“Nowhere.”
“Where are you going, Rebecca?”
Becka turned impatiently to look through the windshield and then back to her mother. Tim leaned into Jane to better see his daughter. “I have a show,” she said.
“This is a school night.”
“School night? Are you serious?”
“Where’s the show?”
Becka unclipped her seat belt and pivoted around to the backseat, where her guitar case lay. She straightened herself and held a flyer out the window. Jane took it and read. Then she passed it to Tim without looking at him.
“It’s not an open mike?”
“I just gave you the flyer, Mom.”
Tim was reading the flyer. “This has your name on it,” he said through the window.
“It’s just around here,” she said. “Not like in the city or something.”
“Why didn’t you tell us about this sooner?”
“Because I didn’t want you coming,” she said. “Besides, what were the chances of that anyway? Can I go now?”
Jane made her promise to be home by one and Becka continued down the drive. Jane pulled into the garage, reached in back for the wine and stepped out. Tim was still reading the flyer when she entered the house.
16
R. H. Hobbs was a stormer. He stepped out of the car before the driver had a chance to open the door and he stormed through the lower lobby and up the escalator to the mezzanine. He stood at the elevators making the people around him nervous. He was the first in and somehow the first out, after the women. He stormed through the glass doors into Troyer, Barr’s reception area and drummed his fingers on the front desk. The receptionist took his instructions, picked up the phone and silently urged it to ring faster. R.H. was this way even when he didn’t have a murder indictment hanging over his head. While waiting for one of the team’s associates to show up and lead him back, he tried sitting on the sofa, but then stood and walked over to the window. He vigorously shook the change in one of his pockets while peering out the glass. His gaze failed to alight on anything so he took his hands out of his pockets and ran them over his slick, brutally dyed hair, smoothing down his widow’s peak as he walked back to the receptionist to ask her how much longer he was going to have to wait. He had been there just forty-five seconds. The receptionist picked up the phone to make another call when Tim appeared.
“Holy hell, look who it is,” said R.H. “An attorney I used to know. I wonder how I might retain his services.”
“How are you, old friend?” said Tim.
“Looking at jail time,” said R.H. “You might have heard.”
R.H. extended his hand. Tim’s hands were badly frostbitten but he didn’t feel he could deny him. He fought the urge to cry out as R.H. squeezed and pumped.
“Maybe I’m just being a prima donna because my life is on the line, but would it kill you to return my calls?”
“I’ve not been as attentive as I’ve needed to be, R.H.,” he said, leading his client out of the staid lobby into the firm’s quiet interior. “But I haven’t neglected you, despite how it might appear, even as I’ve had to deal with Jane’s upcoming surgery.”
“Uh-huh,” said R.H. “And what kind of cancer is it?”
“I’m afraid it’s spread. It doesn’t look good.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. Why are you carrying that backpack?”
“This? Doesn’t it make me look like a schoolboy?”
“And you’re wearing snow boots. Why are you wearing snow boots?”
“There is a funny story about these boots, R.H. You’ll get a kick out of it.”
Suddenly R.H. stopped. He turned to face the wall. One of his knees buckled. Tim thought the older man was having a heart attack. But then R.H. covered his eyes with his hand and tucked the other hand under his arm and began to cry. He looked a little like the disgraced Nixon. His crying built to a steady heaving through thick nostrils. “Why is this happening to me?” he asked, struggling to breathe. “I swear to God in heaven I’m innocent.”
Tim pivoted in front of R.H. to shield him from hallway onlookers. He placed a hand on his shoulder. He didn’t know what to say.
“I’m an innocent man.”
Tim kept his hand there until R.H. pulled out a handkerchief and began to collect himself.
They were arrayed around the conference room table. Peter, the senior associate, had before him the manila envelope that contained the sketch of the man Tim had encountered on the bridge. To Tim’s annoyance Mike Kronish had asked to sit in on the meeting. A secretary put her head in to inform the four men that the detective and the assistant district attorney had arrived.
