the peace. You understand the distinction.’
‘Not really’
‘The Trudell case is a hot button in this city. With respect to race.’
At that, Kelly folded his hands on the table, mimicking Lowery’s prayerful posture. ‘I’m sure the Trudell case is a hot button for Trudell’s family too. As the Danziger case must be for his family’
Lowery did not react. He regarded Kelly a moment before responding. ‘Why don’t we see if we can treat both cases with discretion, Lieutenant Kelly? For both families.’
We shook hands and got up to leave, but as Kelly and I reached the door, Lowery added, ‘Lieutenant Kelly, I realize you have a long history here, but remember you’re a guest in this city now.’
Kelly: ‘A guest?’
‘Yes. And we’ve tried to be good hosts. We’ve extended every courtesy, including the cooperation of the police department. But it doesn’t have to be that way. We don’t have to be good hosts. I hope you’ll continue to be a good guest.’
23
The first time Caroline kissed me:
John Kelly had taken Charlie for the day on Sunday. Kelly was on a mission that day, as far as I could tell, to do whatever the hell his grandson wanted, an excess of generosity offered up to Charlie as a sort of atonement for the old man’s having moved away to Maine. This left Caroline to entertain me, an arrangement that seemed quite natural by then. I’d spent the last few evenings with the Kellys, and already there had developed a homey routine at Caroline’s apartment. After dinner, I would play video hockey on the PlayStation with Charlie and sip Bushmills with the old man, then return to my hotel alone.
That Sunday afternoon, Caroline and I arranged to meet at the Avenue Victor Hugo bookshop on Newbury Street. It was a brilliant autumn day. The sunlight had a focusing, clarifying quality. You seemed to see the Newbury Street scene in high definition — grungers slinking like cats outside Tower Records; couples promenading; expensive European cars inching along in traffic.
The bookshop was a maze of aisles and rooms stuffed tight with dusty, time-faded books. The books lined the staircase and the walls, they were stacked on the creaky floors, they overflowed the shelves in every room. It was heaven. Waiting for Caroline, I drifted through the small rooms upstairs. I was happily skimming a travel book when I was brought up short by a woman’s voice: ‘Ben?’ I knew the voice without looking up, and I tried to keep my nose in the book until the speaker went away. But the voice was persistent. It inflected my one-syllable name into a sickening little glissando: en? e Be It was Sandra, my grad-school girlfriend, the flower of Boston University Communism. She was thinner than ever, but at least she had traded the heavy black-frame glasses of those days for a more chic model. She folded her arms and grinned. Then, craning her head forward like some predatory bird, she asked, ‘Are you here alone?’
‘No.’
‘Me neither.’ She laid her hand beside her mouth vertically, like a bad actress playing to the back row, and confided, ‘I’m seeing someone.’
I heard myself say ‘Me too’ before I could think it through. It seemed important to match Sandra mate for mate. ‘She’ll be here soon.’
‘I thought you were in Maine?’
‘I am.’
‘And your mother?’
‘She passed away this summer.’
‘Oh, Ben, I’m so sorry’
‘Thank you.’
‘It’s good to see you,’ she lied. ‘What are you doing now? Are you back in school somewhere?’
I shook my head no.
‘What then?’
‘I’m — I’m sort of a policeman.’
‘A policeman! Still? In your little town? What was it called?’
‘Versailles.’
‘Versailles, yes. How precious.’
‘I’m the chief there now.’
‘Oh, my.’
I tried to parse the phrase for complimentary intentions, but they were hard to find. That oh, my meant I had just become fodder for cafeteria gossip. Do you remember Ben Truman? You’ll never guess what he’s doing now…
‘What about your work?’
‘That is my work. For the time being, at least.’
‘Oh.’
Her cheeks flushed a little. She seemed to be floundering for a new topic.
‘So who’s your new boyfriend?’ I said.
‘His name is Paul. He’s downstairs. He’s brilliant! He has a chair at this foundation Across The River.’ She confided, ‘Everyone says he’s up for the MacArthur.’
‘Do they?’
‘And your girlfriend? Is she here?’
I paused, fatally.
‘Ben?’
‘Well, she’s not really — I’m not sure when she’s getting here.’
‘Is this her?’
Caroline appeared beside us. She wore jeans and a black baseball jacket, and at the moment she seemed like a higher life-form than Sandra — strapping and confident, radiant at the prospect of a weekend afternoon all her own, with neither child care nor work to consume her.
‘Is this her what?’ Caroline asked, curious.
‘Ben’s girlfriend?’
Caroline gave me a bemused look.
‘I was just telling Sandra…’ My tongue swelled into a grapefruit.
Sandra’s face registered a moment’s confusion, then I saw her put it all together. Another morsel for the cafeteria crowd: And then — oh, this is rich — he said this woman was his girlfriend but she clearly had no idea…
The next moment I felt Caroline’s hands on my neck and her lips on mine, and warm breath from her nostrils on my cheek, and she pressed a kiss onto my mouth. ‘Sorry I’m late,’ she said. ‘Traffic’
Sandra looked stricken, as if she’d just walked in on her parents in flagrante delicto. She made an excuse and scurried off.
‘Thank you,’ I told Caroline.
‘Don’t mention it, Chief Truman.’
The way Caroline remembered Bob Danziger:
‘Bobby wasn’t one of these avenging-angel types. He didn’t open every file and see the Boston Strangler. He was always like, ‘This kid’s not so bad’ or ‘Look at his record. There’s no violence. It’s all just drug stuff.’ He was always so damn reasonable.’ She squeezed the word like a lemon. ‘I mean, he used to carry spiders outside rather than kill them! Is that the kind of guy you’d think this would happen to?’
We were at a bar called Small Planet, in Copley Square.
As she remembered Danziger, Caroline plowed little furrows in her napkin with a fork. ‘Something changed for Bobby, though. At the end, he seemed to lose that courage, that equanimity. I used to watch him sometimes when his verdicts came in. He’d never look at the defendant. It was like he was ashamed. He’d look at the floor,
