Absent Friends

That spring night two years ago he'd met Elizabeth's eyes—plain brown eyes, exactly what they seemed to be, nothing hidden to challenge him with; Sally's were the clear green of emeralds, or pale like spring grass, or gray-green like the ocean reflecting low clouds, and why they changed he never knew—and he shook his head. “Go ahead and call me Phil,” he'd said. “But I wouldn't recommend ‘Lizzie.' This is the big leagues.” He went back to his books and his keyboard. From that night she'd changed her name, made it formal and professional, and he'd called her by it. Though a month passed before she could be counted on to answer to it.

At midday Phil closed a file on his computer, rubbed his hands over his face, turned his chair to face the window. Six floors below, the paths of pedestrians made a sharp-angled latticework on street and sidewalk. Without the cars, the traffic lights, though switching, were meaningless and ignored. In this new downtown, people had to find their own ways and their own rhythms.

Phil swiveled his chair back and called through the open door into the outer office. “You guys come in here a minute?”

Elizabeth and Sandra, neither of them guys, showed themselves in his doorway. Sandra carried a pad and pen. Phil tried to remember if he'd ever seen Sandra's hands empty. “Should I order some lunch?” she asked.

“After. This won't take long. Sit down.” He waited until they did. “You saw the news,” Phil said, no lead-in. With Phil there never was. “That Tribune reporter.”

Elizabeth nodded. Sandra said, “Died yesterday. Killed himself.”

Phil rested his gaze on her, then flashed a grin. “You don't read the Tribune.”

“Never did.” Sandra wore lipstick and no other makeup, kept her graying hair cropped Army-close. She was long divorced and nobody's fool. She had started with Phil a scant few years after he'd set up his practice, not soon enough to be there for the Keegan case, the indictment, and the negotiated plea, but in time to take the phone call from Greenhaven that Markie Keegan had been stabbed by another prisoner and was dead.

Elizabeth told Sandra, but with her eyes on Phil, “The Tribune story implied Randall didn't jump. They think someone killed him.”

Sandra raised her eyebrows, a skeptical question, a doubt.

“The Tribune may be blowing smoke,” Phil said. “I'm not sure what they're after. But listen.” He looked at Elizabeth, at Sandra. “The escrow account. The Keegan account. Neither of you ever touched it. You don't put money in, you don't write the checks. True?” He asked the question as he would in court, and as in court, because he knew the answer, he didn't wait. “If there's something wrong with it, you're clear.”

“Is there something wrong with it?” Elizabeth, fearless like himself.

“I don't know.” Thirty years of reading eyes and posture had given Phil a fairly good idea of when he was being lied to and an unerring sense of when—as now—he was believed. “The money came from someone who wanted Keegan's family to have it. The . . . donor . . . wanted to stay in the background. I had no reason to think the money was tainted. But I didn't ask. And I knew it didn't come from the State, and I never told the client.”

“How bad is that?” Elizabeth would have asked a surgeon to explain his choices as he lifted his scalpel, even if she were the one on the table.

“I thought there was no basis for a suit against the State. This way the widow at least got something. But that wasn't my decision. The lie effectively prevented her from exercising a right to sue that she might have used. That's enough to nail me to the wall even if the money's clean.”

“And if it's not?”

“Then the obvious question is what I—or whoever was paying me—wanted hidden that a lawsuit might have uncovered.”

“About what happened to Keegan in prison?” Uncharacteristically, then, Elizabeth hesitated.

No, he thought, you can't back away from this shit. He finished for her. “Or about Keegan.”

“Was there something to know about him?”

“If there was, I never knew it. But I can't prove that.”

Phil watched Elizabeth mentally file, index, and cross-reference everything he'd just said. When she was done she brought out the next question. “Who was paying you?”

“No one.” He saw her whirring mental machinery catch for an instant. “I've been taking the money and passing it on, but that's all. No cut, no fee. Normally that might make me look better, but not in this case.”

“Why not?”