The Ophelia Cut (28 page)

None of this was Dankers’s concern. Farrell came back to the present, tried to muster a positive tone, a half smile. “Well, Sergeant, you and your men carry on. Sorry to have bothered you. I’ve obviously just fallen out of the loop a little bit. I’m sure all will be explained in good time.” He extended his hand. “Thanks again.”

“Thank you, sir. And if I may?”

Half-turned toward the door, Farrell stopped. “Yes.”

“I’m impressed to see someone in your position out walking the walk. It’s not something that happens every day.”

“I’
M TAKING THAT
as a vote of confidence. When you win your election by ninety votes—and that’s after your opponent dies the week before—you’ve got to take every one you can get.”

Sam sat across from Wes at a small two-top in the Pacific Café, great seafood on the way out to the beach on Geary, the backup rendezvous she’d suggested when he’d told her the Shamrock was closed. She had placed her hand over his on the table top, a good sign, he thought. A couple of sips into their first glasses of wine, Sam cleared her throat. “Thank you for saying you’d come out and see me.”

“Not just saying it. Walking the walk.”

A tolerant smile. “That, too.” Though it was the kind of response that
she tended to underappreciate, she kept her hand over his. “I’ve been thinking a lot about . . . this last thing. Me telling you about Rick Jessup, dropping his name by mistake, and your guys coming out to see Brittany, and what that meant, and now it’s led to poor Moses getting arrested. All because I wanted to share what I do with you.”

“You were right. Maybe I shouldn’t—”

She squeezed his hand, stopping him. “No,” she said. “Listen. This was my fault. Not yours. You did your duty. I’m the one who ought to be able to keep secrets, especially secrets like these. And I’ve been treating them like cheap gossip, where I’ll only tell my three best girlfriends or, in my case, my one best guy friend. But it’s not gossip. It’s really and truly privileged stuff. I am privileged to hear it at all, to have somebody trust me with it, and to treat it as any less is plain irresponsible. If I can’t keep those secrets—and I mean every single time—I don’t deserve to do what I do.”

She lifted her hand to wipe a tear from her eye. Then returned it immediately. “There are actually two reasons I wanted to see you tonight. The first is to apologize—”

“Sam, you don’t—”

“Shh. I do. I am always so sure of myself, so always in the right, so stubborn and ready to pick a fight on some political or moral issue. A fight pretty much to the death, while I’m at it. But now these last couple of days, hanging with my mom, seeing how she likes living alone—which is to say not at all—I started thinking about why I do that all the time. Especially to you. Time after time, you take it and we get back together and don’t talk about it until the next one because I know you don’t want to get me going again, get me all upset, mostly over a radical interpretation of some fine abstraction.”

Farrell broke a true smile. “Radical interpretation of some fine abstraction. There’s a nice turn of phrase.”

“Yes, but it’s not a good way to live.” She took a sip of her wine and drew a breath. “Anyway, that’s the first reason I wanted to see you. To apologize and not just for this time. For all the times.”

“Okay,” he said. “And thank you. Accepted but unnecessary. I love you. I love our life together. We’re good. We just fight sometimes.”

“No. I just pick fights sometimes. And then I give you no choice; you have to wade in.”

“Yeah, but I’m a lawyer. We live to argue.”

“Let’s not now, though, okay?”

He nodded, sat back a bit in his chair. “Okay.”

“I don’t want to be that person anymore. I don’t want to fight about every little thing. We can have different opinions, I don’t have to tell you my privileged secrets. We can be together and support each other. How would that be?”

“If I said ‘weird,’ would you hit me?”

“No,” she said. “I would support your right to say ‘weird.’ ”

“In that case,” Farrell said, “I think it would be good. Very good.” He put his other hand over hers and let out his own breath. “I was thinking you were leaving. I didn’t know what I was going to do.”

“I’m not leaving, if you still want us.”

“I don’t want anything else.”

“Okay, then. Here’s the second reason I needed to talk to you, and why we needed to do it in person.”

D
ISMAS AND
F
RANNIE
Hardy lived on Thirty-fourth Avenue, down near its intersection with Clement Street. The farther intersection was at Geary, and that corner was the home of the Pacific Café. Though there was often a line to get into the tiny place, tonight the drizzly cold monsoon was keeping the crowd close to a manageable level. When Hardy opened the door for his wife, he found himself looking at Wes Farrell, who said to Sam just loudly enough to be heard: “Here he is now. I’ll tell you later.” With a big phony smile, shaking hands, bussing Frannie on the cheek, “Hi, Diz. Frannie. Small world. You’ve got to have the halibut. Incredible.”

