Before You Know Kindness (35 page)

Twenty-six

T
he next morning, Wednesday, Spencer was returning to work, and so he gave in completely. He allowed Catherine to put the jam on his bread—even opening the jar for him so he didn’t have to hold the glass between his legs and hope to God that he didn’t stain his khaki pants as he struggled to unscrew the lid—and the toothpaste on his toothbrush. She held his cardigan sweater for him as he slid his left arm through the sleeve and then discreetly safety-pinned both the right side and the right sleeve to his shirt—a considerably better plan than his big idea, which was simply to try to wad the dangling sleeve into a front pants pocket. Now they were standing together on the sidewalk while the building doorman was hailing a cab. When one arrived, Catherine offered him a restrained kiss on his cheek and then stood aside while the doorman held open the door. He slid gingerly into the backseat, and he was off.

Alone, he gazed out the window at the theater ads on the buses beside him in traffic. After dinner last night neither he nor Catherine had brought up her admission that she still ate meat. In their bedroom she had helped him undress and get into his pajamas and then gotten ready for bed herself, but it was clear that neither of them had any desire to discuss her revelations further. She ate meat; now he knew it. Apparently she wasn’t going to stop and he was, by then, too tired and beaten up to fight . . . or, perhaps, even care all that much. At least about the meat. After all, the issue wasn’t that his wife desired dead things. The issue, clearly, was that she was furious with him, and those Slim Jims she was wolfing in secret were more filled with animosity and bitterness than they were beef and mechanically separated chicken. The truce had continued this morning through breakfast.

With the fingers on his left hand he gingerly adjusted his sling under his sweater. He wondered exactly what he had done to anger his wife so—was it years of being a pill or was all this hostility triggered recently?—and what it would take to make her happy again.

DOMINIQUE THOUGHT
some men looked distinguished with beards, especially such elegant European actors as Sean Connery and Ian Holm. When Americans and her fellow Canadians grew them, however, it often struck her as a mistake—especially these days. The hip beard this season was a patchy heroin-addict fuzz, whiskers that seemed to struggle atop raw cheeks and chins the way bearberry or sandwort strained toward the sun on wind-blasted tundra. Spencer’s beard, when he was through growing it out, was never going to strike anyone as distinguished. It looked like it would become the sort of close-cropped beard that might, if nothing else, be neat—she recalled her favorite image of Marvin Gaye from an album she’d owned in junior high school—but it might just as easily become the kind that would hang laconically down his chest like a bib should Spencer ever stop trimming it. It was spotted with white and black and traces of red. It made his high forehead look even higher.

She watched him run the fingers of his left hand over the brand-new, left-handed keyboard they had purchased for his computer and then punch the buttons that turned on the monitor, the tower, and the printer. He looked like he had missed using them. He rolled the special left-handed mouse back and forth across the rectangular rubber pad with the FERAL logo.

“We have voice input software on order,” she told him. “You’ll be able to dictate your memos and news releases right into the computer.”

“What fun. Thank you.”

“A new sound card, too. And extra RAM. Apparently, you’ll need it.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Did you bring your Palm with you?” she asked him.

He shook his head ever so slightly and motioned with his eyes down at his sling. “I can’t use it with my left hand. Can’t draw the characters, can’t use the stylus.”

“In time you’ll be able to.”

“Maybe.”

“How was your cab ride this morning?”

“Fine.”

“I presume you didn’t get sick?”

“Not this time.”

“That must have been a relief.”

She heard one of Spencer’s publicity minions laughing in the corridor at something Keenan had said, and wanted desperately now to be with them instead of alone in this office with Spencer. She knew she was supposed to say something about how good he looked or how wonderful it was to have him back—how happy she was just to see him alive. But she certainly wasn’t about to lie and tell him he looked terrific, because he didn’t. He looked horrid: That beard was a disaster, he had bags under his eyes that resembled marsupial pouches, and his skin was the color of whey. The idea that this was a man her organization actually used to trot out to news programs and talk shows and speeches before crowded auditoriums astonished her. Had Spencer McCullough ever once been even remotely telegenic? It seemed inconceivable.

But she knew that he had been. Recently, in fact. Seven or eight weeks ago.

Now he was a shabbily dressed, sloppily bearded, debilitated wretch in a safety-pinned cardigan. This was her director of communications? This guy was supposed to sit in one of those boxy armchairs opposite Katie Couric and Jane Pauley?

He picked up a sealed cardboard carton about half the size of a shoe box with a long serial number stenciled in black ink across the side. “What’s this?” he asked her.

“I believe that’s your headset. For your telephone. So you don’t need to hold the receiver in your hand.”

“Oh, goodie. I can be just like a telemarketer.”

“Hands-free communication.”

He put the box back down on his desk and gently rapped the lid with his knuckles. “Well. Thank you for this, too.”

“You’re welcome. We want to do everything we can to make your return to work as seamless as possible. We want—”

“Everything’s fine,” he said to her, his voice as calm and sonorous as an incoming tide. He touched her elbow when he cut her off and she was able to suppress the need to flinch. Barely. “I know what you want, and I thank you for . . . for everything. Okay?”

She glanced down at the spot where his fingers were separated from the flesh on her arm by a wisp of linen fabric. She nodded. She wished she enjoyed the touch of humans half as much as she did the warm fur of her dogs or the scratchy tongues of her cats.

