Chapter 7: What Victor Carried
They brought Victor Voss out through the front door.
Not in restraints.
Not forcibly.
He walked out on his own, which somehow made it worse to watch — a man in his mid-thirties in a pressed shirt and good shoes, looking like he had aged ten years in the last hour, stepping onto the front porch of his father's house and sitting down on the top step like his legs had simply stopped working.
Ronan stood in the doorway behind him.
Gerald Voss was still inside.
Briggs was with him.
Tessa sat on the low garden wall and watched Victor.
He had his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands and he was not crying, exactly, but he was making the sounds of someone who had been holding something very heavy for a very long time and had just set it down.
After a moment, Ronan sat on the step beside him.
Neither of them spoke for almost a full minute.
Then Victor said, without lifting his head: "I was supposed to take the station tonight.
If your waitress hadn't stepped in front of me, I would have cooked for you."
"I know," Ronan said.
"I wasn't going to do it." He lifted his face.
His eyes were red.
"I want you to know that.
I had the vial.
My father gave it to me three days ago.
He told me it would just make you sick.
That it would buy him time." He laughed, but it was a terrible sound.
"I believed him.
I have believed him about so many things for so long that I don't even know when I stopped being able to tell the difference."
"What happened the night my mother d*ed?" Ronan asked.
Victor looked at him.
"I need to hear it," Ronan said.
"Not from a letter.
Not from a report.
From you."
Victor was quiet for a long time.
The street was still.
Somewhere nearby a dog was barking at something it couldn't see.
"I was nineteen," Victor said.
"I was home from college for the weekend.
My father asked me to drive him to a meeting.
He said it was a client matter.
He said it would take twenty minutes." He stopped.
"When we got to Prytania Street, he told me to wait in the car.
He was inside for forty minutes." Another pause.
"When he came out, he was very calm.
He told me there had been an accident.
He told me Mrs.
Callahan had fallen.
He told me that if I said anything about being there that night, I would be considered a suspect because I was young and I had no alibi and no one would believe me over him."
Ronan's hands were flat on his knees.
"And you believed that," he said.
"I was nineteen and terrified and he was my father." Victor's voice broke on the last word.
He pressed his hand over his mouth for a moment.
"I have thought about your mother every single day for fourteen years.
I have thought about what I should have done.
I have thought about what it cost you." He looked at Ronan directly.
"I am sorry.
I know that means nothing.
I know it's not enough.
But I am sorry."
Ronan did not respond immediately.
Tessa watched him.
She watched the line of his jaw and the set of his shoulders and the way he was looking at Victor Voss — not with the cold calculation she had seen in the kitchen, not with the controlled fury she had heard in his voice on the phone with Gerald, but with something more complicated and more human than either.
"You'll go on record," Ronan said finally.
It was not a question.
"Yes."
"Everything.
The night.
What your father told you.
The asset transfer.
All of it."
"Yes." Victor's voice was steady now.
Steadier than it had been.
"I've been talking to a lawyer for the past three months.
Quietly.
I knew this was coming.
I think I've known for years that it was coming." He looked at his father's house.
"I just didn't know it would be tonight."
The front door opened.
Gerald Voss walked out between Briggs and Reyes.
He was still composed.
That was the thing about Gerald Voss — he was composed the way old stone is composed, not because nothing was happening inside but because the surface had been maintained for so long it had become its own kind of armor.
He looked at his son on the step.
Something moved through his face.
"Victor," he said.
Victor stood up.
He didn't look at his father.
"Don't," Victor said quietly.
"I did everything I did for this family."
"You did it for the money." Victor's voice was very calm now.
"You did it because Cora Callahan was about to fire you and report you to the bar and you would have lost everything.
You did it for yourself." He finally looked at his father.
"Don't tell me it was for the family.
I was there.
I know what it was for."
Gerald Voss's composure cracked.
Not dramatically.
Not loudly.
Just a small fracture across the surface, visible only because Tessa was watching closely enough to see it — a tightening around the eyes, a slight parting of the lips, the expression of a man who had spent forty years being the most powerful person in every room and was only now, at seventy-two, standing in a garden at one in the morning facing the fact that it was finished.
"You don't know what you're throwing away," he said to his son.
"Yes," Victor said.
"I do."
Ronan stood.
He looked at Gerald Voss for a long moment.
"My mother's name was Cora," he said.
"She made oxtail stew every Sunday.
She kept her recipe in a blue tin.
She gave a copy of it to a woman named Eda Boudreaux because Eda was her friend and her friend deserved to have it." He paused.
"You took everything else from her.
You didn't get to take that."
Gerald said nothing.
Ronan turned away.
He walked to where Tessa was sitting on the garden wall.
"Celeste is in the car," he said.
"Let's go."
May you like
Behind them, Briggs was on the phone.
The call he was making was to a detective named Arceneaux who had been waiting for exactly this kind of call for a very long time.