“We’ll let you know when to bring them in,” said Tim. “Thank you.”
After the door closed Peter opened the envelope and set the sketch before R.H. Tim had sat for an hour with one of the freelancers from the courthouse and considered it a good likeness.
“I don’t recognize him,” R.H. said within five seconds.
“Now, just take your time, R.H. Look long and hard. Clear your mind. There’s no pressure. Take all the time you need.”
“This is the man who showed you the knife?”
Tim nodded. R.H. focused on the sketch again.
“I could stare at this picture until Judgment Day, I still wouldn’t recognize him.”
“Are you absolutely sure?”
“Well, Jesus Christ,” said R.H. “I sure the hell wish I did.”
The secretary ushered in the lead detective and the assistant district attorney. Detective Roy had a pack of cigarettes in the front pocket of his buttondown. He had the fissured skin of a veteran smoker, as if someone had come along and smoothed out the crumpled ball of his face. He filled the conference room with his smoker’s stench and the impertinence of a hostile witness mocking his interrogator. The assistant district attorney was a short, stout woman who upon sitting down declared her hope that no one here was wasting anyone’s time.
Tim pushed the sketch across the table to Detective Roy. The detective pulled it toward him slowly with all the indifference in the world. He puckered his lips as he looked it over and swished air between his two front teeth, disrupting the room’s silence. He passed the sketch to the assistant district attorney who, before looking, lifted her eyeglasses to her forehead, where they sat well perched.
“So he stops you,” said the detective, “he tells you your client’s innocent, he shows you what he claims is the murder weapon, and then he walks away.”
“That’s correct,” said Tim.
“Well, ain’t that just fucking bizarre-o, hey?” The detective turned to the assistant district attorney. “Isn’t that bizarre-o, Thelma?”
“Pretty bizarre,” said Thelma.
“And where again?”
“Just outside the office here. Right as I was leaving for the night.”
“And when?”
“Last week. Tuesday. No, Wednesday.”
“Uh-huh,” said the detective. “Hey-ho. Hundred percent bizarre. Thelma? Bizarre?” The detective turned once again to look at Thelma.
“Does your client recognize the man?” she asked Tim.
“Sure the hell wish I did,” said R.H.
Tim reached out and delicately touched R.H.’s arm. “Let us do the talking,” he whispered. And then, more audibly, he said, “He does not. But that has no bearing on whether or not this man is somehow involved with the crime my client has been accused of committing.”
“You didn’t try to, I don’t know… take the knife away from the man? You say he had it in a Ziploc bag. He wasn’t brandishing it?”
“It was inside the bag.”
“And you, what—you just looked at it?”
“You’re asking why I didn’t try to take the knife away from him?”
“Well, if he wasn’t brandishing it.”
“Yeah, why the hell didn’t you try that?” asked R.H.
Tim attempted to touch his arm again,
but R.H. pulled back.
“Couldn’t you have at least swiped at it?”
Tim directed his answer at the detective. “When you are approached by a complete stranger who brandishes a knife that may be a murder weapon, your first instinct is not to try and take it away.”
“Maybe not your first instinct,” said R.H.
“Fair enough,” the detective said to Tim.
“During the course of your investigation, Detective, did you have a suspect, or perhaps interview someone, who looked like the man in that sketch?”
Detective Roy smiled. He looked directly at R.H. “We only ever had one suspect, Counselor.”
The room turned silent.
“Did you interview anyone who looked like that man?”
“What are you asking us to do, Mr. Farnsworth?” asked the assistant district attorney, whose glasses remained on her forehead.
“Look into who this man might be. He had the murder weapon.”
“Alleged murder weapon.”
“Fine, alleged. All the same, that’s not your everyday occurrence, I think you can agree.”
“Oh, for sure, for sure,” said the detective. “Bizarre-o indeed.”
“Why does he keep saying that?” asked R.H.
