Read Online Sins of the Fathers by James Scott Bell - Free Book Online

messed up.
    “Mr. DiCinni, I don’t want to make things hard on you,” Lindy said. “I just want to get at the facts here, best I can. And then leave you alone.”
    He shook his head and looked at the floor. “Trudy,” he said. “She was a hooker. I was working as a bartender. She used to come into my place all the time. I’d listen to her. She liked that. I saw something in her. Maybe it was just that she talked to me nice. Nobody did much of that when I was growing up.”
    “Where was this?” Lindy said. “Where you were a bartender?”
    “Vegas.”
    “Okay.”
    “So I guess we sort of circled around each other then figured out we were maybe in love. You don’t need to hear the whole thing. She got pregnant and wanted to get married. Funny, huh? Just like in the old days. The chick wants to get married. So we did. But I made her go into detox first, and she wanted to.”
    “What was she hooked on?”
    “Meth.”
    Lindy jotted a note. Brain damage? Mother on drugs.
    “Anyway,” DiCinni said, “this and that, Darren is born and—”
    “Was he okay? I mean, any details of the birth that you need to tell me about?”
    “Nothing. He was a little small, I guess.”
    “How small?”
    “I don’t remember that stuff.”
    “Go on.”
    DiCinni heaved a deep breath. “Look, we didn’t have much to live on, she couldn’t get a job. I don’t know, the pressure. You’re in a one-room with a baby all the time. She couldn’t take it, so she just leaves.”
    “Where is she now?”
    “Dead.”
    “How?”
    “She went back to the old life. Some cop calls me one night at three in the morning, says she’s been found in an alley. Good riddance, I say.”
    Sentimental fellow. Lindy tried to imagine him testifying in court.
    What impression would he make? Would it help or hurt Darren?
    “Let’s talk about the gun,” Lindy said. “How’d Darren get it?”
    “I kept it locked up. The lock was broken. The cops must have figured that out.”
    “I don’t know what the cops have figured out yet.”
    “Well, that’s what happened. I used the thing for hunting. I actually hunt and eat what I bag.”
    “Not much hunting around here, is there?”
    DiCinni shrugged. “I haven’t done much lately.”
    “You show Darren how to shoot?”
    “I took him a couple of times, sure. Out in the desert. But I taught him to respect the gun, what it could do, and never to use it when I wasn’t around.”
    “Was Darren a problem the last few years? Around home?”
    “Nothing that’d make you think he’d ever do something like this.”
    “Is there anything you can think of, anything at all, that can help me understand why Darren would ever do such a thing?”
    Drake DiCinni’s mind suddenly seemed to shift to a different place, the way an abrupt realization momentarily takes over the body. The air seemed to snap with static, with an electric charge that felt like the key to the whole case .
    But just as suddenly Drake’s face changed from comprehension to disregard. “What are you asking me that for?”
    “Because,” Lindy said, “you are in the best position to know.”
    Drake stood up. “Get out. I have nothing more to say to you.”
    “Mr. DiCinni—”
    “I’m through talking.”
    “You have to help him.”
    “He can’t be helped, don’t you get that? You’re just a little cog in a big machine. You think you’re in control of anything on earth? You control nothing. Now get out of here and leave me alone.”
    5.

    Riding to Roxy’s, Lindy thought about the hatchet jobs some fathers did on their kids. She felt her own wound again, knowing she always would. There was no medicine for it, for what fathers did.
    Roxy Raymond lived in an apartment on Sherman Way in Canoga Park. Not the best section of town, but a good place for getting back on your feet after visiting the abyss. Roxy had been an investigator with the PD’s office when Lindy was there, but an addiction to Ecstasy ended that. Lindy helped