Absent Friends

For Phil, that meant new clients, new interviews, and new bullshit stories to get past: I can't help you if you're going to jerk me around. And the old clients still needed him to stand up with them at their arraignments, their bail hearings, their days in court.

The Tribune story hadn't changed this, not yet. The people Phil defended were criminals. (Aloud, Phil would have insisted on “persons charged with criminal activity.”) If the odor of improper, possibly illegal, behavior swirled around their lawyer, in their minds that only made him more likely to understand. Those of his clients who even knew, who even read the papers. Most of them were hypnotized by their own troubles. Their minds were locked on the desolation of the futures they faced the way you'd stare into a bloodred sunrise, unable to take your eyes off the storm clouds massing.

So until it came to the ethics investigation, the disciplinary committee review—and it would, oh yes; already there were conversations that stopped when he walked into a room, invitations to go get a beer that he didn't have to duck because they'd stopped coming—Phil could stay busy. His clients, as before, would be desperately glad to see him, though what he was able to offer them was, compared to their hopes, a leaf in a windstorm. Until the Feds called, or the State, whichever won the fight over who got to try to take Phil Constantine down—and they would have called already, if everyone on that side wasn't scrambling, madly searching tips and phone taps they'd ignored for years to see if they should have seen this coming, if they could see anything else coming now—Phil's life could go on, no different and completely changed, like everything else.

And if he found himself now, on occasion and without warning, seized with an urge to grab a client's collar and shout, “That's it? After all this, this is still who you are and what you want?” he roped himself back under control each time, and just went on. He wasn't really sure who it was that he wanted to shout at.

Phil had been caught in the cloud on September 11, running like hell with everyone else.

His eyes burned, his lungs were crazy for air. A woman next to him staggered, so he reached for her, caught her, forced her to keep going, warm blood seeping onto his arm from a slash down her back as he pulled her along, later carried her. Somewhere, someone in a uniform took her from him, bore her off someplace while someone else pressed an oxygen mask to his face. He breathed and breathed, and when he could speak, he asked about the woman, but no one knew.

And all the time he was running, coughing and choking and seeing nothing but thick dust, no sense of direction, no up or down, all the time he was hearing screams and sirens and shouts, a clanging like a thousand railroad cars crashing off the tracks, and, in all that, explosions like gunfire that were bodies and parts of bodies hitting the ground, all that time, in Phil's mind, were his clients: skinny little Jose, down two strikes but he just had to try to peddle that one last goddamn bag of grass, though Phil had warned him, warned him; Mrs. Johnson, whose five children still hadn't been told she'd shot her husband's girlfriend and then her husband; that kid he called Ben, though the kid had given four different names already. Phil saw them all, locked in cells down here, in the middle of this swirling, roaring ruin and death, knowing they were trapped, knowing they would die.

They didn't. The towers fell in, not over; the devastation, as bad as it was, was not as bad as it could have been. Acknowledging this truth, as Phil did later, did not make him share the Pollyanna optimism of the friend who had voiced it. As far as Phil knew, it was always true. Nothing was ever as bad as it could have been.

And damn little was as good, either.

So the day would be busy, and complicated in ways Phil wasn't sure about yet by the death of that bastard Harry Randall. He needed to call Sally and Kevin; probably he should've called Sally last night, when he heard. Well, not probably: should have and didn't. What reason? Choose one.

Although the biggest reason might be this, the thought he'd had last night, when, walking home from Battery Park, he'd thought about what Randall's death could mean: This could be my chance. Breathing space, room to maneuver.

Because some of what Randall had said in the Tribune stories was true.

And most of what he'd implied was a crock.

But about a lot of it, Phil didn't know.

Now that Randall was no longer clawing through their lives, drawing blood from anything that came near him, now maybe Phil could take a shot at finding the truth.

Why?

Not because it would prove his innocence, show him to be the falsely accused white knight. Far too late for that. If the truth showed that nothing Phil had done was illegal, he still wasn't innocent, no.

And not because the truth would give him ammunition. If the truth was good, he might win; if bad, he'd certainly lose. How many times, over the years, had he told that to clients who wanted to go to trial instead of taking the plea, who wanted to offer up the truth to a jury? As though truth weren't a prisoner of the ways people find to use it, just like everything else.

Markie Keegan had been the last client Phil had considered trying to talk out of pleading. Markie, Phil had been sure, could have persuaded a jury with the truth.

No, that was wrong: he had not been sure. Markie had sat on the other side of the visiting room table before he made bail and listened. He'd held his son on his lap at his own kitchen table after his family, his friends, his boss, and his church had pooled what they had to get him released, and he'd heard Phil out.

And he'd said, No, no trial. I'll take the plea.

And Phil had felt relieved.

The truth, Phil had come to understand through the years since, through the trials and the pleas, the investigations, the accusations, and the stories, rarely did anybody any good.

But in those years the walls and floors of the world were solid, not blasting air and dust and choking smoke.

Now he was thinking this: what he'd been part of all these years, what Jimmy McCaffery had led him into, Phil had always thought he'd known. What he'd thought was bad. But if Randall was right, the truth was worse.

Now, because he could grasp, hold, be sure of, nothing else, he wanted to find that truth. Just to have it? No.

To offer it to Sally. To show her, to make her know that in this new world where, suddenly, none of them were