Small Town

twenty-one

What if he’d done it?

He woke up Saturday morning, and it wasn’t until he was standing at the toilet, halfway through an endless pee, that he remembered the glimpse of blue in his sock drawer, the second look, the stunning reality of the turquoise rabbit. But had it happened? Or was it, please God and all the angels, a dream?

He brushed his teeth, showered, dried himself, then looked in the mirror and decided he ought to shave. Wielding the razor, he marveled at his own transparent foolishness. He’d shaved for the first time in years what, fifteen hours ago? And he wasn’t going anywhere today, wouldn’t be seeing anyone, and what was wrong with having a day’s stubble on his face?

Anything to put off opening the sock drawer.

He further delayed the moment of truth by making the coffee, and it wasn’t until he’d poured the first cup and had the first sip that he went over to the dresser and opened the drawer.

And of course the rabbit was there, in the same spot he’d left it the night before. It hadn’t hopped around, nor had it disappeared as mysteriously as it had arrived. He picked it up and held it in both hands and wondered what the hell he was going to do now.

How had they missed it? Those two clowns, Slaughter and Reade — except they weren’t clowns, they’d struck him as disturbingly competent, and not without some imagination. Still, they’d come to his apartment with one mission, to search for a missing turquoise rabbit formerly in the possession of one Marilyn Fairchild. They’d looked everywhere, certainly in the drawers of his dresser, and specifically in his sock drawer, because didn’t he remember one of them — Slaughter? Reade? — picking up and squeezing each rolled-up pair of socks in turn, just in case he’d thought to hide the thing that way.

But did he actually remember that? Or did he in fact remember Chris Noth squeezing socks on an A&E rerun of Law & Order, playing Mike Logan to Jerry Orbach’s Lennie Briscoe? (Or Paul Sorvino’s Phil Cerreta, or what was the name of the character George Dzundza played? Jesus, if he couldn’t remember that...)

The best day of his life, better than any night of sexual passion (and he’d had a few, and some of them, let’s not kid ourselves, were pretty great). Better than either wedding, even better (har har) than either divorce. Substantially better, if the truth be told, than the days his children were born.

Which reminded him. He had to call Karin and the kids, had to give them the good news. It would be in the papers, Roz had told him the Crown publicists would see to that, but they ought to hear it from him first. The kids would be excited, and Karin would be relieved, and not just because it meant they weren’t going to take her house away from her. She’d be relieved because she cared about him, even as he cared about her; that didn’t necessarily stop when a marriage ended. And, pragmatically, she’d be happy to know that the kids’ college educations were assured.

And by the way, he could add, I found the cutest little bunny in with my socks. And do you know what that means? Well, you remember that nice woman who lived on Charles Street? It means Daddy killed her.

But did it?

It meant he’d been to her apartment, but they knew it, and he knew it, he’d even admitted it. They could prove he’d been there, and the most the little blue rabbit could possibly do was confirm something he’d never troubled to deny.

Still, he’d exulted when they’d failed to find it, and he’d been devastated when it turned up after all. So what did it mean?

Well, it hadn’t gotten there by itself. If the cops had found it, he could have tried telling himself that they’d planted it themselves. But that would have seemed unlikely, a real Dream Team stretch, and the obvious conclusion, the only plausible conclusion, was that he’d taken the creature from her apartment, stashed it with his socks when he got undressed, and forgot the whole thing by the time he awoke the next day.

It wasn’t like him to steal something. He weighed the rabbit in his palm, trying to imagine why he would have taken it. Out of spite? Out of sheer cussed alcoholic meanness?

Maybe he’d meant to ask her about it, where she got it or who’d carved it, some damn thing, and took it into the bedroom to show it to her. And then forgot about it until he got home, and figured he’d find some way to return it to her in the morning, and...

It seemed more likely that he would have picked it up on his way out the door. Hadn’t they argued? They’d had some kind of drunken sex, and followed it with some kind of drunken argument. But he couldn’t remember the details, and didn’t know what he could trust of what he did seem to remember.

Suppose the worst.

Suppose the argument got out of hand. Suppose she slapped him, or said something that got to him. Suppose he got his hands on her throat, just to shut her up, just to let her know she’d crossed a line, and suppose she taunted him, said he wouldn’t dare, called him an impotent cripple, and suppose his hands tightened.

