The Most Dangerous Thing - Laura Lippman [107]
Then he thinks of Go-Go, on a bender. Not the most recent one, but a year or so ago, the next-to-last time he fell off the wagon. Go-Go was not good with secrets, and his feelings about Chicken George would have been understandably confused. No one had shown him greater kindness. No one had betrayed him more thoroughly. Go-Go drunk was capable of saying anything to anyone. And now he’s dead.
“So what do we do?” he asks Gwen.
“That’s why I called you. You’re a prosecutor. Can’t you make the PI talk to you? I mean, I have no standing, but you’re his brother and an officer of the court—”
He shakes his head. “Gwen, that would be a horrible violation of my office. And, by the way, PIs, if retained through legal counsel, can’t be forced to give up information about their clients. They enjoy almost the same privileges as lawyers. I mean, yeah, if you subpoena someone, but—no, no way. Even if this PI would talk to me, I don’t want to put us in play. Does he still call Lori? Has he called you?”
“She,” Gwen says. “The PI is a she. And, no, there’s no evidence she’s tried to get in touch with anyone else.”
“So drop it.”
“But—”
“Drop it, Gwen. You’re overthinking this. I understand the impulse. I’m on intimate terms with it. You’re worried that something’s going on, something you can’t control. You want to get out in front of it. You can’t. Leave it alone. Let me tell you this much: Among the three of us, the brothers? We never spoke of it. Neither did my parents. They thought it was for the best. It probably wasn’t, and maybe Go-Go ended up telling someone he shouldn’t. But there’s nothing we can do about it, and the minute you start poking around, you’re more apt to stir things up.”
Gwen sips her Coke. For all her big talk about seizing the day with an open-face turkey sandwich, she’s barely touched her food, only moved it around on her plate, a trick he knows from his daughters.
“It’s not just this. My father—”
“How is he?”
“He’s doing okay, all things considered. Breaking a hip at his age is no small thing. Anyway, the day he fell? He claimed it was because he saw a chicken on the stairs.”
Tim can’t help himself. He laughs, an all-out guffaw. Gwen looks genuinely hurt.
“I’m sorry, Gwen, but—what do you think this is, some horror movie, where a relative bent on revenge stalks us and our parents? Hires a PI to pressure Go-Go, then surreptitiously places a chicken on your father’s steps? Forces Go-Go to drive into the barricade? What about you, Gwen, do you hear steel guitars in the night? I mean, come on.”
She tries to act as if she’s in on the joke, but he can tell she’s not entirely persuaded. “OK, I’m a little paranoid. Go-Go’s accident, then my father’s accident—”
“Gwen, it’s fucking middle age. Parents die. People die. I lost my dad fifteen years ago, you lost your mother before that.”
“She wasn’t even fifty, and I was in college. There was nothing middle-aged about that.”
“My dad went young, too. I’m just saying—we’re in our forties, and this is when the bullshit begins to mount. Just when you think you’ve got things figured out—boom, boom, boom. We start losing our parents, then we start losing our friends. Your father fell down the steps? He’s in his eighties. I’m even less surprised that Go-Go’s gone. The shocker there was that he made forty. Look, my brother broke my heart. You don’t think I haven’t asked myself again and again if a more open, touchy-feely family would have been better equipped to deal with what happened to him? You don’t think I suggested psychiatrists, even offered to pay if that’s what it took? I found that AA meeting for him. Sean tried, too. So sure, I’m racked with guilt, but about that. Not about that monster dying in an accident.”
Gwen stares out the window