"Yes."
"This is Vincent Cappa-"
"Vincent! I wanted to call you but I didn"t know if that would be an intrusion. And I don"t have a home number for you," said Vincent"s therapist. It was ironic that Vincent, a resident of California, had had his only counseling experience as an adolescent Chicagoan.
"I don"t have a home number, Tom. This is my business number and that"s it. I wanted to call you but I didn"t want you to think I would only call you if I was in trouble."
"I know you"d have called eventually, either way, about stuff."
Vincent said, "I"m in the worst trouble."
"I know, Vincent." There was a settling sound, a rustle and a soft, brief puppy whimper as Tom obviously got out of bed. "Do you want to talk about it?"
"Who"s that?"
"It"s my daughter. We let her sleep in the bed. Horrible father. Love her too much, I guess. We waited too long and now she"s going to be this spoiled ..."
"How old is she?"
"She is six months old, Vincent."
"Oh, s.h.i.t," said Vincent, and the tears began to slip down his face and into his mouth. "Oh, s.h.i.t."
"Yeah," said Tom. "Now, let"s see. What time is it where you are, Vincent?"
"It"s like ... oh Jesus, Tom, it"s one in the morning. That would make it like four in the morning where you are? Is Michigan in Central?"
"Eastern. But I get up early," Tom said.
"I"m sorry. But if I wanted to crack up a car before, when I lost Ben? This time, I"m not a kid who didn"t know better. I did this. I did this and I cost my brother his kid and I"m f.u.c.ked. My life is f.u.c.ked. Which I don"t care about. Their life is f.u.c.ked. And they"re innocent."
"So that would make you guilty."
"No. Yes."
Tom said, "No." He asked then, "Why did you make this movie, Vincent?"
"I don"t know!"
"Did you do it for world peace?"
"No."
"Did you do it because you were sorry for what happened to Ben and wanted to make it better for someone else?"
"I guess. And it turned out worse."
Tom said, "Yeah, and that"s bad. Life owes you an apology. But you"re not going to get one. It doesn"t work that way." Tom"s voice softened. "And hey, guess what. You don"t get to blame yourself for this one, either."
Vincent carried the phone out onto the porch, where the extravagantly benign California night bathed his face, as if to say, nothing matters ... nothing but you, remember that ... nothing but you. He said, "I wish you hadn"t moved to G.o.dd.a.m.ned Michigan."
Tom said, "It"s not bad, here in G.o.dd.a.m.ned Michigan. I knew my wife in high school, although she wouldn"t look at me then. She"s lowered her standards over twenty years. We live on a lake. Do you live near the ocean?"
"A block. I live in Venice. The crummy artist part, not the minor-movie-star part. You can hear the waves. They call it "ocean sounds" in real-estate ads. I swear to G.o.d." He added, "I can"t live with myself. No one in my family can."
"I think they can. Better than you know. Take it easy, Vincent."
"They"ll hate me forever. They"ll think I did this for me."
"Having a personal reason for doing something well doesn"t negate the purer reasons, Vincent. Just think of Olympic athletes. They say they did this for their mom who loved to skate but she got macular degeneration ..."
"What?"
"She went blind."
"Oh."
"And the thing that happened. It"s not cause and effect. It"s not ad hoc ergo propter hoc. It wasn"t like you made a movie, therefore your niece ..."
"Look, I"m not entirely illiterate, but I don"t know what the h.e.l.l that means either."
"It"s a legal term. It means "from which, therefore because of which." Remember I went to law school for a year. You"re not alone, are you?"
"No, my mom and dad are here."
"Good. Take care," Tom said. "I gotta run. My daughter"s an early riser too." He added after a moment, "Vincent, try to do this. Just keep one thing in the front of your mind, okay? When Ben was kidnapped, you were a child, which presumes you were innocent. And now, you"re an adult. But that doesn"t make you automatically responsible for the actions of every nut on earth who sees your work. I watched your face on TV that night. You were glowing like the guy who discovered religion. And it wasn"t that you had a big head about what an artist you were. It was about Kerry and Ben and you having done this thing together. And about those children in the film."
"And now," Vincent said.
"And now, you do your best. Ben will need you. Count on it."
"Tom, who would do this thing?"
