“Another ten minutes and it would have been done,” said Ramirez. “He would have signed Mein Kampf if I put it in front of him.”
“He just might have.”
“Why’d you stop me?”
“Because I didn’t want that kid saying something he’d spend the rest of his life regretting.”
“That’s our job, isn’t it?”
“Not if we spend the rest of our lives regretting it, too.”
“He already pretty much said he didn’t mean to kill Toth, that it was an accident.”
“He came close.”
“What do you think?”
“I think he found a box.”
They stood side by side and stared at Lamar as the kid tried again to drink from the soda. The stuff was flying from the can before it was halfway to his lips.
“That would mean our killer was clever enough to stage the crime scene,” said Ramirez, “and then place the gun and the watch and the computer screens in a box on some deserted lot so that some chump would find them, hock something, and take the fall.”
“Seems a bit far-fetched, doesn’t it?”
“It would also mean that this isn’t just a simple killing but probably something tied to the fire, to that file cabinet in Byrne’s basement, and maybe to the questionable circumstances of Liam Byrne’s death.”
“It’s enough to give me a damn headache,” said Henderson.
“What would your boy Occam say about all that?”
“He’d say Lamar is it.”
Ramirez thought about it for a moment, took a deep breath. “I owe you, old man.”
“What for?”
“For pulling me out of there.”
Just then there was a knock on the door, and a uniform poked her head inside. “Detective Ramirez, there’s a lawyer here to see you.”
“You get a name?”
“She said her name was Shin, Katie Shin. Just like that. And she said she had a message for you from some Kyle Byrne.”
CHAPTER 40
AT PONZIO’S, an overblown New Jersey diner with a false stone front and overcooked peas, Kyle Byrne stared into the very face of God. Or the closest thing he had going, albeit one wiping a splotch of Hellmann’s from his lower lip with his thumb.
“Now, when you meet with this walking, talking piece of corruption,” said Liam Byrne, “you need come at him from an angle, keep him off balance.”
Kyle listlessly swirled a french fry in a pool of ketchup and pretended to listen, more interested in the features of the face in front of him than in the plots and plans coming out of its mouth. Through the years Kyle had guarded the mental picture of his father so religiously that the image had lost its flesh and bone and become something almost holy. He was the creator, who had formed, through both his genes and his absence, almost the whole of Kyle’s identity. And now, as the creator sat across from Kyle at this desultory diner, stuffing his face with a turkey club on white with extra mayonnaise, the disappointment was palpable.
“We can’t let him know what we’re really after, see?” said his father. “If he cottons on to the fact that we’re trying to destroy him utterly, he’ll disappear. So we give him something he can lunge for, something that he thinks will give him an out. We give him a feint, like a football running back. That’s the position you played, wasn’t it?”
“How would you know?”
“I kept track, boyo. Every week in San Bernardino, I’d gather up the Philadelphia papers and see what I was missing. There you were on the high-school sports page in living color. I couldn’t have been prouder.”
No matter how much Kyle mythologized it in his memory, no matter how much he exalted it in recollection, there was nothing spiritual about the face in front of him now. In the bright and unrelenting light of Ponzio’s, his father looked realer than real, not to mention old as hell. A nd as common as t he burger on Kyle’s plate. Kyle wondered what question he would ask God if He were seated across from him at Ponzio’s.
“How’d you meet my mother?” he said finally.
Liam Byrne looked at his son with a narrowed eye, as if he spotted the peril in the question, and then put down his sandwich.
“She came to work at the firm,” he said softly. “Laszlo hired her, actually. As a secretary. There was something about her that I spotted right off.”
“What exactly?”
“It’s hard to say. I suppose it was that calm implacability of hers. It is impossible to overstate how attractive that is to someone like me. Of course she was a beautiful woman, but she seemed to be challenging me to try to get through her walls. And I could never resist a good challenge.”
The old man’s crooked smile of remembrance struck a chord of anger in Kyle. “So you charged the ramparts. How old was she then?”
“She was old enough to know better. We both were. But once it began, we couldn’t help ourselves. I suppose that meant she saw something in me, too.”
“Like what?”
“The same charm I passed on to you, maybe.”
“So you charmed the pants off her.”
“Ah, boyo, we charmed each other. Your mother was a special woman. Stronger than ever I was, that’s for sure. She knew her mind and acted upon it. And I won’t be giving away any state secrets to say that I loved her mightily.”
“Not enough to marry her.”
“Well, of course, I was married already. To my wife, you see. An interesting woman in her own right. I saw her, actually, just a day before the fire. After you sent your friend inside.”
“You saw her?”
“Yes, though she didn’t see me. It was quite the emotional experience, I must admit. She’s grown old. It happens, though a disappointment nevertheless. And she’s married again, to an old sot too decrepit to be unfaithful. I suppose that is what she wanted all those fallow years with me.”
“Did you say hello?”
“Of course not. I wouldn’t disrupt her current happiness for anything. Whatever we were together in the past, and we were many things, we weren’t happy.”
“If you weren’t happy in your marriage,” said Kyle, “and if you loved my mother like you said, why didn’t you leave your wife?”
“Well, we were married in the church, you see. And in those days it wasn’t always so easy to—”
“Yeah, I get it.”