John Lescroart - Guilt

'My enemy's friend is my enemy.'

He brought a hand up to his forehead. 'That's good. What's that, Kahlil Gibran or the PLO Handbook?'

'It's common sense is what it is. It's survival.'

'I didn't think we were in survival mode.'

'All women live every day in survival mode.'

'Jeez, that's good, too. What are you doing, writing a book of feminist slogans?'

'Fuck you.'

She turned and was walking off.

He followed after her, his own volume way up. 'You've been working at that center too long, you know that?'

She whirled on him. 'Yeah, that's right. I've been working, of course that's the problem. Women shouldn't work, should they, Wes? They shouldn't have their own lives.'

'Sure, that's what I'm saying, Sam. That's what I think. I wonder if you could twist it anymore.'

'I'm sure I could. I'm a woman, after all, I don't get things right.'

'I'll tell you something. You didn't get at least this one thing right. My friend Mark Dooher didn't kill his wife and I'd be Goddamned surprised if he raped this lady, either. She saw his name in the paper, she wants her twenty minutes of fame. You ever think of that?'

'Oh no, Wes, that never crossed my mind. You asshole.' She started walking away again. Stopped, turned back. 'I heard her. I saw her face. This happened, Goddamn it, whether or not you believe it.'

'What happened? She maybe said "no" thirty years ago, and just forgot about it until now? I'm sure.'

Sam said nothing.

'Did she seek counselling? Did she tell anybody? Did she report it to the police back then? Did she do a fucking thing? No.'

'It ruined her life. It changed everything in her life.'

'How sad for her. And now, damn, look at this, what a surprise! Mark Dooher's in the news and it all comes back. And – this is the great part – this means my best friend, who I've known only a hundred times longer than I've known you, this means he killed his wife he loved and raised a family with? Please. I mean it, Sam, you got to get a life here. This is ridiculous.'

This time, she started walking away and didn't turn back.

'Hey, Bart. Daddy's home.'

It was ten o'clock.

The dog got up, yawned and walked slowly over to where his master stood. Wes petted him distractedly, then schlumped into the kitchen, turning on the light, checking for dog shit. He paid a young woman who ran a small graphics business out of her apartment in the building to take Bart out two or three times a day, but sometimes that wasn't quite enough. Today it had been.

The refrigerator held a couple of six packs of Rolling Rock, and he took out two bottles and opened them both, drank one half down, pulled out the kitchen chair and sat heavily at the table.

He felt a hundred years old.

He ached to simply pick up the phone there on the wall and apologize until dawn. But he didn't move. The phone didn't, either. Eventually, he lifted the bottle of beer again, staring out at the night.

This was not supposed to happen. Everything had been going better than it ever had in his life, even better – he thought – than it ever had with Lydia when they'd been young and believed they must be in love.

In the first heady rush of physical pleasure, and then in the next weeks of growing intimacy, he'd put Sam's occasional penchant for volatility out of his mind. That first night, when she'd thrown him out after learning that he was defending Levon Copes – he'd chosen to believe that that had been an aberration born of insecurity and alcohol.

But evidently it wasn't.

It was better to find out now rather than later, he supposed, but he wasn't in the mood to put much of an optimistic spin on anything just now.

He'd wracked his brain all the way home, playing Devil's Advocate with himself, conjuring all the negative images of Mark that he could remember. But there were so few of them and that was the truth.

Once, in college, when they were engaged, Mark had cheated on Sheila. But he'd been riddled with guilt because of it – told Wes all about it on one of their 'retreats'; wondered if he should call off their impending marriage because he was such a bad person.

He'd backhanded his son, Mark Jr, across the face for throwing his bat in a Babe Ruth League game. That, Wes thought, was Mark's worst moment. But at the time Mark had been working eighty hours a week trying single-handedly to save his ailing firm. And he'd tried to turn even that incident, bad as it was, into something positive – treating it as a type of wake-up call. He was working too hard, ignoring what was really important. His family, his spiritual values.

In some way, these peccadilloes reassured Wes about his friend's character. Mark would be the last to say he was perfect. Of course he had sinned – he was human. He'd done things he was ashamed of. But these were why, to Wes's mind, he was balanced. He wasn't wound so tightly holding in every tiny impulse to evil that he would one day need to explode.

So he tried to figure out what it was; why the sudden rush from so many quarters to slander and vilify Mark Dooher.

Jealousy was one thing. Mark was wealthy, powerful, and up until a couple of months ago, lucky. He was exactly the kind of person that lesser people loved to see destroyed.

Then the Trang business, politically motivated and unfounded as it was, had put a hole in Mark's bubble of invincibility. And Wes knew that an enduring truism of life was that accusations bred more accusations.

And now – finally – the dominant bull was injured, limping. This was the time to take him down, when it could be done. Everybody was abandoning Mark. People were lining up to take shots at him when he was least able to defend himself.

Well, Wes wasn't anybody's hero, and he couldn't stop anybody from taking aim and firing, but he could stand in front of his friend and try to defend him until he was strong again.

Trang's murder. This woman's rape story. The enemies were assembling and he didn't have to think too hard to figure out what was coming next. They were going to charge him with Sheila's murder.

And Wes knew he would be the last line of defense. And for once – whatever they might dig up and however it spun – he knew it wouldn't be true.

Wes was going to defend him.

A week later, Paul Thieu got his first real break in the case.

It was not without some trepidation that he guided his city-issue Plymouth off the freeway at the Menlo Park exit, forty miles down the peninsula south of the city, and negotiated the narrow entrance to the parking lot by the Veterans Administration building. The short drive between the freeway and the VA reminded him of 6th Street between Mission and Bryant in San Francisco, the most dangerous walking blocks on the map.

Though the climate down here was infinitely more benign, the small town thoroughfare itself was a no man's land of Reagan's enduring legacy, the mentally impaired homeless. The cops called these people 'eight hundreds' and their social workers called them 'fifty-one fifties' after the Welfare & Institutions code sections that defined them, but by any name, they were tragic. Derelicts, drug addicts, bag people.

Thieu saw them every day in the city, but here within a long spit of Silicon Valley, where the sun always shone and the real estate glittered, he found all this evidence of poverty and despair especially dispiriting.

He was also keenly aware of his Vietnamese nationality. Men in old Army uniforms – singly or in small groups – loitered here and there on the main street and under the trees that provided the shade for the parking lot. Thieu didn't have to guess which war they were veterans of.

And time might have passed, he knew, but in the brains of some of these guys, it still might be 1968.