Tim had to reach out again. The detective and the assistant district attorney quietly conferred.
“Sure, why not,” said the detective as he stood and put a fresh cigarette in one corner of his mouth. The cigarette bobbed up and down as he spoke. “Terrorism, murdered police, getting guns out of the hands of children. We got all the time in the world for this shit.”
The assistant district attorney returned her glasses to her nose, and they departed.
Tim had had to excuse himself directly after the meeting to visit the men’s room. He returned to discover Mike Kronish inside his office with R.H. Sam Wodica was there, too. Wodica was the firm’s managing partner, overseer of all its departments, perched on the final rung of the invisible ladder. Wodica resembled an aging surfer. His sandy-blond hair, suntanned complexion and year-round seersucker had a way of disarming jurors. They expected him to pour sand out of his shoes during closing arguments and then invite them all to the bonfire afterward, which went a long way toward winning them over.
Kronish’s elbow was on a bookshelf and Wodica’s ass was in Tim’s chair, gently swiveling. Their unexpected presence gave the office a charge. Tim had walked into a voluble silence.
“Oh, I’m in your seat,” said Wodica, standing and gesturing for Tim to sit in his own chair.
Do you expect a goddamned thank-you? he wanted to say.
He walked around the desk as Wodica retreated to the wall. Tim set the backpack in the corner. He sat down. He looked directly at R.H. and said, “What’s up?” R.H. stared at him but remained silent.
Kronish spoke. “R.H. is worried that because of Jane’s health, Tim, you don’t have your head in the game.”
“I feel for you having to deal with she has cancer,” said R.H., “but I’m looking at some serious consequences if things don’t go my way. They’ll take my fortune and I’ll rot in a cell, or I’ll just fucking die who knows, so I need to know. Do I have your undivided attention?”
Tim looked across the desk directly into R.H.’s heavy-hanging eyes, ignoring the two partners, and said, “There’s nobody that can try this case like I can.”
“Everybody here knows you’re working this case hard,” said Wodica. “R.H. doesn’t see it like we do, day in, day out. So he just asked that we talk this through.”
“If he saw what we saw,” Kronish added, “he’d know he doesn’t have a worry in the world. Basically we’re just here to clear up a minor communication problem.”
“My guess is he needs to hear more often from you is all. He needs to hear from you every day the way he did before Jane fell ill and then he won’t have any worries.”
Tim did not once look at his colleagues. His eyes remained fixed on R.H. The room fell into silence and he said, “I’m the man who’s going to get you acquitted.”
R.H. peered back with an expression even more despairing than his breakdown in the hall. He craned his neck to look at Kronish and on his way back to Tim glanced briefly at Wodica. “You fellows figure this out on your own,” he said. He stood and buttoned his suit coat. “But for fuck’s sake, figure it out and figure it out quick, because I’m not going to jail for something I didn’t do.”
Tim rose. “I’ll walk you out.”
“No, sit,” R.H. demanded. “And do not stand until you figure this shit out. I can damn well find my own way out.”
“Twenty million dollars,” said Wodica after R.H. had departed. “I could give two fucks if the man rots in jail or spends the rest of his days eating buffet in Miami, but this firm cannot lose the twenty million a year he brings in on the corporate side.”
“And who the fuck found that money?” asked Tim. “Who the fuck, who the fuck’s client is that? And you two come in here—”
“He asked us to.”
“—and interrogate me? Lecture me?”
“Where have you been, Tim?” cried Kronish. “We lied through our asses just now. Where have you been?”
“And now you’re going to tell me I can’t take a day off?”
“If it were only a day!”
“Goddamn right you can’t take a day off when you’re in the middle of a case like this,” said Wodica. “What’s going on?”
“She’s dying!” he cried. “She’s fucking dying, gentlemen!”
This quieted them momentarily.
Wodica, who was good with transitions, sighed with the right mix of compassion and concern. “Well, that’s a problem,” he said.
