The Whole Truth Read online

  “Liar!”

  She turned her back and walked toward the elevators. The gaggle grumbled and cursed in low tones, words in Spanish that Steve didn’t have to understand to know.

  Which left him with a dicey proposition. He could try to squeeze the Mendez family for the fee, but that would be a long and probably uncollectible prospect. Or he could just let it rest. He hadn’t been officially fired from prepping the appeal, but he wasn’t going to do an ounce of work until he got something in the coffers. He guessed she’d cool off and come back for more.

  The very picture of wishful thinking.

  All he had now was Johnny LaSalle, who had retained him for he didn’t know what.

  Steve learned in recovery that idleness is opportunity. And his experience a few nights before alerted him to how close he was to a fall. If he was going to continue practicing law, he knew he had to do everything to keep from falling into the powder again.

  In his car he had a booklet and looked up a meeting. When he’d been forced into recovery by the State Bar, he at first refused to go to a traditional twelve-step program. They were all based on the “higher power” idea, and he didn’t buy that. But that was all he could find in the Valley, so it started as a matter of convenience. What saved him was a good sponsor, and that, he decided, mattered more than what people believed about powers, higher or lower or nonexistent.

  The Ark had been repaired by his genius mechanic, Thomas Charles, who could make tin foil run. He drove to the meeting, which was in the fellowship hall of a Methodist church on Winnetka. At the meeting, ten of them sat in the traditional circle. People could share their tales. Steve passed. Just listened. Get through another day, that’s the ticket.

  His cell vibrated near the end of the meeting. He walked quickly outside and took the call.

  “Steve?”

  He knew immediately who it was. “LaSalle?”

  “Hey, I’m out early,” LaSalle said. “How do you like that? Three days off for good behavior.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Reseda. The Wendy’s right on the boulevard. You know how long it’s been since I’ve had a really good burger?”

  “Wendy’s?”

  “Hey, compared to where I was. How long ’til you can get here?”

  Johnny LaSalle was dressed in jeans and a blue Hawaiian shirt with pineapples and sunsets and swaying palms. He looked rested. Or relieved. He smiled broadly and when Steve got to his table, Johnny threw his arms around him. It was the strangest feeling Steve could ever remember. Being hugged by a corpse, embraced by a nightmare that had broken into a waking dream.

  “We have a lot of catching up to do,” Johnny said.

  “You’re right.”

  “Can I order you something? It’s on me.”

  Steve shook his head.

  “You mind if I finish these?” Johnny LaSalle had some french fries spread out on a wrapper, covered with ketchup. “The fries in the joint are terrible. I think they get them from McDonald’s Dumpsters all over the state and microwave them for the inmates.”

  It was hard for Steve not to smile at the relish with which Johnny consumed the fatty slivers. And it was hard to deny the magnetic rays that came from his presence. He thought of that character Alec Baldwin played in that movie about the real estate salesmen, the one with Jack Lemmon. Baldwin had one scene but practically stole the whole picture.

  Steve reminded himself that Baldwin was something like the devil in that scene. Tread carefully.

  “What should I call you?” Steve said.

  “Johnny’s fine. I’ve been Johnny longer than Robert.”

  “This is so strange.”

  “I know, Brother. I know.” Johnny picked up three fries at once, downed them, spoke around them. “How about I just tell you what happened?”

  “Please,” Steve said, noticing how jittery he was. His past was about to come flying in on all cylinders. Could he handle it?

  “First,” Johnny said, “some of the good things. Remember me teaching you how to throw a baseball?”

  Steve thought a moment. “I’m not sure.”

  “We were at the park near the house. I remember that park. It had two baseball diamonds.”

  “Right. Raintree Park. It’s still there as far as I know.”

  “And I told you, this I remember, that you had to reach all the way back with the ball. Do you remember me telling you that?”

  Steve had no recollection. “I’m sorry. I was just five.”

  “How about this. Do you remember the Sesame Street character you were afraid of?”

  “Sesame Street. Now that I do remember.”

  “Let me tell you,” Johnny said. “It was the two-headed monster. With the horns. You used to hide your face when you saw them.”

