Absent Friends

He was tempted to agree with her: You're right, I'm lying, very clever of you to figure that out, goodbye. Let her read all about it in the paper like everyone else.

Instead he told her what was coming. “What Randall's charging is enough to trigger an investigation. It'll come out then.”

“Who'll say it?”

“I will.”

“After all these years?”

“No one ever asked before. I spent eighteen years looking the other way, but that's not the same as perjury. I know you think I don't know the difference. You think I'm a lying snake—”

“You're a lawyer.”

That was a low blow, unworthy of her. She must be really shaken up, Phil decided. “If they ask me, Marian, I'm going to tell them.”

“Not from Jimmy,” she said. “Not from Jimmy. You're making him the scapegoat because he's dead. That money was from somewhere else. And I'll bet anything there was more than you passed on to Sally. Something for your trouble.”

Her eyes, hard as gems, allowed him no entry. He judged silence to be his most effective weapon, so he used it.

“That's what Randall really wants to know, isn't it?” she asked. “Where that money came from.”

He smiled. Over the years he'd found it multiplied the effect of silence the way caffeine did for aspirin when your head was pounding.

Marian said, “And that's what this smoke screen about Jimmy is for. To distract Randall.”

Quietly, deliberately, Phil said, “Bullshit.”

“I knew Jimmy! I knew them all! I was there in those days, remember?”

“And what are you hiding?”

Her face flushed again, became a mask of openmouthed disbelief the same color as her drink.

“Oh, come on, Marian!” Phil slammed his beer bottle on the tabletop. People were staring at them now, but he didn't turn to look. “You came here for the truth. I'm telling you the truth, and it doesn't make you happy, it pisses you off. You're scared shitless something even worse is going to happen. What are you so afraid of?”

Her eyes blazed at his. He hadn't had to ask the question, not really. He knew. All these years, he'd known. Though even tonight, until right now, he'd hoped he was wrong, hoped someone—Marian, even Marian—could prove to him what a mistake he'd been making. Because she'd been Jimmy McCaffery's lover back then. Because she'd know, if anyone knew.

She didn't answer him.

And that was answer enough.

As if he'd said that out loud and it made her furious, Marian slapped both palms on the table and stood. She dealt a twenty-dollar bill to the tabletop in the contemptuous stroke of a gypsy turning over a card of ruin. Phil understood the insult for what it was: Money's been so important to you all these years, you bastard, well, here's more of it. She stalked out, and he watched her go. After the door drifted shut behind her, he motioned the waitress over, handed her his credit card. He covered the whole bill including the tip and left the twenty lying among the coasters and napkins, across the water-ring chain. In spite of himself he grinned as he left the bar, astonished, as he'd been so many times before, by the human capacity for costly, meaningless gestures.

Now, in his office two days later, staring into the sky, Phil heard the echo of Marian's voice, telling him what she had called to say: that Jimmy McCaffery had left papers behind. Harry Randall, according to the second Tribune reporter, had probably seen them.

And Phil wondered what was in those papers. And where they were. And what the hell McCaffery had been thinking, writing any of this down.

And, he asked himself, how do you measure the meaning of a gesture—or its cost—when someone else pays?

LAURA'S STORY

Chapter 7

A Hundred Circling Camps

October 31, 2001

Laura's head was pounding. Squinty-eyed even behind her sunglasses, she turned south from Marian Gallagher's office and stopped at the first open coffee shop she saw. Before she found it, she passed another, a place called Wally's, where a dark and ghostly interior showed through a grimy plate-glass window. Everything inside was smothered in sticky, poisonous ash. Gray coffee cups and ketchup bottles stood on a gray counter in a trickle of sunlight that was cheerfully yellow out where Laura was but gray inside. Laura tried to imagine this place, filled with the smell of toast and the splatter of frying bacon and the shouts of orders being barked back and forth, as it would have been before, as maybe in another universe it still was.

The second coffee shop, the one she came upon two blocks later, had been scrubbed, polished, restocked, and renewed. The owner, awash in smiles, greeted her like a long-lost friend, though she'd never been there before.