A change of gravity

TWELVE

"I doubt Larry Lane'd recognize the clerk's job you described to me,"

Hilliard said in the High Street office, a week deeper into the spring of '66. "If he did, he'd never admit it. My guess is he'd tell you he's never seen one like it in Canterbury. Mere suggestion'd give him palpitations."

"He's making trouble?" Merrion said. "Who's he think he is, chief clerk or something?"

"I haven't talked to him directly," Hilliard said. "I saw Chassy Spring at the spring Hampden County Bar Association hoedown over at the old Worthy. I thought it might be a good chance to sort of sound him out about having you come in. He was not enthusiastic. He said he wouldn't stand in the way if I told him that's what I wanted, but he also said Lane hasn't given him any indication his two-man staffs overworked."

"There's a job open, though," Merrion said. "Like I said: I already checked that out, long time ago. Canterbury's authorized for three, three assistant clerks, Chapter Two-eighteen, Section Ten. There's only two there now, two assistant clerks so that means they need one more."

"Well," Hilliard said, "I'm not sure that follows. They may have room for one more, but that doesn't mean they need one. Maybe Lane's a thrifty manager, conscientious public servant, saving a dollar or two the taxpayers' money here and there if he can, and he finds he can get by with two assistants. One of whom, incidentally, Spring says Lane doesn't like at all. Some protege of Roy Carnes's; Hammond, I think his name is. But what if we brace Lane and he says two assistants're a quorum? What do we do then?"

"Since when did that ever matter?" Merrion said. "When a chairman on Counties not to mention mine's also on Ways and Means and Judiciary too has a friend and the buddy wants a job and the job he wants is open, when did it ever matter whether anyone else wanted it filled? Even if the guy dragging his feet was the guy in charge the office when did that start to matter?"

"Oh, I couldn't give you the original example," Hilliard said, 'but I can tell you what the situation probably was. The guy in charge didn't want the vacancy filled. From the outside you never know what's going on inside courthouses. The people who're in them think of them as their private domains. Statute may say there's room for someone new, but that'll mean that someone they don't know'll then be learning all their business. Maybe they've got something going on they don't want publicized.

"Or someone in the courthouse, the judge or the clerk himself, is saving the slot until someone gets out of the army or finishes school.

Or the clerk reaches retirement age, which'll mean the guy he's hand-picked to succeed him'll be free to hire two new assistants. One of them being actually qualified; the other one being the retiring guy's bastard child by the fence-viewer's wife.

"You get the idea: one of the new guys would be someone he could not appoint himself, because it might not've looked right. Might've smacked of nepotism, started no end of loose talk — but if the guy succeeding him's the guy making the appointment, then it'll be perfectly kosher. The incoming chief clerk signs the bastard's paper, in order to get his own job.

"That's very often what the situation is, we find," Hilliard said. "And as soon as the Counties chairman sees that's what it is, the maximum heat he or anybody else outside the governor, of course can put on the guy who's set up the swap drops about fifty degrees. Technically, yeah, the chairman could probably make a demand; plant his feet and say "I want this done and I want it done now, and until it is you get no funding." He could do it once. But he'd be a fool if he did. He'd have to know once he's thrown his weight around like that, he'll never get anything else. He represents a client there, he'll have to wear a bulletproof-vest to make a safe trip to the bathroom.

"People don't like guys who threaten them. You put yourself in a position where you've got to be able to get a guy's job if he doesn't do what you want, you're not going to get many things done. You think you can get a clerk fired if he wont lose a ticket for you? Not likely. And even if you could, there'd still be a limit on how many guys you could get fired before you made enough people mad enough at you to get together and see if they couldn't get you. People rebelling like that, pretty soon you can't get anything done. All you've got're guys chasin' around, rantin' and ravin' all over the place, trying to pay off their grudges. That's counterproductive. You want things to be the way most people like them: everything peaceful, and calm.

