I took the playbills from my coat and handed them to him. He took them over to the candelabra and held them up to the light. A smile brightened his face. Even with his disguise you could suddenly see that he was Stephen Wade. He looked much younger.
The first playbill he waved at me showed the three of them together. “We were really brats back then. Even Sylvia. Really filled with ourselves. Did you ever see the Truffaut film Jules and Jim? You know, the two men who love the same woman? We saw that and took it deadly seriously. We were inseparable after it — the film gave us permission, I guess.” He shook his head. “Then David started going on the road.” He held up the other playbill. “It sure didn’t do Sylvia any good. Hell, it didn’t do him any good, either.”
“Where did he go on the road?”
He shrugged. “Oh, those were the days when packaged tours were still big, when a fading movie star could get lot of money to put a musical together and play the smaller markets. They were a real grind, and I never knew anybody who really got anywhere doing them. But David wanted to be a successful actor more desperately than anybody I’ve ever known. So he’d go on these long tours and Sylvia would come apart. I’ll give him one thing, though. He changed after Evelyn was born. He’s been a hell of a good father to her. He gave up his acting ambitions and has been a damn good husband and a damn good father.” He handed me back the playbills. “That’s a lot of years ago.” There was awe in his voice. Contemplating time does that to us.
“I need you to think about something. Hard.”
“What?”
“Sylvia.”
“What about her?”
“Can you remember her ever getting violent again?”
He stared at me through the flickering shadows. “God, are you trying to say you think Sylvia stabbed Reeves?”
“It’s a possibility. A neighbor saw her there the night of the killing.”
“Saw Sylvia?”
“Yes.”
“God.” He went over and sat down again in the chair. He put his head in his hands and then he broke. He didn’t cry exactly. It would have been better if he had. “It’s all so goddamn crazy, Dwyer. I’m scared and confused and—” He paused. “Dwyer, there’s some communion wine over there. It’s still in the bottle so it hasn’t been blessed. I need some, Dwyer. I’m not kidding you. I’m getting hot and cold flashes and my stomach’s going to shit. I’ll beg you if you want me to, Dwyer. I’ll goddamn beg you, I promise.”
“Dwyer,” Donna said softly.
“Where is it?” I said.
“In that top cupboard.”
I went and got it and brought it back. It was a quart of grape wine made by monks in Vermont.
He started shaking then, just as he reached for it, and then he did start crying. I unscrewed the cap for him.
He drank. For a long minute he didn’t seem to be aware of either of us.
“I’m going to see the priest,” I said to Donna.
She nodded and went over and knelt by Wade and started gently stroking his sleeve.
The priest was still at the communion rail, praying. In the red and green and yellow votive lights he looked like a Christmas-card priest. He crossed himself and stood up. “You’re his friend. You know what we should do,” he said.
“I know.”
“He’s in sad and sorry shape. He shouldn’t be running.”
“Is there a phone I could use, Father?”
He led me out of the church and across an open stone courtyard to the rectory. The rain hit us cold and hard for maybe thirty seconds. It made a lot of noise in the metal drainspouts. My feet got soaked in the puddles. The rectory smelled of a roast-beef dinner from earlier in the night. I used a phone by a hall closet filled with yellow dust mops scented with sweet polish. I called Edelman and told him what was going on. I must have said ten times at least, “Just be easy with him, Edelman. Just be easy with him.” When I was finished I turned back to the priest and said, “Now I know how Judas felt.”
“Now don’t be getting melodramatic the way he always does, Dwyer. It’s a curse we Irish suffer from. You may be saving his life and none of this has a damn thing to do with Judas Iscariot, if you’ll pardon my French.”
I laughed. Wade was right: he was a sweet old guy. We went back out into the rain and the puddles and the tinny sound of the drainspouts.
In the sacristy, Wade was still in his chair and Donna was still kneeling next to him. I went into the shadowy light and stood in front of him and said, “I have to tell you something.”
He opened his eyes and looked up. “I know what you’re going to say.”
“You can believe it or not, but I did it for your sake.”
“I know. I can’t run anymore, anyway, Dwyer. I’m too goddamned tired.” He saw the priest behind me. “Sorry, Father.”
Donna said, “Is there anybody you want us to call, Stephen?”
This time he did break and he broke all the way. “That’s the irony,” he said, crying. “Every friend I’ve got in the world is right here in this room.”
Edelman did it the way I asked him. Two cars came, one with Edelman, the other with two uniformed officers.
Edelman came into the sacristy, doffing his hat when he saw the priest. He nodded to me and Donna and then went over and stood beside Wade.
“They’re not going to hurt you, Mr. Wade,” he said, nodding to the two uniformed cops who stood nearby in yellow slickers, dripping water. The overhead lights were on now. Everything looked too real and harsh. Wade took off his beard. Theatrical glue stuck to his face like a skin rash. He looked silly and sad. He looked up at the priest and said, “Would you give me a rosary, Father?”
The priest reached in his pocket and handed Wade a circle of black beads. “I’ll be praying for you, Stephen.”
For the first time Wade, his eyes red from tears, laughed. He looked at the two uniformed cops and said, “Good, Father, because I’ve got a feeling I’m going to need it.”
Edelman nodded to me. Then they took Stephen Wade away.
17
As we pulled up in front of the Bridges Theater, Donna said, “Isn’t it kind of late?”
“I guess right now I don’t much give a damn.”
Between us on the seat lay Lockhart’s wallet. It was a cheap brown cardboard thing. Some of his blood was on the fold.
She covered my hand with hers. “It wasn’t your fault, Dwyer. C’mon, now.”
“I should open the damn thing and look inside. But—” I looked down at it. “I can’t touch it. It’s like having some sort of phobia.”
“You want me to do it?”
“I shouldn’t have stepped on his hand so hard.”
She didn’t say anything.
“I shouldn’t have, should I?”
She sighed. In a tiny voice, she said, “No, I guess you shouldn’t have.”
Then I couldn’t say anything.
“I wish you hadn’t asked me that, Dwyer, because I love you so damn much, but I don’t want to lie, either.”
“I know.”
“But it wasn’t your fault he died. I mean, you didn’t push him out into the street.”
“Yeah.”
“Here, I’ll open it.” She picked up the wallet. She got blood on her hands right away. She looked at me. Then she took Kleenex from a box in the glove compartment and said, “It wasn’t your fault, Dwyer. Do you understand?”
She opened the billfold and thumbed through everything. She found a ten and four singles. A picture of Lockhart and a plump girl in a bikini on a summer beach. A Milwaukee Brewers baseball schedule. A Trojan. She held the rubber up to the light and said, “God, that’s really classy.”