Down Here

them. Or maybe she mostly used the car for those upstate trips she had talked about, wasn’t used to city driving.

“There it is,” I said, “just up ahead.”

She made the left, swung into the parking lot. It was relatively empty—well past dinner, and too early for the night owls.

We walked inside, followed a young woman in a pale green dress toward the back.

“Would you prefer a booth or a table?”

“A booth, please,” I said. “As private as possible.”

“You can take that one there,” she said, pointing. “But this place can fill up just like that,” snapping her fingers.

“I know it can,” I said, slipping her a ten. “And if we end up surrounded, I know it won’t be your fault.”

Laura ordered a Greek salad and a glass of red wine. I made do with a plate of chopped liver, potato salad, and coleslaw, French fries on the side. Not Delancey Street quality, but decent enough. And I was hungry.

“What good would it do him?” she said, out of the blue.

“Your brother?”

“Yes. I did a little . . . well, ‘research’ would be too strong a word. Just a little looking around in the . . . genre, I guess you’d call it. The books I found, they’re either about how an innocent man was finally freed, or they’re an attempt to get him freed. Don’t you think that’s accurate?”

“Pretty much,” I conceded.

“Well, except for the people still in prison—I mean, anyone could see what good a book would do them—the other ones, the people who were the . . . stars, I guess you’d call them, didn’t they get money, too?”

“I guess in some cases they did. Like when you see their names as ‘co-writers,’ you can probably bet on it. Some, maybe not—they might have just wanted to get their stories told.”

“But they never have control, do they?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Well, I read about one man, Jeffrey MacDonald, I think his name was. He was accused of murdering his wife and children. Didn’t he . . . cooperate with a journalist? And it backfired on him?”

“MacDonald played his own hand,” I said. “And, anyway, there’s no similarity. Your brother’s already free. And he’s not charged with any crimes. The book you’re talking about, it was the investigation of a crime. My book is an investigation of the system.”

“But you said yourself, John is the centerpiece.”

“I said I’d like him to be.”

“All right, you’d like him to be. But it comes down to the same question.”

“What’s in it for him?”

“Yes,” she said. “I don’t mean to sound so cold-blooded. This doesn’t have—doesn’t have to have—anything to do with you and me. But I have to view all deals the same way. The interests of the parties.”

“If it doesn’t have anything to do with you and me, maybe we should just split it up,” I said.

“What do you mean?” she said, spots of color in her cheeks.

“You’re not your brother’s . . . agent, I guess is the word I’m looking for. Let’s put them all face-up, okay?

“One, I would rather have simply approached your brother, made my pitch, and either started working with him, incorporating him into my project, or moved on. Quick and easy, yes or no.

“But, in his current situation, he’s not only less accessible—I don’t have a clue where he even is, never mind how to reach him—he’s more attractive. Because of the whole prosecutor-on-trial angle.

“Two, I . . . like you. I guess that’s obvious. I don’t want one thing to screw up the other. I don’t want to put you in a position of making choices you shouldn’t have to make.”

“You mean . . . ? I don’t know what you mean.”

“I want to meet your brother,” I said. “Talk to him. And leave you out of it. And, regardless of how that works out, I want to keep seeing you.”

“Oh.”

I didn’t say anything, just went back to my food. At least the Dr. Brown’s cream soda was the same as you could buy on Second Avenue.

“You wouldn’t still want my . . . recollections?” she asked. “The family history, things like that?”

“Sure I would,” I said. “The truth is, your brother’s story—the factual part of his story—pretty much tells itself. There’s court documents—indictments, trial transcripts, appeals—all over the place. I was looking for more. Deep background. What I told you was one hundred percent true. The impact on the family is a microcosm of the impact on all society.

“It wasn’t until we . . . it wasn’t until I realized I had feelings for you that I decided I didn’t want to risk one thing for the other.”

“We went to bed,” she said, scanning my face. “I don’t know a lot about men, but I know enough to know that doesn’t take a lot of ‘feelings’ on their part.”

“I didn’t expect it to happen,” I said. “Any of it. Sure, you’re a gorgeous girl, and I’m not pretending I wouldn’t want to get next to you even if I had never spent ten minutes talking to you. You don’t know a lot about men; I don’t know a lot about women. But I know some things. I know you’re not the kind of girl who makes love to a man unless you’ve got feelings of your own.”

“You know that . . . how?”

“I couldn’t tell you if you gave me a shot of truth serum,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean I’m not right. It’s just something I . . . sense, maybe. I don’t know.”

She toyed with her salad, not looking up.

“Tell me I’m wrong, and that’ll do it,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“Tell me you don’t have feelings for me, and we’ll drop the whole thing.”

“You’re confusing me.”

“Look at me, Laura. You don’t have to be a map reader to know I’ve been around for a while. I’m not too old to play, but I’m too old not to play for keeps. If you just like sex, and figured I might be fun, I hope I didn’t disappoint you. But it would sure disappoint me.”

“And if I said that . . . that I was just horny?”

“No hard feelings,” I said. “You’re a big girl, you get to make your own decisions.”

“You’d still want to do the book? With my brother, I mean?”

“Sure.”

“Just . . . what, then?”

“Just nothing. I thought, if I told you I could just meet your brother, leave you out of it, maybe you and I, we could try being together, see how it worked.”

She pushed her plate away from her, said, “You can’t meet my brother. I don’t even know where he is. I hear from him, once in a while. But they’re keeping him safe. Until the trial, anyway.”

“I understand.”

“I wish you could smoke here,” she said.

“I can fix that,” I said, catching the attention of our waitress with a check-signing gesture.

She made a sound of pleasure, exhaling a stream of smoke into the warm, soft night, leaning against the side of her Audi in the parking lot.

“I like to know where everything is before I do anything,” she said. “Going to bed with you— taking you to bed—that’s not me, you’re right. But I did it before I thought about it. And now you’re making me think about it.”

“I don’t know money talk,” I said. “But isn’t there some terminology you guys use for long-term