Antonelli - 03 - The Judgment (34 page)

The boy smiled back. “Danny.”

“What’s your last name, Danny?”

It was so still in that room I thought I could hear my own heartbeat. Without any change of expression, he looked at Flynn and said, “Danny.”

Flynn nodded patiently. “Danny is your first name. You have another name, too. My first name is Howard.”

“Howard,” the boy repeated.

“That’s right. My first name is Howard. My last name is Flynn.

Your first name is Danny. Your last name is?”

There was a flash of recognition in his eyes, the look someone gets when they first realize that something is not where it is supposed to be and that they might have lost it. He shook his head.

“Danny,” he said again. It was the only name he knew, and perhaps the only name he had.

For half an hour I watched, an interested observer, while Howard Flynn did his best to learn where Danny had come from and what he knew about the man who had given him the knife.

Flynn was as gentle, as patient, as it was possible to be, but it made no difference: Danny seemed to know nothing about his past. As innocent as the child he was, he lived in the moment, a moment that for him had no beginning and no end. He remembered me, and he remembered we had been together in a room, but he could not have said whether it had happened that morning or a year ago. When Flynn had lit that match, it did not just remind him of when he had been burned all over his body with a cigarette: It was the same event. Time did not exist.

Everything that happened—everything that happened to him—

was now.

Though none of our other questions had been answered, we had gotten his name, and that at least was a start. We had gotten something else as well: the knowledge that this was a case we had to win. It was always more difficult to defend someone you were certain was innocent: You could not comfort yourself with the thought that justice had been done if you lost. But this was worse. Danny was not just innocent, he was helpless. We were all he had. It hit Flynn harder than it hit me. When we left he was as angry as I had ever seen him.

“They should hang people like that!” he growled as we made our way to the front entrance. “And I don’t mean by the neck, either!”

I thought I knew whom he meant, but just to be sure, I asked,

“The people who burned him with cigarettes?”

“Yeah,” he muttered under his breath. His arm shot straight out in front of him and hit the door with such force I was afraid his hand was going to go right through the glass. At almost the same spot where we had stood talking together before, he stopped still. “Forget about that son of a bitch Jeffries. Forget about the guy who killed him,” he said, shaking his head impatiently. “Forget about whether he might have known Elliott Winston. Forget about the state hospital. Unless we find out who gave the kid the knife, we haven’t got anything.” He paused and stared hard at me. “You have to find out, and there’s only one way left to do it.”

People were swarming all around us. It was a few minutes past five and the sidewalks were filling up as civil servants walked quickly to the parking lots where they had left their cars or headed a few blocks across town to catch the light rail.

“You think the psychologist can get more out of him than you did?”

Flynn nodded, but his mind was on something else. “He’ll learn some things from him. He may learn quite a lot.” He worked his jaw back and forth, then he stopped and scratched his chin, a distant look in his eye. “He won’t learn that, though. The kid doesn’t know.”

“Then who?”

His eyes came back into focus. “The people he lived with.”

“Under the bridge?”

“Exactly.”

“Well,” I said skeptically, “we can try. But half of them are probably mentals and the rest are probably addicts or drunks.”

On the other hand, we had nothing to lose. “All right,” I agreed,

“if you think it’s worth the chance. When do you want to go?”

For the first time since we had left the jail, Flynn seemed to relax. He greeted my question as if I had just broken my own world record for stupidity. It was all he could do not to roll his eyes or laugh in my face. “Sure, why not? Let’s just go down there right now, two guys in coats and ties.”

Now I realized what he had in mind—or I thought I did. “You want to go undercover: pretend you’re one of the homeless—one of them?”

“No,” he said, looking away as he dragged out the sound. “Not exactly.”

For a few moments we did not say anything, and then I knew.

“You want me … ?”

“I can’t do it,” he said, turning to me. Earnestly, he shook his head. “I can’t. I can’t spend three or four nights—I can’t even spend one night—by myself with people who are drinking. I’m sorry. I couldn’t do it.” He looked down at the sidewalk and sighed. “But I will if you want,” he said, lifting his head.

