“Our home in Charlestown, with both our names on the deed, is already yours, as well as our liquid assets in the joint accounts,” Gil Harmony said from the next world. “So I leave you, June, something of purely spiritual value. My gavel. The only one I’ve ever used. The varnish has worn off the handle but it’s still a good piece of hickory.” He smiled, sadly, as if it had finally dawned on him that the only way anyone would see the video was upon his death. “I’ve wielded that gavel to strike down the guilty, and to offer them mercy. Use it as you see fit, but I pray you choose mercy.”
June suddenly realized she was still clutching Martin’s arm. She released him as if he had been electrified, and then nodded some vague apology.
On the monitor, Gil Harmony paused for twenty seconds. For what? Applause? For the rest of the gathering to congratulate June? When he spoke again he addressed his brother.
“Lincoln …”
Linc Harmony leaned forward in his seat and answered the screen with a sarcastic, rolling “Yeassss?”
“There isn’t much you need from me, my brother, that you haven’t already received. I had high hopes that when I left the superior court bench you’d be ready to assume my place, but that’s not the way things have worked out, have they?”
“Skip to the punch line,” Linc Harmony murmured.
“To you, Linc, I leave my law texts, including the complete General Laws of Rhode Island, which I have studied nearly all my life.”
“Those books are online now,” Linc argued.
“I leave you my copy of the United States Constitution, a mere eighteen pages in which history’s greatest nation was born.”
“Defendants quote it all the time in traffic court,” Linc replied bitterly.
“And I leave you this—” Gil Harmony fished inside his coat pocket and withdrew a tiny nip bottle of whiskey. He continued, “This is my last drink. I bought it twenty-five years ago when I gave up booze, and I’ve kept it in my desk that whole time. Imagine, they still made the bottles out of glass back then. I promised myself if I ever needed another drink, this would be the last one. I’ve never needed it.”
“Fuck you,” Lincoln Harmony muttered under his breath.
He rose to leave, but his lawyer pulled him back down, cupped a hand to his client’s ear, and whispered into it.
Linc replied to him out loud, “Books and a goddamn lecture? He’s worth millions.”
The lawyer shot him a hard look, which Harmony seemed to understand. Linc snorted like a racehorse, nodded in agreement, and settled back into his chair.
They’re going to sue, Billy guessed.
“Brock, my son,” the image called out in a sudden burst of cheerfulness.
Brock shrank from the screen, and then turned slowly to face it. He looked lobotomized, with the scar on his head and the detached way he floated through the event.
“How are you, my boy!”
He’s trying too hard, Billy thought. Like my old man did when I was Brock’s age.
“Son, I set up a trust for you that will become available when you’re thirty-one. It might seem like a long time away, but I think it’s good for a man to live without a net for a while, to make it on his own. Like I did. In the meantime, your mother will be living at the beach house, so I want you to have the town house in downtown Providence. Hmm? How’s that sound?”
The image waited, as if for an answer. Brock gave none.
“Um, it’s all paid for,” Gil Harmony continued, as if trying to talk his son into accepting. “And I’m sure your mom can help with taxes and that sort of thing, till you get on your feet. I like the town house because it’s close to the court. But it’s close to the art school, too. I was thinking, mmm, maybe you could live there and finish up your degree? You’re so good at what you do! Your teachers said you’re the best they’ve ever seen. As I always say, find something you love to do, and be great at it. Just like your old man.”
Brock lifted his head, exhaled suddenly, and blinked a few times, as if waking from a coma. To Mr. Thybony, he said, “May I step outside a moment?”
“Of course, Brock.”
He got up gingerly, and rested a hand on his mother’s shoulder a moment. Every pair of eyes in the room followed as he limped out.
“To you, Kit,” Judge Harmony continued brightly, undeterred on video, “the best clerk any judge ever had …”
Billy found Brock Harmony sitting on the steps of the historic Arcade Mall, leaning a shoulder against a granite pillar and picking his cuticles. He noticed Billy but looked away and said nothing. Billy sat beside him, on a granite step laid long ago by the sons of the men who had fought Cornwallis. Millions of footsteps over nearly two hundred years had eroded a saddle into the rock.
