"Boots is gone.”
Viz was standing at Gage’s office door.
“When?”
“Day before yesterday. I’ve been going by his hotel like you wanted. I talked up one of the maids after I hadn’t spotted his van for twelve hours. She told me.” Viz grinned. “She turned red and got all fidgety when I described him and pointed out his room. I think she was doing more than cleaning.”
“You get her name?”
“Her tag said Rosa M. Full name, Rosa Montijo.”
Gage walked to the kitchen after Viz left and poured himself a cup of coffee. He collected an empty banker’s box from the supply room, then walked down the flight of stairs to the basement. He punched in the code numbers that had nearly cost Shakir his life, then went inside.
Boxes containing fifteen years of case files he and Viz had collected from Charlie Palmer’s storage locker were stacked along the wall.
Gage lined them up along the floor, year by year, and then lifted up the first in line and set it on the worktable.
He examined his hands, already grimy with dust, then searched around the room for a rag or paper towels. There weren’t any. He wiped them on his Levi’s, figuring it was the least damaging kind of dirt he was about to paw through.
He flipped open the box and sat down.
S even hours later Gage noticed the time, surprised to find it was four o’clock, now broken free from his immersion in Charlie Palmer’s life, or at least those parts leaving a paper trail.
Reflecting back on his moods as he’d examined the files, Gage found he hadn’t felt anger so much as indecision, struggling to focus, wondering what he was trying to do and who his client really was.
Socorro?
Tansy?
Maybe even Porzolkiewski?
Every person who didn’t get justice because Charlie played God and took their lives in his hands?
He knew that Faith would say: You can only do what you can do.
He decided to start with the easiest one.
Or perhaps, the hardest.
Gage walked upstairs. Tansy wasn’t at her desk.
G age hated the song. Hated it the first time he heard it. It sometimes played in his mind as he drove Highway 101 toward the bedroom communities south of San Francisco and looked up at the rows of little houses strung together like pieces of hard candy, striping the hillsides. He thought of the lyrics describing little boxes and ticky-tacky houses all looking the same. Lots of people knew it. Hardly anybody knew who’d first sung it. Gage did. Pete Seeger had been his father’s favorite folksinger. He could still recall the album it was on, recorded during the 1963 We Shall Overcome concert at Carnegie Hall.
Gage remembered his father humming it one day as they’d walked to the plaster-covered adobe building housing his one-person medical practice in Nogales. Gage had just passed his thirteenth birthday. On Saturdays he raked the front yard, watered the cactus, and collected the tumbleweeds desert winds had rolled onto the property.
Gage recalled stopping on the sidewalk and telling his father, “Maybe that’s all they can afford.”
His father had turned toward him and said, “You’re right, son.” His father gazed for a moment at the distant mesquite and saguaro-covered foothills, then said, “I think there may be a lesson in this. Sometimes even the most decent among us don’t listen to what they’re really saying.”
His father never hummed the song again and Gage never heard it again, except when his mind played it for him.
The song had faded by the time Gage had walked up the front steps of Tansy’s tiny Daly City bungalow and rang the doorbell.
Tansy peeked out of the front window and then opened the door.
“How’s Moki doing?” Gage asked, after she invited him.
“Okay. Some muscle spasms. It scared the aide so she called.”
Gage spotted Moki sitting at the dining table coloring with crayons. Twenty-four years old with the mind of a child. Maybe not even a child. Children can recognize their mothers, if only just by instinct.
Tansy directed Gage toward the couch, then sat next to him and looked down at the file in his hand, Moki’s name printed on the yellowed tab.
“It was Brandon Meyer’s old law firm that hired Charlie to work on the side of the punks who jumped Moki,” Gage said.
She shook her head. “They didn’t represent anyone. You can look. I’ve got a copy of the whole court file in the closet.”
“They didn’t represent anyone, they represented everyone. They were the invisible hand behind the case that got rid of the witness.”
Tansy’s eyes went wide. “Got rid of…”
“Not that. Just out of town, way, way out of town. Charlie set him up in a condo one of the kids’ parents owned in Cabo San Lucas. Until today, I had suspected Charlie of threatening the witness into fleeing. The truth is Charlie just paid him off.”
“Where is he now?”
“Dead. Had a stroke a year later. He might’ve survived if he’d stayed in the States and was living close to a first-rate emergency room. He died of pneumonia a month afterward. I found his death certificate in Charlie’s file.”
Tansy bit her lip. “Poor man.”
“What?” Gage threw up his hands. “Poor man? He was a disgusting human being.”
“But pneumonia is a horrible, horrible way to die.”
Gage started to answer, then caught himself. He examined Tansy’s soft, round face and sympathetic eyes. She would’ve made a magnificent nurse.
He watched her drift off in thought during the quiet moments that followed.
“I didn’t realize until now,” Tansy finally said, “that despite what I told you, I hadn’t really made peace with never knowing exactly what happened. I just stopped laboring over it in my mind.” She glanced at the file. “How much money did Charlie make for doing it?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“As far as I can tell. His accounting records don’t show any entries under that case number. Maybe he-”
Pegasus. Maybe the money was wired to Pegasus.
Gage wished he had known the name in India so he could’ve prompted Wilbert Hawkins’s memory of the account that had wired the million dollars funding his escape.
In any case, Gage knew he needed to think it all through before he told Tansy.
“Maybe the payment was combined with something else he was working on,” Gage said. Tansy’s eyes flickered. He knew that she knew he was thinking something different than what he was saying. “Or something like that.”