and it’s a long line.”
“Wasn’t there something about a child?”
“Oh, right. He thought he knocked her up. Well, somebody did. She was pregnant a couple of times while we were together. First time she had an abortion and the second time she waited too long and decided she’d have the baby. Then she winds up having a miscarriage, which was like good news and bad news, you know?” He looked off to the side again. “Makes you wonder.”
“Oh?”
“Say she had the kid. I mean, is that gonna keep us together? She could have had triplets and we’re still gonna split the blanket when the time comes. You can start thinking, Oh, we have a kid, I go to work for IBM, we get ourselves a split-level in Tarrytown, but none of that’s gonna happen. If she had a kid all it woulda meant is she’d have had one more thing to carry when she took off. Or she’d have left me with the kid, and what am I gonna do? Wrap it up and leave it outside a convent?”
I had this sudden unbidden image: my sons, Mike and Andy, standing at a locked iron gate, waiting to be taken in by the Little Sisters of the Poor. I took a deep breath and blinked it away.
“I wonder where she is now,” he was saying. “Last I heard she was in San Francisco. She could have a kid or two by now. Not mine, though. Not Jack’s either.” He had that faraway look again. “I might have a kid out there somewhere. That I had with somebody else, that I never knew about.”
XXII
THEN IT LOOKS as though we’re done,” Greg Stillman said. “They’re all in the clear.”
“You sound disappointed.”
“Not exactly. I had a problem and now it’s been resolved, and I’m grateful to you for resolving it. But—”
“But it feels incomplete. Unfinished.”
“Yes, of course. How do you feel, Matt? You’re the one who’s been out there doing the work. All I did was pick up the tab.”
And all I’d done was go through the motions. I was in my hotel room with a cup of coffee from the deli downstairs, looking across the rooftops at some lighted offices all the way downtown. I’d decided I could make my final report over the phone. There was no real need to sit in another coffee shop while I told my client we were out of suspects.
“I feel all right,” I said. “I’d like it better if I’d managed to crack the case, but that’s not what you hired me for. That’s a police matter anyway.”
“But they won’t do anything.”
“We don’t know that. It’ll be an open file, and when some new information comes their way, they’ll pick it up and work it. Greg, you wanted to be sure you weren’t holding out on them. Well, you’re not. Whoever killed your sponsee, it wasn’t one of the five people on his Eighth Step list.”
“The man in prison—”
“Piper MacLeish.”
“Obviously he couldn’t have done it. Unless they give you a weekend pass so that you can even an old score. But couldn’t he pass the word to somebody outside?”
“He’d have had to get the word himself. There’s nothing to indicate that Jack ever visited him, or even wrote to him. And it doesn’t really add up emotionally anyway.”
“What do you mean?”
“Say you’re in prison, serving a long sentence for something you did. ‘Hi, remember me? Say, I want to apologize because I’m the guy who ratted you out, and you wouldn’t have wound up in the joint if it wasn’t for me.’ ”
“What a marvelous Ninth Step declaration.”
“Well, he might have worded it differently, but that would be the gist of it. And what’s MacLeish’s reaction? ‘That son of a bitch, he did this to me, I’d better call in a favor and have him killed.’ No, we already crossed the Piper off the list, and I think we can leave it that way.”
“I’m sure you’re right.”
“I was a cop for a lot of years,” I said, “and I wasn’t the NYPD equivalent of a Step Nazi. I learned how to overlook things, and sometimes I profited financially from what I overlooked. But homicide was always different. When somebody got killed and it landed on my desk, I wanted to clear the case.
“That didn’t necessarily mean that anybody wound up going away for it. That was the goal, but it didn’t always work out that way. Sometimes I knew who did it but couldn’t make a case that would stand up. But I’d done what I could, and the case was solved, so my work was done.”
“And in this case?”
“My work’s done,” I said. “Even though the case isn’t solved. So it feels incomplete to me, and yes, maybe a little disappointing. But that doesn’t mean I can’t let go of it. And I will. I pretty much already have.”
He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “Maybe it’s just my ego.”
“Because a perfect being like you ought to be able to do something?”
“That’s part of it, Matt. The other part is further confirmation that I’m not really the piece of shit the world revolves around. Remember what I told you? That I got him killed, that I pushed him into the Eighth and Ninth Steps and that’s why he was murdered. But I guess that wasn’t it after all. I guess I’m not the prime mover of the universe. I guess I’m just another drunk.”
At the meeting that night I mentioned that I’d spent an hour or two with a fellow who’d spent the past twenty-plus years quietly stoned on marijuana. “He knew not to offer me any,” I said, “and he didn’t smoke while I was there, but he’d smoked before I got there and I’m sure he fired up a joint the minute I left. The apartment reeked of it.”
A woman named Donna came up to me on the break. She was a semi-regular at St. Paul’s, and had spoken
