in my chair, averted my gaze.
'Gregory was eventually taken away from me,' he finally continued. 'They put him in a home not far from here. They said he was emotionally disturbed as well as retarded. I vowed I was always going to stand by him, to help him in any way I could. I'd lost, or helped to destroy, everything else; I wasn't going to throw away my son.'
'Mr. Trex,' I said quietly, studying the wall to my right, 'I'm no mental health expert, but in my opinion your son needs professional help badly. He needs intensive therapy, maybe medication, and maybe even hospitalization for a time.'
'I know that, Frederickson,' Trex said in a strong, flat voice.
I looked back at him, found him looking at me. Tears glistened on his cheeks, but his eyes were now dry. 'Then why don't you do something about it?'
'I. . can't. He's of age. He refuses to even talk about going to a therapist or taking medication again. In order to hospitalize him I'd have to get a court order, and there's no guarantee I'd succeed.'
'You could try.'
'Gregory would never forgive me if I did that, Frederickson. Somehow, I have to find some other way to bring him around. You see, he doesn't think there's anything wrong with him, and he's surrounded by people who don't think there's anything wrong with him. He thinks there's something wrong with me. The people he hangs around with all feed into his fantasies. Their words are going to. .'
'Does Gregory live at home, Mr. Trex?'
Jack Trex slowly shook his head. 'He did-up until a few months ago. Now he lives in an apartment that's subsidized by Elysius Culhane.'
'Does he work?'
'Odd jobs for Culhane-mowing the lawn, raking leaves, that kind of thing. That's another reason I don't think I could get a court order for Gregory's hospitalization; Culhane would have it quashed. I just don't dare try.'
'Mr. Trex,' I said evenly, pushing my coffee mug away, 'I don't understand why you're telling me all this. Just why did you want to see me?'
Trex pushed his mug across the table until it clicked up against mine. He wiped at his mustache, met my gaze. 'I want to ask you please not to kill my son.'
The words caught me so completely by surprise that I could do nothing but stare back dumbfounded into the anguished face of the man sitting across from me.
'I've found out some things about you, Frederickson,' Trex continued quickly, his words now tumbling over one another. 'I know about your reputation. People like my son who don't know you and don't take you seriously because you're a dwarf make a big mistake. Sometimes a fatal mistake. I know you've killed men; I think you've killed more men than I have, and I was in a combat unit. I know you could have killed Gregory last night. I can see that you're hurting, and I know Gregory did that to you. Maybe it would have served him right if you had killed him, but you didn't, and I thank you for that.'
'Mr. Trex,' I said when I finally managed to collect my thoughts and find my voice, 'I don't plan on killing anybody.'
'Please hear me out. Gregory's a very sick young man.'
'He's not so sick that he doesn't know what he's doing, Mr. Trex. All of us have to be responsible for our own actions; that's the antidote to the language of cannibals.'
'Gregory is a victim of Vietnam, Frederickson, just as surely as I am, and just as surely as the fifty-five thousand Americans who died over there. I was so busy with the smoke and mirrors that I couldn't be a proper father to him. I know Gregory. He won't be able to live with what you did to him last night. He'll come after you; he'll keep coming after you. That's why I'm asking- begging-you not to kill him, to try … to find some other way.'
I sighed. 'Will he come for me in New York?'
Jack Trex shook his head. 'No. He's actually afraid to go into the city. Gregory never goes far from Cairn. This is his turf, if you will; he feels safe here, in control.'
'Then your son is safe from me, Mr. Trex. You don't have to worry. I'm leaving Cairn.'
Trex swallowed hard, nodded with relief. 'Thank you. I didn't want to suggest. . but I was hoping for that. May I, uh, ask when you're leaving?'
'As soon as I leave here,' I said, rising to my feet. He pushed himself up, braced himself with his left hand on the table as he extended his right. 'Thanks for the coffee, Mr. Trex. Good luck to you.'
I walked to the door, hesitated with my hand on the knob, turned back. Jack Trex was staring at me, a drawn, haunted expression on his face. 'Mr. Trex,' I continued, 'what do you think of the idea that there's some kind of death squad operating in the towns along the river?'
He thought about it, and his brows knitted in a puzzled frown. 'Death squad? What do you mean, 'death squad'?'
'Never mind,' I said, and left the house.
Walking back up the driveway, I found I was not only depressed by my strange conversation with the driven Jack Trex but also deeply disturbed for reasons I was not sure I fully understood.
CHAPTER FIVE
It was not quite noon, and it was an easy Saturday drive down the Palisades Parkway and across the George Washington Bridge into Manhattan. I drove down the West Side, then over to the brownstone on West Fifty-sixth, a block over from Carnegie Hall, where Frederickson and Frederickson's offices and living quarters were located. I parked Beloved Too in the brownstone's underground garage, retrieved the plastic shopping bag containing Mary Tree's demo tapes from the trunk, and went looking for my brother. I found him in our basement mini-gym laying out our softball uniforms and equipment. We both played on a team we sponsored in one league, as well as on another team in another league; Garth led one league in home runs, and I led both leagues in number of walks. We were supposed to play a doubleheader the next day.
My brother had changed greatly in the past few years, I thought as I watched him sit down on a weight bench and begin to oil a glove. And not without reason. We had both been hammered good, both physically and psychologically, in the course of investigating a string of related cases that had turned nasty and bizarre on us. But Garth had been hammered more, and a poisoning he suffered had bent both his body and his mind. He'd emerged from that searing experience a mellower man in many ways; but he was considerably harder in other ways, and quite different from the much-honored NYPD detective he'd been for almost two decades. I considered him an almost perfect empath, with an uncanny ability to understand and feel the suffering of other people, and then to reach out and soothe them.
Loonies loved my brother, as did people who were down and out, or on their way there. With life's losers and hurting, he was the gentlest of men. If, on the other hand, you happened to be a person who caused others to suffer, Garth was a good person to avoid. He brooked no nonsense, did not suffer fools at all gladly, and no longer bothered reading bad guys their rights; when really worked up, he took no prisoners.
He now wore his thinning, wheat-colored hair long, sometimes in a ponytail held in place by a thin leather thong. In addition, he had a full beard liberally streaked with silver and gray. The effect of all this hair was to frame his limpid hazel eyes, which could be startling in their gleaming expressiveness-of love, sorrow, or rage; when Garth was upset, you knew it. Fortunately, the occasions on which he really grew angry were rare, for his reactions could be astonishingly quick and brutal. He now seemed to me to be a kind of emotionally polarized human being who lit up brightly at both ends of the emotional spectrum, but could seem dull emotionally to many people when he was in the middle. He could seem virtually Christ-like when dealing with people in need; indeed, with his long hair and limpid eyes I thought he even resembled some pop artist's conception of Jesus-assuming the artist's Jesus was over six feet and upwards of a hundred and ninety pounds of finely toned muscle.
'Yo, brother,' Garth said, looking up as I limped across the room toward him. 'You look a bit stiff.'
'How observant you are today. I look a bit stiff because I am a bit stiff.'
'What happened?'
