They declined and followed her through the house, passed a console organ with sheet music, an overstuffed couch facing two La-Z-Boy recliners with a coffee table between them. Pictures on the wall ran to family portraits, yellowed with age, including two young soldiers in what looked like Vietnam-era uniforms.
Green was probably in her late sixties or early seventies, Virgil thought, wearing a blue blouse and lighter-blue slacks, with sandals. Her hair was what might once have been called a beehive, but was lower, and improbably reddish-purple.
She said, “Dad has faded out considerably. He’s ninety-two, and he was sharp as a tack until he was eighty-eight or eighty-nine. Drove himself until he was eighty-five. He was watching TV and saw that picture of the man with the sports car and he said, ‘I know that fella, the one with the car. He’s the one operated on Helen.’ Sometimes, you know, he can still pull himself together, and he was like that for a little while this morning. He’s been sleeping, I don’t know how he is now.”
Virgil caught Lucas’s coat sleeve to slow him down, and asked, “Who’s Helen?”
“Helen was his sister. She died, oh, let me see, eight, no, seven years ago, a year after Ralph. Ralph was her husband. Helen had breast cancer back when she was in her seventies, but they caught it early and she recovered. She died from a stroke. She was a year older than Dad.”
“Do you know who Helen’s doctor was?” Lucas asked.
“No, I don’t. I didn’t know her very well. She never lived here in Farmington when I was a child. And when she got sick, I was living in Fairmont with my husband. We divorced about the time Helen got cancer. I didn’t pay much attention to her problem because Dad said she was going to be okay, and I had those problems of my own.”
“Let’s go talk to your father,” Virgil said.
She didn’t move immediately, but said, “I need to warn you, Dad can be a little stinky. I changed him just a half hour ago, but he doesn’t have control of his bowels and he could let go anytime.”
“That’s fine. Let’s go talk,” Lucas said. “What’s his name?”
“Bradley. Brad. Trimble. Green’s my married name. I remarried after my divorce, my husband’s up north fishing.”
They followed her to an add-on porch at the back of the house, an aluminum-frame structure with windows all around, looking at a backyard with a single tree in it. Trimble was sitting in a third La-Z-Boy, a shabbier one than those in the living room. He was dressed in sweatpants and a blue tee-shirt, the tee-shirt covered by a gray zip-up hoodie.
Trimble didn’t turn his head when they walked in, but stared straight ahead through a window at the tree. Forty-five degrees to his right, a small television sat on a walnut table, tuned to the Weather Channel, which was showing color radar of thunderstorms outside of Dallas.
Green touched her father’s shoulder. He moved his chin toward her and she said, “There are some policemen here to see you. They need to know the name of the man who operated on Helen all those years ago.”
“Helen?”
“Your sister. Helen. You said you saw a picture of a man who operated on Helen.”
He sat unmoving, then twitched: “Operated on who?”
“Your sister.”
He was silent, and Lucas looked at Virgil and shook his head. Green said, “You remember, Dad, you saw his picture on TV today.”
“Don’t remember that,” Trimble said.
“It’s important, Dad, try to remember.”
“I…” And the room was suffused with the odor of flatulence.
Green: “Dad, did you just poop?”
Silence for a few seconds, then a shake of the head. “Didn’t poop. Just gas.” Then he added, “Helen. Medicare saved her ass.”
Virgil looked at Lucas and raised his eyebrows: of course she’d have been on Medicare if she was in her seventies. There’d be a record.
Trimble cranked his head around, looked first at Lucas, then at Virgil, and said to Virgil, “You don’t look like no cop. Hair is too long.”
“I’m scheduled to get it cut, but I’ve been too busy,” Virgil said. “Do you remember the name of Helen’s doctor?”
“I talked to him in the parking lot after the operation on Helen. He had a little car. Two seats. Couldn’t put nothing in it.”
“Do you remember the doctor’s name?” Virgil pressed.
“Of course I do,” Trimble said. He fell silent again, and his chin dipped to his chest.
