Absent Friends

“Yeah, I bet that's what you'd think. But all right. About Harry Randall's death?” He glanced at the ceiling, frowned, nodded. “Harry Randall was a fixture in this town. A fine example of the old-fashioned muckraking reporter. They don't make them like that anymore. New York needs him now more than ever, it's a goddamn shame what happened to him, and he'll be missed.” He smiled, slid his chair back from his desk to give himself room to cross his long legs. Ankle on knee. “You can quote me.”

She wrote as he spoke, quick sure strokes, and he studied her as she wrote. In that wholesome midwestern way, the way that called up the bucolic farming life (early morning rising, direct and sweaty work, lit evening windows, neighbors bringing pies), Laura Stone was pretty. Straight brown hair brushing her shoulders, features small and neat, pale skin that would probably be smooth and clear once she got some sleep. Phil's forebears were rabbis and ragpickers, salesmen and stevedores. Not a farmer among them, back to the windswept horizon. Why, then, this—not just attraction, no, not only desire—this wistful nostalgia, this homesickness a woman like this had always been able to make him feel? Her bedroom: heightening heat and the crescendo of pounding hearts under quilts in the crystal winter night; but also the breeze through the window of her sunny kitchen on a spring morning. Her soft skin, her soft hair, the feel of them under his fingertips; but even more her quiet companionship by the fire on a blustery fall day. He longed for all that, at the same time—maybe for the same reason—as he knew he'd last maybe a week in that lonesome prairie farmhouse.

Someone who's homesick for somewhere they've never been, Phil thought. The definition of an American.

Laura Stone stopped writing and flipped her hair from her face. It fell back to exactly where it had been. “If I print that,” she said to him, “people will know you're lying.”

What the hell had they been talking about? Oh, right, his tribute to Harry Randall. “Everyone who reads your paper already thinks I'm lying,” he said.

“Then set them straight. Now's your chance.”

Hey, there's an idea. Just tell the truth. After all these years? Then what had been the point? Though, when you looked at this mess, what had been the goddamn point anyway? “No. Thanks.”

“You were Mark Keegan's attorney in 1979?”

“That's public record.”

“Keegan was accused and convicted of possessing an illegal handgun—the gun that killed Jack Molloy—but not of the killing itself. Why not?”

“That was the plea deal.”

“Your idea?”

“The opposition's.”

“The District Attorney's?” Her eyebrows went up as if she needed more light in those morning-colored eyes.

“Yes.”

“What did you think?”

“I thought if we went to trial on the manslaughter charge, we were screwed. I couldn't believe I was being offered the deal, but I jumped at it.”

“Why did they do it, do you think?”

“A bird in the hand.”

“Nothing else?”

“It didn't matter to me.”

“But you think there might have been something else?”

“There always is. An election's coming up. The accused looks like the ADA's cousin. They don't want to waste time and money on a first-timer who killed a gangster they're happy to have out of the way.”

“Or someone buys off someone in the DA's office.”

“It happens.”

“In this case?”

“Who the hell knows? If anyone was up to anything, it wasn't me. My client got a hell of a better deal than I thought he'd get, going in. That was all I cared about.”

Laura Stone turned her head, as though looking around Phil's office, taking in the books, the pictures, and the mess. What was she, Elizabeth's age? No, a little older. The age he'd been when Markie Keegan was assigned to him. The fingertips of her left hand lifted to her temple, pressed. Headache? Or maybe he was supposed to think she had one, so he'd be gentle with her.

He waited to see.

Laura Stone brought her eyes back to him. “It didn't turn out so well for Mark Keegan, that deal.”

“You think that's the fault of the deal?”

She wrote and moved on. Plainly, what she thought wasn't a topic of this meeting. “What's your relationship with Mark Keegan's widow?”

“Private.”

“You and Sally Keegan have been intimate since you met, isn't that true?”

No, it's not true. Markie'd been in jail five months and dead sixteen before the foggy cold night on the Staten Island ferry when I first kissed Sally. “No comment.”

“What's your relationship with Edward Spano?”

Ah, Eddie. I knew we'd get to Eddie. “No comment.”

“Is it true you were taking money from Spano all these years and passing it on to Mark Keegan's family?”

Not directly. Not that I knew about. “No comment.”

“But you don't deny the money didn't come from New York State?”

“That's public record.”

“Where did it come from?”

Wish to hell I knew. “No comment.”

“You're acquainted with Marian Gallagher? Of More Art, New York? And the McCaffery Fund?”

“Yes.”

“Ms. Gallagher suggested that you, as the attorney handling the payments, would have to know the source of the funds.”

“Did she?”