I had her sit on the bed.
“I went to see him,” I said, hands on her shoulders. “We had a long talk. Before I left, he asked me if I knew how he could get in touch with you. I gave him the number. What did he say to you?’’
She told me.
“I kind of thought it would be something like that,” I said. “Carrie, your father killed himself.”
“Wh… what?”
“I was barely out of the building. A small crowd was gathering on the sidewalk… it was just after dawn… he’d thrown himself out of his office window. I’m sorry.”
“Why… why on earth would…?”
“He had connections to organized crime. You probably know that. So did your late husband. You know that, too. Your father found out that some syndicate people from Chicago were trying to have you killed.”
“Me? Why?”
“You inherited some business interests from your husband that the Chicago people wanted to see in your father’s hands. Killing you would have made that possible. Your father knew that, and must have figured the only way to stop it was to kill himself, and in so doing end the need for anyone wanting to kill you.”
She was crying by now, of course.
“This is going to be difficult for you, I know. There’ll be a lot of questions, from a lot of quarters. Just tell the truth, tell them what your father called and said, tell them about me, that we spent some time together, at the Concort, at the cottage. Don’t mention that I worked for your husband, though. Better say I was, you know, just a casual pickup. Better not show any knowledge of any of this mob stuff, either, that killers were after you, none of that. Otherwise you could cause problems for yourself and maybe me.”
“Will you… stay with me… help me through this?”
“I can’t. I think you can understand why.”
She threw her arms around my waist and sobbed into my chest. This went on for some time.
Finally, I got her out into the Buick and went over all of it again for her, several times, as I drove into town. She was still crying, but now and then she would ask a question about the story I’d told her and I’d give her as good an answer as I could. She seemed to buy it all.
Then, as I glanced at her, turning down Brady toward downtown, I noticed something about her I’d never noticed before. She had just the slightest resemblance to somebody, somebody I used to know. And some things suddenly made a crazy kind of sense to me, or maybe I was crazy, but I thought about the two college guys who, back east some years ago, had loved the same woman; and then one of them evidently faded away for a time, for some reason or other, while the other married the girl, partially for money, partially perhaps because she was pregnant with Carrie, which according to Carrie’s age would have been about right; and then the mother had developed a drinking problem and sad, sad eyes and died; after which the father, Curtis Brooks, couldn’t stand the sight of his daughter, because she reminded him of his wife, the resemblance was that striking, and yet Brooks had kept the wife’s portrait hanging in his office…
He’d said something strange to me, before I killed him.
“I wasn’t even her father…”
Then who was?
I never did see the inside of that brown brick castle. Just as I never would understand what had gone on in there. I didn’t know what the furniture was like, whether the colors were lively or somber; I didn’t know what the relationship was like, whose personality dominated, or did they share and share alike. I didn’t want to know, either.
Maybe it was just my imagination that made me suddenly see a resemblance between the Broker and Carrie; anyway I kind of hope it was.
But before I dropped her off at the Concort, where her car was still in the lot, she said, “Maybe… maybe in his own way, my father did love me.”
Maybe she didn’t know how right she was.
