Guilt

by John Lescroart

  He had struck the right tone. They laughed, at home, embraced by the host. Sheila had her arm on his, appreciating the return of his good humor. He nodded again at Avery. 'Go on inside, get yourselves some drinks, warm up. Have fun.'

  Now that she was here, he could be gracious. After his earlier apprehension, an almost narcotic calm settled over him. There would be time to meet her, get to know her. If not tonight, then…

  She was in his house now. He had her name – Christina Carrera. She would not get away.

  They had remodeled their kitchen five years before, and now it was a vast open space with an island cooking area. A deep well, inset into the marble, provided ice and a continual supply of champagne bottles. Across the back of the room – away from the sinks – a twelve-foot table was laden with fresh-shucked oysters, smoked salmon, three kinds of caviar, crawfish, crab cakes, shrimps as big as lobster tails.

  The band – cornets, trumpets, trombones, banjos and bass – was playing New Orleans jazz, getting into it. People were dancing throughout the downstairs, but here in the kitchen, the swinging doors kept out enough music to allow conversation.

  Christina was standing at the well, alone, pouring champagne into two flutes that she'd set on the marble. Dooher had seen her leave Avery with some other young people from the firm, take his glass and go through the swinging doors into the kitchen.

  He came up behind her. 'While you're pouring, would you mind?' He put his glass next to the two others on the counter.

  She turned and smiled. 'No, of course not.' Her gaze stayed on him a second. 'This is a super party. Thank you.' She tipped his glass, poured in a small amount of champagne, let the bubbles subside, poured again.

  'A woman who knows how to pour champagne,' Dooher said. 'I thought it was a lost art.'

  She was concentrating on the task. 'Not in my family.'

  'Is your family from around here?'

  'No. They're from down south. Ojai, actually.'

  'Really? I love Ojai. I've often thought I'd like to settle there when I retire.'

  'Well, that'll be a long time from now.'

  'Not as long as you think…' She handed him his glass, and he touched hers. 'When I think of the pink moment.'

  She laughed. 'You do know Ojai.'

  The town was nestled in a valley behind Ventura, and many times the setting sun would break through the fog that hovered near the ocean and seem to paint the red rock walls of the valley a deep pink. The locals set great store by it.

  Dooher nodded. 'I tell you, I love the place.'

  'I do, too.'

  'And yet, you're here.'

  'And yet…' Her eyes glistened, enjoying the moment, sipping champagne. 'School. USF' She hesitated a moment. 'Law school, actually.'

  Dooher backed up, his hand to his heart. 'Not that.'

  'I'm afraid so.' She made a face. 'They tell me it's an acquired taste, though I'm done in June and I can't say I've been completely won over.' She smiled over her glass. 'Oops. I'm saying too much. Champagne talk. I should never admit that to a managing partner.'

  Dooher leaned in closer to her, dropping to a whisper. 'I'll let you in on a secret – there are moments in the profession that are not pure bliss.'

  'You shock me!'

  'And yet…' he said.

  'And yet.'

  A moment, nearly awkward with the connection. 'Well, Joe's champagne's getting warm just sitting there… that, I take it, is Joe's glass?'

  'The dutiful woman…' she said, softening it with a half-smile, but there was no mistaking it – some tension with Avery. But she picked up his glass.

  'Are you clerking somewhere this summer? Have you applied with us?'

  Most law students spent their summers clerking with established firms for a variety of reasons – experience, good pay, the inside track at a job offer.

  Christina shook her head. 'Joe would kill me.'

  'Joe would kill you? Why?'

  She shrugged. 'Well, you know… he's on the hiring committee… he thinks it would smack of nepotism.'

  'From the Latin "nepos", meaning nephew. Are you Joe's niece, by any chance? Perhaps he's your nephew. Are you two related to the third degree of consanguinity?' He raised his eyebrows, humorous, but holding her there. 'Love those lawyer words,' he said.

  She was enjoying him. 'No. No, nothing like that. He just thinks it wouldn't work.'

