“You have morphine?”
“A good buddy of mine is a hospice worker. I called him, told him about Lawrence. He drove me up some drugs on the sly, for when it gets bad.”
Tommy pulls up a plastic chair for me to sit on next to Lawrence’s bed while Tommy fixes something for Lawrence to eat. I sit quietly with Lawrence for a few minutes. Then Lawrence looks over at me. “So, I hear you beat the pants off Devlin. He’s a wily one. But you were always clever, too. I liked working with you.” Lawrence coughs again.
“You sure you don’t want some medicine?” I ask as Tommy comes back carrying a plastic tray with a plate of what appears to be baby food and a juice box.
I stand to make room for Tommy, and Lawrence answers me. “No. I’m used to the pain by now, except when it gets real bad. Mostly, though, it’s just lotsa rockin’ and rollin’. I can take it.”
My vision blurs, then clears as I stare at Lawrence Washington in disbelief. It feels as if someone’s just whacked me with a two-by-four. Lotsa rockin’ and rollin’. The same words the caller used when he phoned 911 to report the imaginary fight at 1792 Addison. I repeat the words out loud. “Lotsa rockin’ and rollin’.”
I back away from the bed, and Tommy turns to look at me. He’s puzzled at first. But after a second, he gets it. “Mick.” I hear my brother behind me, but I’m already out the door.
“Mick!” Tommy shouts after me as I make my way across the gravel road. I stop and turn toward him.
“It was Lawrence who made that call,” I say. “And you who put him up to it.”
“Let’s sit down,” Tommy says.
“You knew David was in the house! You wanted the police to catch him!”
“Mick! Please. Sit down.”
I hesitate but follow my brother to the picnic table. It’s getting on to dusk now. The sun is behind the trees, and it’s starting to get colder. Tommy takes a deep breath. “They called me from the hotel. Piper and David. Piper told me everything, about the affair and about David finding Jennifer Yamura dead on the stairs. They were both in a panic.”
“It was your idea,” I say. “To have David go back and clean up.” Tommy nods. “But you had to know there was no way he could clean all the . . .” My voice trails off as all the pieces click into place. From start to finish, Tommy had set David up.
“Why?”
“It was a betrayal!” Tommy practically shouts the words. “Piper with that prick.”
I stare at my brother. It’s clear that Piper’s betrayal hit him hard. But her betrayal of whom?
“So you told them that David needed to go back and clean up the place.”
Tommy nods. “Lawrence was ready to make the call as soon as I signaled him. I waited for David to get deep into the cleanup job, then I rang Lawrence and he made the 911 call on a burner.”
“After David’s arrest, I caught you and Piper fighting on our back patio. That’s what it was about, wasn’t it?”
Tommy nods. “Piper figured out that I was the one who’d fingered David. It drove a wedge between us.”
“Why did she decide to call you in the first place?”
Tommy smiles, but there’s bitterness in his eyes. “When I got out of prison, Piper was my biggest fan. She’d been writing to me while I was inside, encouraging me, and she kept it up once I was released. She told me I was no worse than anyone else, that I’d just had some bad breaks. But when this thing with David happened and she needed advice on how to deal with a crime, I was the one she called. For all her talk, Piper still sees me as a criminal.”
My mouth starts to open, but I close it. Piper’s call must have hurt Tommy.
Tommy looks away, and we sit in silence for a long while. I chew on what Tommy has told me. I get that he hated David Hanson because of his affair with Piper. But there has to be more. Tommy wouldn’t frame an innocent man just because he was pissed.
“That day,” Tommy says, “when I was in your office and Jennifer called, I realized she was in a bad spot with the grand jury and was looking for a way out. I figured she might try to save herself by selling me out as her source. So I decided to go see her. I was mad and a little scared, and I didn’t want to show up half-cocked and say something stupid, make things worse. So I decided to stop for something to eat, to cool off and think things through. I went to a sandwich shop on Walnut Street for a while, then walked down Seventeenth, took a right, toward her house. When I got to Waverly, I looked down the alley.”
Tommy’s words hit me like a sledgehammer. “You saw me leaving,” I say, almost a whisper.
“You were walking down the alley, away from me. I started to call out after you, but something stopped me. I waited until you turned the corner on Eighteenth. Then I kept walking down Seventeenth and turned onto Addison. Jennifer said she made everyone—which I figured meant the men she was screwing behind Hanson’s back—come through the back door. But I told her no way. I wasn’t sneaking through anybody’s backyard. So I always came to the front, and I did that day, too. I rang the bell and I knocked. But there was no answer. So I opened the door; it was unlocked.”
Tommy and I sit in silence until the full horror of what must have happened floods my head. I’d thought David Hanson was the only one who’d entered the house after I left. But he wasn’t. Tommy got there before David, but he didn’t appear on Anna Groszek’s video.
“Oh, God, Tommy,” I say as my heart breaks one more time for my brother. For one more terrible thing that he’ll have to carry around inside him. “You went into the house and found Jennifer.” Tommy looks at me but says nothing. “But she wasn’t dead.”
Tommy shivers. “She was lying on the steps. Her eyes were closed. Then she opened them and looked up at me. She was confused at first. Then it was like she figured out where she was and what had happened, and she got a scared look in her eyes. She kind of lifted her back, let herself slide down the steps. At the bottom, she rolled over and started to crawl away. Left a trail of blood. I stood there trying to wrap my head around the thought that you—you—had pushed her down the steps.”
“I thought I’d killed her,” I whisper.