tired.
Twenty minutes and half another coffee later, I spotted something.
“Okay,” I said to Fisher. “I think we’re on.”
He looked up. The diner’s door was jammed open, and through it you could see and hear the passing throng. There were intermittent gaps in the press of bodies outside, and through one I’d seen a man about thirty yards away, not far from where I’d stood to have a smoke. He was gone for a moment, then came back, a little closer. He was average height, gaunt. The skin around his cheekbones was gray and hung a little too loose, but in general he didn’t look very different from many of the other people around, except in his eyes. He was either about to attempt to overthrow the American government by force or a man standing on the edge of a steep drop only he could see.
“That’s him,” Fisher said. “At least, I think. He’s lost weight from the picture I saw.”
I looked the man in the eyes and gave a small upward nod of the head. Sat back in my chair and indicated for Fisher to do the same, giving Anderson a chance to confirm that we were only two, that our hands were empty and on the table, and that we had another chair. Then I went back to my coffee.
A couple of minutes later, he sat down.
When seen close up, the bright, turgid fear in his eyes was terrible. I pushed my coffee toward him. He picked it up, took a gulp.
“You okay?”
He did something with his face. I don’t know if it was supposed to be a smile. In his position I’m not sure how I would have answered either. It was a dumb question. Sometimes they have to be asked.
“I’m Jack,” I said. “This is Gary. And I want you to know right away, Bill, that neither of us thinks you did what you’re supposed to have done. I’ve been in your house, and I know it was the work of an intruder.”
“I can’t think about that at the moment.”
His voice was husky, like he was fighting off the flu.
“Sure,” I said. Not thinking about what had happened to his wife and child seemed to me a sound policy. I’m sure trauma counselors would advise differently, but they have homes and families to go to at the end of the day. “Where are you living?”
“Around,” he said. “I keep moving.”
“Do you have any money?”
“I had nearly fifty,” he said. “I bought a toothbrush, soap. Cheap change of clothes. Some food.”
I put my hand on the table close to his, moved it slightly to partially reveal the money I had folded over small. When he saw it, his face threatened to crumple.
“No,” he said, and shook his head.
“It’s only a loan. I want it back.”
After a moment’s hesitation, his hand moved to where mine had been and then down into his pocket, and there was nothing on the table anymore.
“You want something to eat?”
He shook his head. “Coffee.”
I waved to the waitress, and nothing was said until that was done. I knew that Anderson would need time to settle.
Fisher took the lead. “What happened, Bill?”
He shook his head again. “How am I supposed to know?”
“Why did you run?”
“Because I was afraid.”
“You didn’t want to get to the house, check if they were okay?”
“I would have run, too,” I said. “You’d know that the neighbors would do whatever you could do. That the cops were on their way. And you also knew that whatever happened was no accident, too, right?”
Anderson was crying now. There had been no change in his facial expression or posture, no indication he knew it was happening. His cheeks had been dry, and now they were wet. He put his coffee cup unsteadily back on the table.
“I should have gone in there anyway,” he said.
The truth was yes, he should have—assuming he could’ve held back from contact with his wife or child, thus muddying what might otherwise have been a strong forensic defense. But he didn’t need to hear that.
“You’re going to feel that way, of course, but it’s the past and there’s no changing it. They were dead before you entered the street. There was nothing you could have achieved except getting caught or killed, too. You understand that, right? It’s important that you do.”
He didn’t say anything. Up at the cook’s station, the grill flared suddenly, as a couple more burgers got flipped. Two children down at the far end of the diner were bickering about something, noisily, going at it so hard you almost believed they’d remember what it was tomorrow.
“Bill,” Fisher said, “I know it’s tough, but—”
“Oh, you know?” Anderson said. He turned away from us, the action resolute and possibly permanent. “You have absolutely no…”
His head dropped. He wasn’t going to say any more.
Fisher made a face. I let a silence settle, allowed Anderson to follow whatever thought was in his head and be left empty when it had gone.
“My father was murdered,” I said.
It felt strange to say it, to unearth this fact that lay as a semipermanent coloration in the back of my mind and had for so long that it was hard to believe that everyone didn’t already know. Strange, and also calculating. But if anyone was entitled to use this information, surely it was me.
Fisher stared at me. “I never knew that.”
“You wouldn’t. It happened a couple years after we left school. While I was at college.”
“Who killed him?”
“I don’t know,” I said, and by now Anderson was looking at me. “We never found out. I was away. My mother was visiting her sister overnight. Somebody broke in to the house. My father came downstairs, found them. He was not a man who was going to back down in that circumstance. They killed him—deliberately, accidentally, I don’t know—and then they took the stuff anyway. An old television and VCR, a handful of jewelry, and around eighty dollars in cash.”
Fisher looked as if he didn’t know what to say.
“I’m not equating this with your loss,” I told Anderson. “Point is, I can’t bring him back. You can’t bring your family back either. Somebody came into a place that was not theirs and took these people. They had no right. The question is, what do you do about it?”
Anderson sat completely still for maybe a minute. Then he turned back to face the table squarely.
“What can I do? The cops think I did it.”
“So tell us something that will help them see it differently. Like what this has to do with a check you received for a quarter of a million dollars.”
His eyes went wide. “How the hell do you know about that?”
I nodded to Fisher. I wanted a cigarette. Talking to Anderson was making me sad beyond belief, and I didn’t want to do it for much longer.
“I’m working on Joseph Cranfield’s estate,” Fisher said. “I’m a lawyer. You were one of a very limited number of individual beneficiaries. I couldn’t help noticing that the check was never deposited. Why?”
“I never met the guy,” Anderson said. “I never even heard of him. Then one morning there’s this ridiculous check. I have no idea what to do with it, why it’s there, nothing. But there’s a letter with it.”
“I know,” Fisher said. “I wrote it.”
“Then where the hell do you think you get off?”
“What?”
“Sending someone that much money, with conditions like that?”
“What do you mean? What conditions?”
“You wrote it, you know.”
“The letter I wrote just said, ‘Here’s the money, have a ball.’ And where it had come from. Nothing else.