  'Well, I may have to have a word with Mr Avery…'

  'No! I mean, please, it would just…'

  He stepped closer again. 'Christina… may I call you Christina?'

  She nodded.

  'Look, are you going to be a good lawyer?'

  'Yes. I mean, I think I am. I'm law review.' Only the best students made law review.

  Dooher pounced. 'You're law review and…' He put his glass down, started over more slowly. 'Christina, listen, you're not doing yourself a favor, nor would you be doing our firm a favor, by not applying if you think there might be a good fit. A woman who is on law review and…' He was about to make some comment about her beauty but stopped himself – you couldn't be too careful on the sexual harassment score these days. 'Well, you'll do meaningful work and you'll bring in clients, which is quite a bit more than half the ballgame, although that's a dirty secret I should never divulge to an idealistic young student.'

  'Not so young, Mr Dooher

  'Mark. You're Christina, I'm Mark, okay?'

  She nodded. 'But I'm really not so young. I'm twenty-seven. I didn't start law school until two years after college.'

  '… so you've already got practical work experience? Look, Christina, after what I'm hearing, if you don't come down and apply at McCabe & Roth, I will come out to USF and try to recruit you myself, clear?' He grinned.

  Her champagne was half-gone. 'I should really watch what I say when I'm drinking. Now Joe is really going to be upset.'

  'I bet he won't be upset.' He touched her arm. 'Don't you be upset either. This is a party. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to push it if it's-'

  'No, he will. He also said that there's no sense applying if we're going to get married because there's a policy against attorneys being married.'

  'Are you engaged? I don't see a ring.'

  'Well, not yet, not exactly, but…'

  Dooher pushed it. 'Christina, Joe's a good attorney but this doesn't have to do with him. It has to do with what's best for your career. It's your decision. You come down and apply, and it'll go through channels from there,capisce?'

  'All right.'

  'Promise?'

  She nodded.

  He clinked his glass against hers, and they drank.

  CHAPTER THREE

  He awoke without the alarm in the half-dark, listening to the water still dripping from the gutters. The digital clock on the nightstand read 5:30.

  He and Sheila hadn't come up to bed until nearly 2:00, but Dooher had always been able to wake up at any time he wanted, no matter how long he'd slept. It was a matter of control, of discipline.

  And he had made plans for early.

  Sheila slept on her side of the bed, the covers pulled high over her, and he slipped out and walked over to the window. It was cold in the room but the chill braced him. He stood, shivering, enjoying it.

  The storm continued with no sign of letting up. His spacious back lawn looked gray and somber, mottled with soaking clumps of plant matter. The old elm's skeleton hung barren, the bushes in the rose garden reached out their swollen arthritic fingers – the whole place sepulchral within its enclosing hedges.

  It was Ash Wednesday.

  Abe Glitsky's eyes opened to blackness and he was suddenly all the way awake, sprung from fitful sleep by the jack-in-the-box mechanism that had controlled his metabolism over the past five months, ever since Flo had been diagnosed.

  Unlike a jack-in-the-box, though, he didn't move. Pop went the weasel and the lids of his eyes shot open, but that was all that happened on the outside.

  He lay there, listening in the de
ad room. His wife was breathing evenly, regularly. His head rang – an anvil for the staccato hammering of his heart.

  Glitsky was a Homicide Inspector with the Police Department. He'd been getting through the days by doing what he had to do in five-minute increments, on the theory that if he could just make it through the next five minutes, he'd be all right.

  When the long vigil began, while he felt he still had some analytical powers left, he'd tried to make it through entire days at a time by force of will. He wouldn't think about what was coming, what would be. But his focus on those days would keep splitting up, disintegrating into pointillistic little nothings, the stuff of his life unconnected, separating.

  Now he was down to five-minute intervals. He would function for five minutes, keep his focus. There were twelve five-minute intervals in one hour, two hundred and forty in twenty hours. He'd consciously done the math. He was doing twenty-hour days, on average. He was also into sit-ups, two hundred and forty sit-ups every day. A symbol.