He’d have been drunker than he realized. Drunk enough to do it, too drunk to remember it. Drunk enough, certainly, to take something with him as he left, for a souvenir of the occasion, say, or just because it caught his eye. Most pet shop sales, he’d read somewhere, were to men who got drunk and suddenly decided that they had to bring home a puppy. Could he have felt a similar need for a bunny rabbit?

He looked at the thing again. Much as he wished he’d never seen it, he had to concede it was not without appeal. And he’d admired Zuni carvings in the window of Common Ground and other local shops. He’d never felt the need to own one, but they were the sort of thing that, seized suddenly by a fit of drunken kleptomania, he might have reached for.

And, God help him, he’d have been capable of killing. How close had he come, really, to killing Penny all those years ago? He’d never laid a hand on her, but in the story that sprang from the nonincident, and in the book he was writing now, the wife had died; the young husband had changed his mind, but too late.

In the novel, the man got away with murder. But he hadn’t really gotten away with anything, for all his life from that day on was shaped and colored by that simple act of murder. And, as the story unfolded on the page (or unscrolled upon the screen), it was becoming evident that the protagonist was still a murderer, that he still sought solutions to problems without regard to their moral implications, and that, before the book was done, he would kill again.

But that was just a book, wasn’t it? It was his attempt to construct out of his imagination a logical series of consequences to an event that had never taken place. It didn’t prove anything, did it?

Christ, suppose he killed her.

There was really nothing like denial. It was a powerful tool; used wisely, it could get you through a lot of bad days.

He spent the weekend cloaked in it, acting as if nothing had changed since he’d seen an unwelcome bit of brightness in his sock drawer. It meant nothing, he told himself, and acted accordingly. He made some phone calls, answered his e-mail, and worked on his book. He’d thought it might be hard to slip back into the alternate universe of the novel, thought the blue rabbit might have understandably thrown him off stride, but all he had to do was sit down at the keyboard, and a few mouse clicks took him out of his world and into the far more comfortable world of Harry Brubaker. Comfortable for him, because he was there as an observer and reporter. It wasn’t all that comfortable for Harry, and it was going to get a lot worse.

While he worked, the rabbit sat on a shelf, next to the thesaurus, which he never used, and the dictionary, which he used less now that his word-processing program had a good spell-check feature. (Beside them stood Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, which he used far too frequently; he would grab it to check something, and the next thing he knew an hour had gone by.) Now and then he would glance over at the rabbit. It was ridiculous, even dangerous, to keep it — but he sort of liked having it there.

By Monday, when Tracy Morgensen called, he knew about Friday night’s three firebombings. Tracy was a senior publicist at Crown, and told him she’d be his publicist, and how did he feel about doing some early publicity now? Because they did have his two books scheduled to ship in September, The Goldsmith’s Daughter and Nothing But Blue Skies, and the sales reps would be taking orders for both titles this week, so a little publicity wouldn’t be a bad thing. There wouldn’t be a tour, because there wasn’t enough time to set it up, and besides these weren’t new books, and he’d probably toured when they were first published, hadn’t he?

Well, no, he hadn’t. But he couldn’t really tour right now anyway.

“Because you’re working on a new book. Yes, I know, and we’re all excited. They didn’t tell me the title. Do you know what it’s going to be?”

He said he didn’t. She ran down a list of things she was working on. All local, she said, so he wouldn’t have to travel, in order to keep any interference with his writing time to a minimum. He told her that was just as well, because he wasn’t sure if he was allowed to leave the state, given that he was currently out on bail and charged with homicide. That stopped her right in her chirpy little tracks, but only for a minute, and then they were back to work, figuring out what shows he would go on, what reporters would get to interview him.

By Thursday, when he went downtown to be Lenny Lopate’s guest on WNYC radio, the police had released a photo of the Carpenter. Friday’s papers carried the NAILED! and GOTCHA! headlines, and he’d watched coverage on New York One and read a long story in the Times before he walked over to Jones Street to meet a Daily News reporter at the Vivaldi. They sat outside, where they both could smoke, and ordered cappuccino, and she fumbled with questions, asking him what he as a novelist made of a person like the Carpenter, and how did incidents like those of the previous week affect his use of New York City as a canvas for his novels.

The questions didn’t make sense to him, but that wasn’t the point; they were in this together, she trying to write something that would pass for news, he looking to get some ink and sell some books. And, while he was at it, to give the public at large the impression that he was one of the good guys.

