“The easy thing to do, the right thing, would have been to seek out Mrs. Gallant and pay her. Just a good wholesale price might have made all the difference in her life. But you didn’t do that; you were afraid to admit you had those books because that would put them all at risk. For once in your life you went against your own sense of decency and what’s right. You and Archer decided not to tell anyone. The books were legally yours, you didn’t have to pay the old woman or anyone else. But if you had, if you’d just been as fair to the old woman as you were with Archer, maybe none of this would’ve happened. Instead you decided to keep quiet, take no chances. Just keep quiet and she’d go away, fade into the woodwork, die or whatever.
“You should’ve paid that old woman, Lee. I know that’s what your instinct would have been, pay her and get this blot out of your life. But then time passed and that window of opportunity closed. You became a judge, then a prominent judge. The real point of no return was your interview with Reagan. By then you’d have been glad to get rid of all the books, just give them away. They were like a millstone around your neck when the president began considering you for the Supreme Court. That’s your motive, Lee. You’d do anything for a chance at that appointment, and even a small scandal, even something like this where you were legally right, would be enough to kill that possibility dead in the water.”
I finished off my drink.
“Lee?” It was Erin, and her tone begged him to deny it. “Tell him he’s crazy.”
“He can’t,” I said.
“I didn’t kill her,” Lee said. “I didn’t kill her.”
Then he said, “She just…died.”
“Oh my God.” Erin sank to the sofa. “Oh my God.”
“Erin, Cliff, listen to me,” Lee said. “I didn’t kill anybody. I went over to see her. I shouldn’t have, I know that. But I was so certain I could get the book away from her. I knew they were poor, you told me that, and people will sell out anyone if you pay them enough. I thought if I paid her enough she could tell you she lost it. My God, I don’t know what I was thinking. I was only there a few minutes. But something went wrong…she felt threatened by something I said…Jesus, it was nothing, just a veiled threat, what might happen if she told anybody I had been there. I had no intention to hurt her or her husband, but she got frightened. I tried to hush her— Please, I said, PLEASE! She started to scream and then everything unraveled. I picked up the pillow—not to smother her, for Christ’s sake, just to shut her up till I could talk sense to her. Christ knows I had no reason to kill her. All I wanted then was to get her quiet and get out of there. You’ve got to believe that!”
“I do believe it, Lee,” I said. “I just wish it had turned out that way.”
“I tried to reason with her. I told her just to forget I was there— she could keep the book, keep the book and the money, she could keep all the money, I didn’t care about it then. I tried to shove money at her…”
“And left some of it tangled in her bedclothes. The cops have those bills, Lee.”
“I wanted to do what was right. That’s all I ever wanted. I argued with Hal from the start. We needed to find that old woman and pay her something, a substantial amount that would erase that blot from our lives. Ask Hal, he’ll tell you what I tried to do.”
I put down my empty glass and went to the door. Somewhere behind me I heard Lee saying, “This was no crime, Cliff. This was an accident. It was an accident, I swear. There was no evil intent. You know I couldn’t do that. I could never kill anyone.”
I touched the door.
“Cliff, please…I’ll make her husband a wealthy man.”
I turned and said, “You took away all he ever wanted.”
“I’ll make it right, I swear.”
“You can’t.”
“I can! No one needs to know about this.”
“Yeah, they do. I’m sorry, Lee. You’ll never know how sorry I am.”
“Erin. You talk to him. Talk to him! This doesn’t have to go anywhere.”
I looked at Erin, who sat numbly with streams of tears on her cheeks.
“Good-bye, Lee,” I said.
I walked out. A moment later I heard Koko running along the sidewalk behind me.
“Under the circumstances, I’d rather stay with you tonight. If you’ve got room for me.”
I put an arm over her shoulder. “I’ll always have room for you, Koke.”
Sometime before dawn that same morning, Lee Huxley locked himself in the garage and sat with his motor running until he died. That’s how it ended.
For two days he was front-page news and a hot topic for talk radio. All the yakkers sounded off, speculation ran wild: Denver was treated to the usual tasteless nonsense from vacuous morons with too much time on their hands. Give an idiot a microphone and he’s just a louder version of the same old idiot.
There were a few high spots. To his colleagues Lee was the best and the brightest, a man who weighed every judgment and always strove mightily to do the right thing. Judge Arlene Weston was interviewed and said good things. He was such a fine man, so cultured and well liked. No one could have imagined that he’d do this to himself. It only proved that even a great poet like John Donne could be wrong. Every man is indeed an island, and deep personal torments can coexist with all the ingredients of a happy life.
A rumor leaked out that the president had been interested in Lee as a possible Supreme Court Justice, and the yakkers ran with disappointment as a possible motive. The White House had no comment. Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater confirmed that Lee had had two meetings with Mr. Reagan, but nothing was revealed of what might have been said or how serious Reagan’s interest might have been.
His service was mobbed. The entire legal community turned out: the church overflowed, people stood in the street and then swarmed across the graveyard, and the procession from one to the other tied up traffic for twenty blocks.
I watched it on television with Koko. Lee was buried in Crown Hill Cemetery and instantly became a fading memory.
How quickly even a prominent man is forgotten.
On Saturday after the funeral a car stopped in front of my store. I cringed when Miranda leaped out. Twenty people were in the store but she saw only me. She flung open the door, screaming, “You BASTARD! You fucking bastard, I hate you, I wish I’d never set eyes on you, I hope you die!” She charged across the room and beat at me with her fists until she collapsed.
Apparently Lee had left her a note. I can only imagine what was in it.
A week later I got a vicious letter. If she could kill me she would happily do it. At the end she said, “You will never see that book again. I burned it.”
Who knows if she actually did that? Miranda always had a deep interest in money, she must have had at least some idea of the book’s value, but I have a dark, hollow feeling about it. I think of those books and all that handwritten correspondence, and sometimes I wonder where Lee kept those signed copies and if Miranda might be angry enough to destroy them all. The irony that she may have burned Richard’s journal a hundred years after Isabel burned his papers gives me a headache.
The real story still hasn’t come out. Maybe in his despair that’s what Lee was hoping: that at least I would leave him his good name. From what I could tell, Whiteside wasn’t going anywhere with Denise’s death: it had slipped off his front burner as new murders occurred. I knew Lee must have left some evidence in that room— after all, what did he know about covering up a crime, especially in the heat of the moment?—but a cop doesn’t just ask for random hair samples or fingerprints from a prominent jurist who has no obvious connection to the deceased. If Whiteside had a name, a reason to be suspicious, he could close this case in a few hours. If Denise had been one of Denver’s so-called important people, he might be forced to consider the unthinkable, but that’s not likely to happen now. It remains one of those cases without a probable perp, and Ralston is still the only suspect.