"The system depends on nobody's toes getting stepped-on. Everyone gets what he wants. It begins to look like there may not be enough jobs to go so that everyone who wants someone to get one can get taken care of; well then, what we do is get together and we talk. See if maybe we can work something out. Chances are we can see our way clear to agree that the money can be found, if we all look hard enough, and therefore we can go ahead and create a few more of those very popular jobs.

"To be given, of course, only to people who'll be grateful after they get them: don't leave that out. Because in the future there's probably going to be a way for them to express their thanks that they are without makin' a lot of fuckin' noise and commotion about doin' it. By maybe holding a slot for us when two or three open up in their office.

It's more beneficial for everyone that way, everyone getting along."

"Yeah," Merrion said. "Well, okay, but I don't think that's what's going on in the Canterbury court-clerk's office now, that's short one clerk. Judge Spring; you told me once he's got two kids, and both of them're now big high-powered lawyers someplace. One is down in Boston and the other's someplace else?"

"Right," Hilliard said. "One of Chassy's boys, I forget the kid's name now, but I know he's very large in one of the big firms in Boston. The other one, I think, went to New York very high up in the financial world, some outfit that underwrites bonds. Both making about a ton of money; bucks coming in hand over fist."

"So they're outta my picture," Merrion said. "They're not leavin' jobs like that to come back here and take this job I want they're both fryin' much bigger fish."

"That seems about right," Hilliard said. He smiled. "Be interesting to know how Chass really feels about that: both of his kids doing so well. Proud, of course, naturally; you'd assume that. But maybe kind of envious too? That maybe if he'd done something like that himself; gone out into the big world and made a huge mark of his own. Instead he plays it safe and comes back here; practices law, sends out calendars and Christmas cards every year, until the finale, he becomes the judge next town over. This's not what you call your big finish.

Got to ask yourself: Is this guy content? Was this really what he wanted out of life? Maybe; wouldn't've been my choice.

"I think about that. People who catch my attention for some reason, I begin to wonder how they feel about the way their lives turned out. If they think they made the right decisions. How the bad ones hurt them.

How far they've come; how far they could've gotten if they'd been a little smarter, had a little better luck. Are they happy now; or are they disappointed? How I'll feel some day when I'm their age and now I'm the one who's looking back and seeing how my decisions all turned out."

"Well, he's made himself a bunch of money, hasn't he?" Merrion said.

"Didn't you also tell me Chassy plays the market like Chuck Berry plays guitar? That oughta happy him some."

"Oh shit, yes," Hilliard said. "My father's the Spring family dentist.

Taken care of their teeth for years. Made a good many of them in fact;

Spring family's got very weak teeth. They've all needed bridgework and plates. He used to talk, they came in. He knew for a fact that Chassy'd made a huge amount of money, stocks and bonds and so forth.

That didn't bother my father; what did was that the judge never gave him a hot tip."

"Bastard," Merrion said.

"You'd think that, wouldn't you," Hilliard said. "Least the cocksucker could do, knows what stock is going up, is tell the people that he knows, so they could make some money too. Not everybody, no, just people that he sees around a lot like my father, for example, for his teeth. Not advising them, so you'd expect him to be calling them up every day or so and saying: "Psst, buy GM; sell Coca-Cola," anything like that. No, just that he'd at least have the common decency, he knows he's going to see them, like an appointment with my father, let them in on whatever he thinks might be looking especially good.

"Dad said it to him once when he had him in the chair. Said: "Tell me, Chassy, aren't you just the tiniest bit afraid now? Doesn't it make you nervous to be sitting helplessly here in the chair with a bib on, and me standing over you with this high-speed electric drill I'm about to shove into your mouth? I could hurt you with this thing, if I'm not careful. I should think you'd want to do everything within your power to make sure you're in my good graces so I'm going to do my best not to hurt you."

"Dad and Chassy were in high school together. Most of my father's patients're like that: people he's known all his life. So it's okay for him to talk to them that way, and they can talk that way to him.

"The judge opens his eyes he's like most people, my father says, closes his eyes so he can't see the drill or the needle sits up straight in the chair and he asks my father what the hell he's got on his mind. And Dad puts it to him: "People say you make a lot of money in the market.