They sat in silence. The air smelled like fried food and tailpipes.
In front of them, private cars, box-style delivery trucks, and students on old bicycles jiggled over the rough combination of cobblestones and potholes on the one-way road. Street people hustled quarters from customers pouring out of Dunkin’ Donuts. Businesspeople clicked spiked heels and dress shoes up the granite stairs, heading for afternoon snacks in the Arcade.
“Your father put a lot of pressure on you back there,” Billy said, once he had decided Brock had accepted his presence and would not flee from him.
“He’s dead,” Brock said. He bit off a tiny chunk of cuticle and spat it away. “Which means now I have to become somebody.”
Billy considered for a moment what he had said. “You mean, it’s time to become something other than Gil Harmony’s kid?”
Brock looked at him. He said, “What do you really do for Mr. Smothers? You’re no clerk.”
“Is it that obvious?”
“If a sixty-year-old lawyer does his own hiring, his clerks will tend to be young, hot, and stacked. You’re zero-for-three.”
“Maybe his wife hired me for him.”
“Maybe you’re his investigator.”
Zing. Okay, this kid is sharp. Of course Brock would be bright; he was descended from the genius who was everybody’s favorite law professor.
An old man scraped along the sidewalk, painfully dragging a bad leg. He wore a long, grimy T-shirt stained with yellow circles under the armpits where his sweat had repeatedly soaked and dried. He sipped from a bottle wrapped in a paper bag.
“That guy limps worse than I do,” Brock said. “Do you ever just pick somebody out of a crowd and wonder what the hell happened to them? You know, somebody with a deformity, or in a wheelchair or on crutches? Or somebody like this dude, who obviously lives on the street. Some happy new mom, maybe seventy years ago, nursed this guy in the middle of the night. She loved him. So what the hell happened to him?”
They watched the old man cross the street toward them. He blocked a line of five cars for a full minute. When he passed near them, Brock called out, “Hey, buddy—whatchu drinking there?”
The guy squinted at them, suspicious. His lower jaw was offset from the top, as though it had been dislocated long ago and never properly reset. The odor of piss and cigarettes surrounded the man. Billy wanted to look away. Is there possibly a person in the world who loves this man? He felt the lightness at the corners of his mouth that preceded that god-awful, uncontrollable, ironic, evil smile. He bit hard on his lip.
“I’m not making fun of you,” Brock assured the man. He nodded to the bottle. “I want to buy a sip.”
The bum closed one eye and looked down into the bottle, then reached it toward Brock. “It’s bad,” he warned in a growl.
Brock snatched it, bag and all, swirled it with gusto, and took a long tug. “Ahhh!” Then his face wrinkled. “Oh, my Christ! Peach schnapps? Nasty. How about one shot for my friend?” he asked. He handed the bottle to Billy, saying, “It’s my treat. One sip won’t kill ya.”
No time to argue—Billy needed this interview with Brock. He put the bottle to his lips, let the sickly sweet liquor touch his tongue, and then handed it back to its owner. �
�Awful,” he confirmed.
Brock pulled two fives from his pocket and gave the cash to the startled bum. “There’s a liquor store on Westminster Street,” he advised. “Get yourself some better booze.”
They watched the bum shuffle off. Brock called after him, “Don’t you be wasting that money on food!”
“You have an unusual philanthropic streak,” Billy said.
Brock smiled and nodded toward the man. “Did you see what he just did? He wiped the bottle with his T-shirt.”
Billy laughed. “He’s cleaning our germs?”
“There’s nothing unusual about making people happy,” Brock said. “What does it matter how you do it, so long as you do?” He folded his hands over his chest and leaned back on his elbows. He stared at the upper floors of the bank tower across the street for a minute. Then suddenly he started a new conversation. “I used to think that the reason I’m on the planet would become obvious for me one day.”
“As it did for your father?”
“Mm-hm. My father was here to serve the law. Period. You’re not as dumb as I feel, Mr. Povich.”
