John Lescroart - Guilt

'Maybe he's not the person you think he is. Not with everybody else. He seemed pretty cold to me.'

Now he did let go of her hand. 'Let's not take my best friend apart four days after his wife was killed, okay?'

'I'm not taking him apart, I'm saying he seemed cold. Maybe he was cold to his kids, that's all.'

'And maybe he's trying to keep from breaking down, so he's guarded right about now, how's that?' He had raised his voice and Bart sat up, growling.

Sam took a beat, a breath. 'You're right, I don't know him at all, I'm sorry. The steaks aren't going to be rare.'

Downstairs, in his, kitchen, they sat at the table. Sam stared down at her food. Wes couldn't stop the smile that crept up. She wasn't going to be able to cut her steak. 'Your cast.' Standing up, he came around the table and kissed her. 'I'm sorry,' he said. 'I don't want to fight.'

Sam lay her head against him. 'Don't be mad at me. I'm not attacking your friend.'

'I know. With your permission.' He pulled another chair out from the table, sat down, picked up a knife and began cutting. 'And the fact is, Mark might have been a terrible father. I don't know. Maybe husband, too. We didn't pride ourselves on that so much in those days. He's just my friend. Some of us white males – even if we're not angry – occasionally feel unfairly attacked here in this modern world. It's tempting to band together. So I suppose I've got a gut reaction to protect him. Especially now.'

'I can see that. But I'm not attacking you either, okay?'

'I know, but I wonder if it's just that I didn't see what he might have really been like with his kids, couldn't let myself see because I was doing the same thing.'

'And what about now?'

That stopped him again. For a moment. 'What about now?'

She only dared meet his eyes.

'No,' he said. 'Flatly, emphatically no.'

'Okay, but since we were talking…'

'I don't understand how you can even say that?'

'I didn't, actually. I looked it. But I was talking to Christina today – her reaction to Mark being under suspicion kind of reminded me of you.'

'You told her about it?'

'A little. It's okay, Wes, she won't alert the media.'

'So how was her reaction like mine?'

'Just very knee-jerk. Not really looking at it. She's in love with him, you know.'

'She told you that?'

'No.'

He rolled his eyes.

'But a girl can tell.'

'So Christina's in love with Mark. And he's my best friend. Now let me get this straight – because of those reasons we both don't believe he killed his wife while he was out driving golf balls. How strange. Do you think he killed her?'

She shook her head. 'No. Your steak's getting cold. It's perfect, by the way.'

Standing up, he kissed her and went back to his seat.

'All I'm saying,' she continued, 'is that I have a hard time believing Sergeant Glitsky goes around planting evidence to convict people for no reason.'

'Well, I hope you're right.' He cut a piece of meat. 'Christina's in love with him?'

'Tis the season,' she said sweetly. 'She may not even know it yet, but you wait. Six months.'

Wes stopped chewing. The words were almost exactly those used by Mark's kids when he hadn't known what they were talking about. He did now, and it made him nervous.

Most nights, Sam stayed with her brother Larry. She was apartment hunting in a haphazard fashion, but it was never easy finding the right place. And tonight she was staying at Wes's.

Now she slept peacefully next to him. Unable to do the same, he carefully lifted the blanket from his side of the bed and got out, threw on his old terrycloth robe, and padded into the living salon, sitting on the futon. The streetlights outside painted their designs on his hardwood. He'd left the kitchen window open over the table where he and Sam had eaten, and the breeze coming through it still felt almost balmy.

Bart climbed up next to him and he petted him absently. His mind wouldn't stop racing. Maybe he ought to write a country song, he thought, 'bout settin' up all night while your girl's asleep, your love is deep but you're feelin' blue, what's a poor country boy to do? It had possibilities.

But that thought didn't hold. He kept returning to Christina Carrera… which brought him to Mark. Of course, as he'd told Sam, Mark had an airtight alibi. Hell, it wasn't even that, he reminded himself, it was the truth.

The past twenty-five years of Wes's professional life had been spent in the mud and trenches of criminal law, taking on the causes and cases of a seemingly endless procession of people who'd been careless, negligent – and who found themselves called to answer for their mistakes and misdeeds.

He didn't often torture himself with whether any of his clients had done what they'd been accused of. He generally preferred to ask them about the evidence against them and how they might explain it. Sometimes, if he liked his clients, he'd provide two or three explanations and ask if any of them had a particularly nice ring.

He never asked directly if a client were guilty. That was a conclusion for the jury. Similarly, he tried not to ask any open-ended questions about what someone had or hadn't done because he might get an answer he didn't like, and then be stuck with it. And there was always the very real possibility that his client would lie to him anyway. This was in the very nature of people, he believed, and hence understandable, human, acceptable.

But his adult pragmatism was a far cry from the idealism that had drawn him to the law in the first place. It was a rationalization, as so much of his life had become. You did what you had to. And that was okay.

Most of the time.

He'd been trying to convince himself of all this now for the last decade or so. It was the recurring topic in his 'retreats' with Mark Dooher, who would always argue the opposite – you didn't do what you had to do, you did what you believed in.

Before these troubles, Farrell thought that had been easy for Dooher to say. He'd never had to struggle in his career, in his life. He could afford the luxury of idealism, of believing he was always on the side of the angels. He was Job before the curses.

But Dooher was right about one thing. The accommodation ate at you. It made you cynical. Sometimes it seemed to Wes that the endless litany of 'good enough', 'good enough', 'good enough' was a prescription for failure. That there really wasn't any such thing as good enough. There was your best, and then there was everything else.

And, in his darkest moments, Wes sometimes believed that his marriage had failed, his business had never really prospered, he'd never achieved all he'd set out to do – in law school, he'd dreamed of being appointed to the Supreme Court! – because he'd burned himself, his best self, out on the altar of 'good enough'. Lord knew, it had been hard enough, raising the kids, getting and keeping clients, making time for Lydia. He'd put in all the energy he thought he could spare, instead of all he had, on just about everything he put his mind to. What had he been saving the rest for?

Was this the source of his mediocrity? The secret of the nonentity he'd become?

He knew the reason for his nervousness after dinner. Because for once, now, he'd committed. He had a potential client and best friend that he totally believed in.

And now there was Christina Carrera, his own albatross. Why couldn't she just go away?

Farrell, too, had caught a glimpse of them together for a moment on Mark's lawn this afternoon. Witnessing first-hand the almost embarrassing connection between them, he kept coming back to the one salient fact that he wished he could forget. Or – better – never have known.

Which was that Mark had wanted her from the first moment he laid his eyes upon her.