| way, like, What can I do, this is my job?” She had no business ruling either way, not in these circumstances. It was shame, I could see, that had been her undoing. She hadn’t recused herself from Feaver’s cases because she would have expired if she were ever called upon to explain the reasons to the Presiding Judge. “So they’re gonna put her in the penitentiary for getting laid?” Probably not. There was no mention of any case on the tape I’d heard, and Robbie insisted there never had been. But that didn’t obscure Sennett’s larger message that Robbie was not entitled to pick and choose whom he’d talk about. “Who would I be holding out on?” he asked. “Really?” Mort was my first answer. Robbie jolted. I’d scared him or caught him, perhaps both. My continuing worry was that Sennett and I would someday be having a heart-to-heart much like today’s, but one where it was Morty on the tape, up to his ears in all of this. I told Robbie that the train was leaving the station. Anything that should be said about Mort or anyone else had to be heard now. He insisted, as always, that Mort was clean. “Don’t you believe me?” His dark face was a beacon of baptismal innocence. Conveniently, my phone rang. Even before summoning Robbie, I’d called a private investigator named Lorenzo Kotrar, whom I’d represented some years before when he was charged with violating the federal wiretapping statute. Poor Lorenzo had |
stunning the air. A bird was my first impression, a pigeon, some silvery form. I jumped back in panic, and at the same time heard a flat sound, vaguely like the noise I knew as a boy when for mean sport we’d smash melons on the hot tar of the road. I realized, though, that something was broken. A small hard pellet ricocheted off my face and I was spattered with what I took first for mud. There was an animal smell from somewhere, sudden heat, then the low, guttural sound that Robbie Feaver made as he slumped against me. I caught him and his completely inert weight pulled me to the floor with him. The back of his suit and the arm I had around him were warmed with what I improbably took first for soup, then realized was blood. There was enormous turmoil now, people yelling for the phone and for doctors, screams from inside the grand jury room, and Walter Wunsch hollering to leave him be, as Jim and Evon and three or four other persons subdued and disarmed him. In the process, they broke two of his fingers, but they pried from his fist the number two iron whose blade Walter had driven straight through Robbie’s skull. I saw the wound then, which looked wildly out of place, a welling gash distinct in spite of the gobs of thickened blood that already matted Robbie’s crown. Somehow it resembled an open mouth, almost that wide, with red |
