After the Darkness

Chapter Fifteen

BOOK 2

FIFTEEN

DETECTIVE MITCH CONNORS RETURNED TO HIS desk in a pensive mood.

Is this a good thing, or a bad thing?

Tall, blond, athletic and altogether too big for his glass-walled office, Mitch Connors looked more like a football pro than a cop. Sinking into his uncomfortable chair (Helen had bought him the damn thing two years ago, for his back pain. It had won a bunch of design awards, apparently, and cost a small fortune, so he couldn't throw it away, but Mitch had always hated it), he stretched out his legs and tried to think.

Do I really want this case?

On the one hand, his boss had just handed him what would, in a few short hours, become the biggest, most high-profile investigation in the country. Late last night, Grace Brookstein had pulled off a dramatic escape from a maximum-security prison. It would be Mitch Connors's job to find her, apprehend her and haul her thieving, designer-clad ass back to jail.

His boss said, "You're the best, Mitch. I wouldn't put you on this if you weren't." And Mitch had felt a warm glow. But now he felt something else. Something bad. For the life of him, Mitch couldn't figure out what it was.

He blamed the chair. It was so torturous, no wonder he couldn't concentrate. Ergonomic, my ass. I figure Helen bought it on purpose to torment me. To pay me back for all the shit I put her through. Then he thought, That's bullshit, Connors, and you know it.

Helen wasn't like that. She was an angel. Saint Helen of Pittsburgh, patron saint of tolerance.

And you drove her away.

MITCH CONNORS HAD GROWN UP IN PITTSBURGH. He was born in the well-to-do suburb of Monroeville, where his mom was a local beauty queen. She married Mitch's dad, an inventor, when she was nineteen. Mitch arrived a year later and the couple's happiness was complete.

For about six months.

Mitch's father was a brilliant inventor...by night. By day, he was a traveling encyclopedia salesman. Mitch used to go on trips with him. The little boy would watch in awe as his dad scammed one housewife after another.

"Do you know the average cost of a college education, ma'am?"

Pete Connors was standing on the front steps of a dilapidated house in Genette, Pennsylvania, wearing a suit and tie and shiny black shoes, his trilby hat held respectfully in one hand. He was a handsome man. Mitch thought he looked like Frank Sinatra. The woman standing at the door in a stained housecoat was fat, depressed and defeated. Hungry kids ran around her feet like rats.

"No, sir. Can't say I do."

The door was closing. Pete Connors stepped forward. "Let me tell you. It's fifteen hundred dollars. Fifteen hundred dollars. Can you imagine that?"

She couldn't imagine.

"But what if I were to tell you that for as little as one dollar a week - that's right, one dollar - you can give your child the gift of that same education right here at home?"

"I never really thought about - "

"Of course you didn't! You're a busy woman. You have bills, responsibilities. You don't have time to sit down and read studies like this one." At a given signal, Mitch would run forward and hand his father a laminated sheaf of papers with the words Educational Research printed on the front. "Studies that prove that kids who have an encyclopedia in the house are more than six times more likely to go into white-collar jobs?"

"Well, I - "

"How'd you like for this little guy here to grow up and be a lawyer, huh?" Pete Connors slipped one of the dirty-faced children a boiled candy. "For as little as one dollar a day, you can make that happen, ma'am."

He was like a whirlwind. A force of nature. Some women he would bulldoze. Others he would charm and cajole. Others still he would take upstairs to perform some "secret" sales technique that Mitch was never allowed to see. It always took around fifteen minutes, and it always worked. "Those Pennsylvania women!" Mitch's dad would joke afterward. "They're hungry for knowledge, all right. You ain't never seen a woman hungrier for knowledge than that one, Mitchy!"

After every sale, they would drive to the nearest small town or rest stop and Pete Connors would buy his son an enormous ice-cream sundae. Mitch would return home to his mother full of excitement and wonder, chocolate sauce smeared all over his face. "Dad was amazing. You shoulda seen what Dad did! Guess how many we sold, Mom. Go on, guess!"

Mitch could never understand why his mother never wanted to guess. Why she looked at his dad with such bitterness and disappointment. Later - too late - he understood. She could have borne the infidelity. It was the recklessness she couldn't forgive. Pete Connors was a natural salesman, but he was also a dreamer, who regularly blew his earnings investing in one crackpot invention after another. Mitch remembered some of them. There was the vacuum cleaner you didn't have to push. That was going to make them millions. Then there was the mini-refrigerator for your car. The running shoes that massaged the ball of your foot. The clothes rack that got out creases. Mitch would watch his father work on each new design during weekends and late into the night. Whenever he finished a prototype, he would "unveil" it in the living room in front of Mitch's mom.

