“Hang up the phone, Curtis,” said the justice, “and cancel my appointments.”

And now here he was, Jackson Straczynski, standing before me, fidgeting and wincing as if preparing to be beaten about the head. And now sitting down next to me, leaning forward, elbows on his knees, wringing his long pale hands as if he were auditioning for a role.

“I want to apologize, Mr. Carl,” he said, speaking as if it were a struggle to get the words out. “After your last visit, I made the inquiries I told you I would make. Everything you said turned out to be true, and I am appalled.”

“But of course you knew.”

“No.”

“About my being locked up at Traffic Court? About Rashard Porter.”

“No, I did not.”

“It was your doing. It had to be.”

“But it wasn’t.”

“Then who could-”

I stopped in midsentence and thought it through. The secretive Clerk O’Brien in Traffic Court. The dour Clerk Templeton in Common Pleas Court. The fearsomely protective Clerk Lobban in the justice’s own chambers.

“Son of a bitch.”

“I fear,” said the justice, “that one of my employees might have acted to safeguard my position well beyond his actual authority.”

“A conspiracy of clerks.”

“Clerk Lobban’s loyalties run very deep, deeper than in a normal employee-employer relationship. He knows my wife, in fact it is she who hired him for me. His wife is ill and my wife helps in her care. It is very complicated.”

“I can imagine.”

“No,” he said. “No, you can’t.”

“What kind of car does your clerk drive?”

“Something small, I think. Foreign.”

“ Toyota?”

“I suppose.”

“Color?”

“I don’t know. Look, I have spoken to Judge Wellman. He denied any pressure was brought to bear, but I have reason to believe a motion to vacate Mr. Porter’s sentence would be well received.”

“What about Lonnie?”

“I read about Mr. Chambers in the newspaper. Very distressing, and I know what you must think. But I never told Curtis anything about him. Our prior conversation remained absolutely private.”

“And Joey Parma?”

“Who?”

“Joseph Parma. He called you a number of times.”

“No. You must be mistaken. I never heard of Joseph Parma.”

“He was a friend of your brother’s.”

“Benny?”

“Yes. An old friend.”

“Benny did have a friend named Joey when he was younger. They were altar boys together. I think they called him Joey Cheaps.”

“Bingo.”

“But why was he trying to call me?”

“Because Joey was an idiot. And he had done something twenty years ago for your brother. And he thought he could turn what he did twenty years ago into cash today.”

“And that was the client you were referring to, who had his throat slit.”

“That’s right.”

“Mr. Carl. Oh God. Mr. Carl. I think I am going to be sick.”

Chapter 65

“IF IT HAD been anyone else but Tommy,” said Jackson Straczynski, still leaning forward on the bench, his stomach still riled, “I might have handled it differently. That’s not an excuse. I have no excuse. But it may be an explanation. Have you ever had a friend to whom you feel very close and yet with whom you can’t help but compete over every available scrap? That was the way it was with me and Tommy Greeley.

“I met him on the fencing team. I had thought fencing might be something interesting to learn, a good aristocratic sport. Yes, that was how I thought about things then, anything to wipe the South Philly out of me. Which is funny, when you think of it, because all the while I was working on my parries and feints and lunges with the purpose of rising in class, my younger brother, Benjamin, was building an entirely different reputation with a blade of his own. Tommy was new to the sport too, but from the first he dominated me on the piste, forcing me to break ground, scoring off me at will. And his smile, that little victorious smirk when he ripped off his mask, would eat like an acid at my bones.

“There were other arenas to compete in, of course, grades and girls being the most prominent. I studied more than Tommy and yet he was so damn quick his grades were the equal of mine, and with his smile and charm he got the best of the girls too. It wasn’t long before every time I saw him smile I wanted to choke a goat. And yet, through circumstance and familiarity, we remained as friends. Maybe I wanted to keep him close as a sort of mirror. I knew I would be succeeding if I could best Tommy Greeley.

“My dream was to go to law school. Fair enough. Clarence Darrow, Thurgood Marshall, all the great liberal lawyers were my guides. I was still young, things have changed, but that was the dream. So I worked hard, kept my grades up. Tommy had no real dream, as I recall, except to get high and get laid, the great twining goals of our generation. Tommy was, undoubtedly, having more fun than I, but I could console myself with my future. That’s where I would prevail over Tommy Greeley. It was one of the greatest days of my life when I got into Penn Law. It was also one of the most bitter, because an hour later I heard that Tommy Greeley had also been accepted.

“It was in law school that his little side business took off, that the marihuana he was selling for a nice profit turned into cocaine, which he was selling for an absurdly huge profit. He drove around campus in his sports car, he threw parties, found himself a series of gorgeous girlfriends, and all the while, through sheer brilliance, he kept his grades up. It would have killed me with jealousy, it would have devoured me, except I had found something else by then. I had found my wife.

“Love, sex, beauty, art, purpose. For me she was the repository of all that in my life. I suppose, Mr. Carl, therein lay the problem.

“Our first years together were an idyll, truly, a sweet and dreamy time of absorption in each other. It was all about devotion, communication, art. It was all about the journals. That was our evening activity, after I finished my law studies. We would sit together, at the kitchen table, translating our emotions, our experiences, our love into words so that we could make them hard and real and forever. She had been keeping journals since she was a child, they became a part of her, a necessary organ, like a lung, in which to breathe in her life. For her, nothing was real without them. And together, with our writing and our intimacy and our love, we created art. Love as art, Mr. Carl. Never was a drug so potent.

“Without it ever being stated, our roles in the relationship were agreed upon. I would be the lawyer, I would financially support us. And my wife Alura, she would be the artist. She was a dancer when I met her, but she wanted to explore other fields, every field, she wanted her whole life to be a work of art. She believed no endeavor could be more noble, and I agreed. Yes. I agreed. Together we would play these disparate parts in our singular endeavor. And so, slowly, I spent less time with the journals, more time at the law. She immersed herself in her art, I immersed myself in legal theory. And we were happy.

“Until that man with the beard and the motorcycle vest. He came to me, almost deranged, spouting off about how some bastard was sleeping with his wife, and that he was sleeping with my wife too. I couldn’t believe it, I didn’t believe it. Until he said that the bastard was Tommy Greeley. Tommy was a pig, I could believe anything of him. And Alura had been growing distant, things between us were changing. So I did something I had never done before, and have never done since, I staked out her studio and waited. And waited. And waited.

“And then I saw. Him. My mirror. Opening the door of my wife’s building. Climbing the stairs to my wife’s studio. Through the window I saw him reaching out his arms and embracing my wife’s body. The pain I felt was so physical it felled me, it actually threw me to my knees. And behind my closed lids I could see his little victorious smirk, and I retched, right there on the sidewalk.”