I handed the gun back to Pete and he took it and looked me right in the eye, almost pleading with me. “There was no way I could have known this was going to happen,” he said. Then he dropped the gun on his desk and returned to his seat. His words hadn’t seemed to convince him. His eyes said that deep inside he was blaming himself.
I was wondering what happened to the automaton from a few minutes earlier when Jendrek asked him, “When you think about it all, when you remember what was going on right before the shot, do you think the cops could have reasonably mistaken Don Vargas for a guy who was threatening you with a gun?”
Pete looked down at his desk, shaking his head. His eyes never looked at us as he spoke. “I guess. I dunno. I suppose I can understand them thinking it was a real gun. I mean, our props look awfully damned real. They’re supposed to, right?”
There it is, I thought. There goes the case. Our only witness admitting it looked real, admitting that he could see how someone standing outside could be confused. If Pete Stick sounded this bad sitting in his own office, he would sound a hell of a lot worse on a witness stand, under cross-examination by a government lawyer.
Pete went on, “So yeah. Donnie’s standing there with the gun, maybe waving it around as he talked. I can see someone thinking this guy’s in there waving a gun around. I can understand that. But just hauling off and shooting a guy like that? I can’t understand that at all. I mean, we weren’t arguing. He didn’t look mad. I didn’t look scared. We were just talking. Fucking cops, man. They overreact to everything.”
Back on the sidewalk, making our way to the car, Jendrek let out a long breath and said, “Well, there’s always got to be something like that.”
I didn’t have much to say. Pete Stick was not a good witness. There was no way around it. If we worked with him, he’d get better, but a good lawyer on the other side would eventually get that testimony out of him and our case would be shot. Maybe the police would settle before they ever heard that testimony, but it wasn’t likely.
I tried to put a good spin on it. “Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “He’s not that bad. The whole thing is still outrageous. We can probably settle the thing without going to trial.”
“But Ed Vargas won’t want to settle.”
“But Ed Vargas isn’t in charge. We’re really working for the wife, remember?”
“I’m sure she’s just as outraged as Ed. Maybe worse. These people want revenge, not a settlement. What’s a settlement do for them? They’re already rich. A few hundred grand, if we’re lucky to get even that, isn’t going to make them happy. These people will want a trial. They’ll want headlines in the newspaper.” Jendrek unlocked the car and gave me a defeated smile across the roof. “Revenge, baby. It’s a killer.”
I laughed and slid into the car. “Man,” I said, shaking my head. “That gun sure looked real.”
IV
Liz and I had been dating since our first year of law school. We’d been living together since graduation. In the three years since then, our relationship had become like I imagined any married couple’s might be—except that we weren’t married. Not that Liz wouldn’t have married me. She would have, if I ever got around to asking. But I never did, and she never pressed it with me, so we drifted through the months and years in a state of silent détente.
It wasn’t that we were unhappy. Bored, perhaps, but not unhappy. At least I wasn’t. If there was anything unsatisfying about my life, it had nothing to do with her. But those things that were unsatisfying—work, the inescapable realization that my life was most likely going to be utterly and completely normal, even mediocre—had metastasized into a general unfulfillment that had invaded the space between Liz and me.
As I drove home to the one bedroom apartment we shared in Santa Monica, I thought about Max Stanton, about standing in the lobby at Kohlberg & Crowley again, and about how I had once been on the fast track and had abruptly gotten off. There were a lot of reasons for my decision at the time, not the least of which was that I’d almost