What Gabriel Owed the Dead
Chapter 04 - What Gabriel Owed the Dead
Gabriel took Norah to a townhouse in Lincoln Park that afternoon.
Not his home.
“Whose is this?” she asked.
“My sister’s.”
“You have a sister?”
“Yes.”
“You have employed me six years.”
“And?”
“And somehow I know the birthdays of three board members’ Labradors but not that you have a sister.”
Gabriel opened the door.
“That says more about the board than it does about me.”
The townhouse was warm, quiet and unexpectedly ordinary. Books crowded the shelves. A child’s watercolor of a yellow horse was taped to the refrigerator.
Norah looked at it.
“Your sister has children?”
“One. Lucia. Eight.”
“And they’re not here?”
“They’re in Geneva.”
“Convenient.”
“Intentional.”
He locked the door.
Norah watched him.
“Am I a guest or a prisoner?”
“A guest who should not leave.”
“So a prisoner with better furniture.”
Gabriel loosened his tie.
For the first time since the precinct, he looked tired.
“Norah, there are things you do not understand.”
“I’m discovering there are things nobody bothered to let me understand.”
“That includes me.”
The admission softened something in her despite herself.
She hated that.
Gabriel poured water into two glasses.
“Seventeen years ago, someone placed an explosive under my car.”
Norah sat.
“I was supposed to attend a meeting near the river. Ten minutes before I left, security received an anonymous call claiming there was a gunman on the route.”
“Your security believed it?”
“No. But my mother insisted I change cars.”
“And the bomb?”
“Exploded with my driver inside.”
Norah lowered her eyes.
“What was his name?”
“Samuel Bell.”
Gabriel waited.
Norah looked up.
“Bell?”
“Ezra’s father.”
The room seemed suddenly smaller.
“Ezra works for you after your family got his father killed?”
“He works for me because he believes the person responsible was never found.”
“And you agree?”
“I do now.”
Gabriel set his glass down.
“After the bombing, my father became convinced Daniel Hayes was involved. He said Daniel had stolen money and tried to disappear.”
“My father warned your mother.”
“That appears to be true.”
“So your father blamed him to keep you from asking why someone tried to kill you.”
“Yes.”
Norah stood and walked toward the window.
A line of bare trees shivered in the rain.
“My mother knew.”
Gabriel said nothing.
“She had to. You don’t tell a fourteen-year-old her father died in a car crash unless you want the questions to stop.”
“She may have been protecting you.”
“That is what people say when they make choices for children and then keep making them after the children become adults.”
He looked at her.
The sentence had landed somewhere personal.
“Your mother is alive?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
Norah hesitated.
“Indiana.”
“Name?”
“Elaine Hayes.”
Gabriel reached for his phone.
“No.”
He stopped.
“You are not sending your people to frighten my mother.”
“If Marco knows about the box—”
“My mother has spent seventeen years pretending my father died in weather. I’d like to speak to her before a man in a black suit appears at her door.”
Gabriel looked down at his own black suit.
Norah almost smiled.
Almost.
“I’ll drive you,” he said.
“No.”
“You cannot travel alone.”
“I can take a train.”
“Someone attacked you outside one yesterday.”
“That was Chicago.”
“Criminals have cars.”
“So I’ve heard.”
He stared at her until she finally sighed.
“Fine. You drive. No security parade.”
“One car behind us.”
“Half a car.”
“Norah.”
“One car.”
It was the first negotiation either of them had won that day.
They left at dusk.
The rain faded outside the city, replaced by low clouds and flat winter fields. Norah sat in the passenger seat this time.
Gabriel drove himself.
That surprised her.
“So,” she said after an hour, “mafia bosses drive?”
His eyes remained on the highway.
“I’m not a mafia boss.”
“My father apparently kept ledgers of your family bribing judges.”
“My father was a criminal.”
“And you?”
Gabriel’s hands tightened slightly on the wheel.
“I have done criminal things.”
Norah turned toward him.
“That is not comforting.”
“It was not meant to be.”
“Have you killed anyone?”
The question hung between them.
Gabriel did not answer immediately.
Then, “Yes.”
Norah looked out the window.
“How many?”
“I am not going to give you a number.”
“Because you don’t know?”
“Because the answer would not help you decide what kind of man I am.”
She turned back.
“You don’t get to decide what helps me decide.”
For several miles, neither spoke.
Then Gabriel said, “Three.”
Norah had not expected an answer.
“All of them?”
“Men who were trying to kill me.”
“That isn’t the same as innocence.”
“No.”
She appreciated that he did not ask for absolution.
They reached her mother’s town after ten.
Elaine Hayes lived in a small brick house at the end of a quiet street.
The porch light was off.
Norah frowned.
“My mother never leaves it off.”
Gabriel stopped her before she opened the car door.
“Wait.”
He got out first.
The front door stood slightly open.
Norah’s heart began to pound.
“Mom?”
Gabriel raised one hand sharply.
Silence.
They entered.
A lamp lay broken in the hallway.
One kitchen chair had been overturned.
On the table sat a white envelope.
Norah’s name was written across it.
Her injured hand went cold.
Gabriel opened the envelope before she could.
Inside was a photograph of Elaine Hayes seated in the back of a car, frightened but alive.
Beneath it was a note.
Bring the ledger.
Come alone.
And at the bottom, written in black ink:
Ask Gabriel what happened to Daniel after he found him.
Norah looked slowly toward him.
“You said you never found my father.”
Gabriel stared at the note.
Then she saw it.
Not confusion.
Recognition.
“You lied to me.”
May you like
Gabriel lifted his eyes.
And this time, he did not deny it.