  He wondered how he could be so tired and not sleep, not be sleepy at all. He was never sleepy – tired beyond imagining, far beyond what he'd ever thought were the limits of his physical endurance, but his brain never slowed.

  Sometime in the course of a night or post-midnight morning, the apparatus that was his body would shut down and he would lie unconscious for a few hours, but this never felt like sleep.

  Last night – a blessing – the boom had lowered while he lay in bed next to his wife, praying for it.

  Now – pop – he was up.

  The digital changed – a flicker at the periphery of his vision, the only light in the room -5:15. Still deep dark, yes, but morning really. Far better than when the pop was 3:30, when he knew he was up for the day and it was still night.

  He swung his legs off the bed.

  At 6:15, Dooher was in the fifth row of St Ignatius on the campus of the University of San Francisco because of a hunch that Christina Carrera would appear, as she'd implied jokingly when she'd said her goodbyes last night.

  Dooher realized that the odds might be long against her actually getting up and coming down to church for ashes, but long odds had never fazed him.

  After all, what had been the odds, back when he was fifteen, that the baseball team he played for, from San Carlos, California, would go all the way to the Babe Ruth World Series? And then, beyond that, that Dooher would come up in the bottom of the seventh inning, two out, one run down, with his best friend Wes Farrell standing on second base? And that he would hit a home run to win the whole thing?

  Long odds.

  Or, when he'd managed the Menlo Park McDonald's in 1966 and '67 during his first two years at Stanford and decided to take the stock option they were offering to their management employees even though it lowered his pay by ten percent, to under three dollars an hour. He'd taken a lot of grief from friends about the thousand dollars he was throwing down the drain, but Mark had had a hunch, and when he got out of law school eight years later, that stock was worth over $65,000 and he and Sheila used it as the down payment on the home he still owned, which they'd bought for $97,000 in 1975, and was now worth well over a million.

  Long odds.

  Kneeling in the pew, his knee jammed painfully into the space between the padding so it would hurt, some of the other riskier chances he'd taken came back at him. The time when…

  But, halting his reverie, Christina appeared in his peripheral vision. He lowered his head in an attitude of prayer. She was wearing jeans, boots, a Gore-Tex overcoat, and did not see him. She kept walking, her own head bowed. A couple of pews in front of him, she genuflected, stepped in and kneeled.

  The Glitskys lived in an upper duplex on Lake Street, and Abe was in the kitchen, bringing handfuls of cold water to his face. A steady downpour was tattooing the roof, but a thin ribbon of pink hung in the eastern sky, off to the right, out the window over the sink.

  The thing to do was get the chores started, but he couldn't move. The order of things didn't flow anymore.

  How could he do this alone?

  He wasn't going to ask that question, not in this five minutes. It would paralyze him. He wouldn't think about it.

  He depended on Flo – she was one of the world's competent beings. The two of them had split up their domestic duties long ago. Glitsky had always helped with heavy cleaning; he'd fixed things, lifted and moved, washed and dried dishes, organized shelves and rooms and closets. When the boys had been born, he'd changed diapers and heated baby food, but eventually their care – dressing them, feeding them, comforting them – had fallen mostly to Flo.

  And now it was falling back on him.

  How was he going to do it?

  Stop it!

  It wasn't that he minded doing more work, or even thought about the work. Flo was not someone who worked for him. She was his partner. In some fundamental way, he felt he was half her, she half him.

  And their life together – his job, her competence, the boys – had taken every bit of both of them together. How could that continue with only half of them? It wasn't a matter of shaking the thoughts because they weren't really thoughts.

  He was resting his weight on his arms and hands, which were planted on either side of the sink, fighting vertigo. The ground felt as though it was going to give way to an echoing abyss.

  He raised his head and the strip of morning hadn't grown appreciably wider.

  After Mass, after the ashes, Dooher thought he would let Christina come to him, rather than approach her. Waiting on the steps outside, he watched the rain come down.

  'Mr Dooher?'

