'You're actually the person I wanted to see. Let's go over there in the shade and talk.' They left the man's car and headed toward a mesquite-shaded concrete bench just outside the hospital door. 'What's your name?'
Davy.
'Davy what?'
'Davy Ladd.'
'And where do you live, Davy?'
'In Tucson.'
'What's your mother's name?'
'Diana.'
The man had taken the notebook back out of his pocket and was scribbling furiously in it. Now, he paused and frowned, cocking his head to one side. 'What's your daddy's name?'
'I don't have a daddy,' Davy told him. 'My daddy's dead.'
'I'll be damned!' the man exclaimed. 'You're Garrison Ladd's son, aren't you!'
Davy could hardly believe his ears. He knew from his grandmother's Christmas letters that Garrison was his father's name, but he had never heard it spoken by anyone other than his mother when she was reading those letters aloud. His blue eyes grew large.
'You mean you knew my daddy?'
'I sure did,' the man answered. 'We had a class together at the U back when I still thought I was going to be a novelist when I grew up. I guess Gary did, too. We were both wrong.'
'You mean my daddy wanted to write books?'
The man looked startled. 'Sure. Didn't you know that?'
'I don't know anything about my daddy. He died before I was born.'
For a moment, the man's eyes grew serious, and then he nodded. 'I'll tell you what, Davy, you tell me what you know about Rita Antone, and I'll tell you what I know about your father. Deal?'
He held out his hand, and the boy placed his own small one in it.
'Deal,' Davy said gravely, and they shook on it.
Louella Walker sat up straight and chatted almost hopefully as they returned from their brief trip to the bank. The lady there had been most helpful.
'The same thing happened to my grandmother,' Anna Bush had said sympathetically, when they explained the situation. She graciously made arrangements to drop service charges on the bounced Steinway check.
'The only sensible thing to do is to start a new account with just your signature and your son's on it, if that's all right.'
In the end, that's what they did.
'She was very nice,' Louella was saying to her son as they drove home, 'although I still feel a little underhanded.
It's like I'm robbing your father of his dignity.'
She said that as they turned off Swan onto Fifth and came within sight of their own driveway three blocks away.
Brandon saw the problem long before Louella did.
'Oh, my God!' he muttered grimly.
'What's the matter?'
'My car,' he said. 'The department's car. It's gone.'
As a homicide detective, he took his county-owned vehicle home in case he was called to a crime scene over the weekend when the department was seriously understaffed For years, everyone in the family had hung car keys on a kitchen pegboard upon entering the house. Pure reflex, it was a habit no one thought to change in he face of Toby Walker's failing mental capacity.
'Your car?' Louella asked, puzzled, not yet grasping the seriousness of the situation. 'Wherever would it be?'
When Diana came down the hall from Rita's room, Davy wasn't waiting in the lobby. She found him outside, drinking a forbidden Coke. He seemed distant, uncommunicative.
:'What's the matter?' she asked.
'Nothing,' he said.
:'Are you worried about Rita?'
'I guess,' he told her.
'Well, don't be. Dr. Rosemead says she's going to be fine.'
Diana was tired when she and Davy got back home.
She put the boy down for a nap and decided to take one herself.
