Moment of Truth (13 page)

“Mugs?”

“Coffee mugs. They have them now, with sayings on them. It’s a new thing.”

“Wise guy,” her father scoffed, blinking behind his bifocals. They were thick, but not as thick as her mother’s. Her mother could barely see, from a lifetime of piecework sewing in the basement of the house. Her father had good eyes but could barely hear, the result of living with Mary, her twin, and her mother. Mary had bought him two hearing aids before he consented to wear the one he had now. It sat curled in his ear like a brown snail.

“No, really. I could get you a mug that says World’s Greatest Father.”

“Nah. Mugs, they’re not so nice. Not as nice as cups and saucers.”

“People use them all the time.”

“I see that. I know things. I get out.” He smiled, and so did Mary. It was a game they were both playing.

“And computers, they use, too.”

“Computers?” Her father cackled. “I see that, on the TV. All the time, computers. You know, Tony. Tony-from-down-the-block. He got on the Internet.” Her father wagged the blue scoop at her. “Writes to some lady in Tampa, Florida. How about
that
?”

“There you go. You could have girlfriends in Tampa, too.”

“Nah, I’m more interested in my daughter and why she don’t go to church with us on Sunday.”

“Oh, Pop.” Mary went to the silverware drawer for teaspoons. “You gotta start on me?”

“Your mother would like that, if you went with us on Sunday. She was sayin’ that to me just tonight, before she went to bed. ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if Mary came to church with the family?’ Angie goes with us now.”

“Angie has to. She was a nun.” Mary’s voice sounded more bitter than she intended, and her father’s soft shoulders slumped. She felt a twinge at disappointing him, and guilt gathered like a puffy gray cloud over her head, ready to storm on her and only her. “Okay, you win. Maybe I will go with you, sometime. How about that, Pop?”

“Good.” Her father nodded, one shake of his bald head, with a wispy fringe of matte gray hair. He set the coffeepot on the stove, twisted on the gas, and turned around as it lit with an audible
floom
. The pilot light on the ancient stove was too high again. “This Sunday, you’ll come?”

“This Sunday?” Mary plucked two napkins from the plastic holder in the center of the table, where they had slipped to the bottom. “You drive a hard bargain.”

“I bid construction, remember?”

She laughed. “Okay, this Sunday.” She eased into her chair at the table. It was the one on the far side. “If I don’t have to work.”

Her father turned to the stove, the better to watch the pot, and Mary noticed his heavy hand touch his lower back. In recent years, back pain kept him up at nights, but he pretended he liked to watch TV until two in the morning, and she had always cooperated in this fiction. To do otherwise seemed cruel, but now she wondered about it. “Dad, how’s your back?” she asked.

“No complaints,” he said, which was what he always said.
Et cum spiritu tuo
.

“I know you don’t want to complain, but tell me. How is your back?”

“It’s fine.” Her father opened the bread drawer and pulled out a plastic bag with an Italian roll in it. He would have bought it at the corner bakery that morning, coming home every day with exactly three rolls; one for him, one for Mary’s mother, and one for extra. The rolls would be buttered and dunked in the coffee, leaving veins of melted butter swirling slick on its surface and enriching its flavor. He took the roll out and set it on the counter, then folded the plastic bag in two, then four, and returned it to the drawer, to be reused for tomorrow’s rolls. It wasn’t about recycling.

“Are you taking your pills, for the pain?”

“Nah, they make me too sleepy.” He put the roll on a plate and set it down on the table, near the butter, and Mary knew they would fight over it, each trying to give it to the other.

“Do you do your exercises?”

“I go for the newspaper in the morning, at the corner. In the afternoon, I buy my cigar with Tony-from-down-the-block.”

“But your back hurts. How do you sleep with it?”

“With my eyes closed.” Her father smiled, but Mary didn’t.

“You stay downstairs at night and watch TV. It’s not because you like TV, it’s because you can’t sleep. Isn’t that right?”

Her father eased into his chair, leaning on one of his hands. His expression didn’t change, a sly smile still traced his lips, but he didn’t say anything. They sat at the table and regarded each other over the chipped china.

“Your back hurts,” Mary said. “Tell me the truth.”

“Why you gotta know that?”

“I don’t know. I just want you to tell me.”

Her father sighed deeply. “Okay. My back, it hurts.”

“At night?”

“Yes.”

“When else?”

Her father didn’t answer except to purse soft lips. The coffee began to perk in the background, a single eruption like a stray burp.

“All the time?”

“Yes.”

“But mostly at night?”

“Only ’cause I got nothing to think about then.” His voice was quiet. The coffee burped again, behind him.

“I’m sorry about that. Is there anything I can do?”

“No.”

“Maybe we should try new doctors. I could take you back to Penn. They have great doctors there.”

“You made me go last year. S’enough already.” Her father waved his hand. “Is that why you came here? To talk about the pain in my back?”

“In a way, yes.”

“Well, you’re givin’ me a pain in my ass.” He laughed, and so did Mary. She felt oddly better that he had told her the truth, even though it wasn’t good news. She would have to hatch a new plan to get him back to the doctor’s.

The coffeepot perked in the background, with better manners now, and she caught the first whiff of fresh brew. It was fun to drink coffee late at night, as settled a DiNunzio tradition as fish on Fridays. When her husband Mike had been alive, he used to join them for night coffee. He’d talk baseball with her father and even choked once on a cigar. He’d fit in so well with her family, better at times than she did, and then he was gone. She felt her neck warm with blood, her grief suddenly fresh. She hadn’t felt that way for so long, but the Newlin case was dredging up memories.

