Ninth Step. I certainly don’t have any use for it now.”
“So I should just throw it out?”
“That’s what I did with mine. What?”
I told him I’d taken a preliminary run at the step myself, and all I’d done to obliterate my own embryonic list.
“All the king’s horses,” he said, “and all the king’s men. It’s hard to do the Eighth before you’ve done the Fourth.”
“My sponsor said something along those lines.”
“And yet most of us take a stab at it. If we don’t write anything down, at the very least we run names through our minds. It’s hard to be aware of the step without wondering who belongs on your own list.” He took a forkful of pie, a sip of tea. “Jack kept adding to his list, writing down new names as fast as he could check off the old ones. I wonder what his most recent version looked like.”
“You mean the one you gave me—”
“Isn’t the last word on the subject? I’m afraid not, but that doesn’t mean we missed a clue that would have pointed at his murderer. The ones he mentioned to me were all from his boyhood days. Family, friends, neighbors, and most of them were dead and he’d long since lost track of the others.” He put down his fork. “You’re not letting go of this, are you?”
“I’ve let go of it.”
“Really?”
“When I was on the job,” I said, “it was said of me that I was like a dog with a bone. Just because I’ve let go of something doesn’t mean I can keep from thinking about it.”
“I suppose there are different definitions of letting go.”
“What I can’t stay away from,” I said, “is the thought that his murder somehow ties in to the amends process. Those five names from the list are all in the clear, and when I reread the list this afternoon I couldn’t find anyone who’d make a plausible suspect. But it has to be related.”
“That was my original thought, Matt. That’s why I got all this started.”
“He was running around making amends,” I said, “and one guy punched him out and wound up hugging him and weeping in his arms, and another guy told him to take his amends and shove them up his ass—”
“And one said beating me on a coke deal was doing me a favor, and the other said hey,
“Lucille. And the other one’s locked up, and there’s no way Jack could have reached him to make amends, and even if he did, well, it doesn’t matter, because he didn’t. Five names and they’re all clear, but that doesn’t mean there’s no connection. It just means we haven’t found it.”
“What you mean we, Kemo Sabe?”
I sighed, nodded. “Point taken, Greg. It’s not on your plate, and it’s not on mine either.”
“But it’s on your mind. Don’t apologize, for God’s sake. It’s on my mind too. How could it not be?”
“I keep thinking of that second bullet.”
“The one in the mouth.”
I nodded. “To send a message, though why you’d kill a man first and then send the message is something I’ve often wondered. A message to whom?”
“Like killing someone to teach him a lesson. He’s dead, so how can he possibly learn the lesson?”
Something was trying to get through. Greg was saying something, but I tuned him out and let the thought take form, then held up a hand to stop him in midsentence. “It wasn’t retribution,” I said.
“How’s that?”
“The shooting. It wasn’t some aggrieved person on or off his list trying to get even. It was to keep him from talking.”
“Not
“Has to be. There was no anger in the killing.”
“No anger in putting two bullets into a man?”
“There was a lot more anger in the beating Sattenstein gave him. That was anger, hitting a man in the face until you turn your own hand into hamburger. This was just quick efficient homicide.”
“With a purpose.”
“I’d say so, yes.”
“To keep him from talking.”
“It wasn’t something he’d said. It was something he might say.”
“And this clearly would keep him from saying it. But…”
“The Ninth Step,” I said. “How does it go?”
He looked at me, puzzled. “How does it work? You take your Eighth Step list—”
“No, I know how it works, how you do it. How does it go? The language of the step, I’ve heard it before every meeting, it’s in the chart that’s always hanging on the wall. How is it worded?”
