I closed the folder and gave Vince a reassuring pat on the shoulder. “This is wonderful, Vince,” I said. “You have truly saved the day.” And I wondered whether I’d laid it on too thick, because he seemed to swell a few sizes, and he actually blushed.
“Well, I, you know,” he said. “I wanted to help, and…I mean, this just isn’t right, and everything I ever worked for, you know.” He paused and rubbed at the corner of his eye, and I realized with horror that he was on the verge of tears, and who knows what other terrifying manifestations of emotional excess. Sure enough, he sniffed, and said, “What else could I—”
“And it absolutely is,” I said, cutting him off before he could burst into a chorus of
I Pagliacci,
followed by grabbing my hands and leading us in a rousing fit of tears and a communal singing of “Kumbaya.” “This is just what the doctor ordered.”
“That’s…that’s…I mean, because…” he said, pausing as he visibly filled up with even more emotion.
I took the pause as an opening for my getaway, and began to move toward the door. “Thanks, Vince,” I said. “You have saved us both. Bye!” And I was out the door before he could say more than two more confused syllables.
As I started up my car and drove away I saw him standing in the doorway, gazing mournfully after me, and I was filled with immense relief that I had escaped an episode of naked sentiment that could only have been humiliating for both of us. I did wonder why I should feel so strongly about it, and because I have studied the endlessly fascinating subject of Me for such a long time, I came to a simple conclusion. One of the things I liked about Vince was that he generally faked all the human rituals and expressions. He had a terrible phony laugh, and a habit of making suggestive remarks that were so clearly synthetically generated I marveled that he got away with it. In other words, as far as simple person-to-person interaction went, he was an awful lot like me.
And to see him like this, floundering helplessly in the savage grip of genuine feelings, was very disturbing, because on some deep level I had been thinking,
If it can happen to Vince, it might happen to Me!
and that thought was nearly unbearable.
Still, Vince had brought home the bacon when the chips were down and my fat was truly in the fire. I tried to think of more food metaphors, and wondered whether that meant I was already hungry again. I looked at the dashboard clock; it was nearly five, which was bad news all around. In the first place, it meant I probably
was
hungry again, and in the second it meant rush hour was already in full swing.
I went up onto I-95 South anyway, hoping for the best. As usual, I didn’t get it. Traffic was crawling along at a pace a snail would have laughed at. I had hoped to drive straight down to the MacArthur Causeway and then over to Kraunauer’s office to deliver the file. After ten minutes and only about half a mile, I got down onto surface streets and headed over to Biscayne Boulevard instead. The traffic was moving better there, and I got to the causeway and all the way to Kraunauer’s office in only about forty minutes.
It was eight minutes of six when I stepped off the elevator and began the elaborate ritual of getting myself passed through the layers of insulation around the Great Man, and the Ice Queen herself nudged me through the door and into the Presence just as the clock began to tick through the last minute before six o’clock. Kraunauer was at his desk, packing things into a gorgeous leather briefcase with one hand and speaking on a cell phone with the other. He looked up at me and blinked, as if surprised. Then he nodded, placing a heap of paper into the case and holding up one finger to me to indicate,
Just a minute.
“Sí. Sí, comprendo,”
he said into the phone, and to show that I am no slouch as an investigator, I immediately concluded that he was speaking Spanish, which meant that the person he was speaking with probably was, too. I patted myself on the back for my burst of acumen; if I was this sharp, I would lick this thing yet.
“Sí, seguro, no hay problema,”
he said.
“¿Quince? ¿Es suficiente? Bueno, te doy quince,”
he said, and he broke the connection and put the phone down. He put both hands on his desk and turned his full focus on me. “Well, Mr. Morgan,” he said, with a truly brilliant imitation smile. For the first time in my life, I had met somebody who could fake it better than I could, and it made me feel almost dizzy, like a young boy facing a famous quarterback. “Sit down. Tell me what you’ve brought me.”
I didn’t really need to sit down; I’d imagined I would just drop the folder, give a brief explanation of its provenance, and dash away into the evening without taking up too much of Kraunauer’s valuable—and therefore
expensive
—time. And I wondered whether I was generating billable hours that would be added to a fee I was quite sure was already astronomical. But I was just a bit intimidated by his awesome faux sincerity, and felt I should do what he told me. On top of everything else, Brian was paying, and to be honest, I was not pleased with him for dropping me so carelessly into a firing range with a bull’s-eye on my forehead and a bevy of drug-crazed Mexican assassins on the other end. So I eased carefully into the unquestionably pricey chair across from Kraunauer.
