“There’s somebody I need you to meet,” he said.
“I got an appointment.”
Harvard’s grip tightened.
“First you have to come with me.”
It occurred to me that I wouldn’t be able to get away from Rollins. He had been a New York City cop and could certainly subdue me. I thought about trying to sucker punch him but I doubted if I could catch the powerful ex-policeman unawares.
“Hey, you guys,” someone said.
It was Cassius Copeland, walking over to our isolated part of the granite stairs.
He came right up to Harvard, a big smile on his dark face, proffering his right hand. Then suddenly, when he was in range, he jutted out with his left. He was holding one of those electronic stunning devices. Harvard saw it coming. He released me and made to lunge at Cass. But the stunner hit him in the diaphragm and then Cass socked him in the jaw with a short but powerful right hook. Before Rollins could fall, Cass caught him around the waist.
“Here, let me help you,” Cass said, and he supported the weight of the dazed detective until he was sitting on the ground with his back up against the wall.
“Just wait here, Mr. Rollins,” Cass said, “while me and Ben get US all a taxi.”
Cass took me by the arm and led me away.
Rollins tried to yell something at us as we departed but the shock had debilitated his capacity for speech.
“You want anything else, Ben?” Cass asked me at a little Italian bistro on Sixth Avenue.
“No thanks.”
I had ordered a creamy pasta dish with truffles that went for a hundred dollars a plate and Cass had eighty-year-old cognac. It’s amazing what you can get in New York.
“How did you know I’d be there?” I asked the security expert.
“I didn’t,” he said. “I just Googled Barbara Knowland and saw that your wife’s magazine was hosting her reading at Cooper Union.”
“So you thought you’d check her out?”
“Sure,” he said. “Why not? You know she’s staying at the Fairweather, room eight twenty-nine.”
“How did you get that?”
“Homeland Security, brother. I got some &ends up in there. With just an eight-digit security code you can follow about ten percent of the people in this country at any given moment. Hotel reservations, interstate travel rosters, ATM hits, and credit card purchases.”
Cass was beginning to amaze me.
“She could have a heart attack up in there with no problem,” he said.
“You’d actually do that for me?”
“Why not?” Cass asked. “You’re my &end, right?”
“I need to know more,” I said. “I’ve got to talk to her. She said she’d have coffee with me.”
“Don’t do that, Ben. Don’t meet her anywhere she knows about beforehand.”
“Why not?”
“Who was the guy Rollins wanted you to meet?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“But it’s somebody got to do with this thing Star’s talkin’ about. You better believe that. You make a meetin’ with her and you’ll have some serious uninvited guests.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess that’s right. But who could it be?”
“Doesn’t matter. You okay right now, man. Just keep cool. Let things settle down a little bit. I’ll cover you at work. Let me look into this Colorado angle some more and then we’ll talk.”
Cass paid for the meal and I gave him the number of my hotel.
After that I wandered about until ten or so and then returned to my room.
Lana was there. I’d left her my spare key card but for some reason I believed that she wouldn’t want to see me again.
“What would you say if you found out that I was a murderer?” I asked her near midnight. We’d made love twice and were touching each other, tentatively considering a third try.
“What kind of murderer?”
“Are there different kinds?”
“Many,” she said, the youthful voice of deep experience.
“Like what?”
“There are men who kill for fun or because they are rotten inside and hate everyone. There are men who kill women. There are soldiers who kill in battle and lovers who kill for revenge. Sometimes mothers kill their babies because they do not wish to see them suffer.”
“Is it okay sometimes for a killer to get away with his crime?” I asked, feeling as if I were getting expert testimony.
“No one ever gets away,” Lana said in a soft, serious voice.
“No?”
“No,” she said, and then she kissed me.
My body seemed to surge up out of itself toward her. We made love again. It was a shuddering kind of passion between us. I couldn’t ejaculate, I was used up in that way, but I felt something powerful coming from her. It was a feeling both bitter and necessary.
“Ben?”
I came awake trying to remember the last time a lover had aroused me in my bed deep in the night. I smiled thinking about Lana calling my house, pretending to be from work.
“Yeah?”
“I don’t care.”
“About what?”
“If you have killed somebody. It is all right with me. You are a good man. You are good to me. I love you.”
“Take the couch again, Ben,” Dr. Shriver said when I moved toward my regular chair.
I was afraid of the backless brown chaise longue by then, haunted by the memory of that rocky cove and the man dying by my hand, the back of his skull crushed to pulp.
“It’s okay,” Dr. Shriver said. “I’m here with you. We’ll go through this together.”
I sat and then lay down. When I closed my eyes, I thought that I’d be back in that fantasy or memory or whatever it was.
“Tell me about your father,” Shriver said.
A rush of calm went through my fearful mind...
He was a tall man, or at least that’s how it seemed to me, with big black hands and serious eyes. He’d always tell me and my brother how easy we had it.
“When I was a child,” he’d say, “I didn’t go to school past grade five. I didn’t think about ice cream or television or hula hoops. There was only one radio on our whole block. We never knew that there was a stock market crash or a depression. We were already as depressed as we could get.”
And he really was depressed. At night he would sit in his recliner drinking vodka and smoking cigarettes. To the world he was a happy guy, always ready to smile or tell a joke. People who met my father liked him, were drawn to him; they wanted to spend time with him and share his happiness.
But that face, the one he presented to the world, wasn’t our father.
If Briggs or I got him angry by doing something against him or our mother, he’d whip us with his leather strap. He’d make us strip down to our briefs and lie down on a bed while he lashed us.
I remember crying out, “I won’t do it again, Daddy!” and him saying, “I know you won’t. Not after I finish with you.”
What did your mother do when this was happening?
My mother fretted in another room, out of sight of the beatings we got. And later on, when we cried to her, she’d say that it wasn’t all that bad. A week later she would even tell us that we were imagining it, that our father never beat us.
Maybe she even believed that lie.
I sat up on the couch after half an hour of these laments.
“A lot of fathers beat their kids,” I said. “That doesn’t mean anything.”
Shriver said nothing to this. There was no smirk on his lips to contradict the deep sympathy in his eyes.
“Tomorrow?” he asked. “Same time?”
“Tomorrow’s Sunday.”
“I’m not doing anything,” he said. “So tomorrow?”
It was eight A.M. when I left the therapist’s office but the heat was already beginning to rise in the humid air. Across the way was a small concrete plaza that hovered above the river. I went out there and sat on a bench, wondering about the things I’d said on the couch.