“Always,” Frannie said.

“But first,” Farrell began, stopped, spoke to Sam. “Should we tell them?”

“I believe we should.”

“What?” Hardy looked at Sam, over to Wes. “You’re pregnant,” he said to Wes.

“Good guess, but that’s not it,” Sam said, “for either of us.”

“There’s a relief,” Frannie said, “although if it were Wes, you guys could get rich.”

Farrell ran with it. “We’re already rich in spirit, but pregnant is close, in the sense that pregnant people are sometimes married.”

“But rarely male,” Frannie countered. “In fact, never, I think.”

“Except seahorses,” Hardy said. “Pregnant males. You could look it up.”

“Darn,” Farrell said. “I was thinking that could be us. The next phase, I mean. After the marriage.”

“I’m picking up a theme.”

“Dismas Hardy, thematic wizard.”

“Married? Really?” Frannie beamed at them. “After all this time. That’s great, but what happened?”

Farrell took Sam’s hand again. “She asked me five minutes ago. I caved immediately.”

“Caved,” Sam said. “There’s a sweet way to put it.”

“Bowed to formidable pressure,” Farrell explained. “Caved.” He patted her hand. “Happily.”

Hardy spun around for the waiter. “We should order some champagne.”

“We should,” Farrell said, but then a shadow crossed his face. “Wait . . . not to put a damper on things, but I’m guessing, you both being down here for a nice date, that maybe you haven’t heard about Moses.”

“Damper” was hardly the word. Frannie turned a shade lighter and reached a hand out to steady herself on Hardy’s arm. “What about Moses?”

“I just came from the Shamrock. They had a warrant and were tossing the place. They said they picked up Moses on the Jessup thing a couple of hours ago.”

“They arrested him? Who did?”

“Homicide, I presume. Although I called, and my office didn’t sign off on the warrant. I don’t know what happened.”

Hardy looked like he was trying to place an unfamiliar flavor. “They couldn’t have arrested him. I mean, that’s impossible. Abe would at least have given me a heads-up, had me deliver him downtown. Or he would have called me first thing.”

“You’re his lawyer?”

Hardy nodded. “Couple of days now. I can’t believe he wouldn’t have—”

On his hip, his cell phone rang with Warren Zevon’s “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead.” Hardy glanced at the screen. “Here he is now.”

Frannie squeezed his arm. “Diz, you’ve got to—”

“I know,” he said, and punched to pick up. “Mose, where are you?”

M
OSES WAS IN
jail. In the end, Farrell’s charging decision was unfortunately simple. The crime lab found Jessup’s blood on a pair of hiking boots in McGuire’s apartment, in his car, and on his jacket.

Now Dismas Hardy paced the semicircular glass-block wall along one side of the relatively spacious attorneys’ visiting room at the county jail. He’d been here dozens if not hundreds of times, and in spite of its size and modernity, the place never failed to depress him with its vague smell of disinfectant, its ice-cold fluorescent lighting. In the middle of the room were its only furnishings—a metal desk with a pitted green surface and three folding chairs.

Hardy stopped pacing and looked at his watch. Eight-fifteen. He’d gotten to the jail exactly half an hour ago. In near-record time of only five minutes, the front desk had verified his business and admitted him to wait until Moses got delivered. It was common practice to keep defense attorneys waiting, just as the jail guards rarely took with any sense of urgency an order to produce an inmate. They’d get to it as soon as they could, but there usually was another errand or two to run first. Or a mandated break. Or another prisoner to deliver. Or a bathroom stop.

Everyone inside the jail lived with the reality that things happened when they did, at their own speed. What was five minutes, or even twenty-five? What else were these people doing?

Once, several years ago, after an hour or so cooling his heels in this very room, Hardy had grown impatient enough to go out to the admitting desk and politely inquire as to the status of his client. Were they, perchance, having trouble locating him within the jail? Was there anything Hardy could do to speed up the process? Was there some other problem? Forty minutes after that inquiry, the admitting sergeant knocked on the visiting room door and informed Hardy that there’d been an administrative error and, unfortunately, his client was on his way to County General Hospital with a group of inmates scheduled for psychiatric evaluation. The client shouldn’t have been put on that bus, but it was too late to do anything about it now, so Hardy should come back the following day, when his client would probably be back in his cell.

