“I ain’t goin’ to.”
“Why not?”
John takes the sack off his shoulder and drops it on the desk, where, with a loud thump, it lands on Pitt’s cruller. The lawyer jerks his head back. “That was my last cruller,” he says peevishly.
Verbalizing his fractured thoughts becomes too much for John. He silently stands there, his legs trembling, waiting for the lawyer to open the sack and look inside, but instead Pitt reaches into the box near his right elbow, pulls out a doughnut, and bites into it. Red jelly squirts out two sides of his mouth. He catches the jelly in his claw- hand, then lays down the doughnut, picks up a napkin with his good hand, and carefully wipes his frozen fingers. “What a mess,” he says, then matter-of-factly frowns at the sack. “I’m awfully glad you decided to nip this thing in the bud, John.”
“Huh?”
“This sack doesn’t belong to you, does it?”
John doesn’t answer. No clear thoughts occupy his mind, only muddled images. And dark colors.
“Your wife came to see me yesterday afternoon,” says Pitt, wrinkling his brow at John as if he’s a young child or a retarded adult. “I told her that as your attorney I was prohibited from talking privately with her, but she insisted, and you know, John, I question whether we in the profession always best serve our clients by paying strict attention to the rules—after all, a family breaking up is one of the worst things anyone could go through, and the rights and wrongs of it are muddled and, it seems to me, different in every case.” He nods at the desk drawer to his right. “A small one, John? I—perhaps both of us—could stand a small one?” Without waiting for an answer, he reaches into the drawer, pulls out a mug and a quart bottle of Jim Beam, uncaps the bottle, fills the coffee cup and the mug, then pushes the latter across the desk toward John. Afterwards, he seems to lose his train of thought.
“Your father wanted me to bend the rules, John—he wasn’t in the hole so deep the bank couldn’t have worked with him, but it was more profitable for them to sell the place—but I wouldn’t do it, wouldn’t go to bat for him because—in those days—I didn’t want to make waves.” He moves his crippled hand in a choppy line through the air to signify waves. “That was right before I ran for D.A. the first of three times.” He picks up the coffee cup and holds it to his lips for several seconds. As he drinks, a thin line of whiskey dribbles from one corner of his mouth, and every swallow causes an exaggerated, painful-looking bob of his Adam’s apple. John can see that he’s bombed. “I hear tell the only candidate ever got less votes than me was Ralph Dolan running for sheriff that time.”
John says, “This ain’t about my father or your running for goddamned D.A.”
Pitt tilts his head and purses his lips at John, and John, looking at him, suddenly thinks of Lois Copp, a three- hundred-pound girl he went to school with who would say or do anything just to get a boy to smile at her or talk to her for five seconds. “She was concerned, John, not just for you, but for her and the boy—all that money that you acted as if it had just dropped out of the sky into your lap made her think you’d maybe robbed a bank or even worse and what if you were to get arrested and her as an accomplice, what would happen to Nolan?” He jerkily wipes his mouth with the napkin.
“She asked me to talk to you. She said she’d tried and couldn’t make sense of your answers and was so scared she didn’t know what to do.”
John’s fear, confusion, and anger is such that it melds into a sort of clarity in which the only questions worth answering don’t have to be asked.
“We’re such a small town, aren’t we, John?”
John doesn’t say.
“An attorney with any sizable clientele at all often finds himself in these conflicting situations where one client’s problems overlap with another’s.” More whiskey or maybe sweat slides down one side of Pitt’s face. Several drops land on his desk. “Clients confide in me all sorts of things, John, some of them downright reprehensible, but as a lawyer I must look at the person behind the act, and do you know, in almost every case, I’m able to see the child behind the actor and to say to myself, ‘There but for the grace of God, goes I’?” His hand shaking, he reaches for the bottle and refills the coffee cup, the glass and kiln-dried clay loudly clattering against each other. John again thinks of Lois Copp, how she’d once approached him and four or five other boys in the school corridor and in her sweet little girl’s voice offered to blow anyone who would carry home her books and get introduced to her parents. John had felt as embarrassed for her as he does now for Pitt, and on the other hand, something in both of them made his flesh crawl. He nods at the sack.
“You represent the sons a’ bitches wanting what’s in that, Pitt?”
“In this business, John—particularly when you handle, as I do, mostly criminal and family-court work, seeing as how the upper crust prefers to take their civilized problems to life-sized, former football-playing lawyers—you engage all sorts of pitiable characters…”
“What’s their interest?”
“I didn’t ask.”
“How come?”
“For the same reason I won’t ask you exactly what it is, John, or how it came to be in your possession.” The lawyer gravely purses his lips. “If, let’s say, what you’ve brought me is ill-gotten gains of which I am made aware, I’d be legally obliged to turn it over to the law, and that, I think, is something all parties would like to avoid, yes?”
“I ain’t smart ’nough to see your angle, Pitt, ’cept to figure you’re gettin’ a piece of it.”
“I don’t know what you mean, John.” Pitt quickly picks up with one thumb and forefinger the other half of the jelly doughnut and dunks it into his coffee cup. “I’m a lawyer emboldened by whiskey, is all.” He pops the doughnut into his mouth. “The image of your father, perhaps, has prompted me to take a more personal role than I ought to have…”
“You didn’t give a shit for my father!”
“Not when it counted, I grant you, but I don’t worry so much these days about strictly adhering to the rules, John. You see, I did some soul-searching after I went through my little political stage, and what I discovered is that I am an odd, ugly duck and that my gift is to represent other odd, ugly ducks—such as yourself, John—who don’t comfortably fit into society’s placid pond…”
Listening to Pitt, John is again reminded of his own cognitive shortcomings. Is Pitt a crippled devil or a deformed angel? Suddenly he feels as if all the world, outside of himself, is staring like a large audience at him—a deaf, dumb, and blind performer. Reaching down, he jerks the .45 from his belt and holds it loosely in one hand. Pitt, acting as if the gun isn’t even there, mouths through his chewing lips, “You haven’t discussed with anyone else the problems that have brought you here today, have you, John?”
John doesn’t say.
“Talking in these situations is never good for anyone. Keep the body in the ground, so to speak, yes?”
John points the gun between Daggard Pitt’s eyes.
Pitt exaggeratedly blinks as if struck by a sudden thought. “So, John, shall I turn the contents of this sack over to the other party entitled to my loyalty in this matter and instruct him, then, to consider it buried?”
“What about my wife and son?”
Pitt puts up his crippled hand as if to stop the anticipated shot from John’s pistol. “That’s the whole point of my involvement, John—to see that your impulsiveness in no way harms them.”
“I want to know they’re safe.”
“Safe? Of course they’re safe. Why wouldn’t they be safe? Now, please, put the gun away.”
“Where are they now?” asks John.
“I understand they’re out of town through the weekend—she mentioned something about the Thousand Islands…”
John feels like he’s floating, anchorless, in space. He reaches his free hand into the seat of the wooden chair behind him and picks up the cushion there.
“Call who’s got them.”
“Got them?”
“Do it now. Then I’ll leave.” John cocks the pistol. “On’y don’t call Obadiah Cornish again.”
“John?”
“He’s had his throat sliced and things cut off’n him.”