I believe them. Mind telling me how come you never see your way clear to letting me in on the deal?"

"Judge sits back and closes his eyes again. "Don't mind at all," he says. "I've made some money in the market, as have many. I've also lost some money in the market, as many others have as well. All of my profits have come from investing my own money well, mine and Delia's.

I've risked it to increase it. When my risks have paid off, I've had profits, been happy. And when they haven't, I've had losses. Then I've been unhappy. I always try to buy stocks that are going to go up;

I can't claim I always succeed.

"If I recommend you buy a certain stock, and you do it and make money, you'll be happy. You may even call me up and thank me. But you'll expect to keep the profit as you should; it was your money that you risked. If you lose money, though, as you very well might, then you'll be unhappy. And even though of course I know you wont expect me to make good your loss, you certainly wont call me up and thank me. In fact you'll probably secretly blame me for your loss, because if I hadn't put it into your head to buy that stock, you wouldn't've lost your money.

"So, when I come in here for a filling after that, what you'll remember wont be that you solicited the recommendation that caused you to lose money it will be that you lost your money because you did something that I told you to do. And therefore you might decide that instead of trying very hard not to hurt me, or hurt me as little as possible, you wouldn't mind hurting me at all, because I made you lose your money. So it would probably be best for me if I found another dentist.

"I don't want to do that. You've been a good dentist. I've been coming to you for years. I've got you all trained. I'm too old now to break in a new one. I think much too highly of your dental skills to risk having to do that, by giving you market advice that makes it so I don't dare to come in here anymore.

"Now having said that I must warn you: If you hurt me now, and I decide you did it on purpose because I refused to make you rich, I'll have to have you arrested and put in jail for battery."

"My father told Chassy he thought his explanation sounded reasonable and he'd do his best not to hurt him with the drill. He said what he should've said at that point was that if Chassy didn't start paying his bills on time instead of making him wait ninety days, he'd have him arrested, judge or not, and thrown in jail as a deadbeat. Spring family always took their sweet time paying their dental bills. But he didn't. Basically my father likes Chassy all right; just doesn't like having to wait to get paid for fixing his teeth."

"Okay then," Merrion said, "Spring hasn't got a horse in this race.

Judge Cavanaugh: Has he got a family? I don't know."

"The Boy Judge," Hilliard said, chuckling. "Fuckin' Freddie Dillinger? That's what he called Lennie Cavanaugh, his appointment was first announced ever since then, too, every time he's been in the news.

It's really a wonder, nobody's ever horsewhipped Fred; just beat the old-fashioned shit out of him, some of the things he's put in that column Nineteen-fifty-nine that was, when Lennie got that job; remember because that was the year Mercy and I got married. He was pretty young, though not even thirty, I recall. So that'd make him now, what, thirty-five, thirty-six? Nah, no kid of his'd be old enough. Might have a relative out there someplace, though, who's had trouble dressing and feeding himself. We wouldn't know."

"Yeah, he could," Merrion said. "He could also have trouble digesting fried fatty foods and we wouldn't know that either. Look, I don't want to sit around with you and do our damnedest to dream up a hundred good reasons why I can't get this job. What I want to do is figure out how we can do the same thing for me that the two of us've done for so many other people, nowhere as deserving as I am: figure out some way so that I can get this job that's what I want to do."

"I'm sorry," Hilliard said. "I'm so used to doing what we do when we get a job-hunter in here, I guess I must've forgotten who I was talking to."

"Yeah," Merrion said. "Well, this one time I'll overlook it. I did what you said, got some background on Lane. Since according to you he seems to be the chief hurdle standing 'tween me and the job. He's got a whole bunch of kids, eight of them. But only two of them don't already have jobs, and both of them're married daughters that don't even live around here. One of them lives in Japan or some other place nobody ever heard of. Her husband's with the State Department. The other one's married to some guy who works for a paint company. All the others've got jobs."