“I don’t like people in their twenties calling me Mr. Povich,” Billy said. “Why do you feel dumb?”
“Because I can’t imagine why I survived that night.” His eyes scanned the streetscape, looking for answers in the windows of the downtown offices. “You heard the judge on the video. He sentenced me to be a great man, like he was—but I haven’t a clue how to do that. I thought I’d have more time to figure it out. More time to deliberate in his shadow, a cool and cozy place, where not much was expected of me. But now he’s gone, the spotlight shines, and the time for figuring is here.”
“No thought of law school?” Billy asked, to keep the conversation alive. Interviews are fires that must be stoked with questions.
“Me? Follow in those footsteps? Fuck no. Uncle Linc tried that. You see how well that turned out.”
“Why don’t your uncle and your mother get along?”
“Because she’s not in love with him, and never has been.”
“Ah.”
Brock licked his lips. “I can still taste that awful schnapps,” he said. He closed his eyes. “I can still hear the shot.”
“You were asleep?”
“You must have read the police report.”
“I’d like to hear it from you,” Billy said, feeling a pang of guilt for pushing him, and then adding to sooth his conscience, “if you’re up to it.”
Brock shrugged, eyes still closed. “I’m not going to cry, if that’s what you’re afraid of.”
“That wouldn’t scare me.”
“It seemed,” Brock began, “like the bang was still echoing when I opened my eyes.” He opened them now and looked at Billy. “No confusion, no thought that this might be a dream, you know? That shot was real. A crack, like from a forty cal, not the chunky boom from my dad’s favorite forty-four. I flung myself out of bed and listened for a few seconds. Had my dad misfired a pistol into a wall or something, he would have yelled to let me know everything was all right. As I walked toward my door, I was surprised not to hear his voice. I could hear footsteps downstairs, walking around, not quite frantic … more like urgent. Like somebody was looking for something, maybe the cordless phone or the first-aid kit. So as I’m running down the stairs, I’m thinking he hurt himself, and I’m bracing for some horror show in the reading room, while still assuming everything was probably fine. And that’s when I ran into … you know … him. Literally bumped into him at the bottom of the stairs. Don’t know which of us was more shocked.”
“What did he look like?”
“Like his picture in the paper, except no goatee, and not all bruised.”
“That was Adam Rackers’s old mug shot in the newspaper,” Billy said, instantly cursing himself for saying aloud a name Brock had gone out of his way not to mention. “I mean, how did he carry himself ?”
Brock searched inside for the memory for a few moments. “Outwardly calm at all times, if you can imagine,” he said. “Held the gun with a steady hand. But his voice sounded tightly wound and intense. I thought maybe he was coked up.”
“Maybe he was.”
“I just stared at him and stuttered, and not too diplomatically. My mouth had disconnected from my brain and I think I asked him what the fuck was going on down here. Something like that.”
Billy monitored Brock’s face and voice for signs of stress—signs that Billy was pushing too hard. He was a strong kid, and Billy pressed for more. “So he asked you about a wall safe?”
“Which we don’t even have at the house in Charlestown,” Brock said. His face wrinkled at a memory that did not make sense. “And that’s what I told him. Funny thing, he didn’t accuse me of lying … . I think he believed I just didn’t know what I was talking about. And at this point, I realized I hadn’t heard or seen my dad. I got real cold and my vision blurred and I may have started to black out. Next thing I remember, he was telling me that a wall safe would be behind a painting or a bookcase or something. He told me to lead him through the house.”
Brock shifted on the stairs, leaned forward and rested his chin on his hands, elbows on his knees. He didn’t seem in danger of tears, but his eyes were flat.
A portly middle-aged guy lumbered down the sidewalk, shouting into a wireless cell phone earpiece. “ … St. Louis advised that Anchorage inside-ops would review the core competencies vis-à-vis the vendor’s distribution models. I say it’s a value-ad …”
Brock raised an eyebrow behind the man’s back and chuckled.
Billy shrugged. “Is he speaking Norwegian?”
Then Brock asked, “Why does Mr. Smothers want you to ask me these questions? Does he think he can protect my mom’s assets from Uncle Linc?”
