“Yes.”
“How?”
“I was doing my annual pro bono, for the public defender’s office, as required by the firm, and I drew DeRosa, some sort of auto theft, I believe.”
“So when Conroy wanted a mug you remembered DeRosa.”
Kiley appeared calm. He seemed entirely focused on the questions he was asking and the answers he was getting.
“And Marvin asked me to be DeRosa’s lawyer, this time, too, to see that he stayed on message.”
“The message being?”
“That Mary Smith had approached him to kill her husband.”
“Which was not true,” Kiley said.
“No. I don’t believe it was.”
Kiley sat back in his chair. Hawk and I remained where we were.
Ann Kiley said, “Daddy.”
Kiley stood and went to her and opened his arms and she fell against him and began to cry. As he hugged her, he looked at me.
“We can talk later,” he said.
“You will need security for her,” I said.
“I know,” Kiley said. “I can arrange that.”
“There’s more I need to know,” I said.
“She’s got nothing else to say,” Kiley said.
“I think she does,” I said.
“Doesn’t matter what you think,” Kiley said.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
It was Sunday. I was drinking coffee with my right hand and driving with my left. Pearl was asleep in the backseat, and Susan was beside me drinking coffee from a big paper cup which she held in both hands. We were on the road to Newburyport, and we had chosen to take the old Route 1, through the slow rural landscape north of Boston.
“How’s your lawsuit?” I said.
“I think the insurance company plans to settle,” Susan said.
“Thus leaving you neither vindicated nor convicted.”
“But they’ll probably cancel afterwards,” she said.
“Insurance companies are fun,” I said. “Aren’t they.”
Susan nodded. She dipped into her coffee, her big eyes gazing at the road across the top of the cup.
“And the boy is still dead,” she said.
“And it’s still not your fault,” I said.
She was quiet, her face still half hidden by the coffee. In the backseat Pearl snored occasionally, the way she had begun to do as she got older.
“Fault has little to do with sadness,” Susan said. “One of the things that helps kids get through the difficulty of being a gay adolescent is to have someone. I don’t mean a shrink. But a friend, a lover, someone. But the thing they need help with prevents them from getting it.”
“Because they’re too conflicted about being homosexual,” I said.
“I hate that word,” Susan said into her cup.
“Homosexual?”
“Yes.”
“Too clinical?”
“Makes me think of grim men in lab coats,” Susan said. “Studying a pathology.”
I had nothing to say about that, and decided in this case to try saying nothing. Susan drank her coffee. I drank mine.
“Where’s Hawk?” Susan said.
“I thought we’d have Sunday alone together.”
“Except for the baby.”
“Except for her.”
“Is it safe?”
