“Does that mean you’ll pay for it?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“Not ‘yeah.’”
“Yes,” I said.
“Do you really think Easton did it?”
Yes, I told her, and explained the evidence we had against him. She asked if I thought a jury would find him guilty, and I said most likely Paterno would work out some sort of a deal with a guilty plea so there wouldn’t have to be a trial, but that Easton would go to prison.
“I seem to have made a mess of things,” she said quietly.
“No. Easton did.”
Her excellent carriage became even more excellent. “I can’t understand it. He was never a trouble-maker,” she said, not mentioning who had been. She looked so fine sitting there.
Well, fine, but dated, like a 1952 Republican country club lady brought back in a time machine. Even now, stunned, probably anguished, all she was missing was a Rob Roy with a
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cherry and an Eisenhower button. “He had no drive, but you can’t fault someone for that.”
“No, you can’t.”
“He didn’t belong in the movie business,” she murmured.
No one looked the way my mother did anymore. No one would take that amount of time to produce that strange, dated effect. She set her hair every night on fat wire rollers so it would fluff up and curl under in the chin-length pageboy she’d worn as long as I could remember. She tweezed away most of her eyebrows and redrew them into a thin, light-brown line. Her makeup was pale powder, red rouge and matching lipstick, a little smudged after her martinis. Her nails, filed short and oval, were red too. “He should have gone into banking. Not that he could have been a bank president. I would never deceive myself. But he kept trying to be a salesman, and he couldn’t sell anyone anything. And then movies, with all those people. They’re so hard. He wasn’t cut out to deal with them.”
“No, he wasn’t.”
“I thought he liked that man, though. The one he killed.”
I explained how Easton had been doing Sy’s bidding, how he thought he was shooting at Lindsay. She asked: “Why didn’t he just say ‘I won’t do it’?”
“I don’t know, Mom.”
“Well, neither do I.”
I asked her if she wanted me to make her something to eat. No, she wasn’t hungry, and she’d be all right. I knew that meant she wanted to be alone, but I asked if she wanted me to stay the night, or if she wanted to come over to my place. She said no thank you, and yes, she would call me if she needed me. I told her I’d be over first thing in the morning.
“It will be in all the newspapers,” she said. “On the televi-sion too.”
“It will be a bad couple of days,” I said. “Well, in MAGIC HOUR / 441
terms of publicity. I know it will be bad for you for much longer than that.”
“Do you think they’ll fire me?”
“No. You’re too valuable to them. And I think most people will go out of their way to be understanding.”
“They won’t understand, though. They’ll just be polite.
Deep down; they’ll all think I did something wrong that made him turn out this way.” She stood. “I’d like to be alone now.”
“I’m so sorry, Mom.”
And then she almost knocked me over. “Why should you be sorry? It’s not your fault. You didn’t kill anyone. Your brother did.” But before I could work up a major case of filial sentiment and possibly reach for her hand, or gush, I’ll always be there for you, Mom, no matter what, my mother added: “I’d like you to leave.” So I said good night and so did she.
Ray Carbone and Thighs were getting Easton’s confession on videotape, and it was being transmitted, live, in living but somewhat purplish color, on the TV monitor in Frank Shea’s office. Carbone was asking, “Did you pay cash for the bullets or charge them?” and my brother, showing how ingeniously he and Sy had planned Lindsay’s murder, replied:
“Cash. Don’t leave tracks: that was our motto.”
Shea started to explain to me, “You’ll see the beginning of the tape, how we read him his rights. We gave him every chance—”
I cut him off. “A guy wants to talk, you can’t muzzle him.”
“How’s your mother taking it?”
“She’s numb.” I didn’t mention that the condition was probably congenital. But then, because Shea and I had been at each other’s throats over the case and there was so much bad blood, I decided I’d better show him I was a decent guy.
“I’d be with her now,
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but she asked me to leave. Really wanted to be alone. I think she probably was going to fall apart and wanted to spare me.” That image of my mother going out of control and wanting to protect me had nothing much to do with reality, but it did make us sound like a normal family. Well, until you looked at that talking head on the TV screen who was telling Carbone that yes, he’d cleaned the .22 at home, but when he got to the range the lever was so stiff he could hardly move it, so one of the men there—a black man with a goat-ee—helped him. I said to Shea: “Listen to him. Jesus, I can’t believe we’re from the same gene pool.”
He got up and walked to the TV. His gold chains clanged.
“I’ll catch this later,” he said. “Unless you really want to watch, but between you and me”—he was using his Compassionate Leader voice—“I think you should spare yourself.”
“You can turn it off,” I agreed.
He did and then came back, stood behind my chair and put his hand on my shoulder. “You want to take some vacation time, Steve?”
“Probably.”
“You’ve got it. Ray thinks you ought to see