  That was right. That was exactly what Steve did. He never forgot the two-headed monster. You don’t forget the things that scare you as a kid. Or the losses you suffer when you’re five years old.

  Johnny LaSalle had to be Robert. Had to be, or else he was the coolest liar on earth. Steve had seen some pretty cool ones before, but not like this. The echo of doubt was fading, but Steve wasn’t ready to stop listening. Still, Johnny’s face had changed. A moment before, Steve thought it potentially menacing. Now it seemed soft and open. Even vulnerable.

  Quite unexpectedly, tears pushed at Steve’s eyes. He bit down and fought them back.

  “Hey,” Johnny said. He put his hand on Steve’s arm.

  “Sorry. You just don’t know . . .”

  “I think I do. Listen, Bro, just listen. Life is a veil of tears, as they say. We’re part of that. But there’s a way out. Let me talk a minute.”

  I want you to talk, Steve thought. I want you to talk your way back into my life and talk out all the pain. And talk fast so I don’t just burst the dam here.

  “Here’s what happened,” Johnny said. “The guy who took me was named Cole.”

  “Clinton Cole,” Steve said. “I looked up the story when I was a teenager.”

  “Then you know a lot of it.”

  “Not really.”

  Johnny said, “Here’s how it went down. Cole was a guy who thought he was a demon. A chief demon of Satan. And it was his job to raise up apprentice demons. That meant little boys. Like me. He found me because he knew our father, did some construction with him. He decided I was going to be one of his boys.”

  “Why didn’t he take both of us?”

  Johnny shrugged. “I never got to ask. He wrapped me up and the next thing I knew I was in this place in the mountains, a real dive of a shack. Terrible.”

  Steve swallowed hard. “Did he . . .”

  Closing his eyes, Johnny nodded. “Yeah. Thank the good Lord above it never happened to you, Steve. It didn’t, did it?”

  “No.”

  “Well, somewhere along in there, I got rescued. By some guys who knew about Cole, knew what a bad guy he was. Some people might have called these guys a gang of some sort, but they were like family to me. A man named Eldon LaSalle took me in. Do you know that name?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “All right. I’ll tell you more about him later. One step at a time.”

  “Why didn’t this man bring you back to us?”

  “It’s complicated. I don’t remember a lot from that time. I just know Cole had done a real number on me. Steve, I was really screwed up. Eldon LaSalle treated me like his own son. But he could only do so much. I got into trouble. No excuses. That’s just the way it was.”

  As he spoke, Steve noticed him looking this way and that, never keeping his eyes locked on Steve for any length of time. Steve knew that’s how long-term prisoners act. In the slam they have to constantly be looking around in order to survive.

  He could scarcely imagine what Johnny — Robert — had been through to this point in his life.

  “I remembered you,” Johnny said. “But by the time I was fifteen, sixteen, I was into my own deal and I didn’t think abo
ut the past. But then things changed.”

  Steve said, “Whose body was that in the fire? And how did they make it an ID on you? I have the autopsy report and it says — ”

  “You have the autopsy report? How’d you get that?”

  “I asked. The deputy coroner faxed it to me. It used dental records to make a positive ID on Robert Conroy.”

  Johnny frowned. “I’ve never seen that. I don’t even know who it was in that shack. The kid I mean. The man was Cole. And good riddance.”

  He looked down and was silent for a long moment. Then he looked at Steve. “I’ve paid my debt to society. At least that’s what they tell me. But this time I’m not going back. I want to turn my life completely around. It started inside when I found the Lord. How much do you know about my record?”

  “Some.”

  “I was into an Aryan thing. Thugs. That’s what we were. Pretty heavy into it. But Jesus broke through all that.”

  Steve said nothing.

  Johnny said, “Do you know the story of Paul and the road to Damascus?”

  “Some kind of light, right?”