Maury Winters had made the latter point when he’d asked the lawyer if it was all right to go on the air. “It’s a godsend,” Winters told him. “Anything about Fairchild, the charges, the trial, you smile and explain you’re not allowed to talk about it. You get some prick won’t leave you alone on the subject, you stand up and walk out. Anything else, you’re helpful, you smile a lot, you think crime’s a terrible thing, you think the police do an outstanding job, you’ll be glad when this Carpenter momzer’s locked up and the city can get back to normal. As for you, all you want to do is sit home and write books. And John? They want to interview you, you meet them somewhere. They’ll want to come to your apartment, they’ll want to photograph you at your desk, or in front of a wall of your books. Your apartment’s off limits. You don’t want ’em nosing around in your things. Meet in the park, meet for coffee. They keep asking the wrong questions, you can get up and leave. That’s not so easy to do when you’re already home. You meet a cute one, you want to fool around, go to her place. If she’s married, go get a room.”

The News reporter was cute, in an angular, hard-bitten sort of way, but she wasn’t his type, nor did he sense that he was hers. At the end she turned off her tape recorder and put away her notepad and said that was fine, she’d be able to get a nice feature out of what he’d given her.

They both lit fresh cigarettes, and he asked how long she’d been at the paper, and how she’d decided on journalism. And she said what she really wanted was to write fiction, and that she’d almost enrolled for his workshop at the New School.

“You’d have been shortchanged,” he said. “They canceled the last two classes.”

She said, “Why?” and then winced when she figured it out; they’d canceled the classes because the teacher had been arrested for murder. “I’ll bet I wouldn’t have felt shortchanged,” she said, recovering nicely. “I’ll bet you’re a good teacher.”

“I didn’t do much,” he said. “Teaching writing is like practicing medicine. The Hippocratic Oath, I mean — First, do no harm. Mostly I just encouraged them to write. The good ones, that’s all they need. The others, well, nothing’s going to help them, and at least they’re writing.”

She got out her pad and made him repeat all that and wrote it down. Then she said she guessed he wouldn’t be doing any more teaching, and he agreed that he was probably done with that. She paid for the coffee and they shook hands and he went home.

A few days later, he had lunch with Esther Blinkoff. He met her at the Crown offices, where she took him around and showed him off to ten or a dozen people whose hands he shook and whose names he promptly forgot. The younger ones seemed a little in awe of him, and he wasn’t sure whether it was the size of his contract or the fact that he was going to be tried for homicide. Young or old, they all told him how excited they were at the prospect of working with him.

At an elegant French-Asian restaurant on East Fifty-fifth Street she told him she felt guilty taking him away from his work. “I won’t ask how it’s coming,” she said, and he told her it was coming along quite well, that he felt good about what he’d written and optimistic about the part he hadn’t done yet. Was there any chance she could hope to see some of it sometime soon? He said he never liked to show anything to anybody until he was done.

“Roz said as much,” she said, “but I thought I would try. Actually, I think you’re right not to show work in progress. The only reason writers do it is it gives them a chance to stop work while they wait for a reaction from us, and the only reason we want to see chapters along the way is to assure ourselves that the writer’s actually doing something, not just drinking up the advance.” She patted his hand. “Present company excepted, I hardly need add. Oh, I have some good news. We just increased the print order on both books, Daughter and Blue Skies. They’re good solid books, John, and I’m afraid we underpublished them the first time around. Of course we’ve had some personnel changes since then.”

“For the better, as far as I’m concerned.”

“Thank you, and I have to say I believe you’re right. I think it’s wonderful that those two books are getting a second chance in hardcover, and Tracy’s going to make sure that they’re received like new books. In other words, reviewed, but more than that we’re hoping they’ll generate the kind of sidebars and feature articles that will serve as a launching platform for the big one. Did you say you had a working title?”

He’d long since decided against A Nice Place to Start, and had had several working titles since, tentative successors to Fucked If I Know. The current favorite was Darker Than Water, and he mentioned it with some reluctance; if she didn’t like it, they weren’t off to the best possible start, and if she loved it he was stuck with it.

“Meaning blood,” she said immediately. “As in thicker than water, but darker instead. John, I think it’s very good. It sounds dark, obviously, and it has the feel of a thriller title, but at the same time it’s subtle enough so that there’s a literary feel to it. And it’s short enough so that the art director won’t have a hard time getting it to look good on the mass-market paperback.”

