In this chapter, Law finally meets Bea and Preston's father. Any guesses as to how Law reacts? I suspect that will depend on how Mister Arlott treats the detective. Let's find out.
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NOTE: Check out my other stories in the Sci-fi / Fantasy Section Crown Vic to a Parallel World From Whence I Came Stolen Love
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Wasted Life a Law Edwards Mystery by Sam Stefanik
17 The Sins of the Father
At six, I gave up on sleep. I got out of bed and readied myself for the day. I went around the corner and ate breakfast. At eight, I was sitting at my desk when Bea walked in. She was wearing a dress similar in style to the one she had on when we met, but this one was red with yellow flowers. The wave was back in her hair. She had a man with her who she introduced as Mister Elliott Arlott, her father.
I shook the man's hand and realized with shock that this very tall, slim, athletic, ruddy man was about my age, probably a little older. I felt like I could pass for his father. The only stamp time had left on him was prematurely white hair, but that didn't mean much. Blond men always lose their color early.
"Mister Edwards," the man said in a resonant baritone that would have done well on the radio, "my daughter told me about the work you've done and the little money you accepted to do it. I want my son's killer found and punished. I brought a check. I'll pay whatever it takes."
Elliott Arlott handed over a large check torn from a business checkbook. The document was yellow and was big enough to be a baseball pennant. I accepted the piece of fine linen paper and looked it over. It was made out in my name, my full name, and was drawn for five hundred dollars. Five hundred dollars...a life changing figure for me. I held it for a long time and let my imagination enjoy the thought of all that money. The daydream I had was wonderful, but a dream is all that it was.
"Miss Arlott," I said to Bea without taking my eyes from the check, "could I ask you to step outside for just a moment? I'd like a private word with your father before we start today."
Bea didn't object or question my request. She wordlessly moved to the door and went out. When she was gone and the door shut behind her, I made a feint of shading my eyes from the window, so I could turn from the glass. I had things I wanted to say, and I didn't want Bea to be able to see me say them. The way I turned put Mister Arlott and me both facing the front of my desk. We looked at each other sideways.
Mister Arlott looked at me placidly. He looked with the calm eyes of a man firmly in the right. He looked like a man who'd been getting enough sleep and living well on the fruits of his business. He looked like a man who wasn't bothered that his son had been struggling for nickels and dimes while he lived his nice life in the green grass and quiet neighborhoods of New Jersey.
I decided that I hated him. I decided that I hated everything about him. I hated his pressed shirt and the crisp pleats in his pants. I hated the smooth skin of his clean-shaven face. I hated the self-satisfied smirk on that same face as he thought he could buy my help to solve his problems. I hated the smugness it took for him to write the check I held in my hands. My hands would have been balled into fists except for the piece of paper they held. Those fists might have been punching the shit out of Bea Arlott's father, except that she was waiting for us on the other side of a plate glass window.
"Mister Arlott." I growled my anger at the man. I swallowed hard and tried to smooth my voice so I could say what I needed to say. I also tried to keep my shaking hands from grabbing ahold of him. I knew if I touched him, I'd take him apart. I didn't want to do that in front of his daughter.
My restraint wasn't for her sake, but for Preston's. If I beat Elliott Arlott to a bloody pulp, I would lose Bea as an ally. She'd been surprisingly useful up to that point, and I wanted her help to find and punish Preston's murderer. For that reason alone, I kept my temper in check.
I wasn't going to lay a finger on Mister Arlott, but I still planned to hurt him as much as I could with my words. I set about doing just that. "A-HEM...Mister Arlott, if your daughter wasn't outside, I would beat you unconscious." I said and tore the check to shreds.
I tore it longways and crossways and then into little bits. The fine paper made a satisfying ripping sound as I tore it over and over again. When I couldn't tear the pieces any smaller, I dumped the shreds in the full ashtray on my desk. "I won't take your guilt money. You'll pay five hundred to find his murderer, but you wouldn't pay five hundred and twenty so he could have the degree he earned and a good life? Fuck you.
"You may not have murdered your son, Mister Arlott, but you killed him. He could have been a success, had a career, maybe found someone to love. Instead, someone killed him in a grubby hotel room in a filthy slum. You did that. So, fuck you, Mister Arlott. Get out of my sight."
Elliot Arlott looked at me along his eyes. His face held the stunned and stupid expression of a man who's been mortally wounded but hasn't yet fallen. I let him stare as I walked around my desk and sat in the swivel chair. I settled just in time for an intense spasm that wracked my frame and stole my breath. The pain was blinding. The cramps made me grip both arms of the chair hard enough that I thought I'd tear them off. I rode the spasm out and swallowed the bile that filled my mouth. Mister Arlott remained until my pain had passed, then he turned slowly and left.
Bea came in a few minutes later. She moved to the edge of my desk and stayed on her feet to speak to me. "What happened?" She asked in a way that informed me her father hadn't told her anything about what I'd said to him. "Father said he had to go home but he didn't say why. He looked funny."
I lied to Bea and hoped my lie would stop her questions. "I told him we have work to do. If you're ready, we should get started."
Bea sat in the visitor's chair that was closest to the side of the desk with the ashtray. Her eyes were drawn to the scraps of paper that littered the top of it. I regretted not burning the check, but it was too late. Bea noticed the scraps of paper and picked some of them out to examine. "This is my father's check. Did he tear it up?"
"No, I did."
Bea popped out of her chair like she'd been sitting on a spring. "Why?" She demanded, suddenly nervous that something had changed between us. "Wasn't it enough? Was there something wrong with it? Aren't you going to help us?"
I tried to explain without going into detail. "No, not US, not HIM. I will help YOU." I pointed my finger up at her. "Those pieces of paper don't change anything. Let's get to work."