  He turned with a practiced look of surprise mingled with curiosity, then took an extra moment to place who she was, exactly. He knew her, but…

  'Christina,' she said, reminding him.

  'Oh, of course, Christina. Sorry, I'm not quite awake.'

  'I know. Getting up this morning was a little…'

  'Hey, we're here. That's what counts in the eyes of God.'

  'The eyes of God,' she repeated.

  'Penance,' he said. 'Lent. Some people need Thanksgiving or Christmas. I need the reminder about dust to dust, ashes to ashes.' He shrugged. 'One of the occupational hazards of lawyers is that we tend to think that what we do on a daily basis is important.'

  'It is important, wouldn't you say? I mean, people's lives, solving their problems.'

  He tapped the dot of ash on his forehead. 'Eventually, it all turns to this.' An apologetic smile, self-deprecating. 'This happy thought brought to you by Mark Dooher. Sorry.'

  She kept looking at him. 'You're an interesting man.'

  Glitsky had ten pieces of bread spread out on the counter. Five sandwiches. Two each for the older boys, Isaac and Jacob, one for the baby – no, he reminded himself, not the baby anymore, the ten-year-old – O.J.

  'What are you looking at?' His youngest son didn't sleep much either – night terrors. Everybody in the duplex handled it differently. O.J. was wearing a Spiderman suit he'd slept in, standing in the doorway to the kitchen. Glitsky had no idea how long he'd been there.

  'I'm making lunches.'

  'Again?'

  'Again.'

  'But you made lunch yesterday.'

  'I know. It's going to happen a lot. I make lunch, okay. And let's talk quiet. Nobody's up. What do you want?'

  'Nothing. I don't eat lunch.'

  'O.J., you eat lunch every day. What do you want?'

  'Nothing.'

  Outside the window, the trees of the Presidio behind their duplex had come into relief. Morning breaking slowly.

  He wasn't going to fight his child over lunch. He would just make something and put it in the box, and either O.J. would eat it or he wouldn't. Glitsky was in his mid-forties. He wore green string-pull pajama bottoms and no shirt. Crossing the kitchen, he went down on one knee, pulled his boy onto the other one.

  'How'd you sleep?'

  'Good.' O.J. had to be coaxed to give anything up.

  'No ba
d dreams?'

  'Nope.'

  'Good. That's good.'

  But the boy's arms came up around his father's neck, the small body contouring to Glitsky's chest. A moment holding him there – not really an embrace. An embrace might drive him off. 'I know you don't want anything for lunch, but if you did want something, what would it be?'

  Eye contact. A shrug. 'Peebeejay, I guess.'

  It took a minute to process. 'Okay, you get dressed. I'll make it.'

  O.J. wasn't ready to do that yet. He stayed on the knee. 'But the way Mom does, okay?'

  Glitsky took in a breath. 'Okay. How is that?'

  'You don't have to yell at me. It's not that hard.'

  'I'm not yelling. I'm whispering, in fact. And I didn't say it was hard. I'm sure it's not hard. I just want to know how you like it so I can make it that way, all right?'

  'I said I didn't want one anyway.' The eyes were clouding up, threatening to spill over. 'Just forget it.'

  Glitsky didn't let him pull away. 'I don't want to forget it, O.J. I want to get it right.' He had to keep from slipping into his cop voice. This was his son. He loved him. 'Tell me how Mom makes it,' he asked gently. 'Would you please do that for me, buddy?'

  'It's easy.'

  'I'm sure it is. Just tell me, okay.'

  A pause, considering. O.J. stood, off the knee, and Glitsky straightened up. 'Bread, then butter – you never put butter, but Mom always does. You got to put butter first – then peanut butter, over the butter. Then, on the other bread, the jelly.'

  'Butter, then peanut butter, then jelly. I got it.'

  'On the other piece of bread.'

  'I got it. But don't you close the sandwich when you're done, so that the peanut butter and the jelly are stuck together anyway?'

  'But that's not how you make it. I could tell yesterday.'