She’d heard him on New York & Company, and said he’d come across well. Lopate made it easy for his guests, he told her, and she agreed, but said he was effective in his own right. “And that’s important,” she said. “It didn’t used to be, and maybe it shouldn’t be, but the business has changed. How do you feel about touring? Not this fall, we’ve ruled that out even if it were possible, but for Darker Than Water.”

“If I’m free to tour, I’m all for it.”

“Free to tour. Let’s see now. In the most tentative way, because the last thing I want to do is put pressure on you, we’ve sort of penciled the book into our schedule for October of 2003. I know there’s going to have to be a trial — do you mind talking about this?”

“No, of course not.”

“Well, we’re certainly not going to publish before next October, and wouldn’t you think the trial will be over by then?”

“It seems likely,” he said. “And if I’m acquitted, I’ll be happy to go anywhere you send me.”

“If you’re acquitted. John, I don’t think there’s the slightest doubt you’ll be acquitted.”

“I think there might be a little doubt over on Hogan Place.”

“At the Manhattan DA’s office? I honestly don’t know why they don’t drop the charges. I’m sure that lunatic killed her. He seems to have killed everybody else who died in the past six months.”

They’d collected a full set of Harbinger’s fingerprints from the Upper West Side apartment he’d abandoned, and someone had matched a thumb print to a previously unidentifiable print left on a quart can of charcoal lighter found in the ashes of a blaze in the Bronx back in the early spring. That was strong evidence that the Carpenter had already been plying his trade well before the Twenty-eighth Street whorehouse murders, and just when he’d begun and how many times he’d struck were the subject of endless speculation.

As were his whereabouts. The Carpenter had stayed at the same Midtown flophouse for several days after his attack on the three Chelsea bars, moving out only a day or two before his picture was on every front page. He left without telling anybody, just walked off and didn’t come back. By the time a tip brought the police to the hotel, his room had long since been given to another man. He’d left nothing behind, aside from fingerprints that made it certain he’d been there.

Since then there’d been no end of sightings, no end of squad cars dispatched to locations throughout the five boroughs. But nothing had panned out. William Boyce Harbinger, aka the Carpenter, had vanished from the earth or into it.

Over coffee he said, “Actually, there’s a possibility the charges might be dropped. That’s what my attorney’s pushing for.”

“I should hope so. That’s Maury Winters, if I’m not mistaken? Now there’s a man who could write a book. Of course his best stories are probably ones he’s not allowed to tell.”

They traded Maury Winters stories and then Creighton felt sufficiently at ease to raise a question that had been bothering him. “If there was no case,” he said. “If it turned out Harbinger somehow got into the woman’s apartment and killed her—”

“Which I’m convinced is what happened.”

“Well, would it be harmful from a publishing standpoint? If there was no trial, and the story more or less petered out?”

“And would we consequently drop you like a hot rock? John, you don’t need to go on trial for your life in order to become a star. You’re a star already.”

“That’s very nice, but my sales figures—”

“A, never amounted to much, and B, are meaningless at this point. You’re a man who’s been the focus of considerable attention, and on the strength of that plus your unquestioned talent and ability and, I must say, an agent with more savvy than most, you’ve become a writer able to command a three-million-dollar advance. Which I was thrilled to pay, and not because I had hopes that you’d say something poignant on Court TV, or have a second career as an astronaut and be the first man to set foot on Mars. As far as promotion and publicity are concerned, you’re already as hot a ticket as you have to be.”

“I wasn’t sure.”

“Well, be sure. John, I didn’t just make a deal for one book. I bought your whole backlist, which we’ll bring out in paper a month before we do Darker Than Water in hardcover, and I like that title more and more, I hope you go on liking it yourself. Where was I?”

“The backlist.”

“The backlist, which we’ll sell the hell out of, trust me, but let me remind you that we also bought Darker Than Water plus the book that comes after it. You’re not even thinking about that second book, and there’s no reason why you should be, but I’m thinking about it, and I’m thinking of the books you’ll write after that, which we haven’t contracted for but will when the time comes. I want you at Crown until the end of time, John, or until I retire, whichever comes first, and that’s not because I think I can milk a few sales out of a few newspaper headlines. So all I want is for you to live and be well and write some terrific books, and if that lunatic walked into a police station tomorrow and confessed to everything from the Lindbergh kidnapping on, and said that oh, by the way, there was a woman he strangled on Charles Street, John, I’d be the second happiest person on the planet.”