"How'd you get this?" Hilliard said.

"Turns out my mother knows him," Merrion said. "His wife I guess isn't a very good cook. He gets all their pies and cookies from Slade's Bakery. You know the one I mean. Used to also be a cafeteria, back when we still had the trains coming through. Ma says he's a regular bear for the cookies, oatmeal raisin, chocolate chip. Goes through couple dozen a week, half a dozen or so at a time. Monday nights, Wednesday nights, then a dozen he comes in on Friday. Plus a loaf of the brown bread, for Saturday night I guess him and the wife have baked beans. He's never in a very big hurry, Ma says, always got plenty of time to chat. He calls her "Polly," like all her friends do, and she calls him "Mister Lane." Now."

"What'd she used to call him?" Hilliard said. '"Franklin Delano Roosevelt"?"

"She called him "Judge," Merrion said. "But then someone told her it was Chris; he was still living at home then, after I'd moved out that he's just the clerk. "He's not the judge. He doesn't decide anything."

"Her reaction was: "Well, what did I know, he was only the clerk?

Someone told me he worked at the courthouse. Who works at the courthouse, huh? Judges. How'm I supposed to know he wasn't one? I was never inside it, thank God none of my family was ever arrested. We always behaved ourselves. He certainly looked like a judge ought to look, always very well-dressed and so forth. Although come to think of it, kind of flashy, for a judge. But always a jacket and tie, winter, summer or fall; shoes always shined; a clean shirt and a hat, always a hat. A felt hat in the winter, straw hat in the summer. Nice camel-hair overcoat in the cold weather. Mister Lane is a very sharp dresser." '"Well," Chris tells her, "how he dresses doesn't count. It's what he does that counts. And all he does is file papers no one ever looks at, and collect the money for tickets. It's not like he can send you to jail. He don't amount to a piss hole inna snow."

"To your mother he said that?" Hilliard said. "Did your father rise up out of the grave and belt him one? Pat might've said piss hole out in back at Valley Ford, but never in front of her."

"Well, the general idea was all I meant," Merrion said. "I don't know what Chris actually said. He was just givin' the general idea. Which's what I'm trying to give to you here. I asked my mother about him. I think I can work for this guy. I think it'd work out all right. Not someone I would call, I was lookin' for a guy go out'n have a few with, no, but otherwise, I see no problem.

"And let's not get carried away with ourselves here, either, when we're discussing this thing. This job that Lane's got with nobody in it, it isn't that big a thing. "I get by on it": was what Dad used to call his job, and that's all this job is, too. I can get by on it. A steady check is what I want. I never had any ambition.

"My own mother'll tell you that, if I'm not careful. God knows she's told me enough she's always giving me that. "Second prize, the small change, the leftovers. You poor kid, you've simply got no ambition at all."

Merrion had listened many times while she low-rated him to others. "It just isn't in Ambrose's nature to put himself forward, you know? He's tall enough and strong enough and fat enough, too, God knows he should be, see the way he eats all the time. His father used to say he wasn't a bad athlete. Not that he was ever a real good athlete either that might've meant he'd stand out.

"Pat never seemed to mind, though. I think now it was because he never aimed too high himself. Pat was always careful not to make himself conspicuous. Get his name in the papers, so someone heard about him. I think he approved of that attitude Amby had. He said if Amby didn't watch out, wasn't careful, he'd get too good at something in school, and pretty soon he'd wind up going far away to some fine university or something. I used to think he didn't mean it; that was his way of pushing Amby, getting him to do something. But now I'm not so sure.

"He'd say Amby didn't want people to think he wanted something really good to happen: "Mustn't let 'em catch you aiming too high for anything in this world. You might get it. Then God only knows what could happen. People might not like you anymore. Say you went high-hat on them, something bad like that might happen. It's just not worth takin' the risk, you know?" After a while Pat had us all convinced, Chris and me and Amby both. "Chris's the one who's got his eye on the moon. What Ambrose wants is for people to like him, to be the hero's best friend, covers his backside for him. Never the hero himself."

