for that.
“Guilty? About what?”
“All of this time. I’ve been so angry at him. You know, for what he’d done. Like he had done it to me, not himself. I started hating him, hating his memory. Now, you . . . now this.”
“We were all like that. It was the only way to live with it.”
“Have you told Millie and Tom?”
My parents. She never felt comfortable addressing them any other way.
“Not yet. I will, though.”
“Why didn’t you tell Wexler about Chicago?”
“I don’t know. I wanted a head start, I guess. They’ll find out about it tomorrow.”
“Jack, if what you’re saying is true, they should know everything. I don’t want whoever did this to get away just so you can pursue a story.”
“Look, Riley,” I said, trying to keep calm, “whoever did this had already gotten away until I came along. I just want to get to the cops in Chicago before Wexler. One day.”
We were silent a moment before I spoke again.
“And make no mistake. I want the story, that’s true. But it’s about more than just the story. It’s about me and Sean.”
She nodded and I let the silence hang between us. I didn’t know how to explain to her my motives. My skill in life was putting words together in a coherent and interesting narrative but inside I had no words for this. Not yet. I knew she needed to hear more from me and I tried to give her what she needed, an explanation I didn’t quite understand myself.
“I remember when we graduated from high school we both pretty much knew what we wanted to do. I was going to write books and be famous or rich or both. Sean was going to be chief of detectives at DPD and solve all of the mysteries of the city . . . Neither of us quite made it. Sean was closest, though.”
She tried a smile at my memory but it didn’t quite go with the rest of her face and so she put it aside.
“Anyway,” I continued, “at the end of that summer I was leaving for Paris to go write the great American novel. And he was waiting to go into the service. We made this deal when we said good-bye. It was pretty corny. The deal was that when I got rich I would buy him a Porsche with ski racks. Like Redford had in Downhill Racer. That’s it. That’s all he wanted. He’d get to choose the model. But I’d have to pay. I told him it was a bad deal for me because he had nothing to trade. But then he said he did. He said that if anything ever happened to me—you know, like I got killed or hurt or robbed or anything—he’d find out who did it. He’d make sure nobody got away with it. And, you know, even back then I believed it. I believed he could do it. And something about it was a comfort.”
The story didn’t seem to make much sense the way I had told it. I wasn’t sure what the point was.
“But that was his promise, not yours,” Riley said.
“Yes, I know.” I was quiet for a few moments while she watched me. “It’s just that . . . I don’t know, I just can’t sit back and watch and wait. I’ve got to be out there. I’ve got to . . .”
There were no words to explain it.
“Do something?”
“I guess. I don’t know. I can’t really talk about it, Riley. I just have to do it. I’m going to Chicago.”
10
Gladden and five other men were ushered into a glass-enclosed seating area in the corner of the huge courtroom. There was a footwide slot that ran the length of the glass enclosure at face height through which the arraignment proceedings in the courtroom could be heard and the defendants could answer questions from their attorneys or the judge.
Gladden was disheveled from a night of no sleep. He had been in a single cell but the noise of the jail kept him awake and reminded him too much of Raiford. He looked around the courtroom and didn’t see anyone he recognized. This included the cops, Delpy and Sweetzer. He also didn’t see any television or still cameras. He took this as a sign that his true identity had not yet been discovered. He was encouraged by this. A man with curly red hair and thick glasses made his way around the attorneys’ tables to the glass booth. He was