might encourage others to make such attempts. It always seemed to me a naive logic, that someone would look at a story of suicide and say, “Hey, there’s an idea.” But it also seemed an incomprehensible world where an eighteen-year-old would decide there was nothing left in it for her.
Of the three heroes that day, the sergeant was soon promoted, Scott left the force for engineering school, and I went on to the detective unit where I fell on my face.
The girl lived but we never heard from her. Maybe she resented our interference. Maybe she went back home, recovered, turned her life around. I didn’t think of the incident often, but more than once on the edge of my dreams I have tasted her cold lips, blown air into a dark throat and felt my own warm breath come back to me.
CHAPTER 23
The sound of water pulled me all the way back into the world. The surf below was so clean and uniform, each wave crested and then ripped down the sand with a sound like paper tearing. I listened for a few minutes and then got up and went to bed. There were no sounds from the other rooms and I lay on top of the covers in the guest room for a long time, staring at a dark ceiling and thinking about the taste of Richards’ kiss, and thinking about Megan Turner and how I’d let her go without a fight. Sometime late in the night, my memories let me sleep.
Billy’s girlfriend was gone by the time I got up and made my way to the coffee pot. Billy was out on the patio, the sliding doors opened wide to the ocean and the rising heat. The AC was kicked up to accommodate the fine paintings and fabrics. It was Billy’s way of enjoying both worlds and to hell with the cost of electricity. He was sitting in the morning sun, a laptop popped open on the glass-topped table. He was holding the Wall Street Journal folded lengthwise once and then halved again, reading it like a subway commuter. But he was wearing a pair of shorts and an open white linen shirt and his bare feet were propped up on a chair.
“And how’s the market today?” I said, knowing his early morning inclinations.
“The w-world is a new and wonderful p-place,” he answered, peeking up from his paper, a satisfied schoolboy look on his brown, GQ face.
Billy had somehow foreseen the tumble of technology stocks, and those clients who trusted him, and most of them did, let him put their substantial gains in commodities before the fall.
“Sleep well?” I said.
“Very w-well. Thank you.”
The sun was throwing a wide sparkle on the dimpled Atlantic and the sky was stealing some of the blue from the Gulf Stream.
“I thought I might go out today and buy a new canoe,” I said. Billy nodded.
“B-Back to the sh-shack?”
“Why not? Can’t live with my attorney forever.”
We both listened to the sea for a long minute.
“Your p-portfolio is d-doing well. You c-could afford a reasonable p-place on the beach.”
I let the thought sit awhile as I watched the broken line of early boats making their way east, out past the channel marker buoys and onto the horizon where their fiberglass superstructures stuck up small and white against the sky.
“You d-don’t have to keep h-hiding out there,” he finally said and the sting of the logic, the harsh taste of the truth gathered at the top of my throat.
“Oh, so I could hide up here in a tower like you, Billy?”
He turned and stared out at the ocean, a look of thoughtful recognition on his dark face but not a glint of offense. He was a black man who grew up on some of the hardest streets in urban America. He’d made his way past a million slapdowns from subtle to raw to get out of the ghetto, get through law school, gain the respect of his profession and make it to a place where he made his own choices. He made no apologies or excuses for those choices. It was that truth that made our friendship work.
He went back to his paper. I went back to my coffee. We both let the truth sit there for a while.
“Y-You th-think it’s done?” he finally asked. “The killing?”
“It’s officially done,” I answered. “Sometimes that’s enough.”
“Enough f-for who?” he said, looking at me like a lawyer who knows too much about his client to let it