“Honey, what’sa matter?” her father said, reaching across the table and covering her hand with his. It felt dry and warm. “I was only kidding. You’re not a pain, baby.”

“I know.” Mary blinked wetness from her eyes. “I’m okay.”

“You’re about to cry, how can you be okay?” He reached for the napkin holder but there were none left, so he started to get up.

Mary grabbed his hand as it left hers. “No, sit. I’m fine. I know I’m not a pain in the ass. Actually, I am, but that’s not what I’m upset about.” She smiled shakily to convince him. “I was thinking about Mike. You know.”

His face fell, his eyebrows sloping suddenly. “Oh. Michael.”

“I’m okay, though.”

“Me, too.”

“Good. How’s your back? No complaints?” she asked, and they both laughed. The coffee perked madly in the background, filling the small kitchen with steam and sound. Mary noticed it at the same time as her father did, but beat him to the stove. “I got it,” she said, with a final sniffle. She lowered the heat but the gas went out, so she had to start over and relight the burner. “I hate this pilot light, Pop.”

“I told you, they can’t fix it.”

“I’ll sue them.” She leaned sideways to light the thing, almost singeing her eyelashes with the
floom
. “I can’t do anything about your back but I can do something about the fucking stove.”

“Your language,” her father said, but she could tell without looking that his heart wasn’t in it. She turned around to find him still looking sad. Thanks to her, he was thinking about Mike, and suddenly she regretted coming home. Her father was better off with his TV and his back pain.

“Pop, let me ask you something. I got this case, at work. It’s a tough one, a murder case.”

Her father’s round eyes went rounder. “Mare, you said you wouldn’t take no more murder cases.”

“I know but this is different. This guy is a father, and I think he’s innocent. So don’t start on me like Mom. It’s my job, okay?”

“Okay, okay.” Her father put up his hands. “Don’t shoot.”

“Sorry.” She sat down while the kitchen warmed with the aroma of brewing coffee. “Here’s the question. If I committed a murder, would you tell the police that you did it, to protect me?”

“If
you
did a murder?” His forehead wrinkled with alarm. “You would never do no murder.”

“I know. But if I did, would you go to jail for me?”

Her father didn’t hesitate. “Sure, I don’t want you in jail. If you did a murder, it would be for a good reason.”

Mary thought about it. What could Paige’s reason be? “What’s a good reason?”

“If you were gonna die and you had to save yourself.”

“Self-defense.”

“Yeh.” He cocked his head. “Or like tonight, I saw on the TV, this lady who killed her husband. He used to beat her up, you know, when he got drunk. Night after night. Then one night he came home after he went fishing and he stuck a fish down her throat. A
fish
, in her
throat
. Almost choked her with it. What a
cavone
.” He shuddered. “And finally she got so sick of him doing things like that that she shot him.”

“So, if somebody did that to me and I shot him, that would be a good reason.”

“If somebody did that to you,
I
would shoot him.”

Mary smiled. Her father was such a peaceable man she couldn’t imagine it, but the way he said it, maybe she could. He’d been a laborer, not an altar boy. “Now, here’s the hard part. What if I told you that the person I killed was my mother?”

“Your mother?” Her father’s sparse eyebrows flew up. “Your
mother
?”

“Uh-huh.”

“If you killed your own mother?” He ran a dry hand over his smooth head. “Holy God. Well, then I would say your mother musta been doing bad things to you.”

“Would you go to jail for me, even then?”

“Sure, in a minute.” He buckled his lower lip in thought. “Especially then.”

“Why?”

“Because if your mother was doing bad things to you, it would be my fault.”

“How so?”

“I woulda let it happen.” He pushed the plate with the roll toward her, as the coffee started to bubble madly. “Now, eat, baby.”

“I attended the University of Pennsylvania Law School, Yale, and Girard before that.”

It was just after two o’clock in the morning but Dwight Davis would be working all night. He was arraigning Newlin at nine and he was watching the videotape for the umpteenth time. His care wasn’t only because of what Brinkley had said last night; he was always scrupulous in case preparation. He had written down everything Newlin had said on a pad in front of him. The D.A.’s office didn’t have the resources to order a same-day transcript, which any civil law firm could have done, although in criminal cases, it was justice, not money, that hung in the balance. Davis would never accept it.

“Don’t believe everything you read. Reporters have to sell newspapers.”

He sat alone at one end of the table in the dim light of a small conference room in the D.A.’s offices. Boxes of case files sat stacked against the far wall, a set of trial exhibits on foamcore, and on top rested an open bag of stale Chips Ahoy. Davis didn’t mind the mess. He liked having the whole office to himself. He had grown up an only child in a happy family and he coveted quiet time to think, plan, and work. As a prosecutor, time without ringing phones became even rarer, and the Newlin case would demand it. He’d already devoured the lab results, spread out in front of him like a fan.

“I don’t mean to be impolite, but is there a reason for this small talk?”

The bloody prints on the knife matched Newlin’s. The serology was his, too, and fibers of the wife’s silk blouse were found on his jacket, as if from a struggle. The techs had even managed to lift his prints off her blouse and hands. And the photos of Newlin showed a small cut on his right hand, from the knife. The physical evidence was there. But watching Newlin on videotape, Davis’s canny eye told him that something was wrong with Newlin’s confession. Something about Newlin had betrayed him. His nervousness, or something Davis couldn’t put his finger on. The man was lying.