“Should you go home if that’s the case?” asked Kronish. “Take a leave of absence?”
“Mike can take over for you,” said Wodica. “Peter will get him up to speed. R.H. will be in good hands with Mike.”
“She doesn’t want me to take a leave of absence,” he said. “It’s very important to her that we preserve the routine. Otherwise the disease wins. That’s what she says.”
Kronish and Wodica exchanged looks.
“Fuck you both,” said Tim. “This is my case.”
He returned to the men’s room. He locked himself in a stall, hung the backpack on the metal hanger affixed to the door, and took a seat on the stool. He untied the laces of his boots with stiff and unhappy fingers and removed two pairs of socks from each foot just as he had done fifteen minutes earlier.
The sight was the same. The little toe on his left foot had mummified. It frightened him no end, how easily it might be snipped off with a pair of scissors and he would feel no pain.
Later in the day it fell off on its own. He felt it moving around inside his sock. He shut the door to his office, removed his boot and retrieved what looked like a giant raisin. He crumpled the toe up in a clean piece of paper and threw it away in a trash bin.
17
What they used to call soul. What they used to call spirit. Indivisible, complete, that thing made of mind, distinct from body.
He thought he had one—a soul, a spirit, a nature, an essence. He thought his mind was proof of it.
If mood, facial expression, hunger pain, love of color, if everything human and happenstance came not from the soul, the core of self, but from synapses firing and electrical signals, from the stuff in the brain that could be manipulated and X-rayed, what could he say about himself with any degree of certainty? Was mind just body more refined?
He refused to believe that.
He stopped that night at the security post. Frank Novovian leaned against the backrest of his stool, his arms folded over tie and blazer. With his prune-bag eyes he presided over the building’s calm comings and goings. Tim put both forearms on the marble post.
“How did you know about my walking, Frank?” he asked.
Frank unfolded his arms and set his hands on his thighs. He was hesitant. His initial silence seemed to al
low him time to work out some internal calculation.
“You don’t remember the girl, Mr. Farnsworth?”
“The girl?”
Frank told him the story. Tim had appeared one day at the security post and asked Frank to follow him out. Frank thought he detected some panic in his voice. What transpired was a preview of the events from a few weeks prior. Frank caught up with Tim halfway across the lower lobby and followed him through one of the revolving doors. It was a hot summer day. Tim turned to Frank and told him that he couldn’t get back to his desk. Frank mistook him to mean he had some pressing engagement and needed someone to convey a message for him or run an errand inside the building, but as they continued to walk and talk, Frank understood that the situation was more complicated. “Help me to stop walking,” Tim said to him. City life swirled around them, car horns, snatches of conversation. Tim asked Frank to grab his arms, tackle him, hold him back somehow. “I’m sorry, Mr. Farnsworth,” said Frank as he tried to keep up. “You can’t stop walking?”
Neither of them saw the little girl. She broke away from her mother and went sidewise straight into Tim. The impact of his leg threw her to the ground. He skittered to avoid stepping on her and had difficulty regaining his balance. Everyone—Frank, the girl’s mother, bystanders—stopped, some to stare, others to bend down to the girl who, after a second of stunned silence, began to wail on the sidewalk. Tim kept walking.
“You looked back at me terrified,” Frank told him. “And I looked at you wondering why you weren’t stopping. I mean, you’d told me you couldn’t stop. I just didn’t understand until then that what you meant was, you really couldn’t stop.”
“I have no memory of this.”
“I remember it like it was yesterday.”
“But we’ve never talked about it.”
Frank shook his head.
“You just believed me?”
“You would have come back to make sure that girl was okay if you could have,” he said.
He had moments of doubt, yet he always returned to the belief that he was sick in body and not in mind. But for whatever reason his memory of knocking that little girl to the ground had been erased. Could anything in his mind—indivisible, complete—be erased, or otherwise go haywire? What confidence did that give him in the permanent thing called the soul?
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