S Rozan - Absent Friends

“Is there something wrong with it?” Elizabeth, fearless like himself.

“I don't know.” Thirty years of reading eyes and posture had given Phil a fairly good idea of when he was being lied to and an unerring sense of when-as now-he was believed. “The money came from someone who wanted Keegan's family to have it. The… donor… wanted to stay in the background. I had no reason to think the money was tainted. But I didn't ask. And I knew it didn't come from the State, and I never told the client.”

“How bad is that?” Elizabeth would have asked a surgeon to explain his choices as he lifted his scalpel, even if she were the one on the table.

“I thought there was no basis for a suit against the State. This way the widow at least got something. But that wasn't my decision. The lie effectively prevented her from exercising a right to sue that she might have used. That's enough to nail me to the wall even if the money's clean.”

“And if it's not?”

“Then the obvious question is what I-or whoever was paying me-wanted hidden that a lawsuit might have uncovered.”

“About what happened to Keegan in prison?” Uncharacteristically, then, Elizabeth hesitated.

No, he thought, you can't back away from this shit. He finished for her. “Or about Keegan.”

“Was there something to know about him?”

“If there was, I never knew it. But I can't prove that.”

Phil watched Elizabeth mentally file, index, and cross-reference everything he'd just said. When she was done she brought out the next question. “Who was paying you?”

“No one.” He saw her whirring mental machinery catch for an instant. “I've been taking the money and passing it on, but that's all. No cut, no fee. Normally that might make me look better, but not in this case.”

“Why not?”

“For one thing, my relationship with the client goes way beyond the professional one.” He watched the women before him to see if this was news. Elizabeth (who for the past year had been dating a doctor) nodded. (And what a courtship that must be, Phil thought: she with a full-time job and in night school, he working residents' hours, both of them young and yearning. If they were smart enough to keep their dance cards this full, missing each other's arms more than they were in them, they stood a good chance of living happily ever after.) Sandra (who claimed to have hung up her sneakers long ago) just shrugged.

“And for another thing,” he said, “there's Eddie Spano. The Tribune implies Spano's behind it all, was from the start. If that's true, it'll be hard convincing anyone I didn't know it.”

“Did you?”

“I still don't.”

Elizabeth's steady brown eyes didn't change. Sandra poked her pencil impatiently into the holes at the spiral binding of her pad.

“The point is,” Phil said, “if anyone's gunning for me, this could be very powerful ammunition.”

Sandra smiled, the hard smile of a veteran who finds military life with all its privations preferable to the disorderly insignificance of life on the outside. Elizabeth tossed her long hair and frowned at Sandra's smile.

“You haven't been here that long,” Phil told Elizabeth, indicating Sandra, that she had been. “It's been tried. But this time might be different.”

Different, Phil thought. Hell, why shouldn't it be? Every goddamn thing was different now, why not this?

Sandra and Elizabeth waited, watching him. He tried to see from their eyes whether he was different, too. He gave up: he couldn't tell.

He sat back, threw the pen he'd been toying with onto the desk. “Okay,” he said. “I don't know what happens next. Another reporter's following up Randall's leads. She called this morning, and I told her to get lost. She call you guys yet?”

Sandra, with the tough smile, said, “One of the good things about working off cell phones. It's hard for her to find us.”

“She will, though. I'd rather you guys didn't talk to her, but it's up to you. But that's the press. If it comes to an ethics investigation, or criminal-anything official-Sandra, you know the drill, but it'll be new to you.” This looking into Elizabeth's straightforward brown eyes. “When they call you in, don't stonewall, and for God's sake don't lie. You'll just get yourself in trouble, and it won't help me. And.” This, too, was mostly for Elizabeth. He locked onto those eyes the way he did on a client's when he wanted to make it absolutely clear the time for screwing around was over, this was for real. “If you want out-now, during, or after-go.”

Again, Elizabeth nodded: she understood. Then shook her head: she wasn't going. Sandra let out an exasperated snort: she had work to do, could Phil quit crapping around?

“Yeah,” said Phil. “Okay. You want to talk about it anytime, we can talk. Now: lunchtime. Anybody know if Wally's reopened?”

Sandra said, “Not yet.”

“Then get me a corned beef and a cream soda from that deli up Broadway. Get yourselves whatever you want. Elizabeth, you get a chance to go through the Johnson file?”

Elizabeth echoed, “Not yet.”

Half an hour later, when his mouth was full of sandwich and his fingers were greasy, Phil's cell phone rang. He'd have said “Shit,” but he couldn't manage it. He swallowed, wiped his hands, flipped the phone open, and barked his name.

A woman's voice, sounding like she was speaking from a room with a bad smell in it, told him, “It's Marian Gallagher.”

Shit came to Phil again as a response, and this time he could have said it, but he kept himself in check. Short and cold: “What's up?”

A pause, a break in her rhythm before she answered. She didn't like him any better than he liked her, and the truce of years was shattered now. She'd always found him brash and rude; he knew because Sally had told him. Civility was important to Marian, Sally said, manners mattered to her. Sally had probably hoped if Phil knew this he'd tone it down, show Marian a more cultured and chivalrous face. What really happened was that in Marian's presence, Phil found himself fighting strong urges to put his feet on the table or let the long-suppressed Yiddish-Bronx rhythms of his childhood overwhelm his speech.

So he knew full well that even in the mutual distaste of their relationship, she'd be thrown off by the implied insult of his not bothering with phone etiquette. Knew it, thought less of himself, and went ahead anyway.

“There's a problem,” she said, and he heard her trying to match his cold tone.

“The whole damn thing's a problem, for Christ's sake,” he said. “What specifically do you have in mind?”

“Harry Randall's dead.”

“Thanks for the news flash.”

He could practically hear her grinding her teeth. You just can't cut her a break, can you? he asked himself.

“Another reporter was just here.” On the heels of her words her breath whispered in his ear, in, out. A yoga exercise, maybe; it would be like her. He waited it out. She said, “They think someone murdered him.”

“I figured that.”

Silence. “What do you mean, you figured that?”

“I read the damn Tribune this morning, Marian. Their story just about came out and said it.” It occurred to him: “You didn't, right? Read it, I mean. The Tribune 's too lowbrow for you, I'll bet. You ought to try it anyway. You could learn a lot. What do you want?”

He was sure what she really wanted was to hang up on him, which was pretty much what he wanted, too, but he stayed, her voice drilling into his ear, phone pressed to the side of his head, elbows parked on either side of the sandwich on his desk like he was the Brooklyn Bridge and his corned beef was a stuck barge.