She began to see the steps, the stages, the story that took place twenty years before, and thought she understood the players, their roles, their choices.
“She went down for him,” Roarke concluded. “He conned her into it, or convinced her in that call she made after the bust. ‘We can’t both go down, baby, who’ll take care of the boy?’ ”
“That, maybe,” Eve agreed, “but he’d already been in once. Prints on file. They’d bust him hard on the ID fraud if she admitted he’d been involved, and he’d do more than the eighteen months for the second offense. He’d use that. ‘You’ll do a year, sugar, and I’ll be there for you. If they look at me, it’s five to seven.’ ”
“You got that right. He had more on the line than she did.”
“And he’d need her to go down quick and clean, make it easy for the cops and the PA. No fuss, no muss, no looking too hard at him.”
“And more, I think more, if they both went down, there’d be no one to maintain their identities. He could push that. The center wouldn’t hold, and they’d be exposed for what they were. A lot more than a year and a half at stake. And she’s the one who got caught, wasn’t she? She’s the one who got careless. Why should they lose it all when she could suck it up?”
“That’s my take,” Eve agreed. “He’d already gone in once, and he wasn’t going back. Some time, some dealing, some pleading hardship, she could’ve gotten off with the year, and part of that, maybe most, in a halfway, mandatory rehab. But that would’ve made it risky for him. The quicker she goes down, the quicker he’s clear. But it’s more, I think.”
Sliding her hands into her pockets, she wandered the room so familiar—an illusion, but familiar. And remembered.
“With my mother, I’m vague. It’s blurry with only a few clear flashes. But I know—I knew—she hated the . . . fact of me. But she had me, and she stayed at least long enough for me to have a few pictures in my head, to remember specific events.”
“As Darrin Pauley does?”
“Whatever he remembers, or has been taught to remember is different. I know I wasn’t a child to either of them. I was a commodity. A potential income. But did they come up with that together, or did one convince the other? That’s a question I’ll never have the answer to, and isn’t important.”
She wouldn’t let it be important.
“But in this case, maybe it is.”
“Why she chose, or they chose to have the boy,” Roarke continued.
“She’s the player, the brains, the front man. He’s the manipulator who likes the flash and she taught him what she knew. The sex, the drugs, that’s cheap money, and lacks finesse. Quick and greedy, like you said. She had to have finesse to play Pauley for a year. And the kid? He should’ve been baggage, she should have shucked that off. She didn’t. So she either wanted the kid or she wanted Pauley—maybe both. The kid wasn’t a commodity. Maybe a cover, but even that’s a stretch.”
“Easier to move, to blend, to work the grift without an infant to tend to,” Roarke agreed.
“When Pauley got out, they could’ve left the kid with Vinnie. Poofed.”
“Taking them both, the woman Vinnie loved, the child he thought was his? It’s cruel.”
“Fits the pattern. She was clean and healthy, and they had a decent stake—one they stole from Vinnie—and in a couple of years, she’s using and soliciting. And it shapes up that he was running the show.”
“Easy money,” Roarke concurred, “with her doing the work.”
“It’s Pauley, he was her weakness. She whored for him, and dealt for him—and somewhere along the line he started running the show, looking for easier money, more flash, more cash. By the time she did her eighteen and they shifted to Chicago, he was in full charge.”
She took a breath. “That’s the way it was, that’s the way I remember it. The way it felt to me when I remember them together, or get those flashes of events. She was a junkie and a whore—and he ran the show. So maybe I’m projecting.”
“I don’t think so.”
She shook her head. “That’s for later, maybe it’ll be useful. We have to deal with the now. Let’s get Peabody back and take the judge.”
He went to her first, took her face in his hands. “Whatever you remember, or feel, you need to know that whatever they were they did one worthwhile thing in their miserable lives. And that was you. Whatever they were, they couldn’t destroy that. They couldn’t stop you from becoming.”
Judge Serenity Mimoto, a trim and tiny woman, studied the sketch of Darrin Pauley on screen. “He looks like his father.”
“You remember the father?”
Mimoto cut intense eyes to Eve. Their striking azure color radiated against smooth hazelnut skin. “I refreshed myself on the matter, and those involved, when your office contacted me earlier. I’m familiar with the details of the case. The defendant, through her attorney, had reached an agreement with the prosecutor. She pled guilty to all charges, with the APA recommending a sentence of eighteen months. Taking into account the nonviolent nature of the crimes, the lack of previous criminal record, the defendant’s cooperation and plea, I so ordered. She was remanded to the Minimum Security facility at Rikers.”
Mimoto nodded toward the screen again. “And I remember him, the baby in his father’s arms, crying for his mother. I allowed them a moment to say good-bye. She took the boy briefly, very briefly, then passed him to her attorney and embraced the man. I thought, so she has no comfort to give her son, but needs to take it from the father.”
“You haven’t seen him, the father or the son, since that day in court?”