That’s not what I mean. Of course she’s trying. But that’s just the point. She wants to get better. But it’s not easy.
You think I don’t know that?
No. You know that.
Then what’s your point?
The buzzer on the stove rang. Kelly got up to turn off the burner. She put on her cow-shaped oven mitt to put the pan in the oven, to briefly brown the top.
Kelly loved her cows. We’d gotten them on a whim one day, at Ben amp; Jerry’s. They’d been hanging on the wall, with other oddities for sale. Absurdly overpriced oddities. But we couldn’t resist the cows.
I think I’m very patient, angel child.
You’re patient, Daddy. You’re patient. But your patience shows.
My patience shows.
Yes. It shows. She sees it. She sees you being patient. Holding it in. It’s like she’s some cancer patient and nobody wants to tell her it’s terminal. They whisper about it, thinking she can’t hear. But she hears it. She sees it. It hurts her.
I was taken aback. The truth be told, I’d long ago stopped ascribing ordinary feelings to Melissa. She’d become a task, a puzzle, a conundrum. A burden, a challenge. Anything but a person, really. And Kelly knew it.
I felt ashamed. And angry. God, how much could this life expect of me? As it was, I felt my life was held together with rotting string and brittle masking tape. One trip, one fall, one more jolt and it would fall apart. Like a house of cards.
Okay, was all I could say. Okay. I get you. I’ll try. I’ll try harder.
She hugged me for that. She kissed my cheek.
There was nothing sweeter.
34.
Disgust.
Guilt.
What had I done?
I must have done something, to make me feel this way.
What was it?
I decided to walk to the office. To purge myself.
The day was cold and windy. Gray clouds and spits of rain. I buttoned my jacket. The cold wind in my face was bracing. I walked down Fifth Avenue. I took in the famous canyon of buildings, stretching all the way to the harbor. It was a magnificent thing, in its way.
Strangely empty at the bottom end.
I wasn’t sure I’d ever get used to that.
I thought of people falling. Husbands, wives, sons and daughters falling.
I thought of the cold water of New York Harbor.
Breathless.
At work things were normal. That is to say, depressing. The same complacent, driven faces everywhere. The endless slough of information thick and unavoidable. A fax, red-covered for urgency. Must attend to right away. Don’t ignore. An e-mail, in Alert mode. Must read, respond. Keep the process going. The telephone message slips. Calls from clients, colleagues. The whole preposterous, endless wheel of verbal commerce and pretense converging on my desktop every day again.
I needed a break.
Instead I got a call from Warwick.
Or rather, Cherise, summoning me to His Pomposity’s chambers.
He wanted to know how the Jules case was going. He was meeting with FitzGibbon later. Needed some talking points. Warwick was a fiend for talking points. We often speculated, Dorita and I, whether Cherise prepared him a point-form list of things to say to hookers. Not that we had any direct evidence that he patronized hookers. But he seemed the type. In fact, we wouldn’t have been at all surprised to find out that he had a dominatrix stashed away somewhere.
I shuffled and dissembled. I didn’t want to tell him that I had a line on something. Something possibly exculpatory. That there might be someone with a motive to frame the kid. That it might be the firm’s foremost client. That Kennedy thought he was not just strange but dangerous. Knowledge is a hazardous thing. It would be particularly stupid to put it in the hands of Warwick. So I gave him the bland version: It didn’t look good. The cops, the ADA were treating it as open-and-shut. They’d charge him soon enough. The best that we were likely to do was appeal to sympathy. Emphasize his youth, the circumstances. Plead it down.
Warwick nodded, as though this was what he’d known all along.
All right, he said. We’ve got to manage expectations.
Yes, I said. I think FitzGibbon’s got to be prepared.
Warwick looked at me with uncharacteristic admiration. As though I’d just discovered something deep and interesting.
It occurred to me, at that moment, that Warwick might not be the only one setting me up to fail. That maybe it wasn’t FitzGibbon’s confidence in Warwick, or the firm – certainly not any confidence in me-that had gotten me the assignment. It could be, I thought with alarm, that for FitzGibbon it was the very fact of my inexperience, my presumed incompetence, that recommended me.
Shit.
Yes, Warwick said. Well. Now that I think of it, that’s probably a job for you.
Managing FitzGibbon’s expectations?
Yes.
It figured. If a messenger was going to be shot, it wasn’t going to be Warwick.
I knew I had no choice. I asked the obligatory question.
Do you want me in the meeting?
Yes, that’s a good idea, he said, as though I’d just come up with a brilliant new notion. I’ll make an excuse halfway through. Take an urgent call. Then you can brief him.
Excellent. Not only was he throwing me to the wolves, he didn’t have the stomach to watch the resulting carnage. Afraid his pristine shirt might get splattered with entrails.
Okay, I said. I’ll be there. Three o’clock?
Three o’clock. The Franklin Room.
The Franklin Room it is, I said, with as much good cheer as I could muster.
Good. You can meet the twins.
The twins?
Yes. Ramon and Raul.
He said it with a raised eyebrow. As though I should be intimately familiar with these twins.
I’m sorry, I said. Perhaps I’ve missed something. Ramon and Raul?
FitzGibbon’s kids. You’re not telling me you’ve never heard about them?
No, I don’t believe I have. Ramon and Raul? Ramon and Raul FitzGibbon?
Yes, he said with a slight smile. Adopted, I think. Kept their first names.
Ah, I said, as though this cleared it all up.
It didn’t clear up a thing.
But it did remind me that I had a case to work. I went back to my office. I called up Vinnie Price. Told him to get me whatever he could on Jules FitzGibbon and Larry Silver. Credit card data, assuming either of those losers had a credit card, which I doubted. Telephone records. Bus tickets. Laundry receipts. Whatever. I gave Vinnie the name of a contact I had at a small PI outfit, in case he needed help.
I knew if there was anything to find, Vinnie would find it. Which would nicely relieve me of the obligation of