Thirty years later Polly (Flavin) Merrion late that benign Saturday afternoon in August lay non compos mentis at age seventy-nine in the bed in the bright sunny room with southwestern exposure on a small enclosed patio overlooking a round pool with a tulip-shaped recirculattng fountain at St. Mary's on the Hilltop in West Springfield, picking at the hem on the lightweight white wool blanket, her sparse white hair neatly trimmed, set and combed, her faultless white skin clear and softly lotioned, a hint of color on her lips, her blue eyes 'as clear as Gilbey's gin," as her dear Pat had used to say, just to get her goat. It had been about three years since she'd heckled her oldest son.

"My own dear mother, Rose, now," Polly usually began, when giving him a roasting he understood it to be her way of bragging about him running on the first part of a manhattan as she had been one day in March of 1973 at a small luncheon that he'd thrown in the private dining room at Henry's Grist Mill. He'd invited about thirty people to celebrate his official promotion to first assistant clerk of the District Court of Western Hampshire (meaning: Clerk of Court-designate).

Clerk of Court Richie Hammond after stalling six months had at last formally appointed Merrion to his old slot under Larry Lane. Hammond had instinctively disliked Merrion from the first time they met, knowing on first sight he was a smart-ass. Ever since Larry Lane had died he had been forlornly hoping either that someone with more clout would become interested in the job Hammond knew that was unlikely; Dan Hilliard was in the most formidable years of his ascent or failing that, perhaps God in His wisdom and goodness would strike Merrion dead.

God had not.

Richie had stopped stalling after being credibly threatened with summary dismissal from his own place. The threat had come in the form of a menacing phone call placed by a deputy administrator in the Administrative Office of the District Court Department in Salem. He said that the chief judge had just gotten an upsetting call about the next year's judicial budget from the chairman of House Ways and Means.

The administrator had reported grimly that the chairman of Ways and Means appeared to be not only very angry but 'a very close personal friend of this Ambrose Merrion," as well, and asked Richie Hammond if he'd been aware of that fact. When Richie said he had been "Everybody out here knows they're asshole buddies; that's the only reason Merrion got the goddamned job he's got' the chief administrative clerk had said in a soft savage voice: "Then would you mind telling me, so I can tell the judge, who's practically beside himself with fucking curiosity I think it's curiosity; it may be something else exactly why the fuck it is he had to get the call he got and I have to make this call right now, to get you to do what any fucking asshole with the brain of a retarded pigeon would've known from on the first day what he'd better do right fucking off or get his fucking balk cut off? Or would you rather quit right now, and we'll give Merrion your job would you like that better?"

Hammond had soberly accepted Merrion's solemn invitation to attend the joyous luncheon, but to the surprise of neither of them suffered an attack of the Twenty-four-hour Convenient Grippe when the day for it arrived.

"When Rose was among us," Polly said, 'she had designs on my poor little Ambrose, and selfish ones at that. She'd always had it in her mind that if she ever had any sons of her own it'd be a good thing for her if one of them went into the priesthood. You know what they used to tell all the good Catholic mothers: "If you've a son a priest, your place in heaven's guaranteed." But she didn't have any, so that was a bit of a handicap for her, you see? In that respect, at least, she'd left a stone unturned.

"That was not her way at all, neglecting things. Of course she hadn't had any wayward sons, either, which'd also been known to've happened to perfectly good church-going Catholic mothers. No naughty boys she would've had to pray for, make novenas to Saint Jude for, the patron saint of the Impossible, and go and visit Sunday mornings down at the lock-up, or on Tuesdays and the weekends at county jail or something, like some unfortunate women she knew and don't think she ever let 'em forget it, either; not for one stinkin' minute did she ever do that.

"Those poor unfortunate creatures with those terrible crosses to bear, the poor things."

"But that still didn't give her one to bake the cookies for, and send down to the seminary, either, and she couldn't let herself forget that.