“The second happiest? Oh, because I’d be the happiest.”

“Wouldn’t you? And I’ll tell you something else, just from a purely promotional standpoint, and that’s to have a best-selling author who it turns out was falsely accused of a crime committed by the notorious Carpenter — John, if you were a publicist, do you think you’d have much trouble getting a little media coverage for somebody like that?” She sighed. “But first they have to catch the son of a bitch, and the sooner the better. How he must hate us!”

“Us?”

“New Yorkers. For living when his children died. And his wife, or do you think he killed her himself?”

There’d been speculation to that effect; the physician, long the Harbinger family doctor, admitted under questioning that he’d signed the death certificate without looking too closely. It had looked like a suicide to him, and out of sympathy to the widower he’d written cardiac arrest in the space for cause of death. Which was true enough, in that the woman’s heart had indeed ceased to beat.

The cremation, and the subsequent disappearance of the ashes, made it forever impossible to determine whether Carole Harbinger’s death had or had not been at her husband’s hands. Whether it was part of his problem, in other words, or part of his solution.

He said, “I don’t know if he hates us. I don’t know what it is that drives him. The Curry Hill murders, the bloodbath that got him his name, that looked like a thrill killing, but that’s not what drives this guy. I don’t see him as having any fun.”

“God, I should hope not!”

“I can sort of imagine what somebody like that might be going through. Feeling so much pain, so much loss, and having to do something about it. I’m not presuming to guess how it is with this particular guy, but I can imagine how it might be.”

Esther Blinkoff sat back, folded her hands. “There’s your next book,” she said.

He felt a little silly buying the cornmeal.

He picked it up at the Gristedes on Hudson Street, and had to decide between the white and the yellow. Both were stone ground and both cost the same, and he actually found himself checking the nutritional information box on the packaging, as if a higher vitamin C level in one might make all the difference. He decided yellow was a more traditional color of cornmeal, and that seemed reason enough to go with it.

The smallest package was eight ounces, and he figured that would last awhile.

He’d been walking home from another coffee shop interview, this one at Reggio on Macdougal Street with a reporter from People magazine. She’d brought a photographer, a very tall dark-skinned young man who never made a sound, but who somehow communicated a desire to photograph Creighton in Washington Square Park. He’d changed film and cameras several times, taking endless shots until Creighton told him that was going to have to be enough.

On the way home, a shop window caught his eye. Someone had arranged a desert diorama, with sand and cacti and, incongruously, quartz crystals and other mineral specimens. But what got his attention was a group of stone carvings of animals, fetishes similar to the turquoise rabbit. There were no rabbits, but there were several bears (unlikely in a desert, you would think) along with some dogs and other creatures he couldn’t identify.

He entered the shop, and found a glass case with a great many more fetishes, some an inch long that could have been stamped out with a cookie cutter, others very elaborately and realistically crafted, including an eagle whose every feather was defined and a snarling bobcat or lynx that looked positively fierce.

The shop attendant, a black girl with her hair fixed in blond cornrows and rings on six of her fingers, explained what the fetishes were. The bear was a powerful figure in the Native American cosmology, he learned, and thus was the most common subject for carvers, even in areas where actual bears could not be found. And what he’d taken for dogs were in fact coyotes, and the coyote was the great trickster of Indian folk myths.

“Wile E. Coyote,” he said.

“Except he’s the one who gets tricked all the time. This one’s probably a badger, and of course you get owls and birds. Here’s a rabbit, an owl, a frog. A buffalo, you see plenty of them.”

And would he like to take one of them home and feed it? He said he didn’t think so, that a friend had given him a fetish and he just wanted to get some sense of what it was and what to do with it. Did you pray to them?

“I don’t think so,” she said. “I think you sort of honor their spirits, you know? And absorb their energy. And of course you have to feed them.” And she’d explained about the cornmeal, and showed him a selection of small shallow dishes suitable for the purpose. The nicest one was a piece of lustrous black pottery, and he was astonished to learn they wanted forty-five dollars for it.

