“Your dad?”
“Yeah, old BB.” He was forgetting to whisper in his anguish. “Him and Eleanor, they’ve been so mean about Nicola. Since she died and all. When I said I wanted to go to her funeral, they said why, so I could stand around with all the emotional spicks and bawl to my heart’s content, and then finally BB said there wouldn’t be a funeral because no one could find the body and to—to shut the fuck up.”
“I’m sorry, honey,” I said inadequately. “I guess your dad worries about whether he’s a tough enough man, and so he’s always on guard against any strong feelings. I don’t suppose it’s much comfort to you now, but can you imagine him as someone who is incredibly weak and scared so he acts like a bully to keep other people from guessing how scared he is?”
“You think that could really be true?” There was wistfulness in the young voice, a hope that his father’s meanness wasn’t due to his own failings.
I thought of Baladine, casually helping with the dismemberment of African newborns, getting his hands dirty, and wondered if my diagnosis had any basis in reality. Maybe he was someone who enjoyed torture for its own sake, but I gave Robbie a hearty assurance I didn’t feel.
“Your father is a cruel man. Whatever the reason for his cruelty, will you try to remember that his sadism is about him, about his needs and weaknesses, and not about you?”
I talked to him for a few more minutes, until he’d recovered enough equilibrium for me to turn the conversation. There were two questions I wanted to put to him before we hung up. The first was about Nicola’s smoking. Oh, no, Robbie said, she never smoked, not like Rosario, their nanny now, who was always sneaking off behind the garage for a cigarette, which made Eleanor furious, because she could still smell the smoke on her breath even after Rosario swallowed a zillion peppermints. Nicola said she had to save all her money for her children; she couldn’t waste it on cigarettes or drinking.
My second question was whether his dad owned any shoes with horseshoe emblems—and if he did, were any of the emblems missing. Robbie said he didn’t know, but he’d look.
It made me feel like a creep, asking Robbie to spy on his own father—but I suppose it also made me feel like I was paying BB back for his frothing over his son’s masculinity. If he’d been proud of his sensitive child I might not have done it. But if he could be proud of a sensitive child, he wouldn’t be doing other stuff.
Before Robbie hung up I asked, as casually as I could, how he’d gotten my unlisted home number: it wasn’t on the business card I left him last week.
“It was in BB’s briefcase,” Robbie muttered. “Don’t tell me I’m a criminal to go snooping in his case, it’s the only way I know when he’s planning something awful, like that camp for fat kids he sent me to last summer. I checked it out, and he had this whole file on you, your home number and everything.”
My blood ran cold. I knew Baladine had done research on me—he’d made that clear enough on Friday—but it seemed worse, somehow, his carrying the information around with him.
“Doesn’t he keep his case locked?”
“Oh, that. Anyone with half a brain knows all you have to do is plug in his ship’s ID, the biggest number in his life.”
I laughed and told him he was plenty smart enough to keep up with his dad if he could remember not to let BB get under his skin. In case I ever needed to burgle Baladine’s briefcase myself, I got Robbie to give me his father’s ship number. On that note he seemed to feel calm enough to hang up.
I finally went to sleep, but in my dreams Baladine was lugging Nicola Aguinaldo’s body through Frenada’s factory, while Lacey Dowell leaned heavy breasts forward, clutching her crucifix and whispering, “Her hands are dirty. Don’t tell her anything, or the vampire will get you.”
In the morning I had a call from the operations manager at Continental United, asking me to come in to discuss my report. He thanked me for writing so clearly that everyone could understand it: too many firms cloak the obvious in meaningless jargon, he said. Maybe it was my ability to write a clear English sentence that kept Continental coming to me, rather than my superior analytic skills.
They didn’t want to fire the dispatcher without concrete evidence, the operations manager added, or without knowing whether the plant manager was in on the scam.