“Just got to even things up a little.”
She smiled at Rainey and told him she was glad to meet him, and then she went on into the house with the small girl. Rainey had finished his beer. He set the can beside the empty can Hodge had left. He knew he could say, as Hodge had said, “I got to be getting home.” And he knew he could not say it. He knew this was a turning point. He knew it was important, without knowing what would happen.
The trowel clinked on stone. Rainey stood by the wall, looking down at the man, at sweat beads on the balding head.
“Don’t you know who I am, Canelli?”
He saw the thick hand lay the trowel down. Canelli straightened up slowly. He was no longer homeowner, terrace builder, neighbor. He stood up, and his face was quite still and he was all cop.
“I had a feeling about you. Who are you?”
“Rainey.”
There was no change of expression. Canelli moved one foot slowly, getting more firmly planted. “Why did you come here? I heard you were out. I remembered what you yelled at me in court. Most of them do. It doesn’t mean a thing.”
“Doesn’t it?”
“All you get here is trouble. All kinds of trouble.”
“You gave me trouble. You gave me five years of it.”
“You gave that to yourself, Rainey. I didn’t give it to you.” Canelli had more confidence. The jocular, patronizing confidence of the working cop.
“Now you change, Canelli. As Jones, I was okay. As Rainey, I stink.”
“You’re a con. I don’t want cons around my home. I don’t want any losers around here where the wife and kids are. I’m going to take you in and book you.”
“For what?”
“Trespass, and anything else I can think of.”
“Will you listen to me?”
“Why should I?”
“Because I could have finished my beer and walked away, and that would have been the end of it. So you ought to want to know why I opened my mouth.”
There was a flicker of uncertainty in Canelli’s eyes. “What do you want to talk about? There’s nothing you can tell me.”
“It’s something I want to ask you.”
“What?”
“I want to know why you lied. I wanted to find you here alone. I wanted to hammer the truth out of you. It didn’t break that way. So I’m asking you. You took five years out of my life. You did it just so you could look better.”
Canelli stared at him. “Are you nuts?”
“I nearly went crazy the first few I months up there. It was close, but I didn’t. I thought about you for five years. I kept wondering how one man could do that to another man.”
“I caught you with the meat in your mouth. I fired before you did. What’s all this about lying?”
“Look. There’s just the two of us here. No witnesses. I can’t prove anything one way or another. Just tell me you lied and tell me why you thought you had to.”
“Brother, you may think you didn’t go crazy up there.”
Rainey looked at him, sensed the contempt, sensed the absolute and brutal honesty of the man, and saw how it had been with him. A man too keyed up to hear Rainey’s first faltering words of explanation, too keyed up to see anything other than the gun, believing later it had been pointed at him. And he could not reach Canelli.
Suddenly Rainey was very tired. “I can’t say anything to you, Canelli. There’s no point in pleading my innocence any more. Nobody is ever going to really believe it except me and my wife. I was tried, convicted, sentenced. I’ve served time. I can’t reopen the case. Do what you want with me. All I can tell you is this.” He leaned closer to Canelli, and he spaced each word. “I’ve never stolen anything in my life.”
“But I caught you there with—”
“I know. With a gun and a pocketful of loot. What difference does it make? Nobody can ever tell you different. My story was true. I thought you lied. I guess you didn’t. I guess you believed what you said on the stand. It was the only chance I had.”
“Why didn’t you go away from here and catch me alone some other time? That was you on the phone, wasn’t it?”
“I don’t know. I watched you work. I saw your wife and kids. I got a good look at the way you are under all that rough-cop manner. I thought you might give me a break. I thought it might not hurt you now with the police because it happened five years ago. It was a mistake, I guess.”
Canelli took out a handkerchief and mopped his face slowly. He shoved the handkerchief back in his pocket. He said slowly. “You get so you think in terms of angles. So what’s your angle in coming here? I’m not asking you. I’m trying to think. The only way it can work out is if it did all happen like you said. But I don’t want to think that. If I think that, it means I was wrong and you were right. I don’t want to think that. But I keep remembering I was pretty tensed up. I ran ahead of my partner because I was so damn scared. I had to run fast, because if I slowed down I wouldn’t have gone in there at all. I swear you aimed that gun at me.” He looked at Rainey.
“I was setting it on the countertop.”
“It’s... No, I can’t go along with that.”
“How about this, then. I needed money. That was shown in court. Okay, I’m not stupid. If I had decided to get money dishonestly, I had an easier way to get it.”
“How?”
“Fake a holdup of my own station some night. Hide the cash and get a refund from the insurance. It’s been done before. But I wouldn’t do that. Not Rainey. Not the honest man. I just go to jail for five years for walking home.”
Canelli went over and sat on the wall and mopped his face again. “I’ve wondered about some of the others sometimes. It’s a bad thing to think about, sending a guy up if he’s innocent. But I never thought it about you. That one was open and shut.”
“And the one where it happened. The one time it happened just that way.”
Canelli looked at him with sudden anger. “Go home, will you? Go on home. Get away from me.”
Just before Rainey ducked under the trees, he looked back. Canelli was still sitting on the low wall. The three beer cans glinted in the sun. The trowel lay where Canelli had set it down.
Rainey went back to the apartment. Mary was in the one comfortable chair. She looked up as he came in.
“It’s okay,” he said harshly. “It’s okay. Don’t look at me like that.”
He pulled the bed down out of the wall and stretched out. She did not move from the chair. Somebody near by was listening to the Sunday Philharmonic. It made him think of the five years’ worth of Sundays in prison.
He did not know how long it was before he called her over. He pulled her down and put one arm around her. She felt rigid under his arm, alien and apart.
It was important to explain it to her. The words did not come easily. “Things... happen to people. Being alive means things happen to you. There was a friend of my dad’s. A girder swung and hit him. He was out for nearly two years. They fed him with tubes. They kept him alive. After a long time, he came out of it, and it was another year before he was up and around. So who could he blame? Somebody gets polio. They live in an iron lung for years. So who put them there?
“I don’t know how to say it. I had to blame somebody. It’s hard. I’ve got to start thinking that it was just... a thing that happened to me. People get worse things. I’m not being Pollyanna. It happened, and I’ve got to live with it. That’s all. There isn’t anybody to blame. Not even myself for being stupid. I’m alive. I’ve got you. I’ve got to stop poisoning what I’ve got left. I saw Canelli. He didn’t lie. I can’t beat him up and march him up to God and twist his arm until he confesses. I’ve got to live the best way I can.”