porno with the school janitor.
After deciding to dine alone, Pearl left the office and walked toward the Eighty-first Street entrance to the park, where she could get a hot dog and Diet Coke from a street vendor and sit on a bench and brood while she ate. Mostly because of Nancy Weaver’s arrival at the office, she was in a dark mood. Moody. She felt a twinge. Her mother had always described her that way when she was a child. Pearl would overhear her talking to some of her lady friends: She’s such a smart child, but so moody. Some days she’s so prickly she shoots quills.
The man she loved (most of the time) and lived with (part of the time) was having lunch with a professional sex machine, and here was Pearl thinking about her mother.
And, as so often happened-or seemed to happen-when she thought about her mother, her mother called her on the phone.
When Pearl heard the first four notes of the old Dragnet TV show theme and fished her cell phone from her purse, she wasn’t at all surprised to see that the caller was Golden Sunset Assisted Living.
She sighed, or maybe it was a growl. She flipped the phone open and pressed it to her ear so hard that the side of her head hurt.
“Hello, Mom.”
“Pearl, I’ve been calling and calling here from the wilds of New Jersey and your message machine is making that shrill sound like it does when it’s stuffed too full of messages and I was worried sick about you. For all I knew you were lying dead on the floor.”
“You should have called my cell phone number, Mom.” Before jamming up my answering machine.
“Which at this time I am doing, Pearl. I saw on TV here at the nursing home-”
“Assisted living,” Pearl corrected.
“Way station on the road to death. What I saw on the TV was a doctor explaining how, when a woman gets into her forties, it becomes more and more complicated, which is to say dangerous, for her to have a child.”
“You mean grandchild,” Pearl said, driving to the point. “ Your grandchild.”
“Yes. Little Rebecca, waiting in the wings, in a manner of speaking.”
“My wings,” Pearl said, wondering how many other women were walking around not even pregnant with the child they weren’t going to conceive who was already named. Already Pearl was sick of Rebecca, and the kid hadn’t even been born.
“Not that you aren’t my own darling angel, Pearl. A mother’s love encompasses and forgives.”
“Forgives what?”
“So many things.”
Pearl squeezed the phone, causing the built-in camera to activate and snap a picture of her hair.
“As for Captain Quinn-”
“He’s no longer a captain, Mom.”
“He’s not getting any younger, either.”
“I’ll tell him you said that.”
“Oh, he’ll understand. Your Captain Quinn is a mensch and would, I am sure, make a fine father. You two have been romantically involved for a while now, so I know that marriage is on the near horizon-”
“Not that I can see.”
“-and once that happy event occurs, God willing, there still is time, if barely, to create that which you will hold as dear as I hold you.”
“Quinn and I are content as we are, Mom.”
“You think you’re content, dear. As did your father and I, until you came along, and like little Rebecca-”
“Mom, stop it. If I get pregnant, you’ll be the first to know.”
“No, you will be the first, and then you’ll understand every word I’m telling you now of a mother’s best wishes for the daughter she loves. In an instant it will become clear to you.”
“I really don’t have time to talk, Mom. I’m helping to track a killer who’s murdered-”
“Your eggs, Pearl.”
“My what? ”
“Have you checked to be sure you’re fertile? I mean, with a doctor, of course.”
“I don’t want to talk about my eggs.”
“I think we can be reasonably sure that the virile Captain Quinn-”
“You’re starting to break up, Mom.”
“There is someone I want you to talk with, Pearl.”
“About what?”
“You and Captain Quinn. And your… arrangement.”
“What arrangement?”
“Shacking up, Pearl. To put it crudely but not without accuracy. After all, if you’re going to have a child-”
“But I’m not pregnant, Mom. And I don’t intend to get that way. And Quinn and I aren’t living together.”
“Cohabiting, then.”
“Sometimes,” Pearl said.
“Meaning your clothes are in his closet. I shrug, Pearl.”
“Mom-”
“As a favor to your mother, and it’s seldom enough that I ask for one, will you just talk to this person, Pearl?”
“Who is this we’re discussing?”
“Rabbi Robert Gold.”
“I thought you said a person.”
“A rabbi is a person, Pearl.”
“Rabbi Gold and I have nothing to discuss.”
“You can say that never having met the man?”
“I can,” Pearl said. “I did.”
“Pearl, someday Rebecca-”
Pearl flipped the phone closed, breaking the connection.
Talking to her mother was like a debate with the Spanish Inquisition. Win or lose, it was torture.
40
Jefferson City, 1992
The room was small and gray and square. A single rectangular wooden table and two wooden chairs were bolted to the concrete floor. The overhead light fixture was made up of two softly buzzing fluorescent tubes encased in a wire cage. It provided the only illumination in the room. The light was pale and ghastly. The temperature was warm. The odor was a blend of perspiration and lingering fear.
Vincent Salas sat directly across from Westerley. A guard in a uniform that was way too small for him stood outside the single door that had a tall, narrow window in it so he could glance in now and then and see that everything was going smoothly.
Westerley had told the guard it was okay to go ahead and remove Salas’s handcuffs. There was no reason for Salas to make trouble. And if he did, Westerley would welcome it.
Salas was thinner than when he’d stood trial and had already acquired the dusty gray pallor of the longtime convict. He went with the room. His dark hair was cut military short, and the flesh around his sad dark eyes was finely lined. Westerley thought Salas was one of those cons who would age fast behind the walls.
“Are we here to talk about my parole?” Salas asked in a husky voice. He still had at least the vestige of a sense of humor.
“We’re here to talk about your letters.”
“My cigarettes, did you say?”
Westerley gave him a grim smile and pulled two unopened packs of Camels from his pocket and tossed them in front of Salas on the table. A standard form of prison bribery that never seemed to change. Or maybe by now it
