Pacific Beat, page 41
They watched the news in the big house. The local segments were all on Cantrell and Raymond: the DA’s office had already acknowledged that the well-known developer was “involved” with Lt. Cruz’s wife, Ann, and that the whole thing was possibly a “love triangle that ended in tragedy.” The reports were little more than abject confusion and speculation. Weir was referred to as the “grieving brother” of the dead woman. No one could explain the suicide of Horton Goins or the note he had left behind. Becky, her black dress still caked with the vermilion of Cantrell’s blood, pushed her hand toward a camera and walked away saying, “No comment.” Brian Dennison’s glum face appeared next, saying that a full investigation was under way, focusing on Lt. Cruz’s activities of the last month. He announced with an almost-sullen reluctance that the suicide of Horton Goins was now being “fully reevaluated. There are a lot of things we still don’t know.” Dennison looked like a man at the end of all conceivable tethers, but without the energy to care anymore. A spokeswoman for Hoag Hospital said that Cantrell was in intensive care but was expected to live.
An unrelated item from Newport Beach came in at quarter to ten: A man had been killed on the Back Bay at eight-thirty when his boat exploded on the water. Preliminary investigations indicated a fuel leak and an errant cigarette. Identity being withheld pending notification of relatives.
Jim heard the front door open, Virginia’s voice, then footsteps in the entryway.
“Oh my God,” said Becky.
Jim turned. Virginia stepped into the living room, Joseph Goins beside her.
Weir stood and stared at the young man, who glanced only briefly back at Jim. Goins looked to him like a man who had long ago adjusted to the reduced dimensions of confinement. His eyes lowered and darted measuringly to either side; he put his weight on one leg, then smoothly shifted it to another; he seemed to be immediately aware of the objects around him and their distance from him. He struck Jim as less a presence than a kind of absence— receding as he stood there, threatening to vanish. He emoted an almost-palpable apartness, a discomfort in just being. His privacy, his remoteness, seemed huge. He held a small backpack in his right hand.
“Jim, Becky,” said Virginia. “I’d like you to meet Joseph. He’s going to talk to the DA tomorrow, get all this straightened out. After that, I don’t know.”
She came to Jim, wrapped her arms around him, and hugged him longer and more tenderly than he could remember her ever doing before in his life. “It’s going to be all right,” she whispered. “It’s going to be okay.”
“Where have you been?”
“Sit down. Listen.”
Over the next hour, Virginia told of Ann’s early pregnancy by college-boy Cantrell, Virginia’s belief that Annie—age fifteen—would best be served by believing her child was stillborn rather than alive, that Ann would never know what gender it was, that the boy be placed far across the country, that Ann be forever encouraged to forget the whole minor, ancient incident. Virginia had attended the delivery, to make sure her deceptions were convincingly created. It was only, Virginia said, when Jim showed her the photo of Horton that her imagination was fueled, thus her visitations to Emmett and Edith; the law firm in Los Angeles that had handled Joseph’s adoption; Lucy in Hardin County, who led her to Joseph’s original “family,” still operating the farm outside Dayton; and finally to a big widow named Kate Hanf, who told her of the conversation she had had with a California lawyer in an upstate New York hospital, where he had said to her late on a September evening long ago the simple words that Ann herself waited a lifetime and never heard: You have a son.
Weir listened, speechless. He felt new and uncomprehending, as if just born into a world that had been here for aeons, building up secret upon secret, truth upon truth, without him.
Ann had a son.
When she was finished, she looked at Jim, then away. The shadows of the room seemed to gather in the lines of her brow, along the downturn of her mouth. It was the first time in his life that he had ever seen Virginia register the emotion of shame. It was also the first time she had ever looked at Jim with the need for approval.
He thought for a long moment before speaking. “You must get tired sometimes, Mom, of trying to run the world.”
“I never meant to—”
“Nobody ever means to.”
“There was no other way to make things come out right.”
Jim shot a look at her and held it, but Virginia had already turned away.
