“That’s helpful, isn’t it?”
“Not terribly,” I agreed, “but somehow I don’t think Jack’s sobriquet—”
“You just like using the word, don’t you?”
“—is going to point the way to his killer.”
“Will anything?”
“I don’t know. If you’re losing heart for this—”
“No, not at all! I think it’s remarkable that we’re seeing results already. You’ve told me two things just now, and they’re both important. We know who beat him up, and we know that someone else shot him. I can see right now I was right to enlist your help.”
“Oh?”
“If I’d gone to the police, they’d have been the ones to show up on Mark Sattenstein’s doorstep. Somehow I think he’s better off for its having been you instead.”
“They’d have given him a hassle,” I said.
“That may be an understatement.”
“It might. They’d like him for the murder. Once you’ve got a suspect in hand, you don’t want to knock yourself out looking for another one. I don’t think they’d have made any kind of a case against him, but he’d still be the worse off for having attracted their attention.”
We talked some more, and then he said, “You know, it scarcely matters if we find out who did the shooting. We’re taking the appropriate action, and it will work out the way it’s supposed to.”
“It will?”
“Of course,” he said. “Everything always does.”
Did everything always work out the way it was supposed to? I had that to think about, and I kept turning it around in my mind through most of the evening meeting. SoHo group meets at St. Anthony of Padua’s, a big redbrick church on the corner of Houston and Sullivan with a predominantly Italian congregation. I was a few minutes late getting there, and the first thing I saw upon entering was Jan, looking my way and waving an arm to indicate she’d saved me a seat.
I immediately wished she hadn’t. There were plenty of empty seats, as there always were in that oversized room. I could have been trusted to find a seat of my own. We’d be going out for dinner, and then spending the night together, so why did we have to sit side by side while somebody with a beatific smile on his broad face told us how he used to pee in empty bottles and pour them out the window because he couldn’t be bothered to walk all the way down the hall to the bathroom? Couldn’t we share that experience just as well sitting ten or twenty yards apart?
I kept this to myself, and sat down next to her, right where I was supposed to, and within a few minutes realized I’d have resented it at least as much if she
That particular meeting had a format I hadn’t yet encountered elsewhere. After the speaker’s qualification and the secretary’s break, the group broke up into mini-groups of eight to ten, seated at round tables. Someone at each table would suggest a topic, and the ensuing round-robin discussion would fill the remaining half hour. Jan and I automatically headed for different tables, and the topic where I wound up turned out to be acceptance. I found myself wishing it was something else, and then realizing how ironically appropriate that was.
And the topic hardly mattered, because this was Downtown AA, and when it was your turn you said whatever you pleased. I would have happily passed, but there were only eight of us and it was easy enough for me to find something to say. I just tossed out Jim’s line—well, Buddha’s, I guess—about dissatisfaction being the cause of unhappiness. Then it was somebody else’s turn.
The restaurant on Thompson Street was old-fashioned Greenwich Village Italian—red checkered tablecloths, straw-covered Chianti bottles as candleholders, a Sinatra record for background music. The waiter remembered us, approved our appetizer and entree choices, and didn’t try to coax us into ordering wine. The food was good, and we took our time over the meal, and I talked about Jack Ellery and my attempts to find out who’d killed him.
“Or who didn’t,” I said, “which is turning out to be my real mission here. If I can clear the names on his Eighth Step list, his sponsor can let it go with a clear conscience. No need to share anything with the cops if you’re sure what you’ve got isn’t worth sharing.”
“Is that what it says in the penal code?”
“You’re joking, but as far as the law’s concerned, he doesn’t have to report it even if he knows for a fact who did the shooting. He’s not an officer of the court. He’s a private citizen. That doesn’t give him the right to lie to a police officer, but he can keep things to himself.”
“So all you have to do is clear the rest of the names on the list. That’s simpler than finding a killer, isn’t it?”
“Well, not if the killer’s on the list. In that case it’ll be tricky to clear him.”
We batted that around a little, and she asked how I’d feel about walking away from the case once I’d cleared them all. I said I’d feel as though I’d earned a thousand dollars.
“Would you, Matt? Oh, I’m not suggesting you wouldn’t have earned your money. But wouldn’t you feel as though you’d left part of the job undone?”
“Why?”
“Because Jack’s killer would be walking around free.”
“He’d hardly lack for company.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean there are a lot of killers walking around free. It used to make me crazy when we brought in a perpetrator and watched the case fall apart. Either the DA’s office fucked it up or the evidence just wasn’t there or twelve dimwits on a jury couldn’t bring themselves to do the right thing, and all our work was for nothing. I’m not sure I ever got over it completely, because it’s natural to have an emotional investment in a case. But you get used