“Well,” I said, “this is a folder of documents from the police file on my case. Um,” I added, “they’re all originals.”
“Really,” he said, raising one carefully barbered eyebrow. “How did they come into your possession?”
“One of my friends in forensics,” I said, conscious of a slight exaggeration. Vince was my
only
friend left in forensics—maybe my only friend left anywhere. It made me truly grateful that I didn’t actually need friends. But telling all this to Kraunauer wasn’t necessary. Aside from painting an unflattering picture of Dexter, it was also not something Kraunauer really needed to know. So I skipped to the chase and held up the file. “The documents are all filled with deliberate falsifications, forgeries, and fiction. They altered my friend’s report—um, rather clumsily, too,” I said. He didn’t seem to feel the sting of that insult the way I did, so I shrugged. “And when my friend complained about it, they threatened him.”
Kraunauer leaned back in his chair and put his fingertips together, the picture of an erudite man deep in thought. “Threatened him how?” he said.
“At first with losing his job,” I said. “Then with violence. At the end, he says he was afraid they might even kill him.”
“Exactly who made these threats?”
“Mostly Detective Anderson,” I said.
“Uh-huh,” Kraunauer said. He frowned as if remembering something. “That’s the name of the officer who arrested you.”
“No coincidence,” I said. “It’s the same guy.”
“Hmm,” Kraunauer said. He tapped his fingertips together rhythmically and looked very thoughtful. “He’s obviously willing to go pretty far over the line to keep you in jail.”
“At this point,” I said, “I don’t think he can even
see
the line anymore.”
Kraunauer thought for just a second, and then he sat up straight and leaned over his desk. He took a business card from a small pile of them nestling in a little silver stand, plucked a fountain pen from the desk beside him, and scribbled on the back of the card. “My cell phone,” he said. He handed me the card. A phone number was on it, in still-drying vermilion ink. “You can reach me here twenty-four/seven.”
“Oh,” I said, somewhat surprised. “Thank you, but, um—”
He smiled again, this time a “gotcha” smile. “If he tries to intimidate you, arrest you without cause, rough you up, whatever. Call me.” He leaned back in his chair again and the smile changed to one of simple satisfaction. “We want to keep you on the outside.”
“Yes, we do,” I said. I put the card carefully—reverently—into my pocket. Twenty-four/seven; I was surely one of the Blessed.
“Back to this friend of yours,” he said, serious again. “The one who Anderson threatened. What did he do about that?”
“He took the file to the state attorney,” I said, and Kraunauer sat up straight.
“Did he?” he said softly.
“Yes. And he was once again told to back off, mind his own business, or he would lose his job.”
“Well, well, well,” Kraunauer said. He drummed the fingers of one hand on the desk, and then leaned back again. “Tell me about this friend.”
I told him as much as I could about Vince. It was not as easy as you might think, since as far as I could tell, there wasn’t all that much to tell about him. I tried to make him sound competent, trustworthy, and righteous, but I did not have a whole lot to work with. At least I could leave out any reference to the Carmen Miranda costumes, and I did.
But Kraunauer seemed fascinated, and asked several questions about his character, motivation, and job history. When we had parsed Vince more thoroughly than I would have thought necessary—or even possible—Kraunauer nodded and held out a hand. “Let me take a look at this file,” he said.
I placed it on the desk in front of him and settled onto the edge of my chair, surprisingly anxious. It was very odd, but I wanted to impress Frank Kraunauer, wanted him to think this folder was important and relevant and Dexter was a very good boy for finding it and bringing it to his attention. Even so, at least I managed to keep myself from leaping up and pointing out the good parts, and I just watched for several minutes as he frowned at each page in turn, nodding from time to time and making notes—on a legal pad, of all things.
When he was only a few pages from the end, the office door opened, and Her Royal Highness stuck her haughty and perfect head into the office. “It’s twenty past, Mr. Kraunauer,” she said with immense dignity.
He looked up with a surprised expression. “Is it? Already? Well,” he said. He closed the folder and dropped it onto his desk, watching as Herself smiled, at him only, and withdrew. Then he looked at me and let me have his small but charming smile of apology. “I’m afraid I have an appointment I can’t miss,” he said. “But I want to assure you, this stuff is going to help a lot.”
He stood up and came around the desk, and I stood up to meet him. “This is just terrific, Dexter,” he said, shaking my hand, and I was ready to believe him, because his handshake was firm, dry, and manly, and this was the first time he’d used my first name. “Absolutely great stuff,” he said.