"I think, someone who had needs, like the woman who kidnapped your brother. I think they should be checking hospitals for people in the area who recently lost babies. Stillbirths. Or crib death or meningitis. Young children."
"That"s what my mother thinks. And they are. They have been."
"And also people who have been somehow complicit in the loss of their children. Accidents."
"Someone would steal another person"s baby because their baby got killed in a car accident?" Vincent asked. "You say I"m crazy ..."
"People often feel guilty about things that aren"t their fault."
"Tom."
"Be good, my man."
Don"t hang up, Vincent wanted to scream. The pulse just above his sternum began to beat and he tried to breathe out slowly before he spoke. Don"t leave me! Finally, he said, "I"ll give you a call again. Soon."
Vincent crossed his arms and watched the first of the insane California joggers set out on their endless runs to nowhere.
When his phone rang, at five a.m., he nearly fell out of the deck chair. It was Candy, telling him to brace himself for what she had to say. She told him, "There"s a letter, Vincent."
"To us?"
"From the kidnapper. Sent to The New York Times."
"Is it real?"
"Either it"s real or I"ll turn in my shield," Candy said. "Wake your mom and dad up. Turn on the TV."
CHAPTER ELEVEN.
The letter read: The minor child Stella Bliss Cappadora is unharmed and well. She is being cared for gently. As proof that she indeed is the child in question, we point out that she has a pale brown birthmark on the back of her neck, roughly the shape of the State of Florida. She will be restored to her parents very soon at a place soon to be evident-a designated "safe place" such as a hospital emergency room. This deliverance will occur within hours.
The taking of Stella Cappadora is to be considered a demonstration. It intends to point out the fact that, while the world gazed fatuously on the acclaim given to a film exploiting the feelings of five families of abducted children, a child from the filmmaker"s own family was abducted without violence.
"Caring" is not enough. It changes nothing. It advances no knowledge of causes or solutions-merely provides those who vicariously experience grief the phenomenon known by some as "contact compa.s.sion," which allows them the sense of having done good merely by understanding the "issue." It is no more than satisfying the voyeurism of the ma.s.ses who feed on pain.
This demonstration, however painful, was a direct result of the acclaim accorded to what was essentially a dishonest bid for attention. Ad hoc ergo propter hoc, in essence. It redirects the focus, in a way that could not be achieved without a certain level of sensationalism.
Any temporary distress caused to the Cappadoras is unintentional.
Along with the letter was a package containing Stella"s little satin shoes-embroidered with stars on the toes and her name on the heels by Candy"s sister, the baby"s great-aunt. It was mailed from Vancouver by priority mail and the security footage in the post office seemed to show a pleasant-faced woman, dressed like a grandmother in her fifties or sixties, wearing an oversized wool hat, smiling at the postal worker. She signed the register "Patricia Fellows" and gave her address as 1060 West Addison Street in Chicago-which was Wrigley Field. There were no fingerprints. The woman, said a Vancouver police officer, could have been anyone. In any books in Canada, or any computer files, there was no trace of her under any name. And, they added, after a.n.a.lyzing the tape, despite her cloth coat and old-fashioned orthopedic shoes, the woman actually walked like someone in her twenties.
Although the false name of the murdered child in Chicago was used again, that proved nothing to Detective Humbly except that Candy might be right: This was personal.
The letter itself was strange. Although it was obviously written by someone with a brain-which was some comfort-it was convoluted and drew no real conclusions, which was no comfort at all. Smart people could snap their caps as easy as vagrants.
-- "The letter is goofy," Candy said, as Humbly drove her, Ben, and Eliza to a little guesthouse in Venice, near where Beth and Pat were staying with Vincent. Beth and Pat had come back to help, offering the trunk of their rental, which Ben had used to stow a couple of garment bags, without saying a word.
Rosie and Angelo had gone home that morning.
"Bethie, my daughter," Angelo said. "I am an old man but I never wanted to be old enough to see this. We thought life might be kind now." For the first time, Beth saw her vital, mischievous in-laws as truly old, even frail. They leaned on Pat as he escorted them to the car that Charley Seven had summoned by phone call. There was nothing she could say to comfort them, nothing to soften the splinter wedged hard into the contentment of their age. Angelo was right. They had seen too much, all of them. More than was possible to comprehend or intellectualize.
