have to get your car.”
“But it’s Saturday. You still have to go to work?”
“Yep. Unfortunately.”
“Well, I can bike into town later and get my car, so don’t worry about that.” I sat down on the edge of the coffee table and crossed my arms over my chest. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“For getting you involved in all this.”
He grinned. “Dixie, how long have we known each other?”
“I don’t know. A long time.”
He reached out and pulled me toward him. “Yeah. Long enough for me to know better.”
20
I opened my front door a crack and squinted at the bright morning light slanting in through the trees. Michael and Paco were sitting out on the deck at the table my grandfather built when we were kids. They had laid out a breakfast fit for a king. There was hot coffee, freshly squeezed orange juice, a bowl of locally grown strawberries and blackberries, and a platter heaped with glistening slices of cantaloupe, mango, and kiwi. Holding court at the center of the table was a basket of Michael’s freshly baked scones, still warm from the oven. I was only just a little bit disappointed not to see a platter of bacon, but since I was apparently going to be seeing more of Ethan from now on, I figured I could do without it. A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips, my grandmother always said.