'I need to be able to assure him that what he says is between me and him.'
'You could lie a little,' Cleary said.
'No,' Dix said. 'I couldn't.'
'So what if I don't agree?' Cleary said.
'I won't do it unless you agree.'
'So why do I care if you do or don't?' Cleary looked at me. 'I'm doing him the favor.'
'Private or not?' Dix said.
'Christ, you are a real hard-on,' Cleary said. 'Aren't you.'
'Glad you noticed,' Dix said. 'Private or no?'
'Private,' Cleary said.
'Thanks,' Dix said and opened the door to the interview room and went in. The door closed behind him.
'Embarrassing,' I said to Cleary, 'the way he sucked up to you.'
'I'm just the people's attorney,' Cleary said.
'That's what filled him with awe,' I said.
'Probably,' Cleary said. 'You want some coffee?'
'The coffee here any good?' I said.
'Unspeakable,' Cleary said.
'I'll have some,' I said.
The coffee was in fact brutal, but I drank it manfully.
'You're giving us a lot of slack,' I said to Cleary.
He shrugged and sipped his coffee and made a face.
'I got a conviction,' he said. 'I can play it a little loose.'
'And you want to know more than you do,' I said.
He shrugged again.
'I'd like things to make sense,' he said, 'if they can.'
'We both know they often don't,' I said.
'Doesn't mean there's no sense to be made,' Cleary said.
I nodded. We drank our coffee. Cleary put down his cup, as if he was relieved to have finished it. He stood.
'I got work to do,' he said.
'Thank you,' I said, 'for setting this up.'
'Dix finds out anything interesting,' Cleary said, 'you know where I am.'
'I do,' I said.
After Cleary left, I sat alone in the ugly room for two and a half more hours, and used the time to not drink any more coffee. It was nearly one o'clock in the afternoon when Dix came out of the interview room.
Chapter 51
THE RANGE of lunch choices around the Bethel County jail was narrow. We left Dix's car in the jail lot and I drove us to the village market in Dowling, where I had eaten pie with DiBella the first time I met him. We took a little table inside and ordered a couple of sandwiches. Dix ordered coffee with his. I had a glass of milk to cleanse my palate. A nearly intact pie sat promisingly under a glass dome on the counter.
'Your boy is retarded,' Dix said.
'That's a fact or an informed guess?'
'Like most other branches of medicine, psychiatry is both an art and a science. Most of our conclusions tend to be informed guesses.'
'His grades are good. He was on course to graduate. He seemed able to plan a shootout at his school. How retarded can he be?'
'Mildly,' Dix said.
'What does that mean?'
'It means mildly. We can test him at length and come up with a number, but for our purposes, mildly retarded will work.'
'So how come no one seems to have noticed it?' I said.
'No one else was looking for it. You knew that there was something wrong with him.'
'Yes,' I said.
