“Watch me get a word wrong, now that I’m called upon to perform. ‘Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.’ I
“Who would it injure?”
“Jack’s amends? Only Jack, unless you want to count Mark Sattenstein’s hand. No, I understand, Matt. It’s not amends to any of the people we’ve been looking at. If it’s something else he did, it might not even be on the list we’re looking at.”
“Didn’t you tell me he killed somebody?”
“It was during a robbery. But I think there’s a special term for it. When you rob people in their own home?”
“A home invasion.”
“Yes, that’s right. It’s a term I’ve only heard recently. The news stories give the impression that it’s happening more lately. Part of the continuing decline of everything and everybody.”
“Do you remember the details?”
“I don’t think I heard them.” He frowned, as if to bring the memory into sharper focus. “He wrote about it in his Fourth Step, and I learned about it and everything else when I heard his Fifth Step.”
He thought about it while I signaled the waitress for more coffee. After she’d filled our cups he said, “What I heard was vague. He didn’t read that part aloud. He read a sentence or two, then looked up from the page and summarized. So I just heard a condensed version.”
“And?”
“The person he robbed was another criminal. A drug dealer, I think. They broke in and—”
“They?”
“Jack had a partner. The two of them went into this home, I think it was somewhere on the Upper West Side, and held the man up, and he went for his gun and they shot him.”
“Jack did the shooting?”
“I can’t remember. I’m not sure he told me. Matt, I didn’t really want to hear this part. I wanted him to go through it, but I didn’t want to take in the information. He was a sponsee, he was a friend, he was someone I was trying to help, and I didn’t want to deal with the fact that he was also a killer.”
“Just tell me what you remember.”
“The man’s death didn’t bother him that much,” he said. “Maybe that’s why I can’t say whether it was Jack or his partner who did it.”
“It didn’t bother him?”
“There was a woman present. The dealer’s wife or girlfriend, I’m not sure which, and again I don’t know that Jack was specific.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“No.” He drew a breath. “She was there, she’d seen their faces. The partner shot her.”
“Not Jack.”
“He said he couldn’t pull the trigger. She was begging in Spanish. He didn’t understand the words but she was pleading for her life, and he had the gun in his hand and couldn’t shoot her.”
“So his buddy did it.”
“Matt, it’s strange, but I think he felt guilty twice over.”
“For each victim?”
“No, I’m just talking about the woman. For not being able to pull the trigger, and for the fact that she wound up dead. And he thought it was his fault the man went for a gun, that if he’d done something differently it wouldn’t have happened.”
I knew how that worked. I remembered running out of that ginmill after the two holdup men, remembered emptying my gun at them. If I’d just done any of that the slightest bit differently, if I’d fired one bullet fewer, a little girl might have had a chance to grow up. Oh, I knew exactly how that worked, with the mind throwing up no end of alternate scenarios, but remaining unable to rewrite the past.
I said, “They never got arrested.”
“No.”
“Not him, not his partner.”
“No.”
“I didn’t see anything about this on his Eighth Step list.”
“It may have made it into a later version. Or stayed in his mind, whether or not he wrote it down, because we’d talked about how one could make amends to the dead.”
Someday I’d get to have that conversation with Jim.
I said, “The partner.”
“All I know about him is that he shot the woman. I’m pretty certain Jack never said his name. He went out of his way to use pronouns or just refer to him as his partner. As if he were protecting his anonymity.” He looked up. “Is that who killed him? His partner?”
