minutes later. That makes you the only one who could have known exactly where he was going, arid
when.”
“Now how would I have known that?” he demanded.
“When you talked to Raines, you must have told him to come here, not to your condo. You knew he‟d
walk straight across the park. All you had to do was go down and wait for him.”
His eyes were beginning to bob like fishing corks on the sea. His white shirt front was stained dark
gray with sweat. He jumped
“Christ, I think you‟re serious,” he said angrily.
“Deadly so,” I said.
“You‟re out of your mind, Kilmer,” he snarled. “My God, talk about trying to prove a preconceived
notion! Barring the fact that I couldn‟t have done it, what reason would I have had for killing by best
friend? A disagreement over an error in judgment? Don‟t be ridiculous.”
I could have given him a lot of stereotyped reasons—greed, power, fear of Raines—-hut they would
have been simple answers. They didn‟t cover the abstractions.
He sat back down, put his feet on his desk, and glared at me over the end of his cigar.
“Well?” he challenged.
“Let‟s forget the obvious and deal with the abstractions,” I said.
“What the hell do you mean, abstractions?” he said.
“Look, I understand you, Donleavy,” I said. “There was a time when I could‟ve been in the same boat,
doing things the way I was told to do them, or expected to do them, running the show in the same old
ways, with an occasional pat on the head. I also know that in the end I would have had to make a
name for myself, to prove I was worth the trust, that I wasn‟t just somebody‟s lover or best friend.
„The thing is, you were smarter than I was. You had it figured out from the beginning. You knew the
power was given and you knew it could be taken away. I learned that lesson the hard way. Hell, I
never did know the rules.
“You were given the power, the day-.to-day business of running Findley Enterprises. You got it from
Raines, who got it from Chief, and you ran it the way it was always run, the way the Findleys had run
things since Oglethorpe was governor. But sooner or later, Donleavy, you had to prove your value,
not only to everyone else, but to yourself. You had to prove you weren‟t a sycophant, just another
jock with a rich friend. And not just any rich friend. Harry Raines lived by the rules. He managed the
Findley businesses brilliantly, got himself elected state senator, moved a mountain by swaying public
opinion in favour of the pari-mutuel laws, and looked like a shoo-in to be the next governor. A tough
act to follow. You had to show Dunetown that Sam Donleavy could move a mountain or two
himself.”
“Big deal,” Donleavy snapped. “Since when is ambition a crime?”
“There‟s nothing wrong with ambition,” I said. “It‟s all in how you handle it.”
“And just what do you know about how I handle things?”
“I know that Raines was a clone of the old guard. I think when the opportunity presented itself, you
saw yourself as a harbinger of the new. Dunetown was growing, and suddenly you had a chance to
revitalize the town—before the track was even finished. After all, tourist trade was booming; the city
was growing faster than flies in a dung heap. What you needed was to pump fresh money into the
system that had been passing the same old tired bucks back and forth for centuries. Then a windfall
blew your way. A chance to develop the beach with new hotels, condos on the waterfront,
subdivisions in the swamplands. Dunetown to Boomtown, courtesy of Sam Donleavy.
“Except the dream turned into a nightmare. Dunetown became Doomstown, because the opportunity
was spelled T-a-g-l-i-a-n-i. “You‟re ploughing old ground,” he snapped, culling off the sentence.
I ignored him and kept ploughing.
“And when you found out you were in bed with La Cosa Nostra, you had to make one helluva
decision. Tell Raines? Risk his wrath? Or ride it out? What did you have to lose? Tagliani was
reclusive, his people were running legitimate businesses, everything was coming up sevens for you, so
why rock the boat, right, Sam?”
He hadn‟t moved. He was twisting the cheroot between his lips, staring straight into my eyes.
“So far, nothing you‟ve said is incriminating, immoral, or illegal,” he said.
“Right. But you forgot one thing—the Golden Rule of Findley. They didn‟t give a doodly-shit
whether it was immoral, illegal, incriminating, irregular, or anything else. „The unwritten rule of
Findley was that Harry was going to be the next governor and your job was to cover his ass, not
grease your own. You fucked up, Sam. When you made your deal with Tagliani, you jeopardized
Harry Raines‟ political career and padded your own, and that was an error Raines would never
forgive. It was imperative that Tagliani‟s real identity be protected, not for him, but for you. You
needed to keep that power until you established your own power base. Then the war with the
Taglianis broke out and you ran out of time. Like I said, the power is given and the power is taken
away.”
“Nobody has taken anything away from me!” he said, rising up as though he had grown an inch.
It was time to go for the jugular.
“That‟s a lie,” I said. “You committed the big sin. You betrayed Raines‟ trust. He knew Seaborn was
too naive to get as deeply involved as he was on his own, and he really didn‟t have any hold over
Seaborn, anyway. But you? You he had by the short hairs. Harry was the only person in the world
who could destroy you, and he was going to do it. It wasn‟t the killer who said You‟re finished‟ to
Harry Raines down there iii the fog; it was Harry Raines, saying it to you. So you shot him.”
His expression didn‟t change. He blew a thin stream of blue smoke out into the room and watched it
swirl away in the breeze from the windows, and then he laughed in my face.
“Nobody‟ll believe that hot air,” he sneered. “You couldn‟t get that story into small claims court if
you had Clarence Darrow, John Marshall, and Oliver Wendell Holmes on your side.”
I ignored him. I said, “The irony of all this is that Raines might still be alive if it weren‟t for a horse
with a game leg and his croaked owner. It was the death of the horse, the shock of learning that a race
had been fixed and Tagliani knew it, that woke Raines
up.
The phone gave me a breather. Its buzzer startled Donleavy. He snatched it up, said, “Hello,” paused,
and then handed the receiver to me.
“Kilmer,” I said.
It was the Stick. “You were right,” he said. “I dialled the other number.”
“Any other news?”
“Not yet. Baker‟s doing his best. You want me to come up now?”
“That sounds good, thanks,” I said. I gave the phone back to Donleavy.
“Now that your course in Psych 101 is over,” Donleavy said, slamming down the phone, “maybe you‟
-l like to tell me how I‟m supposed to have gotten here from Sea Oat. Did Peter Pan fly me over?”
“You never went home,” I said. “You came straight here from the Thomas cocktail party.”
I took out the card he had given me he night before, the one with his home phone number on it, and
picked up the phone.
One of the dozen or so yellow lights on its base lit up as I dialled the number. When it started to ring,
the light beside it gleamed.
He stared down at it dumbly.
“Pick it up,”! said.
He hesitated for a moment and then lifted the phone.
“It‟s called call-forwarding,” I said, the - two of us staring at each other across the desk. “Courtesy of