And then he slipped his hand out of mine and put it on my shoulder, easing me out the door while continuing to assure me that everything was coming up roses and life was a wonderful thing. Moments later, I was standing in the elevator, still blinking from the magical experience, and glancing at my watch. Twenty-two past six. I’d been in Kraunauer’s Presence for twenty-two minutes. From what I knew of lawyers, that would be at least three billable hours. How much money had that cost me? Or cost Brian, perhaps. Ah, well. How can you put a price on that kind of overwhelmingly competent and focused expertise? It occurred to me that Kraunauer would know exactly how to put a price on it, and he would. But why worry? Being permanently in debt was still better than being permanently dead or in jail.
It cheered me up, and I was actually whistling as I climbed into my rental car. I’d told Deborah I’d drop off the custody papers around seven. Her little house in Coral Gables was about fifteen miles away, and there were no shortcuts. My best guess, based on years of experience with Miami traffic, was that at this time of day there was no possible way I could make it to her house in under forty-five minutes. Surprising or not, that lifted my cheerfulness one more full notch. And why not? She had done nothing to earn my considerate punctuality. She didn’t even answer my phone calls—and I wouldn’t put it past her to show up late just to irk me.
So fine—I would take my time, enjoy the drive. I might even stop for coffee. Let her wait.
I started the car, nosed out onto Ocean Drive, and began my long, slow drive to Deborah’s house.
I
t seems terribly odd, considering the general tone of recent events, but I actually felt somewhat chipper as I fought my way into the sludge that is Miami traffic. I had a brief moment of uneasiness as I drove away from Kraunauer’s office and headed for the MacArthur Parkway, a small and anxious hiss from the Dark Passenger that said things were not at all what they should be. And sure enough, a moment later, a car right behind me slammed on its brakes and leaned on the horn. I stepped reflexively on my own brakes and looked back, senses on high alert.
But it was no real threat, just an eager idiot, overanxious to get home after a hard day on the job. I watched the car in the mirror, a newish dark blue SUV, as it pulled out into traffic and joined the rest of us in the long, never-ending stream of cars headed for the causeway and home.
Aside from that, I saw no suspicious cars on my tail, and no one on the sidewalk seemed to be pointing a bazooka. I decided that the Passenger was just responding uneasily to our newfound freedom, no doubt simply picking up on tiny things, the perfectly normal universal hostility of the rush-hour drivers all around us, so I dismissed it and settled back to enjoy my own rare and unwarranted high spirits.
There was absolutely no reason for me to feel anything but angst, and yet there was an unquestioned spring of good cheer welling up from some rarely used spot inside. It wasn’t just my excellent prospects for making Debs wait for me, juggling children and gnashing her teeth. A larger part of this unwarranted and uncharacteristic brightness came from the general sense of belonging I got from the savage, merciless ferocity of driving in My City at rush hour. In the past I’d always gotten a sort of My-Country-My-People affinity from being up to my neck in a sea of drivers with a total lack of empathy and a naked lust to kill. It was nice to feel this sense of happy belonging settle over me once more; it meant that some tiny, deeply buried part of Dexter had decided that the world was restored to its natural state and Things were going to be all right.
And another cause of my lunkheaded happiness was certainly born of my sense of accomplishment. I had delivered a vital chunk of evidence into the hands of my powerful and supremely effective lawyer, and thereby put the first nail into Detective Anderson’s coffin, while removing one from my own. But yet another piece of my stupidly good mood, I realized, was because of the effects of being in the company of Kraunauer himself. His aura was almost tangible. There was something about him that impressed me, which all by itself was impressive enough. I had always considered myself the Master of Duplicity, the Paradigm of Synthetic Behavior. No one else had ever come close—until now. Kraunauer left me in the dust. He was the most highly polished faker I had ever met, and I could do nothing but watch and admire every time he favored me with one of his completely artificial smiles. And he had not merely
one
fake grin; I’d already seen at least
seven,
each with its own very specific application, each so perfect as to leave me breathless with admiration.
Aside from my appreciation for someone who was better than me at something I held dear, there was an unspoken assumption of command in his bearing. And it worked. Just being near him made me want to please him. It should have been deeply unsettling, but somehow it wasn’t.
I have no real feelings. And I am certainly not capable of love, or even hero worship. There was no one in this world I cared more for than Dexter. But in our short time together, Frank Kraunauer had impressed me in a way no one else ever had, with the possible exception of Harry, my adoptive father. On the face of it, that was beyond absurd, and I wondered about it. Harry had saved me, created me, taught me how to use my gifts, and consequently made my life into something that, until recently at least, I rather enjoyed in my own quiet way. Harry was the All-Father, the Fount of Wisdom, Maker of the only Map of the Dark Path, and I had known him for many years.