I don't think nuns counted in that bounty-hunt and they didn't take young ladies in the priesthood. If they had, I think she would've thought nothing of wrapping me up and sending me along, "see what you can do with this one. Not much to look at maybe, but good with pots and pans, and she knows how to do a wash. Send her back if it looks like she isn't going to work out for you." But the choice wasn't available.

"So you could see what she was thinking, the minute he was born and we knew he was a boy. She thought maybe Ambrose might become a priest, if she took a hand in it as she generally did everything that happened within a mile or two of her, and played her cards right, of course.

Wasn't his namesake a famous bishop? And a saint? The bishop who baptized Saint Augustine, by God? Well, didn't that tell you something? Meaning that if the vocation didn't come naturally to our little boy, if the Holy Ghost didn't give him a good bat on the head and tell him what he ought to do, well then, she might get involved herself in working out the matter. Since she was pretty sure she knew what would've been God's will, if He'd only just spent the time and taken the proper interest in it. If you know what I mean. Bashfulness was not a thing that troubled her.

"So for a while then, after Pat and I were first married and Amby'd come into the world after only the bare decent interval, there, I'm sure she had her eye on him. Not that I'd want you to think, for even one moment, that my dear mother Rose actually had a thing to be concerned about where getting into heaven was concerned. Far from it butter wouldn't've melted in her mouth, not in that one's. No, it was just that she was always one to believe that where salvation was concerned, you couldn't be too careful. If now a grandson was the closest she could come to meeting the requirements, well, that was the best she could do. Couldn't ask for more than that. At least 'til I told her I didn't think grandsons counted, met the tariff for admission to Jerusalem, the holy city, the same way that sons do. And so that more or less cut down her zeal.

"It really was all for the best. If Ambrose'd gone into the church, you know, none of you here in this room or even at this table would've ever heard of him at all. He'd most likely be the curate in a small parish 'way up in the State of Maine someplace, up there on the forty-fifth parallel, on the Canadian border. And he'd be perfectly happy, you know? Completely at peace with the world. My boy's a humble man."

"At least she didn't say the celibacy stuff would've been no trouble for you," Mary Pat Sweeney had said to him that night in the apartment he'd been renting then in Hampton Pond. "If she had then I'd've known for sure I'd come to the wrong funeral after all." Mary Pat had kept about a hundred-fifteen pounds in what seemed like constant merry motion back in those days, and not just in her office down in Springfield at Massachusetts Mutual, or at the evening and weekend county Democratic meetings, either.

Mary Pat was well-known far and wide "Oh sure, both ways, north and south, up and down the river," as she used to say herself, 'good-time Mary Pat' for being the one person that you had to sign up before you could be really sure that what you had in mind to do would be a success. Merrion admitted cheerfully that her reddish hair and greenish eyes were the sights he first looked for when he walked into a room, 'just like everybody else does. Everybody else."

She believed in realism, just as he and Dan did. While Sunny was around but stationed far away from home, he 'always seemed to get along real good with Mary Pat," as Polly said from time to time, with some insistent wistfulness, the closest that she ever came to declaring her preference for Mary Pat among his girlfriends that she'd met. That was fully close enough for him to implying her somewhat-less-than-full approval of then-Lieutenant later Captain Geraldine Keller, USAF. Mary Pat in those days without discussion understood and apparently accepted the fact that she was his second-best girl and probably always would be no more than that. She appeared to believe that the reason was timing: he'd met Sunny first, at UMass." and because he was a loyal man, Sunny would remain first as long as they lived. Many times without wishing Sunny any ill Mary Pat therefore sincerely and coolly wished her dead.

She excused such thoughts to the accuser in her mind with the mitigation that she never actually prayed for Keller's death. That would have been deliberate; she wasn't willing anything; she simply couldn't help thinking that it would have been much more convenient for her and better for Ambrose as well, if Sunny were to die young without any pain at all, peacefully, in her sleep.

