Past Due

Chapter 65

“IF IT HAD been anyone else but Tommy,” said Jackson Straczynski, still leaning forward on the bench, his stomach still riled, “I might have handled it differently. That’s not an excuse. I have no excuse. But it may be an explanation. Have you ever had a friend to whom you feel very close and yet with whom you can’t help but compete over every available scrap? That was the way it was with me and Tommy Greeley.

“I met him on the fencing team. I had thought fencing might be something interesting to learn, a good aristocratic sport. Yes, that was how I thought about things then, anything to wipe the South Philly out of me. Which is funny, when you think of it, because all the while I was working on my parries and feints and lunges with the purpose of rising in class, my younger brother, Benjamin, was building an entirely different reputation with a blade of his own. Tommy was new to the sport too, but from the first he dominated me on the piste, forcing me to break ground, scoring off me at will. And his smile, that little victorious smirk when he ripped off his mask, would eat like an acid at my bones.

“There were other arenas to compete in, of course, grades and girls being the most prominent. I studied more than Tommy and yet he was so damn quick his grades were the equal of mine, and with his smile and charm he got the best of the girls too. It wasn’t long before every time I saw him smile I wanted to choke a goat. And yet, through circumstance and familiarity, we remained as friends. Maybe I wanted to keep him close as a sort of mirror. I knew I would be succeeding if I could best Tommy Greeley.

“My dream was to go to law school. Fair enough. Clarence Darrow, Thurgood Marshall, all the great liberal lawyers were my guides. I was still young, things have changed, but that was the dream. So I worked hard, kept my grades up. Tommy had no real dream, as I recall, except to get high and get laid, the great twining goals of our generation. Tommy was, undoubtedly, having more fun than I, but I could console myself with my future. That’s where I would prevail over Tommy Greeley. It was one of the greatest days of my life when I got into Penn Law. It was also one of the most bitter, because an hour later I heard that Tommy Greeley had also been accepted.

“It was in law school that his little side business took off, that the marihuana he was selling for a nice profit turned into cocaine, which he was selling for an absurdly huge profit. He drove around campus in his sports car, he threw parties, found himself a series of gorgeous girlfriends, and all the while, through sheer brilliance, he kept his grades up. It would have killed me with jealousy, it would have devoured me, except I had found something else by then. I had found my wife.

“Love, sex, beauty, art, purpose. For me she was the repository of all that in my life. I suppose, Mr. Carl, therein lay the problem.

“Our first years together were an idyll, truly, a sweet and dreamy time of absorption in each other. It was all about devotion, communication, art. It was all about the journals. That was our evening activity, after I finished my law studies. We would sit together, at the kitchen table, translating our emotions, our experiences, our love into words so that we could make them hard and real and forever. She had been keeping journals since she was a child, they became a part of her, a necessary organ, like a lung, in which to breathe in her life. For her, nothing was real without them. And together, with our writing and our intimacy and our love, we created art. Love as art, Mr. Carl. Never was a drug so potent.

“Without it ever being stated, our roles in the relationship were agreed upon. I would be the lawyer, I would financially support us. And my wife Alura, she would be the artist. She was a dancer when I met her, but she wanted to explore other fields, every field, she wanted her whole life to be a work of art. She believed no endeavor could be more noble, and I agreed. Yes. I agreed. Together we would play these disparate parts in our singular endeavor. And so, slowly, I spent less time with the journals, more time at the law. She immersed herself in her art, I immersed myself in legal theory. And we were happy.

“Until that man with the beard and the motorcycle vest. He came to me, almost deranged, spouting off about how some bastard was sleeping with his wife, and that he was sleeping with my wife too. I couldn’t believe it, I didn’t believe it. Until he said that the bastard was Tommy Greeley. Tommy was a pig, I could believe anything of him. And Alura had been growing distant, things between us were changing. So I did something I had never done before, and have never done since, I staked out her studio and waited. And waited. And waited.