But I had only met Kraunauer recently, spent less than an hour in his company, and I didn’t really know him at all, except to know that he was, in his own way, as completely without feelings as I was. I knew this from his reputation, of course. But from being in his company I had also sensed that somewhere behind his eyes there lurked that familiar Dark Emptiness. He was a predator, totally without mercy, the kind of dedicated and enthusiastic shark who didn’t even need the smell of blood in the water to strike. He ripped out chunks of flesh because that’s what he was made to do, and he liked it that way. Naturally enough, that kind of inborn enthusiasm struck a chord in me.
Beyond all that, he was on my side, and it was universally acknowledged that he did not fail. Drug kingpins, brutal dictators, mass murderers—he always came through for his clients, no matter how heinous the crimes they had committed. Because of him, some truly awful, wicked, dreadful monsters roamed free. And if all went as it should, I would soon be one of them. All hail Kraunauer.
So I settled into my seat and relaxed, enjoying the drive. I made it over the causeway in under fifteen minutes, which was disappointing, since I really did want to keep Deborah waiting. But once I turned south onto I-95, things slowed down again to a very satisfying crawl. I inched along, making only a block or two every five minutes, and taking pleasure from traveling so slowly that for the most part, the speed wasn’t even enough to register on the speedometer. With any luck at all, I would make Debs wait for a good half hour or more.
Of course, not everyone was keeping their so-called sister waiting, and very few of the other drivers shared my newfound enthusiasm for creeping along like this. Most of them, in fact, seemed to take against it somewhat, and very few were hesitant about sharing their feelings with the other drivers who were clearly making them go so slow simply by being in front of them. There was a great deal of horn blasting, middle finger raising, and even good old-fashioned fist shaking. All standard fare, but done with real enthusiasm and passion, and therefore a pleasure to behold. I didn’t join in; I simply observed, taking a quiet civic pride in watching my fellow citizens interact with each other in such a genuine and meaningful way.
Just before NW 10th, we slowed even more, which was very gratifying. When I had inched forward enough, I could see that a Jaguar convertible had plowed into a van loaded with seafood. There was an impressive array of dents, broken glass, and twisted bumpers, considering that they couldn’t have been moving very fast when they collided. But the impact had caused the van’s back doors to spring open, and a wonderful variety of fresh and succulent seafood had slid across the Jaguar’s hood and filled the car’s beautiful leather interior. Luckily for all concerned, it looked like most of the fish would stay fresh, since a massive amount of ice had gone with it.
A nicely coiffed woman still sat in the Jaguar’s passenger seat, screaming hysterically, up to her shoulders in fish and ice. The driver was nose-to-nose with two men from the van, and the words they were exchanging did not seem to be the kind that lead to lasting friendship. And because this was, after all, Miami, three young men and one woman, from three different cars, had left their vehicles to gather up the spilled fish and take it home for dinner.
This delightful accident delayed me quite nicely, and it was nearly eight o’clock when I arrived at Deborah’s little house in Coral Gables. It was a modest home, and since my ex-sister had neither the interest nor the patience for gardening, it was somewhat overgrown. There was an assortment of fruit trees that had spilled their crop all over the yard unnoticed, and a crumbling coral rock wall around the place. Her car was in the short driveway, and I parked behind it and got out.
And strangely…I hesitated. I found that I was a little reluctant to face her, to have my nose rubbed one more time in her dislike and contempt for me, which, it should be repeated, was totally undeserved. But it stung anyway. I didn’t like seeing her look at me the way she had when she visited me in jail. Like I was some kind of loathsome contagious affliction, something smeared onto her shoes, perhaps a great and disgusting glob of raccoon feces.
Standing beside my car, I stared at her front door. I knew it didn’t matter what she thought of me—and yet, somehow, it did. It was astonishing, but apparently I still wanted her to like me. She never would, ever again, if she ever had in the first place. She’d made that quite clear, and feelings as strong as she’d shown do not change. So why didn’t I simply saunter up to the door and get this unpleasant business over with? Why should I dither and mope because I didn’t want to face her sneers?
No reason at all. I would do it, and get on with my life—get on with
saving
my life, in fact, which was enormously more important than any of Deborah’s mean-spirited snits.