He meant it, and I knew it, and I could never let it happen.

“All right,” I said with a rueful glance, “I’ll do it. But only after the psychologist sees Danny.”

“He’ll do it first thing tomorrow.”

“You said you hadn’t talked to him yet.”

“I haven’t,” he replied as if that was an answer. “This will be a great experience for you,” he said cheerfully. We turned and began to walk and he again put his arm around my shoulder. “You remember that time Jeffries put you in jail for the weekend? Look at it like that: You might not like it much, but think of all the stories you’ll have to tell.”

I thought about that after I left him at the corner and headed back to the office: not what it would be like to pass myself off as one of the homeless, but what it had been like spending three nights in the county jail. Three nights—and I had never forgotten it! One weekend all those years ago, and as vivid as if it had happened last week or the week before. Three nights! How many nights are there in twelve years, the length of time Elliott Winston had already spent locked up in an asylum for the criminally insane? I could list the numbers and make a rough estimate of the result, but I could not do the multiplication, not in my head, not without a calculator or at least a pencil and paper. If I had been at the state hospital I could have asked Elliott’s friend, the former high school history teacher somehow given the gift for mathematics by his own insanity.

Somewhere behind me a voice called my name. I stopped and turned around, but I did not see anyone I recognized among the crowd of faces that moved past me on the sidewalk. The voice called again, but I still could not find who it was.

“Here,” Jennifer said, laughing. She was sitting in her car, parked at the curb just a few feet away. The top was down. “You looked like you were in a trance. Have you been sleepwalking?”

“No,” I replied, embarrassed. I took a step toward the car, then stopped and looked back over my shoulder. We were directly in front of my building. If she had not called out to me, I might have walked right past it.

“You told me to pick you up in front at quarter past five,” she said as I got in. “Did you forget?”

“No, I didn’t forget. I was thinking about something.” As we drove off, I remembered the look—that trancelike look—Elliott had on his face when I first saw him at the hospital. “You ever do that?” I asked her. “Think about something and forget where you are?”

Jennifer glanced across at me, a puzzled expression on her face.

“I don’t mean when you were sick,” I said, touching the back of her neck. But I realized that that was exactly what I meant.

“Is that what it’s like—you don’t know where you are?”

She looked straight ahead, steering through the downtown traffic. Dressed in a white short-sleeve blouse and a green and blue cotton skirt, she looked young and pretty, eighteen years old all over again, and both of us certain that nothing bad could ever happen. A faint smile flickered across her mouth. She lifted her head and bit her lip; and then she turned to me and her eyes seemed to beg forgiveness. “I can’t,” she murmured.

She stared ahead at the road, and with a quick turn of her wrist shifted down to the next gear and gunned the car through a yellow light at the intersection just before the bridge.

I tried to get her mind off the past. “We’re passing over my new home,” I said brightly.

She passed the back of her hand over her eyes and cleared her throat. “What?” she asked, forcing herself to smile.

“Yeah, it’s true,” I said with a cocky grin. “It’s my new home.

Right down there,” I added, jabbing my finger in front of her.

“Under the bridge. It’s Flynn’s idea.”

Jennifer listened intently while I explained what I was going to do and why there did not seem to be any other choice. I was not quite prepared for her response. Instead of trying to talk me out of it; instead of telling me how much she was going to worry about me; instead of reminding me that I was a lawyer and not a private detective; she thought it was a perfectly wonderful idea and tried to invite herself along.

“If you just suddenly show up—I don’t care how much of a homeless person you make yourself look—you’re still a stranger and they’re not going to trust you. But if there are two of us—a homeless couple—that makes sense. It happens all the time. You see couples holding up cardboard signs saying they’ll work for food. We could be like that,” she said eagerly.

On the other side of the bridge, her eyes darting all around, she merged into the freeway traffic and then crossed over into the lane that, a little farther on, connected to the highway that led east along the Columbia.