“As if,” she said quietly, “this is right. God.”
“You should have said something. If I’d have known about Annie and Cantrell, maybe I could have kept it from going down this way. You should have just come out with it instead of sitting on everything.”
“I was trying to protect her from what people would think.”
“You were trying to protect yourself from what people would think.”
“Jim—”
“Just admit it. That’s the least you can do.”
Virginia’s gnarled hands spread and closed upon her legs, looking for something to hold besides each other. “Yes,” she said quietly. “But also, I believed I was doing right I consider the whole chapter the most … the great shame of my life. When I took away Ann’s son, I had no idea I was taking away the only child she’d ever have, the only thing that might have prevented all this from happening. I thought it was best. I truly believed it was the right thing to do.”
In the quiet that followed, Jim listened to his mother’s hesitant breathing, to the water lapping outside, to the steady, slow throbbing of his own heart.
Joseph, staring at his feet, then told about his correspondence courses in genealogy—taken while an inmate at the state hospital—his growing curiosities about his own beginnings, his fateful glance at his hospital file one afternoon while a disturbance took all the orderlies away for a few minutes, his final confirmation of what he had suspected all along—that he had never seen his actual parents. Then his burglary of the Los Angeles law offices referred to in his file, and later, his hours with library microfiche, finding out all he could about Virginia Weir and Blake Cantrell of Newport Beach—whose signatures were indelibly fixed in his mind from the law firm’s adoption records of 1967, Joseph’s voice changed as he told about first seeing Ann, playing with the toddlers at work. A strange urgency came into it, an edge that suggested unresolvable intensities. “I’m still not sure why,” Joseph said. “But I couldn’t go up to her. I wasn’t sure what to say, if she’d believe me, or if I might be doing something to hurt her by telling her who I was. So I followed her and watched her and took pictures. I talked to her only once. I asked her what time it was. She said quarter ’til ten. That was all we got to say to each other in twenty-four years. ‘What time is it?’ ‘Quarter ’til ten.’ I was so nervous, I could feel my feet sweating in my shoes. The next thing I knew, she was dead.” Joseph clutched the top of his backpack and looked down at his hands. He turned up his palms and looked at those, too. He said that there was something about the way she died that he “understood.” It took him a few days to try to see his father. But Cantrell wasn’t available by phone; his security guards wouldn’t even let Joseph onto the floor where his offices were; and he had so many homes in the south county that Joseph could never figure out in which one he really lived. So he wrote the letter on Mrs. Fostes’s word processor and proposed the meeting in the cemetery.
Joseph said that Cantrell had showed up as planned, and offered him sanctuary in a big home overlooking the water in Laguna. A man named Dale was assigned to help him get what he needed, but Joseph had quickly surmised that Dale was more his keeper than his butler. “Today about ten in the morning,” he said, “Dale showed up without… without my father and said that he was arranging for me to see my grandmother—Virginia.”
Virginia leaned forward on the sofa. “When I’d confirmed what I suspected about Joseph, it wasn’t hard to figure he’d be in contact with Cantrell. David denied it, but I traced Joseph to one of his houses. But by the time I got there, Cantrell was gone and Blodgett wasn’t exactly going to hand Joseph over,” she said. “The situation was that Blodgett knew the toxic-spill investigation would lead to him sooner or later—Becky’s press conference told him as much. He came right out and told me that he and Louis Braga were dumping in the ocean. I was to prevail upon Becky to drop that angle, and give Blodgett fifty thousand dollars in cash to bring Joseph to me. Otherwise, he’d kill him.” She shook her head at Blodgett’s apparent stupidity.
“Well, what did you do?” asked Jim.
