He turned, seemingly stunned that she had corrected him.
“Juneau was an engineer. He studied at Cal Tech. He was not a construction worker, though he was black, if that’s the point you’re making.”
He started to wag his finger at her. “Let’s remember that you’re the one who keeps bringing race into this.”
She said, “Robert Juneau was injured while visiting a construction site in downtown San Francisco.” Laura turned to the crowd. She tried to keep the quiver out of her voice when she told the story. “One of the workers made a mistake. It happens. But Juneau was in the wrong place at the wrong time. A steel beam struck his head here—” She pointed to her own head, and for a moment, her fingers could feel the rough scar on Robert’s scalp. “His brain started to swell. He experienced a series of strokes during the surgery to relieve the swelling. The doctors were unsure of his recovery, but he managed to walk again, to speak, to recognize his children and his wife.”
“Yes,” Martin snapped. “There’s no need to over-dramatize the story. There was severe damage in the frontal lobe. The man’s personality was permanently altered by the accident. Some call it Jekyll and Hyde Syndrome. Juneau was a competent family man before the injury. Afterward, he became violent.”
“You like to draw straight lines across a crooked world, don’t you?” Laura was repulsed by his cavalier assessment. She finally let her gaze find Jane in the front row. Laura spoke to the girl because she wanted her to know the truth. “Robert Juneau was a good man before he got hurt. He fought for his country in Vietnam. He earned his degree on the GI Bill. He paid taxes. He saved his money, bought a house, paid his bills, took care of his family, reached out with both hands for the American Dream, and . . .” Laura had to pause to swallow. “And when he couldn’t stand on his own two feet anymore, when it came time for his country to take care of him—” She turned back to Martin. “Men like you said no.”
Martin heaved a pained sigh. “That’s a tragic tale, Maplecroft, but who’s going to write a check for twenty-four-hour, supervised medical care? That’s three doctors on call, at least five nursing staff, the facilities, the infrastructure, the insurance billing, the secretaries, the janitors, the cafeteria staff, the bleach, the Mop & Glo, multiplied by however many seriously mentally ill people there are in America. Do you want to pay eighty percent of your income in taxes as they do in our host country? If your answer is yes, feel free to move. If the answer is no, then tell me, where do we get the money?”
“We are the richest country in the—”
“Because we don’t squander—”
“From you!” she yelled. There was a stillness in the audience that transferred to the stage. She said, “How about we get the money from you?”
He snorted by way of answer.
“Robert Juneau was kicked out of six different group homes managed by Queller Healthcare. Each time he returned, they contrived a different reason to send him away.”
“I had nothing to do with—”
“Do you know how much money it costs to bury three children?” Laura could still see her babies on that crisp fall day. David whispering to some girl on the phone. Lila upstairs listening to the radio as she dressed for school. Peter running around the living room looking for his shoes.
Pow.
A single shot to the head brought down her youngest son.
Pow-pow.
Two bullets tore open David’s chest.
Pow-pow.
Lila had slipped as she was running down the stairs. Two bullets went into the top of her head. One of them exited out of her foot.
The other was still lodged in Laura’s spine.
She’d hit her head on the fireplace as she fell to the ground. There were six shots in the revolver. Robert had brought it back from his tunnel-rat duty in Vietnam.
The last thing Laura had seen that day was her husband pressing the muzzle of the gun underneath his chin and pulling the trigger.
She asked Martin Queller, “How much do you think those funerals cost? Coffins, clothes, shoes—you have to put them in shoes—Kleenex, burial space at the cemetery, headstones, hearse rental, pallbearers, and a preacher to bless a dead sixteen-year-old boy, a dead fourteen-year-old girl, and a dead five-year-old little boy?” She knew that she was the only person in this room who could answer that question because she had written the check. “What were their lives worth, Martin? Were they worth more to society than the cost of keeping a sick man hospitalized? Were those three babies nothing more than a goddamn correction?”
Martin seemed at a loss for words.
“Well?” she waited. Everyone was waiting.
Martin said, “He served. The Veterans’ Hospital—”
“Was overcrowded and underfunded,” she told him. “Robert was on a year-long waiting list at the VA. There was no state mental hospital to go to because there was no state funding. The regular hospital had barred him. He’d already attacked a nurse and hurt an orderly. They knew he was violent, but they moved him to a group home because there was nowhere else to warehouse him.” She added, “A Queller Healthcare-managed group home.”
“You,” Martin said, because the well-respected thinker had finally figured her out. “You’re not Alex Maplecroft.”
“No.” She reached into her purse. She found the paper bag.
Dye packs.
That was what was supposed to be inside the bag.
Back in California, they had all agreed on the red dye packs, flat and slim, less than the size and thickness of a pager. Banks hid the exploding dye inside stacks of paper money so that would-be bank robbers would be indelibly stained when they tried to count their loot.
The plan was to see Martin Queller humiliated on the world stage, stained by the proverbial blood of his victims.
Laura had lost faith in proverbs when her children were murdered by their father.
She took a deep breath. She located Jane again.
The girl was crying. She shook her head, silently mouthed the words her father would never say: I’m sorry.
Laura smiled. She hoped that Jane remembered what Laura had told her in the bar. She was magnificent. She would find her own path.
The next part went quickly, perhaps because Laura had watched it play out so many times in her head—that is, when she wasn’t trying to conjure memories of her children; the way David’s feet had smelled when he was a baby, the soft whistle that Peter’s lips made when he colored with his crayons, the wrinkle in Lila’s brow when she studied how to frame a photograph. Even Robert sometimes haunted her thoughts. The man before the accident who had danced to Jinx Queller on the piano at the Hollywood Bowl. The patient who had wanted so desperately to get well. The violent inmate at the hospital. The trouble-maker who’d been kicked out of so many group homes. The homeless man who’d been arrested time and time again for theft, assault, public intoxication, aggressive panhandling, public nuisance, loitering, suicidal tendencies, making terroristic threats, willfully threatening to commit bodily harm.
“In some ways you were lucky,” Laura’s oncologist had told her after the shooting. “If the bullet had entered your back three centimeters lower, the scan would’ve never found the cancer.”
Laura reached into the paper bag.
She had known the moment she pulled it from behind the toilet tank that she was not holding the agreed-upon dye packs, but something better.
A six-shot revolver, just like the one her husband had used.
First, she shot Martin Queller in the head.
Then she pressed the muzzle of the gun beneath her chin and killed herself.
August 21, 2018
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