It was out of the question. She was not going with me. “It’s too dangerous,” I said quietly, and then started to laugh at the way I sounded, all self-assured and protective, as if it had been my idea instead of Flynn’s.

She waited until I stopped. “So you rather I went alone?”

“Flynn told me I had to do it. By the way, where are we going?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I thought maybe we could drive out along the river, maybe go a ways into the gorge.”

We drove along the shore of the great slow-moving river as it cut its way through the tree-covered cliffs of the gorge, changing color from gray to silver and then, finally, as the sun slanted in the stillness of dusk across the far edge of the horizon, a deep purple mixed with gold. The river ran forever, through the rough red rocks of the high windblown desert; through wheat fields that flowed under a yellow sun and cloudless skies and clear starry nights in places where a tree had never grown; through high mountains that had risen from the earth thousands of years after the river had already begun to run out to the sea; through the flatlands and lowlying hills where another river joined and where a city had been built and a handful of generations had lived their lives and died their deaths. Always changing and always the same, the river carried us back and carried us forward, and gave us the feeling that though we could never quite put it into words, we knew something important, something that had value.

We stopped at a restaurant with a view of a narrow steel suspension bridge and the green black hills of Washington on the other side. We ate hamburgers that came in red plastic baskets covered with white wax paper and slapped ketchup over the French fries and drank Cokes out of Coke glasses with straws.

Every few minutes, Jennifer would reach across and wipe my mouth with her paper napkin.

“You sure you want to do this? Get married in a year?”

Holding it with both hands, her teeth had just sunk into the hamburger. “Why?” she asked, almost choking as she swallowed hard and tried not to laugh. “Are you having second thoughts?”

“Second thoughts? I haven’t had first thoughts. I’ve been in love with you all my life, but until you came back I didn’t think about it very often. It’s like breathing. Most of the time you don’t know you’re doing it.”

Her hands were in her lap under the table, and she was looking up at me, making fun of me with her eyes, while she drank Coke through a straw. She finished what little was left in the glass and kept sucking on it, laughing with her eyes at the sound she made, waiting to see my reaction. I signaled the waitress to bring her a new one.

“Got a quarter?” Jennifer asked. I found one in my pocket and she went to the old-fashioned jukebox that stood against the wall on the other side. I watched her tap her foot as she searched for something she wanted to hear. She came back to the table and held out her hand. I looked around, hesitant. “Come on,” she insisted.

” ‘Chances Are’?” I asked, laughing quietly as we began to dance on the linoleum floor in front of the jukebox.

We moved together to the music, a few steps one way and a few steps back. She let go of my hand and wrapped both arms around my neck, and both of mine went around her waist. At a booth a few feet away, two teenage boys nudged each other. The girls they were with first scolded them with their eyes so they wouldn’t laugh and then, because they were young and sentimental and still dreamed that love could last, turned and watched themselves.

When it was over, Jennifer went to the cash register, got change for a dollar, and played it again. She wanted to do it a third time, but I pulled her away and we went back to our table and she drank some more Coke and teased me again with her wide laughing eyes.

“It wasn’t like breathing for me,” she said, peering down at the glass as she twisted the straw through crushed ice. “I thought about you much more often than that. I thought about you a lot when I was in the hospital.” She raised her eyes until her gaze met mine. “I tried to think of why I was there. They told me it was because of some chemical imbalance in the brain, that it was something physical, that it could happen to anyone. But it didn’t happen to anyone: It happened to me—and I kept thinking maybe it wouldn’t have happened if my life had been different, if I’d been married to someone I was in love with. How could I have been depressed if I had been happy?” She paused and, reaching across the table, ran her fingertips down the side of my face. “I kept thinking I wouldn’t be there, in that awful place, if I’d been married to you.”

Slowly, her head came up straight and she sat perfectly erect, and perfectly still. “Is that what you want, Joey?” she asked, measuring each word. “After all this time. Are you sure that’s what you want—just to be with me?”