Mary Pat further understood without being told that Merrion could stand it if she should happen to run into someone else who would replace him as first in her love (although she hadn't wanted the assurance, and would have summarily rejected it if he'd offered it). So except for that first fucking week in fucking July every god-damned fucking year, and all the other fucking times fucking Sunny came home on fucking leave again, goddammit, always unexpectedly because unwanted by Mary Pat she and Amby did have their good times.

It wasn't easy for her. Mary Pat said nothing to nobody about nothing, as she put it, but then she didn't have to; she turned up the volume on her desk radio whenever WHYN-AM played "Time Is on My Side," by the Rolling Stones, and everyone who knew and liked her including all the men, and she knew a lot of them, from her interest in politics also knew she played the waiting game. She was generally steadfast and obdurate, silent in receipt of truly well-meant good advice from friends including her boss, Carol, a peach, who was really good to her and mentioned it only once until they stopped giving it, content to eyebrow smart remarks. She did allow a rather dumpy woman in Agents Accounts named Priscilla, from Three Rivers, whom she didn't even like, to get away with saying one beautiful June day during lunch outside on the lawn that she was 'never sure if the reason Sweeney's cubicle's always filled with smoke's because of all those Winstons she smokes or if it's from that torch she carries."

Knowing immediately from the laughter that self-restraint had been a mistake, Mary had rectified it early the next month — when Sunny's annual July visit, now two weeks at the place in Falmouth Heights that Amby rented had her in an ugly mood anyway. During a lull in a department briefing about the company's upcoming autumn media campaign of suggestions for avoiding life-endangering, artery-clogging, sedentary obesity, Mary Pat murmured rather loudly to the person sitting next to her that the ads should feature Priscilla as national poster girl. "Show Priscilla linin' up a chocolate-frosted jelly doughnut," Mary Pat proposed, well aware that her husky voice carried, 'drawin' a bead on a cruller. That'd put the point across: Henry the Eighth' amp; slim down."

Then everything'd gone all wrong and come apart in May of 1973, when Sunny died in a hospital in Honolulu. The cause was severe head-trauma she had suffered when the rented Jeep CJ that she was driving rolled over and down a cliff in the aftermath of a three-car accident that killed another woman and injured four other people on a mountain road switchback during a blinding downpour. Merrion at first did not believe it. Stunned in his grief, he was badly surprised as well that Sunny had returned to Hawaii and he hadn't known about it. He had met her at the Royal Hawaiian she'd called it 'the big pink hotel on the beach, the one where everyone always goes once' for her previous energetic furlough four months before, and had assumed from its delights he'd be returning for the next one. The married major from Coronado, California, who'd flown from Tan Son Nhut to Hawaii with her for ten days of R amp;R, when he recovered consciousness gave police a statement proving conclusively the crash had not been Sunny's fault. Somehow that post mortem exoneration hadn't seemed to help Merrion feel better at all.

That fact had not been lost on Mary Pat. Heedlessly leaving her desk at mid-morning as soon as she'd heard the news, putting off the explanation to another day no one in her office ever asked her for it later she had gone at once to his place to make stiff drinks and get in bed to give him a lover's help. She had arrived there knowing she thought: instinctively, without possibility of error he needed to have that done. It had always seemed to him afterwards that both of them had realized about ten seconds before she'd really begun trying to console him, it was never going to work.

Neither one of them had ever gotten over it. After a few more perfunctory, good-buddy, make-believe tries at making him feel better she'd decided on her own to give it up. While in one corner of his mind he believed she'd never found it getting any easier to do, she'd started saying No without excuse or explanation every time he called, and she had stuck to it. After a while he'd given up too, and rather gratefully stopped making the calls.

That August Saturday waiting for Hilliard at Grey Hills the most recent time he'd seen her had been by chance at a dinner-dance at the Sheraton Hartford hotel in '92 or '93, benefit for the family of a high-spirited, hail-fellow lawyer they had known from Seventies-early-Eighties New England Democratic politics. Disbarred and disgraced after having lived very graciously for many years on money he had not, after all, earned from representing a few extremely wealthy and secretive clients, as he had always seemed to claim.

