“On the night before your sentencing? I don’t know,” she said. “I’m just surprised.” Her smile was self- conscious.
“I don’t have many friends anymore, to be honest.” Davis realized almost immediately how unseductive that sounded, and also how true it was. “I’ve seen enough of Graham the last few months. My next-closest friend is Walter Hirschberg, I suppose, and I’m not sure this would be the most comfortable evening to spend with an ethicist.”
“Well, even if I was at the top of a short list, thank you.”
“Not at all.”
“And not just for dinner.”
Davis was foolishly optimistic about her intentions.
“Thank you for keeping me out of it,” she said, reaching over and brushing his hand. “They might have been easier on you if you offered them something. Given me up. Many people would have, to save themselves.”
“I’m hardly worth saving,” Davis said. “Besides, you had nothing to do with it. If anything, I used you. They should tack time onto my sentence for that, not shave it off.”
Joan retracted her hand and placed it over the pearls at her neck. “I thought you said you wouldn’t have to go to prison.”
“Graham doesn’t think so, but there’s always a chance. It’s actually mandatory in the guidelines, but he thinks they’ll suspend it.”
“And then?”
He let a sip of Shiraz trickle down the back of his throat. “Put it behind me.”
“Really?” she asked. “Put it all behind you?” She had her hair up for the night, but it refused to be contained. Long, wavy tendrils hung down past the corners of her brown eyes to her cheeks.
“It’s been ten years since I did it. A fifth of my life. The worst fifth of my life. I made a lot of other people miserable or worse. Including you. For all I know, the guy who killed Anna Kat is dead or rotting in jail by now, anyway. Odds are, he is. It’s time for me to stop caring and see that the next fifth of my life is better. I don’t have many fifths left.”
“Don’t be ashamed of what you tried to do,” Joan said. “It was stupid.” She looked at him honestly. “But you did what you did because you loved Anna Kat. And what happened to Jackie wasn’t your fault.”
“Yes. It was.”
“No. God, Davis. I don’t want to speak ill of her, but she was deeply troubled.” A pair of waiters arrived with their plates and Davis and Joan gazed at each other in silence until they were alone again and she was able to finish the thought. “Did you know Jackie slashed the tires on my car?”
“No! When?”
“Maybe four months before she passed away. It was parked in the driveway of my condo. On a Tuesday night. I found it the next morning.”
“How do you know it was her?”
“She didn’t try to hide it. She came to my house the next day and warned me to stay away from you. I told her there was nothing going on, which was a lie, I guess, but nothing sexual was going on.”
“Why didn’t you call the police?”
“Oh, really, Davis. Call the cops on your wife?”
“You should have told me…”
She puffed her lips. “That would have been worse.”
“I don’t believe it.”
Joan allowed herself a breather for a few bites of pumpkin ravioli. “So, was there something going on?”
Davis squinted. “What? With you and me?”
“With you and anyone. I mean, the woman was suspicious about something. She might have been unbalanced, but I don’t think it came from nowhere.”
The restaurant was full now, and the late setting sun reflected against the glass of downtown in an orange glow. “Yeah, well, nowhere was kind of a theme with Jackie.”
Joan whispered, “Even I wondered about you once. That day at the Finns’ house.” She took a sip of Chardonnay and said, almost inaudibly, “Maybe I was just jealous, too.”
“I remember,” Davis said. “But no. I never cheated on Jackie.”
“See? You always had that perspective. Take care of the people closest to you. At all costs.”
“I wanted to once,” he told her.
“Cheat? Really?” she said, mouth full, somehow unsuspecting. “When?”
“Brixton,” he said.
She nodded, slowly, sincerely. He didn’t feel bad for having said it.
After dinner, they walked to the end of the pier to enjoy the blackness over the lake. To their left was Festival Hall, part of the original pier built in 1916. He and Jackie had been married there, in the Grand Ballroom, and it suddenly struck Davis as inappropriate that he should be here with Joan. Some subconscious gremlin had caused him to make reservations at Abbott’s, where he and Jackie had celebrated a handful of their early anniversaries (although the restaurant had another name then). It was impossible that this wouldn’t have occurred to him before now, impossible that he couldn’t have seen how callous it was to be here with Joan on what amounted to, if he was being honest with himself, their first date – his first date with the woman Jackie had accused of threatening their marriage. And although Jackie might have been half crazy, about that she was at least half right.
For that reason, demonstrating what he recognized as too-little-too-late respect for the memory of his wife, Davis didn’t take Joan’s hand as they walked, and if she had expected him to, she didn’t show it. Joan, her fingers holding a light black sweater over her bare shoulders, seemed content, commenting on the wonderful smells of the shore and the pleasant breeze and the number of children about at so late an hour.
At the tip of the pier stood a crowd of maybe thirty people, staring off into the darkness. In the back a young man in shorts hopped on his toes for a better view, but all Davis could see from his six feet three inches was a couple of midsized boats – not pleasure craft, but not the massive party-and-tour yachts that docked here in the summer, either – about seventy-five yards out. They were working boats, with electronic gear and a radio dish and men in uniform scurrying on deck and men in diving gear going over the side.
“What happened?” Davis posed the question to the back of the crowd, offering it to anyone who thought they knew the answer.
“They found another girl,” somebody said without turning around. “Another dead girl.”
Part Two
Justin at Fourteen
– 52 -
Davis pushed the remains of an overcooked chicken back and forth across the heavy white Prince Hotel Palm Springs catering plate. He knew he was being watched, and the scrutiny had poisoned his appetite. Every one of the three hundred or so doctors and researchers and ethicists in this room probably brought with them to this conference an opinion, rumor, or assumption about Davis Moore. He still wasn’t comfortable with the kind of celebrity he had become.
His difficulties with the Lake County state’s attorney had resolved themselves much as Graham had promised. Davis pled to a misdemeanor and paid an affordable fine, was sentenced to seven days in jail, suspended, and worked at a free clinic on Chicago’s West Side every Tuesday for six months. Martha Finn followed up with a civil suit, which Graham settled out of court for less than $75,000. Following his community service, the Congressional Board of Oversight and the AMA suspended his license for another four months, a slap on the wrist considering the full menu of their options.
When the suspension was up, however, he didn’t return to the clinic. The Chicago dailies lost interest in him