"Whaddaya think, Lucy?" he'd ask hopefully, his face alight with pride and anticipation, like a little boy's. The tragedy was, Pete Connors loved his wife. He needed her approval so badly. If she'd given it, just once, perhaps things would've turned out differently. But her response was always the same.

"How much d'you blow this time?"

"Jeez, Lucy. Give me a break, would you? I'm an idea man. You knew that when you married me."

"Yeah? Well, here's an idea for you, Pete. How about we make our mortgage this month?"

Mitch's mom used to say that the only thing his father could ever economize on was the truth.

By Mitch's sixth birthday, they'd moved out of the Monroeville house. The new place was a condo in Murraysville. Next it was Millvale, an area full of old millworkers' tenements. By the time Mitch was twelve, they were in the Hill District, Pittsburgh's Harlem, a boarded-up, drug-riddled hell bordering the prosperous downtown. Too poor to divorce, his parents "separated." Within a month, his mom had a new boyfriend. Eventually they moved to Florida, to a nice house with palm trees in the front yard. Mitch decided to stay with his dad.

Pete Connors was excited. "This is great, Mitchy! It'll be like old times, just the two of us. We'll have poker nights. Sleep late on Sundays. Get some pretty girls over here, huh? Shake things up a bit!"

There were girls. Some of them were even pretty, but those ones were paid for. Pete Connors's Frank Sinatra days were long gone. He looked like what he was, a tired old roue long past his sell-by date. It broke Mitch's heart. As Mitch grew older, his father began to get jealous of his son's good looks. At seventeen, Mitch had his mother's blond hair and blue eyes and his father's long legs and strong, masculine features. He'd also inherited Pete's gift of gab.

"I'm just home for the summer, helping out my old man. I'm off to biz school in the fall...

"My car? Oh, yeah, I sold it. My little cousin got sick. Leukemia. She's only six, poor kid. I wanted to help out with her medical bills."

Women lapped it up.

Helen Brunner was different. She was twenty-five years old, a redheaded, green-eyed goddess, and she worked for a veterans' charity that provided impoverished ex-servicemen with meals and helped them out at home. Mitch never knew how his father had convinced Helen's charity that he'd been in the navy. Pete Connors couldn't even swim. Pictures of boats made him nauseous. In any event, Helen started showing up at the apartment three times a week. Pete was crazy about her.

"I bet she's a virgin. You can tell. Just thinking about that untouched ginger bush makes me horny."

Mitch hated it when his dad spoke that way. About any woman, but especially about Helen. It was embarrassing.

"Twenty bucks says I fuck her before you do."

"Dad! Don't be stupid. Neither of us is going to fuck her."

"Speak for yourself, kiddo. She wants it. Take it from someone who knows. They all want it."

Helen Brunner didn't want it. At least, not from a drunken alleged ex-midshipman old enough to be her father. Mitch, on the other hand...now, he was something else. Helen had been raised a Christian. She believed in abstinence. But Mitch Connors was testing her faith to the limits.

Lead me not into temptation. Watching Mitch move around the cramped apartment, feeling his eyes surreptitiously sweep over her body as she did the dishes or made the beds, it seemed to Helen that the Lord had led her right into temptation. Mitch felt the same way. He started to make lists.

Reasons not to sleep with Helen:

1.

She's a nice girl.

2.

You'll probably get struck by a thunderbolt halfway through.

3.

If God doesn't smite you dead

,

Dad will.

Then one day Helen walked into the laundry room to find Mitch standing in his boxer shorts.

Helen said a silent prayer. Deliver me from evil.

So did Mitch. Forgive me, Father, for I am about to sin.

The sex was incredible. They did it on top of the washing machine, in the shower, on the floor in the living room and, finally, in Pete Connors's bed. Afterward, Mitch lay slumped back on the pillows, replete with happiness. He tried to feel guilty but he couldn't. He was in love.

Helen sat bolt upright.

"Don't tell me you want it again?" Mitch groaned.

"No. I heard something. I think it's your father!"

Helen was in her clothes in a flash. Rushing into the kitchen, she started scrubbing pots. Mitch, whose lower body suddenly seemed to have developed advanced Parkinson's, stumbled around the bedroom in blind panic. The front door opened.

"Mitch?"

Shit. There was nothing else for it. Stark naked, Mitch dived into the built-in closet, pulling the door closed behind him. At the back of the closet, against the wall, was a trapdoor leading into a crawl space in the roof. Mitch had barely managed to squeeze his six-foot frame through it when he heard Pete Connors's footsteps in the bedroom.

"MITCH!" It was a roar. The old man wasn't stupid. The combination of Helen's flushed, guilty face and the rumpled sheets must have given them away. Mitch heard the front door open and close. Helen, sensibly, had made a run for it. How Mitch wished he were with her!