  “Blinded him. Got his attention. That’s what happened to me in that prison infirmary. Only I didn’t go blind. For the first time in my life, I could see. Saw all the bad stuff I’d done, saw that I was going to die soon if I didn’t get my life together. No, that’s not what I mean. I mean I couldn’t get my own life together so it had to be from God. From Jesus. And I got on my knees and prayed. And I got saved, man. I got saved.”

  “That’s great, ” Steve said.

  “You’re not a believer then.”

  “It shows?”

  “I can hear it in your voice. Or not hear it, as the case may be. Well, let me tell you, you’ve got to come to the Lord, Brother. It’s the only way.”

  “Let’s keep it on you for now. What are your plans?”

  “That’s where you come in. I want you to be my lawyer.”

  “Hopefully you won’t need a lawyer anymore.”

  Johnny shook his head. “They won’t give up. The feds. They hate us. And the lawyer I had before this was a lying sack of” — he grimaced — “was just no good. I landed in prison because of him. I have never had a lawyer I could really trust. Who would bleed for me if he had to, and who I would bleed for. Until I got saved, I never would have thought this way. But now I do. That’s why I came to you after all these years, Steve. Family. That’s what it’s all about.”

  Steve took a breath, trying to process the whole thing. For a moment he felt like Jimmy Stewart in that Christmas movie, getting a chance to go back after jumping off a bridge. But that was a movie and this was a Wendy’s in Reseda.

  “Rob — Johnny, I’d like to help, but federal’s a major deal — ”

  “Say you will. Just say it.”

  “You need somebody who specializes — ”

  “There’s more to it. I don’t just want you to be my lawyer. I want somebody who can guide me on the outside, help me get on the right track. But most of all . . .” He paused, then took a deep breath. “Most of all I want you to be my brother again. For the rest of our lives.”

  Steve couldn’t speak for a long moment. It was like the moment was frozen in time, yet rushing by like a bullet train. And he had to grab on now. If he didn’t, it would pass, and with it the last chance to make everything right again.

  “Of course I’ll help you, Johnny.”

  With a relieved grin, Johnny said, “I was hoping for that. Knowing I have you to count on will make all the difference in the world.”

  He put his hand out. Steve shook it. A sealed deal.

  And then Steve couldn’t hold back any longer. The tears came. His body shook and he put his head in his hands.

  He felt Johnny’s hand on his back. “Hey, it’s all okay,” Johnny said. “It’s all okay.”

  Dear God, he wanted that. He wanted it to be more than that.

  He wanted his brother back, and now here he was and the tears would not stop.

  SIXTEEN

  Steve didn’t turn the lights on when he got back to his apartment. He felt if he did he might shatter the delicate, glassy hope he’d allowed to form on his unsteady insides.

  Once, when he and Ashley knew they were heading toward the end but had not yet formulated the words, Steve suggested a trip to Napa. Ashley loved the wine country, and Steve thought a last-ditch trip together might mend at least the edges of the fabric of their marriage. Ashley almost didn’t go. But he persuaded her, and all the way up on the plane, and in the rental car, he chose his words so carefully lest he ruin what he knew was his final chance.

  The trip went well, better than expected. At one of the wineries Ashley remarked how much she liked the logo — a centaur holding a cluster of grapes. When she went to the restroom, Steve bought two expensive wine glasses with the logo in gold and had the clerk hold on to the box. When they left, he told Ashley he’d be right out, and he got the box and held it behind him as he went to the car.

  She smiled at him.

  He presented the glasses to her as a gift, and she was pleased. She kissed him, a warm kiss like they hadn’t done in months. It could happen, it could heal. He allowed himself to believe it.

  Then, just a week later, it was all bad again. The coke did it. It always did. After an argument one night, Steve went to the kitchen, to the sink to throw water on his face. He was careless, his hand hit one of the wine glasses with the centaur logo. Ashley had put them out, but they never got around to pouring the wine.

  The glass shattered on the counter.

  The shattering sound hit him in the gut like a cannon blast. His insides were like the shards of glass, strewn, irreparable.

  It had been so over-the-top symbolic he almost laughed.

  Then he heard mewing.

  Steve took a small bowl of milk down to the courtyard of the Sheridan Arms Apartments to feed Nick Nolte.