Virginia looked at him, then at Joseph, then back to Jim. “I agreed to everything, left, and told Blodgett I had put the money out on one of the light beacons at the end of the jetty, so to hand over my grandson and I’d tell him which one. He said he didn’t believe me, which is just what I thought he’d say. He took me along for the ride, which is just what I thought he’d do. Joseph was on the boat, too, of course— Blodgett guessed the cops would be all over Cantrell’s properties sooner than later. Out in the middle of the bay, there was this accident that involved a gaff and the back of Dale Blodgett’s idiot head. Later, some matches got mixed up with the fuel. Joseph and I were lucky to get overboard and swim back to my car. We ditched our life jackets and sat with Mackie Ruff in his little ghetto while the police buzzed and the Harbor Patrol put out the fire. Mackie had some blankets and rum and a fire to dry our clothes. Mackie said he was a reserve cop now. By the time it was over, we just kind of drove away. That’s the only time I’ll tell that story— I’ll never tell it again. I will answer no questions, entertain no discussion. It had to be done and I will talk about it no further. Joseph has the definitive version.”
Joseph studied his hands again, then turned his clear blue eyes to Jim. “Your mother and I were … reunited by Mr. Blodgett, down at the dock. He went to go get the money and his boat blew up. We swam out to help if we could—but we couldn’t find him.”
“You forgot something,” said Virginia, in much the same tone with which she had drilled Jim on multiplication tables when he was ten.
“Later,” he said, “we took a rental boat out of the locker and got the money off the beacon.”
Jim had to admit it was a pretty tidy package. With all the other action for Dennison to cover, the whereabouts of Virginia Weir would be far down on the list. When Marge sang to the grand jury, Braga would be the only one left standing to take the fall—or, would he?
“So Blodgett was doing the dumping all along?”
“He was proud of it. It’s been going on for years—way before he volunteered to be the one-man Toxic Waste patrol. He’d been doing ‘personal security’ work for Cantrell off and on for a decade. Cantrell was using plenty of TCE to paint all his new condos and houses. He was using Cheverton money to pay Blodgett and Braga to handle the disposal. That was just to keep PacifiCo out of the loop, in case someone like Becky or I wanted to make something of it—Cantrell could just say he handled his own waste. It was supposed to be by the book—permits and licenses, a thousand each for Dale and Braga to transport it to a Long Beach company every other month for disposal. Well, Dale and Braga just split the seven thousand that was supposed to go to the Long Beach people, and dumped the stuff ten miles out instead of transporting it to Long Beach. Everything was fine until Annie and I started finding trace. Things got bad when Duty Free threw a rod in the harbor and they either had to jettison the solvent or take it back to Cheverton. They panicked and dumped it.”
Weir tried to figure. “Who were they scared of? If Blodgett was the Toxic Waste patrol, who was left to watch him?”
“Cantrell,” said Virginia. “Annie had seen them loading drums at Cheverton, and she must have told him. Cantrell thought everything was legal. He never knew until Ann found out, then he landed on Blodgett and Braga.”
“Why did Blodgett tell you all this?”
“Because he was going to kill us after he got the money,” said Joseph. He looked down, blushing, and clasped his hands together. In a quiet voice, he added, “I could tell by the way he was moving.”
“What about Dennison?” asked Becky. “Can we sink him?”
“He didn’t know what Blodgett was up to, either. He was too busy rising to the top to worry about what all his men were doing. And of course Dale was bringing him whatever Brian could use about what we were doing politically—and in the bay. When Dale told you he’d seen Sea Urchin that night, he’d already told Dennison, too. That’s why Brian was so worried. He thought we were dumping to make a campaign issue out of it, but he couldn’t prove it. I don’t see how he can save his public face now—with one of his men confessed to murder and the other dumping toxins into the bay. By the time the press gets done with cover-up speculations and Marge Buzzard talks to the grand jury, Dennison will be finished. He knows that. I think he’ll withdraw. Congratulations, Mayor Flynn.”
Becky sighed, shook her head, and sat back.
Virginia asked about Raymond. She had already pieced most of it together herself from what Cantrell and Joseph had told her. “He listened to her phone calls, and read her mail and journal. The baby wasn’t his, and he knew it,” said Jim.
Joseph looked down at the floor. Again, the great yawning absence of Ann had visited them—Ann, the very center of all this—Ann, departed like a guest of honor summoned to a more important engagement.