Hardy had learned his lesson. You waited as long as it took.

His stomach growled at him. Moses’s phone call at the Pacific Café had brought to an end the dinner portion of the night, before it began, and portended a lengthy next portion.

Finally, he stopped pacing and sat down on one of the chairs. Several minutes after that, the knock sounded, the door opened, and Moses came in wearing an orange jumpsuit. This was always a depressing moment, especially when the client was a friend who’d never been in jail garb. Hardy’s heart went out to his brother-in-law as the guard gave Hardy an all’s-well nod, then left and closed the door behind him.

“I’ve got to be honest,” Hardy said. “I’m getting a little tired of your shit. When did they pick you up?”

“Four. Somewhere around there.”

“Did it occur to you to ask them to let you call me then?”

“No, and they didn’t offer. They just packed me up, put handcuffs on me, and threw me in the back of their car. By the time anybody was listening to me wanting my phone call, it was kind of moot.” Moses came closer, pulled around a chair, and straddled it backward. “Meanwhile, look at this, my skin’s all scraped off. Those things are cruel and unusual punishment all by themselves.”

Hardy wasn’t looking at McGuire’s wrists. He was staring at his face. “Have you been drinking?”

“What?”

“It’s not a trick question. And you just answered it.”

“Hair of the dog, that’s all. A few drops.”

Hardy lowered his head, rubbed his eyes with the thumb and index finger of his right hand. After he stopped, he looked across at his brother-in-law. “Mose,” he said wearily. “We’re all pissed off at what happened to Brittany. Nobody’s crying over Jessup being dead. But you being dead or drunk isn’t going to help her get over it. It’s only going to make it worse because she’ll think it’s her fault. You’re a smart guy. You’re telling me you don’t see that?”

“No, you’re right.”

“I know I’m right. The question is, what are you going to do? What are you even trying to do? If you’re not going to suck it up and deal with this like a grown-up, maybe we need to get you a lawyer who wants to live
with the aggravation, which there will be plenty of even if you’re at your best. So answer me, what the hell is going on with you? Is this it? Are you just giving up? Is your life over?”

McGuire stared at the wall behind Hardy’s head. He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing a couple of times. “I can’t seem to find a place to put it, Diz. I mean, what he did to her. I start thinking about it, and before I know what’s happening, there’s this, this rage . . . it’s just overwhelming. I can’t get a handle on it, so I’ve got to black it out, I mean obliterate myself. And we know what works for that.”

“Yeah, except it doesn’t.”

“I know.”

“Really, Mose. It doesn’t.”

“I know.”

“But you keep pushing it? And please don’t tell me you can’t help yourself. That’s not you.”

McGuire hung his head, barely whispered, “That’s what it feels like this time. Like it’s all too much to handle.”

“Spare me,” Hardy said, his own outrage kicking in a bit. “Grow the fuck up. This didn’t happen to you. It happened to Brittany. You’ve still got Susan and both of your girls, and you’re trading them in for a bottle. Is that what you want, who you’re going to be? Because if it is, I’m done and out of here before we even start.”

Hardy surprised himself by standing up, heading for the door, knocking for the guard.

“What are you doing?” McGuire was up, too, standing back by the desk.

“I’m letting you make some decisions. Or really, only one. I’ll see you tomorrow morning. I assume you’re getting arraigned.”

“I don’t know.”

“I’ll find out, and they’ll tell you and bring you down, so we ought to meet up sometime.”

“Until then, what?”

“Same drill,” Hardy said. “Keep your mouth shut.”

M
ASSAGING THE SKIN
over his heart, Abe Glitsky stared down through the plantation shutters that covered his living room’s picture window. Though it was not yet nine o’clock, darkness had come on rapidly with the approaching storm, and already the west-facing window thrummed with the lashing rain. In the back of the flat, he was vaguely aware of Treya’s bedtime rituals with the kids, who had stayed up later than usual because the family was preparing for tomorrow’s seder, a good reason to amend the nighttime schedule if ever there was one.