Remember Me, Irene

“Thanks. Have you read it?”

She shook her head. “Just glanced through it.”

“What’s the last place to request a transcript?”

“Nowhere. She didn’t finish her master’s.”

“What?”

“Dropped out. Never showed up for the fall semester. I guess Andre really hurt her that second time around.”

“SO TELL MEwhat’s on your mind,” Frank said as we began the drive home.

I tried to go over all I had learned that day. It had been a long day, and when the story was starting to take longer than the ride home, he took an unexpected detour.

“Keep talking,” he said. “We can drive around for a while. This way you won’t get distracted or attacked by twenty-pound tomcats or hear phones or pagers. Besides, we’ve got a sitter.”

“Good old Jack. Hope he doesn’t feel like we’re taking advantage of him.”

“Are you kidding? He gets all of the benefits of having pets, with none of the vet bills, food bills, or shovel duty. Quit worrying about him. Go back to your story.”

“I can’t help but believe that what happened in town this past week-Ben’s suicide, Allan’s resignation, Lucas’s death, this attack on Roberta-all have something to do with what went on in the summer of 1977.”

“When Selman’s first redevelopment study had been accepted and was being acted upon in city hall.”

“Right. In seventy-seven, Andre completed a study for the city, one that probably ensured that certain folks made a lot of money. Lucas, who knew the statistics in the study were phony in some way, was discredited, thrown out of school. The person who helped discredit him was Nadine Preston.”

“The only woman Selman ever went back to,” Frank said.

I nodded. “And who conveniently left town after a fishing trip with Andre. I don’t know if it will do much good to locate her. She seems completely untrustworthy. She destroyed Lucas’s academic career and was apparently in cahoots with Andre. She probably knew she had Andre and his friends over a barrel, so she used Lucas to make her threat clear.”

“You think she never intended to go into that hearing?”

“Exactly. I think Andre got the message and bought her off somehow. And Andre made other people buy him off, too-Ben Watterson was involved in it in some way, and Andre blackmailed Ben into giving him the Bertram for a song.”

“How can Selman afford the slip fees and maintenance on something that size?” Frank asked.

“That was my question. I’ll bet you’ll discover that consulting fees and all kinds of other income find their way to him.”

“Hmm. So you want to try to find Nadine Preston. You’ll have her Social Security number tomorrow?”

“Yes, Ivy’s faxing it to me. I know you can’t look her up for me,” I said, coaxing all the same.

“Oh, that would be illegal, wouldn’t it?” he said, barely suppressing a grin.

“Yes.”

“Don’t worry. I think I can convince Reed that he ought to pursue her as someone who may have information on a possible homicide. That is, if you don’t piss him off again tomorrow.”

“Listen, Frank-I’m looking into all of this because I owe this much to Lucas, and for my own peace of mind. But it’s also a story-one that John has been waiting for with more patience than I thought he possessed. Can Reed be trusted to keep this to himself?”

“He’s trustworthy, so is Vince. But this gets tricky.”

“If this gets into the hands of a competitor-I don’t even like to think about it. I won’t be working for a newspaper. My former coworkers would drive through my new workplace just to hear me say, ‘May I have your order, please?’”

“Can’t have that,” he agreed. “Those places are bad for the complexion, too. Wait a minute-would you give me extra fries?”

“You’d be looking for your beef.”

“Okay, okay. I’ll try to work something out with Reed. He owes me a couple of favors.”

“I need for you to look up something else.”

He shook his head in disbelief. “May I have your order, please?” he mimicked.

“This is serious. Could you look up Jeff McCutchen’s suicide?”

He looked out at the darkened road. “August of 1977?”

“Right.”

“Selman loses a lot of friends to suicide, wouldn’t you say?”

“The thought did occur to me. They happened fairly far apart, and there are reasons to believe they were both suicides,” I said. “I guess I still want to know where Andre was on the night Ben died.”

“Carlos is pretty certain on that one, you know. Lots of people wanted to implicate your friend Claire-rich young widows don’t get a lot of genuine sympathy. The note, the powder residue on Ben Watterson’s hand, the angle of bullet wound-lots of other things make that one hard to question.”

I shrugged. “Claire just admitted to me today that he was subject to depression-although she immediately minimized it. You think about Ben, how he usually did business, the reputation he had built. A leading citizen in every sense of the word. But if Lucas could prove that Ben knew Andre’s studies were phony, Ben’s reputation would go into the toilet.”

“And the confidence of the bank’s board of directors would probably go right with it.”

“Yes.”

“‘There is no cure.’ Isn’t that what the note said?”

“Yes. And he added something about avoiding days of pain.”

“What about McCutchen?” Frank asked.

“Ivy said he used drugs and alcohol, left notes, looked like a very depressed individual when he visited her-a loner whose closest friend had run off with his girlfriend-and he made her say something that he referred to in his note. I guess it’s hard to question. But just to make sure…”

“Yeah, I’ll look into it.”

“Thanks. One other thing.”

He raised a brow. “Just one?”

“For now. Seeing Becky reminded me of it. If Andre Selman didn’t have his heart medication with him, maybe it’s because he gave it to someone else.”

“Hmm. You think he slipped heart medication to Lucas?”

“Admit it’s possible.”

“Andre climbed all those flights of stairs with a heart condition?”

“No. He didn’t have to. He just had to give the thermos to Lucas.”

“Lucas wouldn’t be very trusting of Andre, would he?”

“Probably not. Still, I think Lucas was seeing all of those guys who were hanging out with Moffett. I’m not sure what he said to them. Maybe he was trying to work his twelve-step program this way-you know, forgiving people. Maybe he was blackmailing them. So what if, on a cold night, someone makes a peace offering. A thermos full of nice hot coffee?”

“I’ll talk to Carlos. He’s undoubtedly asked them to look for those kinds of drugs in the toxicology screen.”

I sighed and leaned my head back. “Thanks, Frank.”

“Don’t thank me. Theories are one thing, proof another. Conviction…well, don’t get me started.”

I thought he would head home then, but he took another detour and headed up the highest hill in Las Piernas, a hill that leads to a place called Auburn’s Stand.

Auburn’s Stand is what locals call the hill itself, but it’s actually the name of a house that a rich guy owns. Halfway up the road to the house, there’s a turnout that faces the ocean. Las Piernas becomes a sea of lights from this vantage point, which was the really hot makeout spot when I was in high school. Not that I was ever taken there, but I drove up there once during my junior year and had some pretty great daydreams about this guy who was a couple of years ahead of me in school. That was before the road was closed, and before the kid got drafted.

These days, the road is private, and to get to the turnout, you have to pass a security guard at a gate. So making out on Auburn’s Stand has gone downhill, you might say.

We drove right up to the gate, though, and when the security guard stuck his gray head out of his booth, Frank rolled down the window and said, “Hi, Mackie. How have you been?”

Mackie smiled and said, “Not bad for an old coot. Long time no see, Harriman. Never expected to see you here this time of night. How’s it hang-ooops, didn’t see your lady friend there. Come back and talk to me some other time, Harriman.”