The only one who chose to stay at the Paloma was George, whose wife and six-year-old son had flown out to join him.
"Pat," George said as the Cappadoras left. "You"ll let me know...."
"Of course, everything, George," Pat said. "No hard feelings. I know that what Ben said didn"t have anything to do with you."
Ben said nothing. He said nothing on the ride, although because of the dimensions of the squad car, he had to ride in the backseat of his father"s rental car.
The management of the Paloma had offered to put the Cappadoras up ... forever if need be; but no one wanted to stay anymore.
At the end, that morning just before they left, Candy and Beth were lost in skeins of memory as they watched the command center in the hotel dismantled, as the command center in the Tremont Hotel lobby in Chicago had been dismantled after the first few days following Ben"s kidnapping-when it became apparent that they were in for a long haul rather than a short and ugly solution.
Hauling Eliza"s things, along with Ben"s few things, into the guest house gave Pat and Candy something to do.
Alone with Vincent, who was inert, Beth was frantic. Hope seemed close at one hand. Destruction seemed to have the other hand pinned. She decided to arrange her son"s home-since rearranging it would have been a misnomer. Vincent had basically moved some elements of furniture into his cinder-block s.p.a.ce, which was maybe twenty by twenty feet divided into two cubes, and shoved everything against the wall. The living room was basically a futon and a huge table-the table holding a laptop surrounded by at least ten stacks of paper three inches thick and a corkboard covered with thicknesses of slides and still photos. In the kitchen portion of the "big" room, a sink and stovetop stood like bookends on either side of the refrigerator. A piece of Formicaed planking jutted out into the room. Beth supposed this was counter s.p.a.ce.
On the floor and against the wall were a large 7UP sign and a huge yucca plant beyond the sincerest hopes for survival. Behind the screen in the bedroom were a mattress with clean sheets and one pillow, a few transparent plastic storage bins labeled SOCKS and SWEATS, and a dentist"s chair pointed at two TVs and two stereos.
There was a bag containing an unopened shower curtain. Beth strung that together with the rings and put it up. Trolling through the refrigerator then, Beth threw out a bulging trash bag filled with grisly Styrofoam boxes of takeout and dumped some milk that was on the verge of cottage cheese.
She folded the sleeping bag where Kerry had lain and topped it off with the pillow. Kerry, who"d said she needed to move, had walked the mile or so to see Candy.
Finally, there was nothing left for Beth to do.
"No one wants to eat, but we can go get a few things," said Vincent. "Maybe coffee and bread and milk and bologna and frozen pizza." Beth fought the urge to gag at the mention of lunch meat. "I can"t believe that Pop went in there with them given what Ben said."
"You will someday," Beth told him quietly.
As they drove along in Vincent"s ancient Citroen, Vincent said, "Ma. It"s bugging me. Something about that letter. I have this sense of something about it. But I don"t know what. If I could talk to Rob or Emily ..."
"Emily?"
"The editor, Emily Sydney.... I know something"s in the film. A link. Somewhere."
The telephone in the office vibrated, like some kind of little insect trapped in Rob Brent"s hand. He dropped it and nearly hit the floor after it: He had been asleep in his desk chair and his leg was numb.
For so many hours, it had toned the old Blondie song "Call Me" nonstop, with other calls breaking in on the first calls, which, when he switched over, were interrupted by other calls, until his jaw literally ached from answering questions he had no answers for. No one knew Vincent"s number but Pieces by Reese was listed for both of them, two lines. Finally, Rob had switched off the tone and set the phone to vibrate.
He sat up and rubbed his stubbled jaw. He was going to put this phone down, once and for all, take a long shower, and fall in his bed for eight or fourteen deep ones. There was nothing he could do. Nothing.
He laid the phone on the table. It brrred again, spinning in its insistence. At the same moment, the fax machine erupted with a waterfall of sheets that spilled onto the floor. Rob picked up the first. It said the same thing as the second and the third and all twenty that came after.
PICK UP PICK UP PICK UP IT IS VINCENT I NEED TO FIND EMILY WE WILL COME TO THE STUDIO IT"S A LEGAL TERM IT"S A LEGAL TERM.
CHAPTER TWELVE.
"They"ll check it out, thoroughly," Candy said. "They"ll go through the whole film. Humbly and the FBI guy."