this one, but I appreciate it. After a few moments I break it off. “Adam was killed, Willie. They shot him thinking it was me.”
Willie looks at me disbelieving, then his face briefly contorts in a kind of rage I’m not sure I’ve ever seen before. Without a word, in a lightning-quick move he puts his hand through the front window of his car, smashing it to bits. I know Willie holds a black belt in karate, but it’s still an amazing sight to behold.
I put my hand on his shoulder. “Come on, we’ll drive you home.”
Laurie drives, and after we drop Willie off, we go home. She makes us drinks, and we sit down in the den. I just can’t seem to clear my head, to accept as fact what has happened. I don’t want to be a part of this; I don’t want people to die because of what I do for a living. I don’t want to be around this anymore.
“You want to talk, Andy?” Laurie asks.
“All I do is talk.”
“It’s not your fault,” Laurie says. “You couldn’t know this was going to happen.”
“What do I need this for? I’m a lawyer. Did I cut the class in law school when they said that people were going to die just because they knew me?”
“Andy—”
I interrupt. “I want to do what other lawyers do. I want to sue doctors for malpractice because they forgot to remove the sponge after my client’s appendectomy. I want to represent huge corporations when they merge with other huge corporations. I want to make cheating husbands pay through the nose in alimony. I want to do everything but what I’m doing.”
“No,” she says, “you’re doing exactly what you should be doing. And you do it better than anyone I know. As one of your former clients, I can say with certainty that you’re needed right where you are.”
I shake my head, not giving an inch. “No, you’ve got the right idea,” I say. “Findlay is a better place to live than this. I think you should go. I should go with you.”
She shakes her head. “You can’t run away, Andy. I won’t do that, and I won’t let you do it either. If I go, if we go, we’ll be going toward something, not running away.”
I know she’s right, but I refuse to say so, because then I might have to stop feeling sorry for myself. An old Joe Louis expression pops into my head, as if he were talking about me. “He can run, but he can’t hide.”
Right now all I want to do is hide.
I TAKE IT UPON myself to call Adam’s parents in Kansas and notify them of the death of their son. It is one of the more difficult conversations I’ve ever had in my life, but I can only imagine how much worse it is for them. They want his body flown home for the funeral service, and I promise I will help them make the arrangements. It’s a murder case, so by law an autopsy must take place first, but I don’t see any need to mention that right now.
They seem not to want to end the phone call, as if I am their final connection to their son and they want to keep that connection going as long as possible. They show incredible generosity by telling me that they had been receiving phone calls from Adam, telling them how much he enjoyed working with me and how excited he was to be meeting important sportswriters. He’d been meeting football players, not sportswriters, but I certainly don’t bother to correct them. Memories are all they have, and I don’t want to blur them in any fashion.
I tell them Adam was hoping to buy them a house, that he talked about them lovingly and often. They thank me and finally say goodbye, to retreat into their agony.
In the morning I have Kevin, Sam, Marcus, and Edna join Laurie and me at the house for a rare Sunday meeting. Willie comes over as well, since he wants to be involved in whatever way he can in protecting me and nailing Adam’s killer. I’m happy to have him; the trial is not going to stop while we mourn for Adam, and I have to make sure that as a group we are ready to deal with what happened and move on.
We spend the first hour or so talking about Adam and how we felt about him. He had made a