Guilt

Pleading a headache, she'd gone into her apartment alone, said she'd call him when she felt better.

Which wasn't Sunday. Then on Monday he'd flown to LA and stayed overnight. She'd been out both nights, studying. She'd come home and listened to his petulant messages and it all got clearer.

Now, Wednesday morning, she stood at his office door. He was, as always, hip-deep in work. Ear stuck to his telephone, he was signing something and reading something else, passing paper to his secretary, who hovered beside him with a notepad and an expression of exasperated fear.

Yep, Christina thought, Joe is going to make it.

Fate sealed the decision. At that moment Joe reasonably spoke into the telephone: 'I don't think you've got all your ducks lined up, Bill, and that's the plain fact of it.'

She came forward into the room. Seeing her, Joe held up one finger, pointed at the phone and smiled as though she were a client he'd been expecting. He mouthed, 'Be right there.'

She sadly shook her head and put the envelope containing the ring and her letter on his desk. Patting it once, she turned and walked out.

'I feel like a coward, just running out like that. I should have faced him.'

'And said what?'

'I don't know. Told him.'

'Would he have listened?'

'Maybe to the fact that I was leaving him. Maybe that.' She looked out at the whitecaps pocking the blue bay, sailboats half-keeled in the breeze, San Francisco in the distance, the Golden Gate beyond the Sausalito curve to her right. At Sam's expression, she laughed. 'No, you're right. Not even to that. And that look isn't fair.'

'What look? And I didn't say anything.'

'You know what look. And you didn't have to.'

They were at Scoma's, having taken the ferry to Sausalito. Sam had two experienced volunteers working at the Center and decided she could afford a few hours off. For her part, Christina, after leaving her envelope, had been tempted to go to Dooher's office and tell him about it, but thought it would smack of leading him on, which she flatly wasn't going to do.

To what end? He'd made it clear he was married, not interested in her in that way. And what a relief, really, though she did think he was terrific.

She sometimes thought every other man on the planet was incapable of seeing who she was inside. But not Mark. He simply liked her, who she was. It was a joy.

She was aware, however, that her decision to break off with Joe had come about because she'd been unable to avoid contrasting the younger man to Dooher, with his heady mix of physical good looks, substance, experience, power, and humor. She decided that her growing friendship with him would be the litmus test for the kind of relationship she would eventually… not settle for, as she had with Joe. But settle on. Someone of Dooher's quality, if he could be found at all. It might take a while.

But that was the other thing, the other wonderful result of this friendship with Mark Dooher – if some other man didn't come along to validate who she was, it didn't have to be the end of the world.

She was trying to explain this to Sam. 'I don't know why it took me so long to realize. Sometimes I think about the only man who's ever liked me for me, besides my dad, is Mark.'

Sam, mopping up the perfect Dore sauce with the perfect piece of fresh sourdough bread, was matter-of-fact. 'It's the curse of fabulous beauty.' She raised her eyes. 'I'm serious.'

Christina knew better than to flutter her lids with false modesty. 'Well. But now at least I'm getting a glimpse that maybe I'm worth something by myself.'

'As opposed to?'

'I don't know. The lesser half of some guy I happen to be with?'

'The trophy?'

Christina nodded. 'On some level it's flattering. Or something. So I let it happen -I become the person they want me to be.'

'It's tempting, that's why. It is flattering. It's also what everybody's always taught you. You want to please. You're hard-wired for it. So it gets internalized.' Sam mopped more sauce. 'I cannot make a sauce this good at home. How do they do this?' She took the bite, chewed a moment, sighed. 'It's one of the hard truths.'

'The sauce?'

Sam laughed, shook her head. 'What sauce?' Another laugh. 'I'm all over the place, aren't I? No, the hard truth about who we are. I went through the same thing about ten years ago.'

'I think you've lost me. What same thing?'

'This decision that I wasn't what some man thought I was.'

'And you did it, just like that?'

'No.' Smiling again, she held up a finger. 'But I tried. I acted that way for all the world to see. Got my heart broke four or five times. Got bitter and cynical about men. But I did get better about me. I think. Eventually.'

Christina nodded. 'Well, I'm not going back. Not the same way. Not to another Joe.'

'Good. Hold on to that feeling. You're going to need it when it's been six months. You get a little lonesome. Trust me on this.'

'I think I can handle lonesome. I've done lonesome before. The difference was that lonely was always clearly the time between one guy and the next guy. Now, I think I'll cultivate some friendships.'

'Friendships are good,' Sam said. 'As long as you don't get confused.'

'You mean Mark Dooher?' Christina shook her head. 'No. He's not like that.'

Sam raised an eyebrow. 'He's not a sexual creature?'

'No.' She laughed. 'He exudes… confidence that way, I suppose. But he's married. He's happy. He's got it in balance. He's never come on to me in any way. In fact, more the opposite. Hands off. Be a person first. It's great, actually.'

'I've got to meet this guy. Wes thinks he's God, too.'

'Speaking of…'

'God – or Wes?'

Christina nodded. 'MrFarrell.'

'I'm afraid I let lonesome get the better of me and pursued him a little more, uh, recklessly than I would have liked. Now I like to think we're moving cautiously toward friendship, but we've got a ways to go before we get beyond superficial.'

'Which isn't so bad, is it?'

Sam shrugged. 'I don't really know. That's the funny thing. It makes me a little nervous – what we've been talking about all day here. There's no way I'm investing any of this,' she tapped her heart, 'until I know him better.'

'Until you know it's real.'

Sam's face was a kaleidoscope of emotions. She nodded sheepishly. 'That's always the question, isn't it?'

Glitsky really hated it when he talked himself out of a plausible murder suspect, and that's exactly what his two talks – the one with his wife and the other with Paul Thieu – had accomplished.

Not only did he lack any physical evidence pointing to Mark Dooher as Victor Trang's killer, but – as he had told Flo – there was no reasonable way that a successful corporate lawyer was going to stab another lawyer to death over the terms of a possible settlement. That solution, much as he would love it if it did, just didn't scan.

So he was going to have to get another approach, and to that end he had dropped in on Paul Thieu in Missing Persons and asked him to call Felicia Diep and set up an appointment for some time, if possible, before afternoon tea.

In the meanwhile, Glitsky went upstairs to Homicide.

The room looked as it always did – a large open area with twelve desks, no more than three of them occupied at any one time; the doorless corner cubicle 'office' of the Chief of Homicide, Lieutenant Frank Batiste; two massive dry wall columns papered, stuck and tagged with every poster, fax, ammo sale notice, car repo slip, random prostitute's phone number – and so on – that had crossed some Inspector's desk in the past four years or so and which, at the time, had seemed too important, funny, or unusual to simply discard in a waste basket.

Glitsky's desk was next to one of these columns. He pulled his chair in, crossed his arms behind his head, and put his feet up. His eyes came to rest on the Xeroxed note at his eye leveclass="underline" Don't let your mouth write a check your ass can't cash.