The Hearing

'Now he's a private eye. You'll never guess who he works with.'

Hardy could figure it out. His eyebrows went up. He turned to Rich. 'How did you meet him?'

McNeil lifted his glass, drank off another half inch. 'He came to me one day last week at the office. Said he'd been doing some work for Mr Logan, didn't want to see us get involved in a lot of ugly accusations.'

Freeman chuckled without mirth. 'We can bring this to the bar, and I'm going to. But I'm sorry, Rich, you go on.'

The expression was apologetic. 'I should have told you, Diz. I just thought it would be easiest to bail out. I'm just so tired of all this.'

'What?'

McNeil sighed from his shoes. 'Fifteen, eighteen years ago, I fucked up, got involved with another woman. My secretary. Stupid, stupid, stupid.' Pure disgust. He sipped wine. 'Anyway, I did it. She got pregnant, had the child. Sally found out. It was awful, but we worked it out. It was awful,' he repeated. 'And the girl, Linda… hell, it wasn't her fault… anyway, I wound up having to let her go, essentially paid her off out of our own savings, got her set up with another job…'

'And now she's blackmailing you?'

McNeil shook his head. 'Not her, Diz. But the main thing Sally and I wanted to do was keep it from the kids, you know. I'd made a mistake and I was paying. Believe me, I was paying. But it wasn't going to ruin our family.'

'And Visser found out about it?'

A nod. 'He must have gone digging around in my old company for dirt on me. There had been rumors, probably some resentment. I left a couple of years afterward, but people remembered. And now…' He shrugged helplessly.

'So Visser threatened to tell your kids and drag Linda and her kid through it if you didn't settle.' Hardy sat back, considering. 'You know, Rich, it's not as though this kind of thing is going to make headlines. You had an affair, you and your wife worked it out, you're sorry.'

McNeil looked across the table. 'I know. That's what David was saying, too. It was just that after all this time, hearing it from Visser, knowing the kind of person Manny Gait is, what else he might do… I panicked, I guess.'

'Totally understandable,' Freeman was controlling the moment and this was precisely where he wanted McNeil. 'Anyway, Diz, I suggested that he and Sally just gather the family together – maybe not the grandchildren, but the kids. They should just – simply, honestly, humbly – lay it all out for them.' He poured out his heart across the table. 'They'll understand, Rich, I promise you.'

'You know. I see it now. I think they would.'

'Of course they would.'

McNeil had his hand on his forehead as though rubbing away a headache. He wore his feelings like a billboard – it was all going to work out at last. Finally he looked up. 'So both of you guys, you think I should just wait?'

'A few weeks, that's all,' Freeman said.

Hardy added, 'You can always settle. It never has to get to the criminal trial.'

'That I really don't want. I'd sell the building before that.'

'That's the right decision,' Freeman said forcefully. 'Nobody could blame you. But let's not breathe a word of it until when… let's say March first? Three weeks. How's that sound?'

McNeil gave the decision its due, then nodded. 'I can do that.'

Images, smells, feelings were beginning to break through the fog. Cole didn't remember the last time he'd felt any kind of hunger except the craving for g. But after this morning's meeting with his hard-ass lawyer, they took him back to his cell and he realized he was ravenous. He'd gotten his pill from the orderly, then had his four slices of white bread, glass of milk, orange juice, two sausages, two eggs for breakfast only three hours before, but now he was counting the minutes until eleven thirty, when they'd bring up lunch.

As a capital murder defendant, he was still separated from the general population, in a sort of wing with six cells, three on each side of a ten by twenty foot common area which they were rarely permitted to use. He was in front right, with only one 'neighbor'. Cole didn't know his name. He thought of him as Jose, a tattooed rail of Mexican steel who spent all of his time doing push-ups, then watching the public television which was left on sixteen hours a day above the common area in the center of the pod of cells.

There was some game show on now, and he stood at the bars for one of the segments between commercials, then gave that up. Jose was doing push-ups again, and Cole watched him for a while before deciding that this wouldn't be the worst way to spend some time. He dropped himself and ripped off ten before it got a little difficult. By twenty he was done, his biceps and chest muscles, such as they were, screaming at the exertion. He looked over and Jose was still methodically pumping, his head craned up to the side to follow the TV.

Cole lay on the cold concrete, catching his breath. Loathing what he'd become.

It didn't even feel like a memory. He could close his eyes and recall it perfectly, the sense that he was sixteen -yesterday – he and Steve Polacek in his garage, their huge twenty dollar bet over who'd be the first to press his weight. A hundred thirty-one pounds, that was Cole. Polacek was seven pounds heavier, wanted a handicap.

For a while, he remembered, their warm-up had been fifty push-ups. Fifty! He couldn't bring back who'd won the bet -if either of them had ever made it to their weight. Probably both – that was the way they were back then.

But he remembered the garage. They never parked cars in it, not even in the winter. Just his dad's tools on the wall, the workbench, the ping-pong table in the middle. Bikes and skates, skis and balls and sports equipment all over the place. Pretty good jock family up till his dad died. His sister Dorothy training with him that whole last summer she was home before she went to college. They were going to ski cross-country from Des Moines to Iowa City when she came back on Christmas break.

Cole lifted his cheek off the floor, pulled his arms up to beside his shoulders, pushed. This time, even the first few were hard. Eight.

Turning onto his side, he sat up, then pulled his mattress off its concrete pad, onto the floor. He rolled onto it, hooked his hands behind his head, tried a sit-up. Once upon a time he could really do sit-ups – sixty in a minute. Polacek couldn't touch him.

Again he started fast. Again he faded quickly, but he forced himself through fifteen and on to twenty. He wasn't going to accept less than twenty, although the last couple felt like they ripped something inside him. But he got to it, turned on his side away from Jose, gulped for breath, closed his eyes.

The clang of the outer door to the common room jolted him up. Cole had dozed through the twenty minutes that inmates were allowed out into the common room every morning. Two guards with the trolley holding the lunches banged again on the outer door. 'Back in your rooms, girls!'

When everyone was back where they belonged, the guard entered his code into the box outside and all the cell bolts slammed into place. Seeing the mattress on the floor with Cole cross-legged now on it, the guard distributing the trays couldn't resist a little moment of clever repartee. 'Having a picnic, Alice?' he asked. 'Nice day for it.' He slid the tray under the door.

Cole barely heard and didn't care.

Eric was the social worker who passed out the pills -he stopped at the door. This was the first dose Cole had told him he was going to miss – he'd get his usual come dinnertime again – and Eric wanted to check to make sure Cole was comfortable with the idea. He was.

Then, finally, the food. If Cole thought he'd felt a jab of hunger before, it was nothing compared to now, with another of the jail's full-fledged meals actually in front of him. All the meals he'd had so far included four slices of white bread and four pats of butter. The butter was soft, warm, and he smeared one of the pats onto a piece of the bread, folded it over, and put it all, whole, into his mouth. While he chewed, he looked down at the tray. Today, lunch was two thick slabs of meatloaf with gravy, mixed peas and carrots, mashed potatoes and more gravy, canned peaches in a plastic bowl, milk and two chocolate chip cookies.