Encouraged, he leaned forward. “What I did was wrong. I admit it. But don’t think it hasn’t eaten at me all these years. I know people say I go too easy on white-collar defendants sometimes, but whenever some poor slob comes up before me embezzling a few thousand, or cheating on his taxes, I have to think that there but for the grace of God. Everybody’s done things they’re ashamed of, Deborah. Haven’t you?”
“Of course.”
“Not that it’s an excuse. But when you know how much some people are getting away with and what you’ve done hasn’t really hurt anybody—” He sighed, set his drink on the wide arm of his chair, stretched his long legs straight out till he was nearly horizontal, and in a tone so low I almost couldn’t hear, he muttered, “Shared shabbiness.”
“What?”
“That’s what I call it. When we tell ourselves everybody’s doing it and most are doing worse. The small shabby things we do that make us not point the finger at someone else. A shared complicity. But every time we do it, a little more decency leaks away from us, a little more glory gone from our world. Take Andy Bynum. He actually apologized to me, but he said he couldn’t figure any other way to get Linville to keep her mouth shut about commercial fishing in close. Said blackmailing me like that wasn’t half as bad as signing Ritchie Janson’s signature.”
I stood and as if I’d jerked a string, Kidd started up from the landing.
“What are you going to do?” Chet asked.
Shared shabbiness or holier than thou? I didn’t like either choice.
He read the decision in my eyes and leaned back in his chair with his own eyes closed.
“I’m sorry, Chet,” I told him.
And I was.
• • •
“Why don’t you head straight on down Front Street?” said Kidd. “I’ll buy you a beer at the Dock House and we’ll look at all the rich people in their boats and I’ll tell you about the time I found a fish trap at a creek off Kerr Lake.”
“Okay.” I didn’t trust my voice to say more.
“Hey, you’re not crying because you’re going to unseat that sorry bastard, are you?”
“No.” We both knew I was lying.
“Okay,” he said. “So what happened was I had to sit on that fish trap for three solid days before anybody came to check on it.”
He spotted the tissue holder over the sun visor on his side and handed me a couple without breaking his narration. It was very long and very complicated. Something to do with a six five, three-hundred-pound gorilla of a man who brought along three little young’uns when he came to empty his illegal fish trap. The story lasted all the way till we were seated at a small table on an upstairs porch overlooking the marina, and by that time I was resigned to doing the right thing and was ready to, if not laugh, at least relax.
To my bemusement, I spotted Lev on the deck of the
Poor Lev, I thought, picturing the rest of a life co-opted by Catherine Llewellyn. No doubt she’ll allow him one- night stands, but I also have no doubt that she’ll make very, very sure (ever so solicitously, and for his own good, of course) that he never again gets entangled by someone who could disengage him from her orbit.
Already Lev was taking on the outlines of a Proust novel—something I know that I read and absorbed, yet can no longer remember why, nor even if, I actually enjoyed it.
“See somebody you recognize?” Kidd asked.
“No,” I said. “No, I don’t.”
15
“All things considered,” said F. Roger Longmire when he finally got through to me next morning, “I’m gonna tell Judge Mercer’s chief to find someone else to sub for Mercer next week. Harrison Hobart can still sit in for you in Dobbs if you want to take a couple of days off.”
“That’s okay,” I told him. “I’ll be fine by Monday, but thanks, Roger.”
While we’d talked, Kidd had cleaned the bathroom and swabbed down the kitchen floor. There was nothing else to do except finish packing and run the vacuum over the carpet in the rest of the cottage. Sue keeps the place like a dollhouse and no way was I going to leave it less than pristine.