Instead he had stolen systematically and routinely from a couple dozen estates left by fairly prosperous clients whose heirs had trusted him, taking what he'd wanted as boldly as if it had been his. Caught, he had avoided criminal prosecution, certain conviction and plenty of jail by stripping his own estate as ruthlessly as he'd plundered his late clients' accumulations. The sale of everything he owned at distress prices, beggaring his still-young family, combined with the proceeds of his malpractice insurance policy amounted to enough to constitute ostentatious restitution of eighty-four percent of what he had stolen. He was sentenced to five years in jail, two of them to be served, three suspended for ten years.

Granted thirty days to finish putting his affairs in order before starting to serve his sentence, he had needed only two to complete his liquidation by shooting himself in the head.

"Well, no one ever said Mickey wasn't thorough," Mary Pat said, encountering Merrion at the bar. She still smoked the Winstons and weighed around the same trim one-fifteen, but she was dressing and decorating it a lot better. Merrion told her she looked like a million bucks. "Yeah," she said, satisfaction in that smoky voice, 'and even nicer, now I've got it."

"Hit the lottery?" he said. "Lucky you."

She grinned and shook her head. "Can't count on luck," she said.

"Luck's not dependable, and as you know, mine's never been all that good. Stock market's much more reliable. Skill and smarts still count there, which is good. Helps if you clank when you walk, but it's really not all that complicated. You quit spending all your time partying around; start staying home and paying attention to what the rich people say."

"You have rich friends now?" Merrion said.

"Well," she said, "I have a rich friend. He takes me where rich people go; I get close enough to listen."

He hadn't asked her the next question because he'd known the answer.

She'd delivered it anyway, shaking her head. He played dumb, smiled back and said: "I'm missing something here, am I?"

She'd shaken her head once more. "Probably nothing that ever really interested you that much," she said. "Funny how things seem to change, after time's gone by."

"What is it that seems to have changed on us here, all of a sudden and all?" Merrion said to Hilliard on the terrace at Grey Hills, that Saturday in August.

Hilliard frowned and leaned forward in his chair. He rested his elbows on its arms and scraped it on the flagstones up against the table. "I think," he said slowly, frowning, '1 think… well, lemme put it this way: what I think is, anyway… I…"

"Well, this is reassuring," Merrion said. "If you're doing that."

"You had some doubt in your mind, maybe?" Hilliard said, looking up from under his eyebrows.

"I was beginning to get a little concerned, yeah," Merrion said. "I was beginning to wonder if maybe instead of asking you to explain Julian to me, I should ask Julian about you. Or maybe get Janet back in and put a different question to her. "What's the meaning of life, huh Janet? You got a handle on this?"

"Yeah," Hilliard said. "Well, look, whyn't we do this now, then, all right? Let's you and me just go inside and get a bite to eat, cheeseburger, something, a bottle of beer, talk it over in there, and see what we do about this. Would that be all right with you? Then, after that, play a round. Or maybe just nine holes or something."

"Fuck going inside," Merrion said. "Tell me here what you think's going on."

"I don't know," Hilliard said. "I heard things I don't like, but I'm not sure… Look, you gotta remember Bob Pooler."

"Remember and hate the fucker," Merrion said.

"Yeah, well, still," Hilliard said. "I think you should go, you know, talk to the guy, and see what he thinks about this. See what he's got to say."

"Hear what the little prick's got to say about what?" Merrion said.

"What could that little shit possibly have to say that could possibly interest me?"

"Well," Hilliard said slowly, "I'm not exactly sure myself yet what the broad outlines of this might be, but what it seems to be is this: he thinks they may be thinking, the federal boys in Boston, about maybe starting up grand jury hearings out this way, down in Springfield, I mean, and if they decide to do that then they might be… well, you know what I'm saying, right? Might be coming after me."

"Which of course would have to mean, then," Merrion said thoughtfully, 'also after me."

Hilliard frowned and cleared his throat, "Yeah," he said. "Well, after us. That would be the gist of it. After you and me."