Now, Billy was a nimble liar. How many times had the words I’ll have your money tomorrow rolled off his lips, sounding as pure as the pope’s bedtime prayer? Sometimes such a lie would free him from the steroid-inflated arms of a debt collector, without so much as having his fingers purposely slammed a few times in a car door. Billy had lied so well, his ex-wife hadn’t known he was gambling again until the repo men came for the house.
Yet, when facing the fatherless son of a jurist—a father who had made a career of hacking through lies like an adventurer swinging a machete through the jungle—Billy reflexively offered the truth: “Martin Smothers doesn’t think Rackers broke in to rob any wall safe. He thinks somebody paid Rackers to shoot your dad.”
The words hit Brock like a flick of cold water in the face—a slight jerk of the head from mild shock, and then a heavy-browed scowl, more annoyed than angry. Brock leaned back on his elbows and stared straight ahead.
“A little more than two weeks before the shooting, you scared an intruder from your family’s condo—where the judge often stayed when he was working in Providence,” Billy said. “Three days later, the police noticed Rackers hanging around your beach house in Charlestown. It looks like he was stalking the judge.”
Brock seemed unimpressed. “There’s a break-in every night somewhere in this city. Some crack addict was probably trying to steal my CD collection.”
Billy plowed forward. “Rackers was a full-time shoplifter, and a sadly ordinary burglar,” he explained, in an excited voice that pumped life into Martin’s hypothesis, even though Billy did not entirely accept the theory. “Never shot anyone before.”
“That you know of.”
This kid sounds like my old man.
“Point given,” Billy said. “But there’s no other violence on his record … well, except a bar fight or something, um—”
“You don’t need my permission to investigate,” Brock said, cutting him off.
“But I need your memories.”
Brock rolled his eyes. “You’re dramatic, Billy,” he said. “You should come to art school and sit in my drama class.”
“Oh, so you’re going back to school?”
“You heard the judge.” He
sounded resigned to a fate he did not choose, but had no earthly power to change.
“Yeah, the judge,” Billy said. “Is it wrong for Martin to want justice for his friend?”
Brock lobbed an imaginary football to a man jogging down the street. “My father thought Martin Smothers was foolish,” he said.
He’s trying to hurt me, Billy realized. Brock wanted to punish Billy for suggesting somebody might have gotten away with Judge Harmony’s murder. The comment glanced off Billy with no damage. Martin was Billy’s best friend, but, yeah, the odd little vegan was a bit foolish. Instead of amassing wealth, Martin performed a disrespected virtue—he legitimized justice. By defending villains who inflicted their sick dreams on the community, Martin redeemed all of us who lived under the law. Criminals brutalize us; in return, we brutalize them, by ending their lives in steel cages. The difference between what we do and what the villains do is the criminal defense lawyer.
“He’s a little foolish,” Billy conceded. “But he’s not a fool. And you cannot look me in the eye and say your father didn’t respect Martin Smothers as much as any other lawyer.”
Brock deflated a bit. “Point given,” he mumbled. He looked away, cast a lingering glance at a passing businesswoman in a tight skirt, and then offered, “If I tell you the rest, can you do this without upsetting my mom? She’s wrecked on the inside. She wants me to go to law school. Wants me to disown Uncle Linc. Wants me to visit the cemetery every day, even though she hasn’t gone since the funeral. And she’s nagging me to visit the other guy who survived the crash.”
“Stu Tracy?”
“I don’t think I can walk into that hospital room with just a few scars and a sore foot, and see him lying there, all smashed,” he said, a shiver in his voice. “I just can’t fucking do it, Billy.”
Billy promised, “Everything I do is under the radar. Your mom won’t even know. So take me back into the house.”
Brock’s eyes widened for a moment as he searched for where he had left off. “Really isn’t that much more to tell,” he said. “I wandered through the house with a gun at my spine, lifting the artwork so he could see there was no wall safe. When I turned down the hall toward the reading room, he yelled, ‘I already checked down there … . Get away from there.’ But it was too late to stop me from seeing. The judge was facedown over his desk. In blood.”
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