  Nick Nolte was a scruffy, homeless cat. Steve had started feeding him a few months back and couldn’t get rid of him. Not that he’d tried. Nick’s fur was matted and wild and stuck out at odd angles. Steve decided he looked like that mug shot of Nick Nolte when he got arrested for DUI some years back.

  Thus, the name.

  Nick met Steve at the bench just inside the apartment building gates. He seemed to have a lot of bad stuff in his background too.

  Steve supposed that’s why he and the cat got along.

  “What’s up, Nick?” He put the bowl down and let the cat go to it.

  “Hey, you’ll never guess,” Steve said. “I met my long-lost brother today. Can you even believe that? I haven’t told you the whole story, but you wouldn’t believe it anyway.”

  Nick Nolte was concentrating on the milk.

  “I mean, you guys have nine lives, right? So maybe it isn’t such a big deal to you. But, pal, this is a big deal for me. Let me try to explain it to you. You got it easy. You chase mice and squirrels, and then you eat. You don’t have to think. We have to think. That’s the breaks of evolution, Nick. Sorry about that. If it was up to me you’d be the owner of a convenience store. Or a psychiatrist. You’d be a good psychiatrist, Nick. You listen and don’t talk much. And you roll with the punches.”

  Right now, he was rolling with the milk. Steve could hear the womp of a stereo system blasting 50 Cent. No doubt the gangsta wannabe in number seven. He was a white kid, maybe twenty-two, with the fake swagger of the middle-class pretender. The less Steve saw of him, the better.

  “So all of sudden, today, I feel like there might be a reason to keep getting up in the morning. I’m still in shock. You got to understand, Nick, I’ve been living with this thing in my gut for twenty-five years. That’s a long time. Can you please explain to me the complex I’ve got?”

  Nick lapped with rhythmic indifference.

  “Maybe I’m cat-atonic. Maybe I’m feline fine.”

  No response.

  “This is quality material here, what’s up with you?”
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  “Quit feeding that devil cat.”

  Mrs. Edna Mae Stanky was standing behind the bench. Steve hadn’t heard her wheel up. She was on oxygen and had a tank on wheels and plastic tubes up her nose. At somewhere north of seventy years, she spent her days and evenings patrolling the grounds, looking for something to complain about. Steve knew this to be true, because he’d been Stankied on numerous occasions.

  “You keep feeding ’im,” Mrs. Stanky said, “he’ll keep coming back.”

  “I’ll make sure he behaves, Mrs. Stanky. How you feeling tonight?”

  “He’s got disease, you can tell by lookin’ at ’im. We got kids who play down here.”

  “Nick is as gentle as a . . . he won’t hurt anybody.”

  “Nick? Who’s Nick?”

  “The cat.”

  “I need some Afrin. Would you run to the Rite Aid and get me some Afrin?”

  Steve knew she also patrolled the grounds looking for people to run errands for her, people who weren’t her immediate family, her immediate family being those who largely stayed away. It struck Steve then that Mrs. Stanky and Nick the cat had a little more in common than she realized.

  “Sure, Mrs. Stanky. I’ll pop right over.”

  “And quit feeding that devil cat.”

  Nick looked up from the bowl, singularly unconcerned.

  “And I’m going to get somebody to turn off that devil music.”

  Steve waited until the old woman wheeled off, then gave Nick a quick pat. “Hey, I’ve got a job. I’m a nasal spray delivery man. Aren’t you proud?”

  Nick turned his backside to Steve and started off toward another end of the courtyard. For a moment Steve envied him. Eat, drink, and be furry. Wander the earth without memory. Rely on the kindness of strangers.

  Then he heard, “Mr. Conroy?”

  Two men in suits had entered the courtyard from the front. They looked like government types. One was tall, with thinning, sandy-blond hair. The smaller one was well on the way to male-pattern baldness and didn’t look happy about it. He didn’t look happy about anything.

  “Do I know you?” Steve said, not standing up.

  The tall one took the lead. He was about forty and whipped out a leatherette case, flipped it open. Showed a credential.