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“Well, I have to touch all the bases, you know. Do my due diligence. Robbie hasn’t tried to contact you at all? Not here or on your personal phone?”
“No. He knows better than to call here, and he doesn’t have my cell number.”
Annie let her brows sketch upward even though this was not news to her. “And do you have his number? I only ask because we’re going through his cell phone records.”
“No, I don’t. B’Lynn might have texted it to me once. I would have deleted it. I’m sure you find that cold.”
Annie said nothing.
“Do you have children?” Fontenot asked. “I’m guessing you do.”
“I have a son.”
“And you can’t begin to imagine not supporting him, not loving him, not helping him no matter what,” he said. “You haven’t dealt with addiction.”
“You don’t know what I’ve dealt with,” Annie said. “And it’s not relevant anyway. It’s your son I’m trying to find.”
“I walked away,” he said. “I’m not proud of the way that looks, but Robbie was destroying everyone and everything in his life, and there came a point when I had to say no. No more. I wasn’t going to let him ruin my life as well as his own. Maybe one day, if he ever gets himself straightened out for good, we can try again, but I’m not betting on that. He’s been to rehab more times than I can count. He’ll bankrupt his mother.”
“You don’t contribute?”
“No. B’Lynn got a generous settlement in the divorce, and I got my freedom.”
There were so many things Annie wanted to say, but she chewed them all back.
“I’m sure you’ve seen it in your line of work,” Fontenot said.“What addicts do, what they stoop to. Lying, cheating, stealing to get high. Robbie stole from his own family, hocked family heirlooms, stole from neighbors, from friends. And we had to keep making the excuses, making the apologies, begging friends not to press charges. It was humiliating.”
And imagine what it was for your son, Annie thought. How desperate Robbie must have felt, how afraid he must have been. He was a child. And all his father cared about was how he looked to his neighbors.
“The last straw,” he said, “was when he stole a prescription pad from my office, forged my signature, and sold the pages to other druggies. I could have lost my license to practice medicine. I had to call in every favor anyone ever owed me to get out of that one—including favors from your boss, in case he didn’t tell you. That was it for me. I was done. I could have lost my livelihood.”
“Well, lucky you,” Annie said. “You only lost your child.”
“I think we’re done here,” Fontenot said, stone-faced.
Annie nodded. “Yeah. I’ve certainly heard all I care to. I just have one question. You’re a doctor. You knew the risks involved with those painkillers. Why did you let your son take them in the first place?”
“It’s a perfectly safe drug if you don’t abuse it.”
Robbie had been seventeen with his whole world crashing in around him, desperately in need of the support of his parents, of this man he had probably idolized. And Robert Fontenot’s answer had been to punish his son for being an embarrassment and an inconvenience when he could have prevented the tragedy from happening altogether.
Annie shook her head and started for the door.
“Not everyone is cut out to be a martyr,” Bob Fontenot said, as if that was a viable defense.
“Or a parent,” Annie returned, and walked out.
She wanted to go take a shower, to wash off the oily narcissism of Robert Fontenot. She knew it wasn’t her job to judge this man oranyone else. And she certainly knew enough about the desperate struggle of families dealing with addiction to know that there were few good answers and too many tears, and people did what they thought they had to do to survive it. But this guy…wow.
Well, now she knew the whole story anyway, she thought as she got in her vehicle. The story Gus had let hang in the air with no explanation when Annie had spoken to him. The reason B’Lynn had thought she could appeal to him to take Robbie’s case. No part of that story had ever made it into an arrest report, at least not one that had survived. Gus had killed it. A crime that would have warranted serious felony charges with serious prison time. Poof! Gone.
She wasn’t sure how she felt about it.Uneasywas the best word she could come up with. It was like Gus had taken a truth and turned it into a lie, and everyone involved had just gone on with their lives. She wanted to be okay with it because she felt sorry for B’Lynn and Robbie, but that wasn’t how the system was supposed to work. It was, however, how privilege worked, over and over.
Sometimes the ways of the world just drained the optimism right out of her. But there was nothing for it except to keep putting one foot in front of the other and hoping she could make a difference every once in a while.
26
“Cody Parcelleisn’t in Houston,”Stokes said as he walked into the bullpen. “I talked to the uncle running that auction. Cody was supposed to be there Sunday afternoon. The uncle got a text from him late in the day Sunday saying he wasn’t going to make it after all. No explanation, just that something came up and sorry he wouldn’t be coming. The uncle was pissed—is still pissed. He said he tried to call him a couple of times, but the calls went to voicemail.”
