The Silent Hour

time, and eventually a car engine started in the parking lot, and then it was gone, and I was alone.

7

__________

For more than a week, it was quiet. At first I checked the locks with extra care, wore my gun when I left the apartment, and held my breath each time I turned the key in the ignition of my truck. Visits from a guy like Dominic Sanabria can make you conscious of such things.

Nothing happened. Sanabria didn’t stop by, nor did anyone operating on his behalf. Parker Harrison made no contact. I was quiet, too—despite promising Harrison that I would pass his name along to the Joshua Cantrell death investigators, I didn’t make any calls. After Sanabria visited, it somehow seemed better to do nothing. Amy and I discussed the situation frequently for the first few days, but then the topic faded, and soon I was leaving the gun at home and starting the truck without pause. I’d gotten out of the mess early enough, it seemed, and no damage had been done.

“Managed to escape yourself this time,” Joe said when I called to say that seven days had passed without disaster following Sanabria’s visit. “It’s good that you’re developing that skill, LP. Without me around, you’ve actually been forced to learn some common sense.”

“Aren’t you proud.”

“Not particularly. If you’d had even an ordinary amount of that sense, you’d never have agreed to look at the house in the first place.”

“Harrison assured me he’d been rehabilitated. What else could I do?”

“I’ve sat in on parole hearings and listened to true psychotics insist on the same thing.”

“You wouldn’t release a jaywalker until he’d done five years in solitary, Joe.”

The conversation drifted away from Harrison then, on to more important things, like baseball, and eventually Joe asked after the weather.

“Warm,” I said. “The sun’s shining every day, and it’s warm. So why are you still in Florida? I’m pretty sure the rest of your kind has migrated back north.”

“My kind?”

“Snowbirds, Joseph. Men who sit around the pool all day talking about their experiences fighting in Korea and working for the Truman campaign. You know, your peers.”

“My peers.” Joe hated the idea of being one of those flee-for-Florida-in-winter retirees, so naturally I raised the subject during every phone call.

“Perhaps I’m wrong, though,” I said. “Perhaps you’re not part of that group. Like I said, most of them are already coming back north. So if you need to stay down there this late in the year, you must be even more old and frail.”

“That must be it, yes,” he said, determined not to rise to the bait this time around.

“When are you coming back?” I asked, serious now. I’d been expecting his return sometime in April, but that month had come and gone and he remained in Florida.

“I don’t know yet. We’ll see.”

“We’ll see? If it’s pushing eighty degrees up here it has to be, what, a hundred and sixty down there? With ninety percent humidity?”

“Close to that, sure.”

“And summer hasn’t even hit yet. Only a damn fool would stay in Florida in the summer when he could retreat to a home near the beautiful shores of Lake Erie.”

“I’ll admit I’m not enjoying the weather as much lately.”

“So why not come home? What did you do, meet a woman?”

He didn’t answer.

I said, “Joe?”

“Could be the truth, LP. Could be the truth.”

I’d made the initial remark as a joke, but his response seemed sincere, and that silenced me. Joe’s wife of thirty years, Ruth, had been dead for five now, and in that time he’d not gone on a single date. The few people who’d attempted to make introductions for him had been shut down quickly and emphatically. If Joe was actually seeing someone, it was an awfully big step for him.

“Well, good for you,” I said after the pause had gone on too long.

“Oh, shut up with the sincerity. Makes me sick. If I were anybody else, you’d be giving me hell right now, asking which strip club I met her at.”

“A stripper? At your age? No way. I just assumed you’d done some volunteering at a home for the blind. Convinced her you were forty years younger and good-looking. Convinced her you were more like me, in other words.”

“You’re neither good-looking nor forty years younger than me.”

“Close enough on both counts, grandpa. Close enough. Can I at least hear the young girl’s name?”

“Gena,” he said, “and she is a few years younger than me, smart-ass.”

“You lecherous old dog. How many years? Is she even legal yet? Is this girl—”

“Goodbye, Lincoln.”

“Oh, come on, you’ve got to give me more than—”

“Talk to you soon,” he said, and he was laughing as he hung up.

I was laughing, too, and in a good mood as I went downstairs to check the mail, happy for him even if disappointed that this might delay his return. Had a smile on my face until I took the mail out of the box and saw my name written in unpleasantly familiar handwriting on the only envelope inside. P. T. Harrison, the return address said, but I didn’t need that to identify the sender. I’d seen enough of his damn letters already.

I tore the envelope open as I walked back up the stairs, shook out the contents as I stepped inside the office, dreading whatever twisted manifesto he’d decided to write this time. There was no letter, though. Nothing but a check for five hundred dollars, with thanks for your time written in the memo portion.

I threw the envelope in the trash but kept the check in my hand for a minute. It was a simple design, blue on blue, standard font, the sort of check most banks issued cheaply. It told me nothing about Parker Harrison that I didn’t already know, except that he had a checkbook. I have six thousand dollars. I’ll spend every dime . . .

I smoothed the check against the top of the desk and wondered if it would bounce. If not, then Harrison had done all right for himself after serving fifteen years in prison. Managing to stay on the streets for twelve years and save at least a little bit of money might not seem like much, but it was more than most of his fellow offenders managed. Twelve years was a hell of a run for some of them. I had a friend who worked at the Cuyahoga County Jail and referred to the booking area as “the revolving door.” Same faces went in and out, year after year, decade after decade. Harrison hadn’t done that. From the small amount of research I’d done once he began his letter writing, I’d determined that he’d never been charged with any crime after his release, not even a traffic ticket. I didn’t know where he worked or how he lived or what he did with himself, but he hadn’t taken another bust. For years, he’d lived quietly and without incident. Then the remains of a former employer turned up in the woods and he’d decided to surface again, surface in my life.

“Go away, Harrison,” I said quietly. “Go away.” Then I took the check and held it over the trash can, opened my fingers, and watched as it fluttered down. I wouldn’t take his money. Didn’t want it, didn’t need it.

For once, that was true. My former fiancee, Karen Jefferson, had mailed me a check for eighty thousand dollars after my investigation into her husband’s death in the fall. She was worth millions now, could certainly afford it, but I’d thrown that check in the trash, too, and the two that followed it. Then she sent another, along with a letter insisting that I take the money. I had. Cashed the check but hadn’t spent a dime of it. The money sat in a savings account, earning a pitiful interest rate, but that was enough for me. I didn’t want to invest it or spend it, but I appreciated the sense of comfort it provided. The sense of freedom. If I didn’t like a client, I didn’t have to work