“It’s Santa Clara,” she said, “or San Ildefonso, I can’t always tell the difference. See, this bowl here is Santa Clara, and this one’s San Ildefonso, but on a small piece like this one, it’s harder to tell. Oh, wait, it’s signed, Maria Sojo. Well, she’s a well-known potter, and she’s Santa Clara, so now we know it’s a Santa Clara piece, and that’s why it costs that much. Some of these others don’t cost half that much and” — she grinned — “I don’t think the little animals can tell the difference.”

But he liked the black one, and said he’d take it. While she was wrapping it he said he bet there was a lot she could tell him about the fetishes and pottery, and that he’d really like to take her to dinner and learn more.

She smiled, her whole face lighting up, and touched one of the rings on her left hand. “Now this gets sort of lost in the shuffle here,” she said, “but it’s a wedding band.” He started to apologize, but she told him not to, that she was flattered. “You ever see me without the ring,” she said, “ask me again, okay?”

A few days ago he’d moved some books to create a niche for the rabbit. Now he spooned cornmeal into the black dish and placed it in front of the little animal.

He checked his messages, returned a call from Roz. She was holding off on foreign sales until she had Darker Than Water in hand, but reported that his French publishers wanted to renew contracts on his earlier titles, and to acquire one book they’d passed on first time around.

Nothing succeeded like success.

There were two other messages, but not ones he wanted to respond to. He erased them and sat down at the keyboard, and the book drew him in almost instantly, and the next thing he knew it was dark outside and he was hungry. He saved his work, ran spell-check, and printed out the day’s pages. While they were printing he picked up the phone and ordered Chinese food.

He could have gone out, but he hardly ever did, except for interviews. The phone rang more frequently these days, with old friends who’d avoided him after the arrest now eager to pick up where they’d left off. He was cordial enough, but found himself turning down dates, pleading the pressures of work. He gave the same excuse to a couple of new friends, if that’s what they were — people he’d met that magical night at Stelli’s, who hadn’t dropped him earlier because they hadn’t even known him then. He didn’t bear resentments toward the old friends — at least he didn’t think he did — and he didn’t want to reject the overtures of the new friends. But he really didn’t feel very social.

He wondered how much the rabbit had to do with this.

Not its mystical energy, nothing like that. Just the enormous fact of its presence, because until he’d come upon it in his sock drawer he’d been looking forward to an expansion of his social activities, to nights at the Kettle and the Corner Bistro, to field trips uptown to Stelli’s. Dinners at fine restaurants, and night games at Shea, and the company of women.

He looked at the rabbit, serene enough in front of its dish of cornmeal. He heard Bogart’s voice in his head, speaking in haiku:

Hitting on the girl who’d sold him the little black dish had been spontaneous, and more of a surprise to him than to her. It was probably just as well she’d had a husband, or invented one. Jesus, she was half his age, and what would they talk about when they ran out of Zuni fetishes and Pueblo pottery?

And suppose she’d come back to his apartment, and wanted to see his fetish? Suppose she recognized it, suppose she’d sold it to Marilyn Fairchild? That wasn’t as far-fetched as it sounded; Tenth Street was just a block from Charles Street, and the woman could very easily have shopped there.

He went over and took another look at the rabbit. Was he supposed to name it? That was something he could have asked the girl. He wasn’t inclined to think of a name for it. He had to name characters, every little walk-on in Harry Brubaker’s life needed a name and a history, and that made him think of the biblical folk tale of Adam in the garden, required to assign names to all the animals. It felt presumptuous, like playing God, when he arbitrarily assigned names and back stories to characters, but maybe it was more a matter of playing Adam.

The first day or two, he’d figured he had to get rid of the rabbit. It was dangerous to have it in his possession, and he was just lucky beyond belief that the cops hadn’t found it when they’d come looking for it. How likely would they be to overlook it a second time?

He thought of ways to dispose of the rabbit, simple things like dropping it into a sewer, more elaborate strategies like walking a few blocks west and tossing it off a pier into the Hudson. You wouldn’t have to weight it down, like a body. It would, appropriately enough, sink like a stone.

But for some reason he wanted it.

He liked the thing, and wasn’t that nutty? Although, if you thought about it, it wasn’t all that surprising. If he’d liked it enough to swipe it in the first place, why shouldn’t he go on liking it?

Had he somehow killed her for it? Had she caught him taking it, and called him on it, and had that triggered the fight that left her dead? He could see how that might have happened, but that was the trouble, he could imagine anything and everything.

