I hate hard liquor—more now than before—but when Silas offers, you don’t refuse. “Yes, sir. Thank you.”
“That Jackie raised you right, I can see that.” George lifts his foot to push a chair out for me with his polished shoe. “The kids these days . . . My grandkids misplace their manners more than those godforsaken electronics they’re attached to.”
“She’s a stickler for some things. Was a stickler.” A fresh wave of numbness washes over me before I have to feel the full impact of that simple correction.
George’s heavy sigh fills the room. “I still don’t know what to say. I never would have seen that comin’ in a million years.”
“No one did.” My standard three-word line. Pretty sure I’ve started saying it in my sleep.
“Silas mentioned that she had a bit of an issue with . . .” He tilts his glass in the air.
“Near the end,” I admit reluctantly.
“Bad?”
“Bad enough.”
“I reckon so.” He shakes his head. “She’d be far from the only one to get caught up in the drink. She and the boys could tie one on, back in the good ol’ days. Still . . . I can’t make heads or tails of it.” Sweet smoke fills my nostrils as he puffs on his cigar. “She was smart as a whip, that one, and driven to succeed. Loyal . . . honest . . . Integrity like I’ve never seen.”
I can’t help but drop my gaze, afraid that he’ll see the doubt in my eyes.
“I wish I could say the same for the rest of the force and your blue wall of silence,” Silas mutters. “It’s no wonder the public doesn’t trust the police.”
“Now don’t get all riled up with that hogwash,” George warns through another puff.
But Silas is never one to back down. While the two of them bicker over police politics, I hide behind the terrible burn of this bourbon, picking through my mother’s final words. It’s funny . . . I can still smell the acrid stench of her Marlboros, can hear the crackling buzz of the radio, can see her lifeless body hunched over the table, but the most important part of that night—all the seemingly nonsensical rambling—is swimming loose in my mind, testing my memory.
I do know that she spoke of honesty that night, of Abe being a good, honest man and, if I were to read between the lines, not guilty of what he had been accused of. So what exactly is the truth? The version I’ve believed for the past fourteen years? Or what might have been a deeply hidden confession that forced itself to the surface in her final moments?
Silas’s cell phone rings. He checks his screen and sighs. “I’ve got to take this. Maybe while I’m gone, you can talk my nephew into staying in Austin. The DA’s office can’t afford to lose him.”
“Stay with a bunch of liars and crooks? You’re two sandwiches short of a picnic if you think I’m gonna help you with that,” George hollers after Silas as he ducks out the door. “Heck, if I’m convincin’ you of anything, it’d be to apply for the academy. If you’re half as determined as your mother was, Austin PD would be lucky to have you.”
“Yes, sir.”
His eyes narrow, studying me. “That ain’t something you’re interested in, though, is it?”
“No, sir.” I grew up thinking I was going to be a cop. After I finished my stint in the NBA, of course. But when it came time to make those big life decisions, the last thing I wanted to do was apply to the police academy. I had too many bad associations with it already.
“Oh, to have your whole life ahead of you . . .” he says wistfully. “I didn’t have no choice but to retire, heart issues and all. Both the doc and the wife insisted it was time. But you know, Jackie’d call me almost every week, askin’ for advice. It was nice; made me feel like I was still of some real value. And she’d talk about you, plenty. She was so proud of you. Of the man you’ve become.” He pauses. “You two were close, weren’t you?”
“She’s the reason I applied to UT.” I wanted to come home.
His forehead furrows with his frown. “And she never gave you any clue, hey? Just out of the blue up and did that? No warning at all?”
“I mean, she said things, but I didn’t think anything of it at the time.” All those nights of drinking, mumbling to herself about making better choices . . . how did I not take it more seriously? “She told me she wasn’t good enough to be chief.” That seems innocent enough to admit.
He snorts. “That there’s the biggest load of bull crap I’ve ever heard. She was one of the best damn officers I’ve ever seen, and believe you me, I saw a lot over my forty-odd years on the job. I was groomin’ her to take over my spot. She should have had it when I was forced out, but that spineless city manager Coates put Poole in. Took me a few years of meddlin’ to get both of them out, and your mother in there. But she knew the job of chief inside and out long before she ever accepted it.”
I’d love to take his high praise at face value.
“What’s the matter? You look bothered.”
I smooth my expression. “No, nothing. It’s good to talk to someone who knew her well.”
George takes a long puff of his cigar. “My oldest son, Wyatt, was a police officer. He came home one day and said, ‘Dad, they gave me a female partner. Can’t you do somethin’?’ I said, ‘Sure I can, son. I can move you to the graveyard shift of the drunk tank, if I hear you sayin’ another word about having a woman partner.’ Just three shifts later, Wyatt found himself starin’ down the barrel of a pistol at a routine traffic stop. This guy was all cracked out on somethin’, ranting and raving, with two little kids in the backseat. He wasn’t goin’ anywhere with the police. It was that female partner—your mother—who talked him down from pullin’ the trigger. Her and her level head. She never panicked, not once. Didn’t even raise her voice while dealin’ with him, from what I hear. Cool as a cucumber. I knew right then and there that I had a good one. I kept a close eye on her after that. Mentored her some.”
“I thought Abe was her first partner.” He’s all I remember.
“No, sir-ee. Jackie and Wyatt were partnered for three years.” George peers into his drink, his mood suddenly somber. “Then Wyatt got caught in the middle of two gangbangers on some drug-turf-war issue. He was mindin’ his own business, walkin’ out of a corner store. Bullet hit his throat. He died right there on the sidewalk. That’s when she got paired up with Abraham Wilkes. And, well, we all know how that turned out.”
“He was a good, honest man.”
“We are bad, bad people.”
George shakes his head while I struggle to ignore the way my stomach tightens. “Lord knows I’ll never lose that name. One cop goes rogue and I’m left scrubbing filthy fingerprints off the whole dang department for years. Forget that I spent years before that all up in everyone’s asses with more task forces than anyone else in the state of Texas, trying to rid this city of the kind of drug runners who killed my son.”
I hesitate. “My mom never talked about Abe after he died. She wouldn’t answer my questions.” I don’t want to sound too eager, but I’m desperate to know what George Canning knows. Did my mom tell him what she admitted to me?
“I remember her sayin’ something about you havin’ a rough go of it afterward. She didn’t know what to tell you.” George studies me for a long moment. “What was he, again? Your baseball coach? Or was it football?”
“Basketball.”
“Right.” George pauses. “You still have questions about him? Because if you do . . .” The chair creaks as he leans back. “I’m all ears.”
I should say no. I should pretend that what Abraham Wilkes was or wasn’t doesn’t matter to me after all these years. My mother’s cloudy confession might be safer that way. But the truth is it has mattered to me, since long before the night my mother died.
Abe wasn’t just the guy who taught me how to dribble a ball like a pro. And he may have been my basketball coach for five years, but he was never just my coach.