Bea wouldn't be so easily redirected. "But...I don't understand. Father wants to help."
I couldn't take her questions. I was angry at Mister Arlott, and I hadn't been able to relieve that anger with physical action. I was stuck with the emotion with nowhere to spend it. Bea's interrogation made everything worse. I didn't want to tell her my opinion of her father. As I had that thought, I wondered why. I wondered why I cared what she thought about me, or her father. Both things were her problem and not mine. As long as she continued to help me, there was no reason that I could think of for me to worry about anything she might think or feel...or was there?
I was too angry in the moment to reason that out. I needed to put an end to Bea's questions. I struck the desktop with my right fist. I struck it hard enough that the ashtray jumped and its contents overflowed. Cigar ends and scraps of Mister Arlott's check spilled onto the wood desktop. Bea startled at the sound of the impact and looked at me like a green soldier would look at his first battle.
I unclenched my fist, stretched the fingers, and spoke to Bea as calmly as I could. I prepared myself to reveal something to her that I'd hadn't told anyone, not in a very long time. I didn't want to tell her, but I wanted her to understand why I felt the way I did. For some reason, I needed her to understand.
"Two days ago, you sat in that chair and said that your brother and I were alike. You didn't realize how true that was. I was seventeen when my father disowned me. He was a tailor who had a shop uptown at Spring Street and 10th, where the money is. The clothes he made were sought after. Society people would ask each other, `is that an Edwards?' He outfitted some of the finest people in Philadelphia. I was his heir, the oldest son who was supposed to take over the business.
"We worked well together. We respected and loved each other. I thought I could tell him anything. Three months before my eighteenth birthday, we'd had a good day at work, and my father was in a great mood. Just after we closed up, I asked him into the back room, and I told him what I am, what I couldn't help being. My father leaned against the cutting table and called me a filthy name. He called me the name that you called me the day we met. He told me I was dead to him.
"He pushed me to the front door of the shop that I always thought I would own one day, and he put me out with nothing but the clothes on my back. He didn't even look at me when he locked the door between us. That was the last contact I had with my family, twenty-six years ago last month."
Bea interrupted my story with a question. She asked it with her head cocked to one side in confusion. "You were a tailor?"
I glanced down at my wreck of a suit and understood her incredulity. I tried to explain. "I haven't always looked like this. I was a young man once, well-dressed and proud. You could have peeled fruit with the pleats in my trousers, they were that sharp. Like your brother, my life was on a good path, a positive path. Like Preston, because of my father's ignorant hatred of what I am, my life took a different path, one that hasn't always been good.
"The morning after my father threw me out, I enlisted in the army. They gave me a uniform to wear. I took the beautiful suit that my father and I had made together, and I tore it apart at every seam. I went through basic training, and they sent me to fight in France. When I left, I was a boy. I came back a man, a real man with medals and wounds that I planned to throw in his face.
"He didn't even let me have that. A week before they discharged me from the hospital, I read his obituary in the paper. He had a stroke in the shop. He was dead before he hit the ground. I cursed him that day, and every day since."
Bea looked at me with an expression similar to the one her father had worn when I told him what I thought of him. It was a look of stunned surprise. "Why did you curse him?" She asked me in a quiet voice that seemed afraid of the answer.
I didn't know if I could explain why because Bea was a girl. I assumed her relationship with her father couldn't be the same for her as it would be for a boy. I said as much. "I don't know what it's like to grow up as a girl. Boys worship their fathers. I did. I curse him because it's crushing when your hero turns out to be your enemy."
Bea's expression didn't change. "Would Preston have felt like that?"
I lifted my shoulders in a helpless shrug. "The stronger the relationship between them, the bigger the wound when it's ripped away."
I paused and rubbed my face with my palms. I needed to finish the story, and I needed to get off the subject. The memory of my father's rejection was making my stomach crawl. "I tore up your father's check because that money wasn't to pay for an investigation. It was to buy his way out of his guilt. That's not something he can do. He can't purchase absolution for the responsibility he has for the death of his son. At least, he can't buy it from me."
Bea's face was blank. I assumed she needed a moment to process the implications of what I'd told her. I figured my story was pretty grim for a young woman to deal with. I got a cigar from the box in my desk drawer and lit it. I was waving the match out when Bea said, "I'm so very sorry."
I dismissed what I thought was her apology for her father's action. "Nothing for you to be sorry for. Your father made his own choices."
Bea's eyes focused and bored into mine. "I'm sorry for you, not because of my father. I'm sorry it was like that. Does that happen a lot?"
I drew on my cigar and answered through the smoke. I thought of David and the father who had disowned him. I thought of others I'd known. I told Bea the unvarnished truth because that's what she seemed to want. "It does." I admitted. "I've known quite a few."
Bea lowered her eyes away from the brutal facts I'd given her. She didn't say anything. I waited a moment before I cleared my throat. "AHEM...does that answer your question? We need to get to work."
"Thank you for telling me, Mister Edwards." Bea breathed in a voice full of tender pity. She dug in her bag, found a small lace handkerchief, and dabbed her eyes with it.
Normally, I hated pity. From almost anyone else, I would have shoved it right back at them. From Bea, I appreciated it. It made me feel just a little less lonely on that grim morning. Between that, and what I assumed was my changing opinion of the young woman seated in my visitor's chair, I decided the `Mister Edwards' formality seemed silly. "Miss Arlott, you may call me Law, if you'll let me call you Bea."
"Alright...Law." She agreed and flushed pink like the young woman that she was.
I stuck the cigar in my mouth and swept the ashes and junk off the desk into the ashtray with my hand. I dusted my hands, and the moment was over.