The Silent Hour

“So here I am,” he said. “Doing something about it, a few months too late—and I’ve got to thank you for wandering into this by mistake and pissing Sanabria off, because that led to the phone call that got me off my ass. I intend to push it as far as I can, Lincoln. With or without your help and with or without Graham’s approval, I intend to do that. Know what I said about being distracted this spring? Well, summer’s rolling on in now, buddy, and I’m looking for a distraction. This one fits fine.”

His easy, amused manner had lost its grip and tumbled free, leaving behind a sheen of bitterness. I could sympathize with some of it—I’d lost a fiancee to another man—but what he was going through as a father was not an experience I knew. Or wanted to know.

“You know why I want that distraction?” he said, his hand returning to the knife. “Because when I have to sit around and think about what’s happened in my life in the past year, nine times out of ten I conclude that my wife was right to go, and that my daughter’s better off for it.” He pressed his thumb into the blade. “That’s the truth of it, but as you can imagine, it’s not a truth I want to have to spend a hell of a lot of time considering.”

“Why do you think it’s the truth?”

“Sometimes you make decisions, Lincoln, that seem absolutely righteous at the time. Like there is no other possible option, you know? None. Then the years tick by and you see the way your decisions affected your family, and you wonder if it was a selfish choice.”

He didn’t offer any more details, and I didn’t ask any more questions. There was a piano player in the corner of the room—seemed Sokolowski’s always had a piano player—and for a while we just sat and listened to him play “Night Train” and didn’t talk. When the song ended, Ken pushed the knife away. There was a hard white line down the middle of his thumb.

“All right,” he said. “You’ve heard me out, and that’s more than I had any right to ask, but I’ll push it a bit more. I’ve been up-front with you, at the risk of bruising my ego, and admitted that I’ve never worked a homicide case. I know my way around an investigation, and I’m good at it, but I don’t have the experience or the knowledge on a homicide, and you do. You also have some local credibility, which is going to be important. Those things are why I made the drive. I can move forward on this without you, and I will if I have to, but I’d rather have the help. So I’ll ask you just once, with no pressure: Would you be willing to back me up on this?”

The piano player was into something upbeat and jazzy now, the sun was coming in warm through the windows behind him, and it had been many days since Dominic Sanabria stood in my living room. Easy to feel good about things. This one also felt like the sort of job that could get you into trouble, though, and generally you take those only when they’re high-paying or personal. I didn’t have that kind of excuse this time.

“Graham’s assessment didn’t exactly encourage me that this is something I want to be involved in, not even in a backup capacity,” I said.

“You think he’s going to leave you alone now?”

“I can make him. Police can solicit informant help, Ken, but they can’t force it.”

He shrugged.

It was quiet, and then he smiled, a cajoling, fraternal grin, and said, “Come on, Lincoln. This is what you are.”

“Yeah,” I said, but I couldn’t match the smile. “It is.”

“So?”

“Back you up. That was what you said, and it’s what I’ll hold you to. It’s your baby, Ken, but I’ll help you in whatever way I can, at least until it seems like that’ll get me killed.”

He smiled. “Can you ask any more of a man than that?”

13

__________

Joe didn’t like it. That was hardly a stunner. He grumbled and grunted and offered dire predictions and then told me I was an ass for not checking Ken’s background out before agreeing to help him. When I explained that I had, he just grumbled and grunted some more.

“You had one of Ohio’s last major mob figures standing in your apartment after one afternoon of work on the case, LP. That wasn’t a clear enough warning sign to you?”

“Warning sign, sure. Stop sign, no.”

“I knew there was a reason I always drive when I’m with you.”

“Well, why don’t you put that damn Taurus in gear and point it north, come back and run the show again.”

“In time,” he said. “In time.”

Amy was a bit more receptive. That, too, wasn’t exactly surprising—Amy’s curiosity level can generally override her good judgment, a trait that Joe no longer shares. Or never shared. As a kid, he probably did background checks on the neighbors before trick-or-treating at their houses. Still, while Amy was at least lukewarm to the idea, her normal enthusiasm was tempered, and I understood that. It hadn’t been so long ago that one of my cases invaded her life in a horrifying way. We rarely spoke of it now, and her typical bravado remained, but I’d also seen the pepper spray she’d added to her purse, and I’d heard the new steel security bar fasten behind me each time I left her apartment. Those were good things, maybe, the sort of precautions that would have pleased me had I not known that I was the reason for them.

“It’s a bizarre story, and I can see why you’re intrigued, but I also understand what Joe’s telling you about the risks,” she said as we sat on my roof that night, after Ken Merriman left for Pittsburgh. We had the Indians game on the radio and a bottle of pinot noir within reaching distance. I’d swept up the broken glass from the previous night. Found plenty of dust on the roof, but nothing as black as what had come from Parker Harrison’s shattered bones, and no silver coin. Reassuring.

“I understand that, too, Amy, but I only agreed to help the guy. Give him some advice.”

“Lincoln Perry, technical adviser?” She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, that’ll go well.”

“What are you saying?”

“You know, I’m sorry. The more I think about it, the better it sounds. Instead of getting yourself arrested, like normal, you can get him arrested.”

“It’s not a long walk home to your apartment. I’d be happy to throw you down to the sidewalk so you can get a faster start.”

“Ha, ha.” She stretched out in the chair, put her feet up. “I’m not saying you should pass on this, Lincoln, but you can imagine what’s going through my head, too. Sanabria already came to your home once.”

The implication was heavy, an unspoken reminder of a day when a man I’d angered had come to her home instead of mine. It was a memory that chased me through my days, that could bring me up short with a grimace of agony seemingly out of nowhere, striking my heart like a sudden and unexpected muscle cramp. The possibilities of what might have happened loomed even larger than the pain of what had happened. I’d been in this business for far too long to keep such images at bay; I knew what the world could do, knew the savagery and senselessness of it all too well. It was this that had invaded my mind when Dominic Sanabria came to my apartment, and now she was remembering the same incident and worrying about me. I thought of him again, and of a body laid in a Shawnee grave in Pennsylvania. I thought of those things, and I looked at Amy, and I felt afraid.

“What?” she said. She was watching my face, and a frown had gathered on her own as she studied me.

“I can stay out of it,” I said. “I should. It’s the right thing for you.”

“For me?”

I nodded.

“That can’t be the issue, Lincoln. It needs to be the right thing for you.”

“No,” I said. “Not anymore. We’re together, right? So we make decisions that are the best for both of us. That’s the whole point.”

She shook her head. “I don’t want to let myself be shoved around by fear, Lincoln. It was hard for a while, after what happened. It still is, sometimes, but I’m trying not to let that dictate my life. If you start doing the opposite, you’re going to scare me more. Can you understand that? I need support, not protection. There’s a