“What about your … suicide?” Becky asked.
Joseph explained that Cantrell’s plan was to stage the suicide, close the case, let him disappear, and live with the fact that Ann’s killer would remain free.
Weir couldn’t figure it, until he remembered the old woman who’d spotted Joseph’s car down by the Back Bay the night she couldn’t sleep. “You knew it was Raymond, all along. You followed them down there that night. You’d been waiting around Cantrell’s to see her, the same way Raymond was waiting to get her into the patrol car.”
For a moment, Joseph’s eyes traced a pattern in the air, as if tracking an invisible fly. He looked down, pressed his fingers against his temples, then addressed his feet. “I didn’t think I could go to the police and tell them what I knew. And, well … the next day, when I read that Ann had died—I couldn’t really remember what I’d done after I left the Back Bay. I… sometimes things aren’t clear. I thought I should talk to Mr. Can … well, my father.”
And, as Jim foresaw even as Joseph told it, Cantrell had been unwilling to go to the police for the scandal his affair with Ann would cause—not to mention his fatherhood of an illegitimate child, a committed sex offender. Cantrell’s star witness was the one he couldn’t call. Weir could hardly believe, though, that Cantrell was desperate enough to kill one young man and try to pass his body off as that of Horton Goins.
“No,” said Joseph. “Dale arranged the body. He was a transient from a county morgue out in some desert town. No family, or friends. He was my size. Mr. Cantrell—I mean, my father—said that we could depend on Chief Dennison to influence the coroner’s findings. The handwriting was mine. I wrote the confession and signed it. I meant it, but not the way it was taken.”
Weir asked Joseph what was going to happen to him once he was officially dead.
“Montana,” said Joseph. “He has property there, where I could start over with a new name and be a different person. I agreed to confess to Ann—it was my father I was saving from suspicion. And the more I thought about a new life as someone else, the better it sounded. He was going to come visit often. We were going to fish and hunt and ride horses. I think he likes me.”
Jim let the statement sink in, fully realizing for the first time that this young man in front of him had come two thousand miles, only to lose the mother he had never known. The strange part was that Joseph’s expression now told him without question that he had been through things even more terrible than this.
Joseph looked at him directly. His eyes were windows to inner landscapes of immeasurable damage. Turning away, he seemed to know this.
Virginia stood and began unbuttoning her windbreaker. The shadows still hadn’t left her face. “My silence has been a lie. But I believed—I always believed—I was doing right.”
“Is that an apology or an excuse?” Jim asked.
“Both, son.”
“If you were a little weaker, you’d be pathetic.”
“What am I now?”
“Relentless. That’s all I see.”
She looked at him, then turned and climbed the stairs.
Weir lay on his bed. Becky had gone home, saying she felt spent and unclean. Jim wondered again as he lay there whether Becky’s statement had more to do with the blood on her hands earlier that day or the crushed expression on her face at the Wrecking Ball as she’d learned that George Percy was refusing to move forward against Cantrell. It was an expression confessing to Jim that she had offered more of herself to sway Percy than she could forgive, an expression that told him she had been bought for promises, then sold an hour or two later for nearly nothing. Becky, true to her spirit, had tried to dance it all away.
It was still before midnight. Jim could see a faint light coming from Ann’s old room, where Joseph was supposed to be sleeping. He rose from the bed, went to Joseph’s door, and knocked.
Joseph said to come in.
Weir stepped inside and shut the door quietly. Joseph was sitting in bed, fully clothed, with a leather-bound journal open on his lap. He was examining his fingers, which in the lamplight looked, to Jim, unremarkable. His electronic pillbox was on the nightstand beside him. His eyes shifted down, left, then right, as if Weir were a blinding light. He raised his knees. “I’m not dangerous,” he said. It was almost a whisper.
“I wanted to look at you.”
Joseph colored deeply, still looking down. He waited. Jim had the feeling that Joseph was used to waiting.