So I leaned against the car and did nothing. A car drove by slowly, a dark blue SUV of some kind, probably a Jeep. Hard to be sure—it was one of the new kind, the ones that look like station wagons, and they all look the same. It didn’t matter. I looked up at the sky. Most of it still seemed to be there. That didn’t matter much, either. I looked at the front door of the house again. If Debs peeked out, she would see me here, loitering indecisively, and she might think I was hesitating because of timidity. She might think I actually gave a rodent’s rectum what she thought of me, which was silly. I didn’t care. Not at all. I could go knock on the door anytime I wanted to.
Once again, as seemed to be the case so often in my life, my stomach finally settled things; it growled, reminding me that life goes on, and even more so with a good dinner. And so, rather than risking the wrath of my digestive system, which was much more relevant than the wrath of my nonsister, I straightened up, clutched the custody papers firmly in my left hand, and moseyed up to the door.
Deborah answered in person on the first knock. She looked at me with such a hard, stony face that she must have set the expression in place well before now, so it would be properly congealed when I saw it. She said nothing at all, letting her face do all the talking. Behind her, I could see a dim purple glow from her living room, and hear the sounds of a cartoon show. I recognized one of the voices—it was the only show Cody and Astor could agree on watching, and it involved a platypus, as I recalled.
The kids must be in there, all four of them together, Deb’s son, Nicholas, and my very own Lily Anne, as well as Cody and Astor. I craned my neck slightly to see if I could catch a glimpse, and Deborah immediately pulled the door shut around her, so only her neck and head stuck out and I could no longer see in at all.
I shrugged. If she was that determined to be unpleasant, so be it. And so I saw no need for pleasantries. “I assume you got my message,” I said curtly.
She stared a moment longer, and then without any change in expression, she simply held out her hand.
It took me a moment to realize that she was not offering to shake my hand, but I figured it out at last and gave her the custody papers. She took them, stared at me a few seconds longer, and then, before I could even frame a properly scathing farewell, she shut the door firmly in my face.
Well, if nothing else, the papers were delivered. At least I could scratch one thing off my to-do list. And I supposed I could cross the entire bunch of them off my Christmas card list, as well. I doubted that I would ever again really wish Debs a merry anything, and she would certainly make sure that all four kids remained uncontaminated by my toxic presence. I had watched how she behaved with her boy, Nicholas, and although I would not quite call her a helicopter mom, she would certainly be very aggressive about protecting them from all dreadful forms of mental and psychic pollution, like drugs, violence, and Dexter.
Well, she was in for a little bit of a surprise, at least as far as Cody and Astor were concerned. She thought of them as battered waifs, poor little orphans of the storm, sweet and innocent children who had suffered a series of terrible shocks. She would discover soon enough that they were nothing of the kind; Cody and Astor were undeveloped Dexters. The terrible physical, mental, and psychic abuse they had taken from their bio dad had left them just as empty of empathy and human feeling as I was. And they had not had the Harry Course of Miracles to properly channel the impulses that were already slipping up behind them from the Dark Backseat and gently but firmly trying to take the controls and drive them down the Dark Highway. When these impulses began to take over, as they absolutely
must
from time to time, Deborah would begin to realize that she was nurturing a viper in her bosom. I almost wished I could be there to see her face when she found out she had changelings in her nest. I had a feeling that the discovery might alter her perspective just a wee little bit.
It brought me a small glow of much-needed comfort, even when I realized that she would blame the whole thing on me. That didn’t matter at all; I was already dead to her, and I could not conceivably get any deader.
So be it. I was never meant to be a father. Another chapter in the Great Book of Me was finished. Time to close the book and move on. No kids, no sister, and no regrets.
I turned away and went back to my rental car.
In Miami, many people eat rather late each night. It is part of the city’s cultural heritage, a proud Old World tradition, brought to our shores by our Hispanic brethren. It is not unheard-of to eat dinner at ten o’clock, and certainly nine o’clock is common. But tonight, at a mere eight o’clock, Dexter was simply not in touch with his Cuban side, and he was becoming ever so slightly rapacious. I drove away from Deborah’s crumbling, child-infested cottage and began my search for something appropriate to eat.
There were so many choices, even within a two- or three-mile radius. The possibilities were nearly overwhelming; Chinese or Chinese nouveau; Cuban, of course; Spanish classical or tapas; Thai; at least three varieties of French; ribs and barbecue—truly, that was only scratching the surface. And the beauty of it was that I could go to any of them and eat my fill of My City’s Great Bounty, delectable viands from every land and every body of water on the globe. My mouth began to water. Freedom is truly a wonderful thing.