“And then I saw. Him. My mirror. Opening the door of my wife’s building. Climbing the stairs to my wife’s studio. Through the window I saw him reaching out his arms and embracing my wife’s body. The pain I felt was so physical it felled me, it actually threw me to my knees. And behind my closed lids I could see his little victorious smirk, and I retched, right there on the sidewalk.”

“What did you do about it?”

“I did the worst thing I could possibly think of doing. I told my little brother.”

“What did you tell him?”

“Just what I heard, what I saw. I didn’t tell him to do anything, but I told him, and I knew what he was. So when Tommy Greeley came up missing, I had little doubt what had happened.”

“That’s it?”

“Isn’t that bad enough?”

“You didn’t tell him where, when, what he’d be carrying?”

“What are you talking about?”

“There has to be more.”

“I told my brother. My brother was a drug-crazed maniac. Tommy disappeared. What more is there? Later, in a panic, I went to him. I asked him if he had anything to do with Tommy’s disappearance. And what he said, Benny, what he said was ‘Don’t worry about it. You just keep hitting them books.’ He was always so protective, so proud, my little brother, and that’s what he said. And he winked. And I knew.

“And what was it all for? Tommy Greeley was just the first. I confronted my wife about it. In her studio, and she was unapologetic, defiant even. ‘What do you know of art?’ she said. She accused me of giving up art for mammon. ‘You made your choice, fine, but don’t come in here and judge what I must do to fulfill my artistic destiny.’ My wife was exploring the depths of her sexuality, the depths of what it meant to be a woman. And she told me it would continue and it was none of my business. That was the last time I ever entered her studio.”

“So why do you stay with her?”

“Love, sex, beauty, art, purpose. Whatever she was, whatever she has become, she is a part of me I am unable to deny, the better part of me, Mr. Carl. I had aspirations to be an artist myself. Now I have Alura. I can’t bear even the thought of losing her.”

“And what about the baby she was carrying?”

“You know? How?”

“I can see your wife in her.”

“She’s quite beautiful, isn’t she?”

“Yes, Kimberly is.”

“I meant Alura.”

“Okay.”

“We couldn’t keep it. She didn’t want it. Whatever she is, Alura is not maternal. And how could I bear to raise this symbol of betrayal in my own house, to see her smile every day, the same smile of the man who humiliated me at every turn. When Alura came to me it was too late for an abortion. She had the child, we put it up for adoption, that was the end.”

“But it wasn’t the end, was it?”

“I couldn’t leave it at that. I felt responsible for her. I helped support the family, I was able to arrange her acceptance into Penn, I paid her tuition. It was hard on a government salary to support Alura and the baby both, but I felt I owed that, at least, to the child of my wife and the man for whose death I was responsible.”

There was sincerity to what the justice had just told me that I found striking, an utter honesty, and part of it was that his story made him out to be about the biggest weenie on the planet. I mean, here he was, tolerating a wife who felt totally free to sleep around and humiliate her husband all in the name of art. And at the first sign of trouble, instead of dealing with his wife himself, he went running to his little brother, the same little brother that had undoubtedly protected his big brother’s butt in the schoolyard. Yes, if a statement against one’s penal interest is considered reliable by the courts, what about a statement like the one the justice had just given me, which you could say was baldly against his penile interest. But it wasn’t just that which convinced me he was telling the truth. His story meshed perfectly with everything else I had learned, and it pointed perfectly at the person who had truly set up Tommy Greeley for his brutal encounter at the river’s edge.

“You’ve been torturing yourself about this for twenty years,” I said.

“Of course I have. It has colored everything in my life, including my political philosophy. Personal responsibility, reverence for life, harsh enforcement of the criminal code. Everything.”

“But you weren’t responsible,” I said to the justice.

“Excuse me?”

“Responsible for Tommy’s death. It wasn’t you.”

“Don’t be a fool, Mr. Carl. What do you know of my brother?”

“Enough. I know he hired the men who beat up Tommy Greeley. But it wasn’t you who put him up to it and told him what he needed to know.”

“I don’t understand.”

“And Tommy wasn’t murdered that night.”

“Mr. Carl…”

“Let’s take a walk, you and I.”

“To where?”

“To find a suitcase.”