Penance Read Free Page B

shorter sentence.”
    “There’s a happy thought,” I told her.
    “In this country, the law …”
    “I’m not interested in the law,” I said, interrupting her lecture, my voice calm. “And I gave up on justice a long time ago. What I need is an address.”
    She gave it to me.
    “A private investigator, an ex-cop: If not justice, if not the law, what do you believe in?” she asked as I wrote the address into a small notebook I carry.
    “I’m not sure I believe in much of anything,” I said. “Like a lot of people, I make it up as I go along. Mostly, I guess it’s a matter of what I can live with.”
    “If everyone felt that way …”
    I pushed myself away from the table.
    “No, wait, please,” Cynthia said. I waited. She looked down at her hands. “I apologize that I never got a chance to tell you how sorry I am about your wife and daughter.”
    “Thank you,” I answered and in a half moment relived their deaths at the hands of John Brown, who was so drunk he couldn’t tell the difference between red and green. He served four years, four lousy years. It should have been life. Now this woman was saying she wished she could have gotten him off. Well, it was her job, I suppose.
    “It’s getting to be a long time ago,” I told her. Yet that’s not how it felt.
    “Is it because of what happened to your family? Is that why you quit the cops?”
    “No.”
    “What then?” she asked, her eyes wide and glistening.
    “It’s not something I discuss with my friends much less …”
    “The lawyer who defended …”
    “Strangers,” I said interrupting her, completing the thought.
    “Have dinner with me tonight,” she said.
    I was jolted by the invitation and answered too abruptly, “No.”
    “How long are you going to resent me for defending Brown?” she asked.
    “Until hell freezes over.”
    I have nothing against lawyers. After all, a sizable portion of my income is derived from law firms—gathering evidence, investigating witnesses, checking testimony, recovering stolen property, that sort of thing. And if many of the lawyers I work for are jerks, well, a buck’s a buck. But this wasn’t business. This was personal.
    Cynthia gave me a regal nod, but I didn’t leave. I sensed that offering the dinner invitation had been an effort for her and now I felt I owed her something in return. So I told her, “Taking the jumper off the ledge the way you did, that took guts. I admire you for it.”
    She nodded.
    Then I ruined it all by adding, “But that little contest with the Scotch? Really, Counselor, that was one of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen.”
    “If you say so,” she replied curtly.
    I let it go at that.
    I left the tavern and made my way toward the public library, hoping I wouldn’t find a parking ticket jammed under my windshield wiper. Along the way I noticed a man pretending to examine a watch in a jewelry store window, a newspaper tucked under his arm. He was wearing a red ski jacket with blue lining— the old reversible jacket trick , I told myself, smiling.

THREE

    I T WAS JUST A house, a large, old Victorian that needed paint in a ramshackle neighborhood where most of the homes could benefit from a little maintenance. There was no sign, no address plate, nothing to indicate who lived there. That was probably the way the residents wanted it. If the locals knew who their neighbors were, no doubt they would organize to force removal of the halfway house—there’s nothing like adversity to bring a neighborhood together. The more enlightened among us, of course, would accuse the locals of everything from shortsightedness to discrimination to hypocrisy. But then, none of us would want a halfway house for convicted felons next door, either.
    I parked on the street and followed the crumbling sidewalk to the porch. The front door opened before I could knock and a tall man with a prison pallor stepped outside, followed by a cloud of cigarette smoke and the faint aroma of coffee,