That night, about an hour after paramedics are called to AJ’s home—there is a hideous comedy involving the address, with the EMTs trying to gain access through the wrong doors as Lauranne wails inside, not that it matters in the end—Lu and her father receive the courtesy of a personal visit from Mike Hunt, who has been informed by a detective he knows in the Southwestern District that AJ is dead. He waited until Lauranne went to bed, then apparently drank two more bottles of his nice Italian wine, chased it with a handful of pills, and walked into his own swimming pool, tying a metal drum of tomato plants to his ankle to ensure he could not change his mind.
Lu sees her father’s knees buckle—the phrase makes sense to Lu for the first time, and the next image that comes to her mind, crazily, is one of the towers on 9/11, that seeming moment of hesitation as it swayed, then collapsed—and she realizes that her own pain and anger and sorrow will have to wait, possibly forever, certainly for the rest of her father’s life.
She grabs him by his elbow, pilots him to a chair with Mike Hunt’s help.
“Why?” Andrew Jackson Brant keeps asking. “Why?”
But that is the one thing she must never tell him.
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES IS CALLED TO THE INQUISITION, OR THE FINAL SHOE DROPS
My father became old overnight. Maybe he was old all along and I willed myself not to notice it. Other friends have told me that they watched their parents sail through their eighties, only to age suddenly at ninety, and my father was getting close to that milestone. At any rate, he is increasingly frail. He doesn’t eat enough, subsists on cold cereal and bananas. He no longer walks around the lake. His hearing seems to be going, or maybe he just doesn’t want to answer the questions put to him, simple as they are. His practice had been a charade for years, albeit a charade that seemed to keep him alert, active, happy. Now I barely trust him to drive a car to the grocery store. He has stopped reading books and it takes him much of a day to make his way through the Beacon-Light, slender as it is. The television is on almost all day. MSNBC and, much to my amusement, endless repeats of Law & Order. It is the one thing that seems to get a rise out of him, those Law & Order episodes. He finds all the lawyers wanting, in acumen and strategy. But, come the end of the hour, at least you know everything. That’s one luxury I will never have.
Suicides take their secrets with them. Was Rudy wily enough to kill Mary McNally as a warning to Nita Flood, or did he make a mistake that night? Fred said he saw the faded “R” and “L” on his wrists a week after he was arrested. A mistake might explain that trace of DNA. Was he excited about what he was about to do? Or was he sitting on the bed he presumed to be Nita Flood’s, thinking about another cold night, in which he hid in the trees and watched boys come and go in a room where a girl appeared to be sleeping. What did you see, Rudy? What do you know? But his loyalty, to the very end, was to AJ; and if my brother were my client, I would have no problem presenting a plausible case in which he had no knowledge of what Rudy intended to do. And paying for someone’s attorney does not prove conspiracy. Nor does telling your sister a life-changing secret at the very moment she is closing in on this fact. Give AJ this: he was very good at derailing me. That lovely Saturday lunch we had to discuss surrogacy—he was milking me about the case, trying to figure out what I knew, realizing that Rudy would need a better attorney.