They took a long lunch. When they got back, the station had filled up. The cops and clerks and secretaries had returned from the memorial park. “How was it?” Colin asked Gabe Sanchez—somehow, Caroline had left him off her we-don’t-want-his-kind-here list.
“Not so good.” Gabe hesitated, then went on, “Better you hear it from me than from somebody else, I guess. The preacher didn’t quite come out and say you put the rubber band around Mike’s neck to hold the bag in place. Not quite—but he might as well have.”
“Christ! Just what I need!” Colin said. “Let me guess—a bunch of people bought it, starting with Caroline and Darren.”
“Right the first time.” Gabe nodded unhappily. “I’m sorry, man. I’m sorry as hell. No good deed goes unpunished, is what they say.”
“Yeah, that’s what they say, all right,” Colin agreed. The conventional wisdom wasn’t worth a pitcher of warm piss most of the time. This once, the multiheaded they monster had hit the nail right on the thumb.
* * *
Marshall Ferguson had told his father what he knew. Because he had, one man was in jail and another man was dead. When you were sort of on the edge of making your living as a writer, you thought you knew how powerful words could be. They could make people think. They could make people feel. And there you were at the strings, as if you had a violin or a guitar.
Words could make people die.
He’d never imagined that. If he hadn’t talked to his dad, Mike Pitcavage would still be wearing fancy suits and getting expensive haircuts. It wasn’t as if Marshall had had any great liking for the chief or his son. Getting Darren busted didn’t break his heart. He wouldn’t have been bummed if Mike had resigned in disgrace. He might even have been proud, though he never would have shown it.
But when Mike Pitcavage killed himself . . . Marshall wasn’t proud of that. He’d always pretty much skated through life. The worst things that ever happened to him were grandparents passing away and his folks breaking up. He’d been little when his grandparents died one by one, and they hadn’t been young. He’d grieved, yes, but not enormously. And, while the breakup hurt like hell, he knew more people with divorced parents than with fathers and mothers who’d stayed together.
He didn’t know anybody else who’d driven someone to suicide. Vanessa might have wanted to, to show what a femme fatale she was. That was different, though. For one thing, it was bullshit. For another, even if it weren’t, dying for unrequited love was a long way from dying because your son was looking at a felony rap.
No way could he talk to his friends about any of this. If they found out the chief’s suicide had rocked him, they would also have to find out why. He didn’t want them knowing he’d talked to his father.
He couldn’t talk about it with Dad, either. If anything, Dad was hurting worse than he was. A lot of the cops seemed to have decided it was his fault Mike Pitcavage no longer occupied the big office with the window.
“This really sucks, you know?” Marshall said to Kelly. He could talk to her, after a fashion. But she was bound to be hearing it from his father, too. Getting it in stereo was the last thing she needed, especially when she was taking care of Deborah, too.
“It totally sucks,” she agreed. “I’d like to go to the cop shop and bash their stupid heads together, you know?”
“Yeah.” He nodded. “Like we expected Pitcavage to do that, or wanted him to. No way!” When he said we, he meant I.
For a wonder, she got that. “You did the right thing, Marshall. You—” Deborah chose that moment to wake up with a yowl. “One moment, please,” Kelly said, like an old-time telephone operator.
She came back with the baby and started nursing her. For modesty’s sake, she covered her breast with a blanket. It didn’t bother her, but she’d discovered it did bother Marshall.
For a bigger wonder, she remembered what she’d been saying when she got interrupted, and picked up where she’d left off: “You did the right thing. You can’t help it if Mike Pitcavage did a back flip into an empty pool on account of it. That’s not your fault.”
Marshall desperately wanted to believe it wasn’t, but he couldn’t help asking, “Whose fault is it, then?”
“His. Or Darren’s, for dealing drugs to begin with. Or nobody’s. Sometimes stuff just happens. The supervolcano wasn’t anyone’s fault. It just happened.”
“People aren’t like that, though. I don’t think they are, anyhow.” Marshall believed in free will. But if he was predestined to believe in it, how much good would that do him?