sober times. But he was certain James Bond had sexed evil women and allowed himself to enjoy it. Toward a greater end.
His hand reached for the front button of her jeans. At some point in the next hour, they moved to her bed.
Finally, between oddly configured and suffocating clenches during which there was circumstantial evidence of her climaxing, but before he had done the same, Big Rob said to her, “Hon, I can’t lie to you.”
She gave him a puzzled and tired look. “Baby, lie to me,” she said. “Please lie to me.”
“No,” Big Rob said. “This isn’t a game.”
She grunted. Peg wanted to reciprocate, quickly, and go to sleep. But Big Rob knew there would never be a better time to interrogate this witness than right now.
“Something you said. About a Chicago doctor.”
Peg’s eyes snapped open. Her teeth set but didn’t quite meet, the result of an uncorrected, genetic asymmetry.
“I’m looking for a doctor and it sounds like he could be the same man,” Big Rob said.
She squinted into the darkness and imagined a path from the bed to the door.
“It’s okay. Maybe we can help each other.”
She relaxed some and sat up against the headboard. “What do you mean?”
Big Rob backed off the bed and found his pants. He pulled out the illustration that Jackie Moore had sent Philly. “Do you know who this man is?”
She took it and turned on the light. “Oh, fuck,” she said.
“What is it?”
Her mind sorted the possibilities like an old mail machine. “You know Davis Moore?”
“I do,” Big Rob said. “I mean, I know who he is.”
“Fuck,” she said again. Big Rob didn’t know if she was going to say anything else.
“Look, I don’t want your money. Your big payday. You and Ricky. I just want to know who the guy in the picture is and what he has to do with the doctor. Like I said. Maybe we can help each other.”
“So you’re saying, I help you, and you’ll let Ricky and me sell our story to the magazines?”
“Magazines?” Big Rob said. That was their big plan? “Sure. I’ll drive you right to Vanity Fair ’s front door, if that’s what it takes. Look, you said yourself you were waiting for something to happen so you could cash in on your story. Maybe I can help move things along a little bit.”
Peg was very tired and still a little drunk. Given the events of the last hour, the heavy, shirtless man in her bedroom had gained her trust. “That’s Jimmy Spears.”
“The football player?” Big Rob looked at the drawing again. He knew of Spears – he played for the Dolphins. Or maybe the Falcons. He’d heard the name a hundred times since he started coming to Brixton, but like most football fans, he wouldn’t know what the guy looked like without a number and name on his back.
“Jimmy Spears grew up here in Brixton. Davis Moore thinks Jimmy Spears killed his daughter. Ricky thinks Moore is gonna, I don’t know, get revenge or something.”
“No shit?” Big Rob wished Philly were here, then looked down at his mostly naked body and at Peg half covered by a sheet and he almost laughed. “No shit.”
Peg continued. Big Rob recognized the tired, relieved – almost tearful – tone of a confession. “After Moore used Ricky to track down Spears, he sent some guy here – a private eye with a gun, to kill Ricky, and Ricky… well, Ricky wrestled the gun away from him. Here at the trailer. Then the detective started running. He ran to his car.” She sighed and closed her eyes. “I saw it. He came here to kill Ricky.” Then, in a confused and tired lapse that shattered Big Rob’s most fragile hope, “It was self-defense. I saw it.”
“Self-defense. I believe you. Anybody would,” Big Rob said. His heart was beating at a speed that would terrify his doctor. “What did Ricky do with the gun?”
Peg climbed out of bed and opened the sliding closet door. On tiptoe, she reached up to a high shelf and pushed aside a number of boxes and single shoes. In the moonlight, the skin on her back was shiny like wet sand. She turned around and presented the gun to him carefully, at arm’s length.
“It’s okay.” Big Rob hooked his pinky through the trigger guard and checked to see if the safety was on, and he set it on top of his folded pants. He took her in his arms and she squeezed him. Her hands were sweaty against his back. Later, remembering this, he would cry.
“So you’re gonna help us?” she asked, sniffling into his ear. “You’re gonna help me and Ricky get our money?”
What could Big Rob say except yes?
That’s when her hand went under the waistband of his boxers.
Big Rob closed his eyes and coaxed himself to the finish. Toward a greater end.
– 42 -
Barwick kept her apartment dark and cool. A friend in Arizona often asked why she lived in Chicago, why she put up with those Northern winters, but Sally never understood the question. With layers, it was easy to escape the cold, and snow was only a temporary nuisance, like boxes piled in a hallway. Northern winters were preferable to Southern summers – which were unrelenting and bright and hot. You could hide your worst flaws in the short, cold days of winter, but the Southern heat and sun only exposed your worst features to the world. Even now, as spring intruded, Sally, with drawn shades, made her home a bunker from the early mornings and lengthening afternoons.
She turned on her computer and with a keystroke rejected an offer to enter Shadow World, which she had just started playing in the past week. She had heard about the game from a friend and although it wasn’t exactly a mainstream phenomenon, the alternative press had been raving about its potential. She understood the appeal. Being inside the game was like being in one of her dreams.
Sally opened her word processor and began a letter to Martha Finn.
She told Martha who she really was. What her job was. What she had done. She said she was sorry. That she had accepted the assignment without realizing they would become friends. That once she started the lies – the most necessary tools of her business – it became impossible for her to stop them.
A man is dead now, and I don’t yet know if I have any culpability for his murder, Sally wrote. I once asked that same man about conflicts of interest in our profession. Philly told me, “Lawyers have conflicts of interest, Barwick. Not us. We’re more like priests. The husbands confess to us. The wives confess to us. We hear their worst secrets. Act on their worst impulses.”
You deserved less cynical consideration from me, Martha. You are a good person, far better than me. You have a wonderful son, destined for wonderful things. Even now it is easy for me to imagine him as an older boy, as a man. A man of duty and great responsibility. I have not only betrayed you, my friend, I have betrayed Justin. I will live with that pain all my life.
When my boss returns from his business trip I am quitting. Leaving this job for good. All I have to show for my falsehoods are dead colleagues and lost friends. There must be a better living in honesty, a better way to pursue the truth than through lies.
She printed the letter and signed it, then stuffed it in an envelope, which she addressed and stamped and left on a tiny sideboard that flanked her door. She deleted the original from her hard drive so it could never be edited, never be changed.
– 43 -
Davis left work at about ten o’clock. He liked coming home after Jackie had gone to bed but before she had gone to sleep. In the darkness of their bedroom, lying in their king-sized bed like parallel lines, never touching, they could talk. They could discuss the highlights of their days and the miscellaneous nuisances of their lives – bills,
