“It was tough for him,” I said.
“Painful. He was handsome. And charming, girls liked him. But by his junior year at alternative school they were the wrong type of girls. That was his last year of formal education and most of it was spent playing hooky. The school was designed for students with special needs so they would’ve kept him in no matter what he did. But he refused, said he was sick of feeling retarded. Lenore and I went round and round with him on that and finally gave in on condition that he’d home-study and earn a GED. You can guess how that turned out. He did get a job, I’ll grant him that. Construction assistant on a development downtown. One of my friends was the general contractor.”
“How did that go?”
Paul Kramer said, “It didn’t. A few months in, Peter stopped showing up at work and before we knew it, he’d packed a few things and was gone from here. For over two years, he cut us off, we had no idea where he was living, Lenore cried at night. He didn’t come begging for money, I’ll give him that. Then one Mother’s Day, he showed up wearing a full beard and hair to his shoulders and told us he’d been working on a sportfishing boat in Florida. Assisting the captain, which I took to mean some sort of scut work. Meanwhile, Barton’s off researching the brain and Josh is investing and amassing trophies.”
I got up and took a closer look at the shot of the brothers.
Hair tousled and windblown, so close in age they could’ve been triplets. No wattage variation in their perfect smiles.
A knife-blade of gray sea in the background.
Paul Kramer said, “That was a good day. When you’re sailing, you don’t need a Ph.D. Peter did okay when he was able to pay attention.”
I said, “Was the Mother’s Day visit a drop-in or did he stay?”
“He stayed. Lenore was thrilled. Even though Peter stayed up in his room, didn’t clean up after himself, and we rarely saw him. He’d sleep during the day, go out at night, come home at all hours. Sometimes there’d be money missing from Lenore’s purse or my wallet. Friends advised us to use tough love but we didn’t want a confrontation.”
He dabbed at his eyes and cheeks. “I might’ve tried getting tough but Lenore had the softest heart in the Western Hemisphere. Plus when Peter felt social, he’d go shopping with her, they’d lunch, have a grand time. I found the situation distressing so I upped my work hours. It put a strain on my relationship with Lenore but we resolved that.”
Paul Kramer laughed. “By that I mean Peter and Lenore did their thing and I got used to it. Finally, he left, just shy of his twenty-third birthday. By leaving I mean I paid for an apartment in Hollywood and set up a trust fund that gave him enough money to live on for five years with me controlling the payouts. Lenore was dead-set against it. She’d never admit it but I think part of her enjoyed having Peter as a perpetual child. The apartment was my idea. I subverted her and essentially bribed Peter to get the hell out of here. Lenore figured it out. There were some cold nights.”
He shook his head. “She said she forgave me but I’m not sure she ever completely did. I tried to get Peter another construction job but he said he’d do his own thing and ended up working as a busboy in various restaurants. We’d see him spottily, though Lenore and he talked on the phone. Then she developed a brain tumor and our life became a nightmare for the eighteen months she hung on. Bart and Josh flew in as frequently as their situations permitted but Peter was the star. He was at his mother’s side continually, totally devoted. That was when I learned to admire him. I saw the goodness in him that I’d been blinded to because I’m a conventional man.”
I said, “After your wife’s death—”
“I fell apart and paid no attention to any of the boys, least of all Peter. I dated, got married again—we won’t discuss that, it lasted five months. Peter was close to his mother, he had to be devastated. But I wasn’t there for him and when he told me he was moving back to Florida, I wished him luck.”
He leaned forward. “I saw it as one less complication in my life.”
“Before he left, were drugs—”
“A factor in his life? Definitely. The ones I know about are marijuana, Ecstasy, quaaludes, cocaine, and alcohol. I know because Peter was open about his drug use. Basically, he’d brag and dare us to do something about it. He knew his mother was a soft touch so he—but that’s water under the bridge. And despite all that, Dr. Delaware, I never picked up anything to do with heroin. Peter had been terrified of needles since childhood. Even when getting a tattoo became the thing, he said he’d never get one. Not into pain was the phrase he used.”
Milo said, “Nowadays people snort and smoke heroin.”
“So I was told,” said Kramer, “by the coroner who did his autopsy.”
He looked down, hands knitted and twitching. “Second worst day of my life, the first was when Lenore was diagnosed. I suppose I went into denial about the heroin aspect, asked the coroner if he’d found any needle marks. He said he hadn’t but that didn’t prove anything—what you just said, people inhale. I demanded to know if Peter’s autopsy revealed any signs of long-term opiate use. I’d done some research, knew the signs: pulmonary hyperplasia, micro-hemorrhages of the brain, inflammatory heart tissue, liver disease. He admitted Peter’s body showed none of that. But his interpretation was Peter, being a novice, had snorted far too much. Still, accidental never sat right with me. And now you’re here.”
I said, “Peter was thirty-four when he died. What do you know about his life between the time he returned to Florida and then?”
“The second time, he was gone for seven years. I’d get emails two, three times a year, mostly when he needed me to wire cash. Which I did, he didn’t request much. But we were essentially out of touch.”
“Emails from where?”
“Obviously Florida—the Gulf Coast, the fishing thing. Then Texas, he’d gone back to restaurant work in Austin and later the same in San Antonio. Then it was fishing again, back to Florida, he claimed he’d been promoted to first mate or something along those lines. Whatever it was, it didn’t last long. He went down to Mexico—Cabo San Lucas. Then Panama and Costa Rica. He asked for money and informed me he was working at a zip-line outfit in some Costa Rican jungle, had discovered he wasn’t afraid of heights. How do you respond to something like that? Congratulations, you can hang from a wire? I sent him half of what he requested.”
He glanced at the piano, unlaced and fluttered his fingers. “Was I an S.O.B.? Certainly. Widowhood and a disastrous second marriage took it out of me. I wound down my practice, played more golf, tried to get back to music and found I’d lost my flair. I’d visit Barton and his wife in Boston twice a year. Every eighteen months or so I’d endure a sixteen-hour trek and see Josh and his girlfriend in Tel Aviv. I was just back from Israel when Peter showed up here. Unannounced, just like the first time. He was thirty but already had gray hair. He said he needed temporary lodgings so I took him in, we went to dinner, he talked, I listened. Apparently after Costa Rica he’d gone back to Panama City where he’d worked at a hotel. First in the dining room, then the front desk. He said he’d discovered hotel management was his passion and he’d come back to ‘develop himself.’ He also had a girlfriend he’d met there. A dancer at a club, she’d be arriving soon and they’d be living together, could I advance him on the rent? I gave him enough for six months.”
“Generous,” said Milo.
“You think so?” said Kramer. “More like go-away money.” His lips folded inward. “I was an S.O.B. in general and a rotten dad, specifically. And then he died. And now you’re digging it all up.”
I said, “You do know about his last job.”