He’d keep it, he decided. At least until it was time to buy more cornmeal.

Her card was still in his sock drawer.

Susan Pomerance, who sold folk and outsider art, and what was a turquoise rabbit if not folk art? Probably not the sort of thing she dealt in, but she very likely knew something about the art of the southwestern tribes.

Come up and see my fetish — how was that for an opening line?

Did he even need an opening line? She’d made her interest clear enough. All that had been required of him was that he call her the next day, or the day after, and they could follow her script.

But he hadn’t called. He’d found the rabbit, and walked around in a daze for a few days, and then forgot about her and her calling card, and now far too much time had elapsed. Hi, this is John Creighton, I’ve had better things to think about than you, but I’m horny as a toad right now, so why don’t you come on over? Yeah, right.

She was good-looking, too, and more age-appropriate and culture-appropriate than the girl he’d hit on. But he’d waited too long, and that was that.

Might as well throw her card away.

Then again, it wouldn’t hurt to hang on to it.

Maury Winters said, “Been a while, boychik. I feel like we’ve been in touch on account of I keep reading about you in the papers.”

“Have I been overdoing it, Maury?”

“No, it’s good, the publicity. The more you show up as an important figure in the arts, the more absurd it is that you should be accused of a crime. Listen, you remember Fabrizzio?”

“Vividly.”

“Yeah, she makes an impression. She also made an offer.”

“Oh?”

“And I report it to you because I have to, but I also have to advise you very strongly to turn it down. What she offers is for you to plead to second-degree manslaughter, with a sentencing recommendation of three to five years. You’d do the minimum and be out in under three.”

“I see.”

“Now the only interesting thing about this offer,” Winters said, “is that she made it, and believe me, she had a tough time getting the words out. The only reason she’d offer a plea to Man Two is her case is looking a little worse every day, and what she wants and what her boss wants is for it to go away. And the reason I’m even bothering you with it is because I’m going to turn it down, thanks but no thanks, and then she’ll ask me what I want, and I’ll say I want her to drop the charges altogether, and she’ll make another offer.”

“Which will be what?”

“My guess? Involuntary manslaughter, a year or two, whatever the code calls for, and the sentence suspended so you got no time to serve.”

“Really.”

“That’s my guess. And that’s where we have a decision to make.”

He thought for a moment. “I’d have to allocute,” he said.

“That’s exactly correct, but how do you even happen to know the word, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“TV.”

“Of course, how else? Now everybody can talk like a lawyer. Yes, you’d have to allocute. You’d have to stand up in front of God and everybody, which includes the judge and the media, and tell how you happened to kill Fairchild.”

“Which I didn’t do.”

“Which you have always maintained you didn’t do, but you’d have to say you did. Now I can’t advise you to lie, but someone in a similar position could say that his partner had been choking on something, had appeared unable to breathe, and consequently he’d taken hold of her and tried to assist her by shaking her, and it so happened he was holding her by the neck, and the shaking didn’t help, and the next thing he knew... well, you get the point.”

“Yes.”

“If she offers it and if we take it, which is a lot of ifs for one sentence, you do no time whatsoever. That’s the good news, but the bad news is you’re on record as saying you did it. Anybody on the inside’ll know it’s a formality, but the general public’s only going to know that you stood up in court and admitted you killed the woman. You’ve got a felony conviction on your record, and yes, you’re free to walk around, but so’s OJ, and there’s not a whole lot of people inviting him over for dinner, or trying to fix him up with their sisters. Other hand, when it comes to prison, there’s a world of difference between being inside and being out.”

“What would you advise, Maury?”

“At this stage,” he said, “I wouldn’t, because what’s to advise when there isn’t an offer on the table? This is just a heads-up, John, so you can start thinking about it. Meanwhile, remember that green rabbit those bozos came around looking for?”

“Blue.”

“Huh?”

“It said blue on the warrant.”

“I stand corrected. Let’s hope they find that Carpenter putz, and they search him head to toe, and when they look up his ass, lo and behold, there’s the rabbit. Then you won’t have to decide what to do about the offer Fabrizzio hasn’t made yet.”

Could he stand up in court and say he’d done it?

If he was innocent, could he proclaim himself guilty? If he was guilty, could he admit it, make it a matter of record?

And suppose he didn’t know? Suppose he couldn’t really say one way or the other?