“Uh-huh, yeah. Guess I shoulda known tellin’ ya’ that would come back ta’ haunt me.”
“Are you saying you don’t really believe it?”
“You know better’n that.”
“So maybe you need to listen to your gut, just like she is.”
“My gut ain’t talkin’ right now.”
“But Constance’s is, and she believes Felicity is innocent even after everything that happened.” I offered the words more as an admonishment than a question.
“Yeah, Row, I get it. If Mandalay thinks she’s clean, why can’t I?”
I didn’t reply. I didn’t really feel the need to because he had said almost verbatim what I had been thinking.
Ben turned his face back to the window and stared into the growing darkness of the evening as he let out a long sigh. “Like I said, white man. My gut’s not talkin’. I’m just not gettin’ a feelin’ on it, either way.”
“Then give her the benefit of the doubt.”
“I’m tryin’…” He shook his head. “Believe me, I’m tryin’…”
“Maybe it’s just that you’re too close.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
After a long pause I offered, “Felicity once said something about you that you might like to know. She told me she felt that when it came to your friends you were loyal to a fault.”
“I try.”
“Well, I’ve never had a reason to disagree with that assessment…until now.”
“Ya’think I’m not feelin’ guilty enough about it on my own, Row?”
“Maybe you are,” I replied. “But I think we both know I’m not in a terribly forgiving mood right now.”
“Yeah,” he grunted. “No shit.”
The bell on the diner’s door jangled, and I glanced back over my shoulder to see Jackie coming through the opening.
“Well, your mouthpiece is here,” Ben offered as he scooped the still-wrapped burgers from the table and cradled them in one large hand. “Guess I’d better go so you two can talk.”
“Don’t give up on Felicity, Ben,” I returned. “Just…just believe.”
Without looking back down, he spoke in a low voice that sounded almost like a plea. “Gimme somethin’, Row. Dammit, just gimme a reason I should believe.”
“You don’t need a reason from me, Ben,” I replied. “You already know in your heart that she’s innocent. You just have to stop being blinded by the evidence.”
“I’m a cop, Row. We live and die by the evidence.”
“Then stop being a cop for a minute. Stop looking at what someone else is calling evidence and take a long, hard look at the truth.”
Saturday, November 19 10:05 A.M.
Saint Louis, Missouri
CHAPTER 13:
I gave up and simply stopped paying attention to the angry voice that was currently bellowing from the speaker of the answering machine in the living room. Given that it was my father-in-law, calling yet again to place blame and scream epithets at me, I didn’t feel that his diatribe warranted very close consideration on my part. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t already heard everything he had to say more than once. I’d even made the unfortunate mistake of blindly picking up on the initial ring the first two times he’d called, so I’d twice been on the receiving end of every name and insult he could think of-and, some that I suspected he’d just made up. Of course, my grasp of Gaelic extended only as far as my wife’s commonly used phrases, so I couldn’t be positive about anything other than the fact that he’d repeatedly damned me to hell for all eternity.
I’d already told him once that as far as I was concerned, I was already there, and the past twenty-four hours had definitely seemed endless. I didn’t bother to repeat it.
After that second round, I’d learned my lesson and just started screening the calls, allowing the machine to handle his ongoing tirades. There was nothing I could tell him that he didn’t already know, and I was just as frustrated as he could ever be. Probably more so when you considered that last evening Jackie hadn’t even waited to get out of the diner before breaking the news to me that I wasn’t going to be able to see Felicity until today; and that would only happen if she could call in a favor or two and get a judge to sign off on it. Needless to say, I hadn’t taken the news well at all. Of course, I’m sure she had expected that fact, and it probably had quite a bit to do with her decision to tell me while standing in a diner full of cops. Still, even then I made a scene, but in the end there was nothing I could do to change the harsh reality, and all that I accomplished was to get us kicked out.
After that, things took a turn for the worse, which was something I hadn’t really thought possible. As if the first piece of painful information wasn’t enough, Jackie was now completely unwilling to discuss any further details of the case with me. My own wife, it seems, had requested that everything remain under the umbrella of attorney client privilege for the time being, and since I was neither attorney nor client, I was completely removed from the loop. Had she dropped that bomb on me prior to us getting kicked out of the diner, my explosive response probably would have ended up getting me arrested.
The insult topping it all was that I wasn’t even privy to her reasoning behind subjecting me to the information blackout. Each of these things, in turn, had dumped their own load of distress onto my already strained emotional state. Adding all of them together was just about to put me over the edge, and I still honestly don’t know how I managed to avoid having a bigger meltdown than I actually did.
I was momentarily snapped out of my introspective haze by an angry click popping loudly from the speaker in the front room. Shamus had once again ended his call by slamming down the phone. If I was lucky, maybe this time he had broken it and wouldn’t be able to call back for a while.
Of course, that wouldn’t necessarily bode well either. At this point, I had lost track of how many times the man had phoned just this morning. He had pretty much reached critical mass, and I had a bad feeling he actually might be ceasing the relentless calls very soon anyway. I say a bad feeling because I figured once he stopped, it wouldn’t be long before he replaced phone calls with a face-to-face attack. I feared he would soon be knocking on my door, and a physical confrontation with my wife’s hot-tempered father was something I really didn’t want to deal with right now.
I didn’t actually fear him; it was the situation itself I wanted to avoid. He was nowhere near as big as Ben, so I could pretty much guarantee that we would both end up going to the hospital, and that wasn’t going to help anyone, least of all, Felicity. Don’t get me wrong, I certainly wasn’t looking for another fight, but if it came in search of me, I wasn’t about to turn and run from it either.
The thought prompted me to look down at the back of my right hand. It was slightly swollen and had already started taking on a reddish-purple cast. I ran the fingers of my left hand over the bruised knuckles and noticed that it was definitely sore. Still, I suspected I would be able to ignore that if the need presented itself.
I sighed and bent to the bathroom basin then cupped my hands beneath the running faucet. Once they started to overflow, I pressed the handfuls of cold water against my face. Of course, most of it either ran between my fingers or dribbled along my arms to turn my shirtsleeves into a soggy mess, but I didn’t care. Wet clothing was the least of my worries right now.
Looking back up, I stared into the mirror at the dampened, haggard visage now living in the silvery, reflected world. Its eyes were sunken and bloodshot, stubble shadowed its cheeks and neck, and its face sagged with exhaustion. I kept telling myself that all of those properties applied only to it and not to me, because I simply didn’t have time to feel like it looked. Of course, I had learned long ago that denial would only get you so far; but, that wasn’t going to stop me from riding it all the way to the last stop.
The peal of the pendulum clock in the dining room had died away several minutes ago, but using the memory of the evenly spaced tones as reference, I did some quick math. The product of the equation was a number which told me I hadn’t slept in better than twenty-four hours, a fact that readily explained at least part of my current state
