All of them were looking for me on behalf of Katy and their tone ranged from desperate to angry. Something was wrong, but no one would say what exactly. When I tried Katy’s house and cell numbers, I got recordings. Now I was getting panicky. As a keeper of secrets, I was uncomfortable on the opposite side of the fence.
Although the Boeing was half empty, it took an eternity to deplane. When I finally managed to free myself, I did something I hadn’t done for quite some time: I flashed tin.
“Listen,” I said to a woman at the desk of the adjoining gate. “I need a quiet place to make some important calls.”
“Follow me.”
I was glad she took a closer look at my badge than at me. I was getting a little long in the tooth to be flashing a regular cop’s badge at anyone. Like an aging comedian taking stock of his act, I realized the time had come to retire that joke. The gag was on its last legs.
“You can use this lounge, officer,” she said, fiddling with a keypad lock. “No one will bother you in here and if you want to use the phone, just hit nine for an outside line.”
I thanked her and waited for her to close the door behind her before getting back to my cell phone.
My first thought was to call Aaron, but it wasn’t my second. Just the judgmental tone of his voice was enough to set my teeth on edge and I’d heard hints of it in his message. I was an enigma and a bit of a disappointment to my big brother. He didn’t understand my being a cop in the first place and when I was forced to retire, he couldn’t comprehend my missing the job so much. There was a lot he didn’t understand about me. We were wired differently, Aaron and me. But the flash point between us for the last two decades was my stubborn refusal to leave my PI license in the sock drawer with the dust bunnies and the rest of my unrealized ambitions and accept my life as a wine merchant. That was always enough for him. It never was and would never be enough for me.
I tried Katy’s numbers again to the same frustrating end. Again, I left messages. I hesitated to call Sarah before I knew anything. Trouble sucks, but it sucks worse when you’re seven hundred miles away from it and you feel helpless. I didn’t want to add to her frustration. Carmella was out of the office and not answering her cell, so that left Sheriff Vandervoort. At least he’d left me his cell number.
“Vandervoort.”
“Sheriff, it’s Moe Prager. What’s going on?”
“Where’ve you been, Mr. Prager?”
“What the fuck does that matter? What’s going on with Katy?”
“You better get up here.”
“One more time, Sheriff, what’s going-”
“Your ex-wife’s had a little trouble. She’s over at Mary Immaculate.”
“Trouble! Is she hurt? What happened?”
“No, she’s not hurt, not physically, anyway. We just had a little excitement and the doctors wanted to take a look at her.”
“Sheriff, I’m an ex-cop and I respect other cops, but if you don’t start speaking English to me, I’m gonna-”
“Mrs. Prager called us to her house and when we got there she was
… unhinged and talking a little crazy. Maybe it was all the heartache from yesterday or-”
“Crazy how?”
“She said she got a call.”
“A call. A call from who?”
There was silence on the other end of the phone.
“Sheriff!”
“She said she got a call from her brother Patrick.”
I’d been to the Mary Immaculate Medical Center only once, back in 1981. I was up in the Catskills looking into an old fire in which some of my high school classmates had perished. One of the dead was my fiercest teenage crush, Andrea Cotter. That’s when I first met Mr. Roth. During the investigation, Francis Maloney suffered a stroke and I rushed to be with Katy. Now as I drove, I remembered that last time, how I prayed for the cold-hearted prick to die. He knew it too. Even with a partially paralyzed face and mild aphasia, he warned me to be careful what I wished for. He was right. Eventually all death wishes come to pass, and the fallout with them.
Vandervoort met me in the lobby. I wouldn’t say he looked worried. Concerned was more like it. Oddly, I found his concern reassuring. As cynical a bastard as I could be, I had never been completely cured of hope. We shook hands.
“What happened, exactly?”
“I got a call at home from dispatch around seven this morning.. Hey, you want to grab a cup of coffee? My treat.” He was avoiding the subject.
“Sure. We’ll talk as we go. You were saying…”
“They said your wife-ex-wife, sorry, called in hysterical, begging for us to get a car to her house. The dispatcher couldn’t get anything out of her about what was wrong, if there’s been a break-in or what. So they sent a car out, but thought maybe I should know too. Like we were talking about yesterday, people up here still know the Maloneys.”
“I’m glad they called you.”
“I got there a little after Robby, that’s the younger deputy who was out at the cemetery with you yesterday. He’s green, but he’s good with people and he’d gotten your wife-ex-wife-”
“Just call her Katy, Sheriff. It’ll make our lives easier.”
“Okay. Well, he’d gotten Katy calmed down, but he couldn’t get anything out of her except that she’d gotten a call. She wouldn’t put the phone down no matter what Robby did. How do you take yours?” he asked as we stepped into the hospital cafeteria.
“Milk, no sugar.”
“Wait here.”
He was back in a minute with our coffees. “Let’s sit before we go up to the Psych Ward.”
“We?”
“Sorry, Mr. Prager. You’re not family anymore. They won’t let you up there without me.”
I didn’t like it, but it wasn’t his doing. It was mine. Divorce impacts couples in different ways. It’s an equation of losses and gains. The gains, however large or small, are usually apparent early on. The losses, as I was discovering, reveal themselves slowly, in painful, unexpected ways. We sat at the closest table.
“When you got there, what happened?”
“I told Robby to wait outside and your-Katy broke down. She said she knew what she was going to say would sound crazy, but it was true. Her brother Patrick had called. She recognized his voice.”
“Christ!”
“Exactly. What was I going to say to that?”
“What did you say?”
“I’m no shrink, Mr. Prager. I said maybe she was just stressed out by what had happened yesterday and how it can get rough sometimes with people you love when they’re gone. But that set her off again. ‘I’m not crazy. It was my little brother,’ she started screaming. Then she started talking about little star or something.”
“Little Star is a pet name she had for Patrick,” I said. I hadn’t heard those two words uttered in two decades.
“Oh, okay. Well, I told her I believed her, but that I needed her to come with me to the hospital. I gotta tell you, I expected that to flip her out, but she came along pretty calmly.”
“Thanks for taking care of her, Sheriff Vandervoort.”
He held his hand out to me. “Pete. Call me Pete.”
“Moe.”
We shook hands again and started for the elevator.
“So what do you make of it, Moe? You know Katy. I don’t, so I’m just asking.”
“Pete, my wife is the least crazy person I ever met. If she says she got a call, I believe her.”
“From her dead brother?”