JOHN THOUGHT
the offices of Tuttle, DiSpiro, and Maroney, P.C., looked surprisingly unchanged from the period in his life when he’d toiled here. The only visible difference was the removal of Howard Mansfield’s name from the signage and letterhead since the older lawyer had become a justice on the Vermont Supreme Court. The offices sat in a renovated brick building on the Burlington waterfront that had once been an icehouse. When Burlington began to gentrify the area, the icehouse was one of the first structures to be transformed into office space. Howard Mansfield and Chris Tuttle were among the business visionaries who understood that its views of the lake and the mountains were sufficiently panoramic to justify moving an upscale law firm to what was then a still up-and-coming neighborhood.

As John strolled down the corridor, his feet positively sinking into the plush cobalt carpet, he realized just how squalid was the workplace four blocks to the east that housed the Chittenden County Public Defenders’ Office. The threadbare carpet there was no thicker than cardboard, the walls—an ivory so coated with fingerprints and grime that it now resembled the color of a T-shirt left too long on a subway grate—were peeling, and most of his lawyers’ offices were about the size of this firm’s coat closet in the waiting room. The difference in the two waiting rooms, in fact, said it all: The one here had a pair of leather couches so soft he could have slept on them, a postcard view of the mountains in New York, and tables with the latest issues of
Forbes, Fortune,
and that morning’s
Wall Street Journal
. There was coffee or ice water or tea if you simply raised your gaze at the receptionist, a polite young woman who could have passed for a Neiman Marcus model. The waiting room back in his world of PDs was a cramped cubicle with two badly cushioned wooden chairs and a box of half-broken toys for the children of the drunk drivers and mentally ill street people and insolvent check bouncers who hoped that, somehow, he and his associates could finagle for them yet one more chance.

Though John didn’t believe he had made a mistake leaving this splendor for the public defenders’ office, he couldn’t help but wish he could find within the organization’s state-funded budget the money to repaint the walls and perhaps buy a decent couch for the waiting room. It wasn’t simply that he believed his lawyers deserved freshly painted walls: Those forlorn denizens who depended upon the PDs deserved them, too. After all, was it too much to expect that your lawyers’ offices would be clean?

Chris Tuttle rose from behind a desk the size of a small putting green as soon as he saw John in the doorway of his office and came around it to greet him. Tuttle was a few years older than Mansfield—John guessed he was in his midfifties now—but his hair was a shade of black darker than creosote, and his eyes were a vivid chestnut brown. His face was deeply wrinkled, however, and John suspected that Tuttle was dying his hair.

Unlike some of the other senior lawyers in the firm, Tuttle didn’t keep a conference table of his own in his office, and so when they sat back down Tuttle was on one side of the massive desk and John was on the other. He was reminded of those images of estranged couples in their baronial dining rooms in movies from the 1930s and 1940s, the length of table between them a signal for the viewer that this marriage had absolutely no hope of being saved. He and Tuttle had already spoken twice on the phone about his deposition, and John had told him all that he could about the rifle—including his fear that when the New Hampshire State Police had returned the gun to him in August the casing had somehow been lost.

“So, how are the girls? Sara and young Willow?” Tuttle asked.

He answered briefly that the girls were as fine as could be expected, given the reality that his family was dealing with a waking nightmare of guilt and self-recrimination. John knew that Tuttle didn’t actually want the details of their personal lives right now; nor did he himself have any great desire to volunteer the information while on this other lawyer’s billable clock.

“So, the folks in New Hampshire tell me they’re still looking for your missing casing,” Tuttle said to him. “But I really have no more confidence than you that it will turn up. They don’t think there was a casing in the chamber when it was checked into the firearms locker.”

“Oh, that’s bullshit, of course there was. They just lost it is all.”

“I’m just telling you what they’re telling me. You still have the box the cartridge came in?”

“Yes, absolutely. Why?”

“A gun guy thought it might be worth seeing if other rounds from the box jam in the chamber. Maybe it wasn’t just that one.”

“Interesting.”

“A longshot. Obviously you loaded and unloaded the rifle a couple of times last November, and no other cartridges got stuck. Still, it’s something to consider when we get a chance to look at the gun. So, bring me that box of ammunition, okay? Now, let’s talk about the deposition,” Tuttle continued. On the lake outside the window John could see a ferry leaving the dock at the boathouse and starting its way west toward New York.

“Yes, let’s.”

“Obviously there is no justification for your . . .” Tuttle paused, searching for the right word. John considered assisting him with
stupidity, irresponsibility,
or
carelessness,
but he restrained himself. “Improvidence,” Tuttle said finally. “There is no rational reason for what you did.”

“Thank you.”

“So what I’ve told Paige I want us to focus on, first of all, is the mystery of the round in the chamber. How it simply wouldn’t pop out when you cycled the weapon, and then—and this will be very important—how you struggled and struggled to extract it.”

“I didn’t struggle. I didn’t want to shoot my hand off with a ramrod or risk blowing my head off by firing it. I didn’t know what would happen if I fired it, and I envisioned the damn thing exploding against my cheek.”

“I understand—and we’ll need to make that point. But you did try to pop out the cartridge; you did try to remove it. Multiple times. Correct?”

“Correct.”

“And it just wouldn’t come out.”

“Yes.”

“Good. It must be clear that you did what you could. Second, it must also be clear that events then conspired to prevent you from dealing with it further, i.e., bringing it to a gunsmith. All that busyness you told me about at work, the birth of young Patrick. I want the numbers, please, of exactly how many cases your office handled over the last twelve months, and the number for the previous year, too. You were down, what, two lawyers this year?”

“One. But we were also down an investigator.”

“Fine. I also want to know how many cases you managed personally, in addition to all your responsibilities running the public defenders’ office.”

“I can get you that.”

“And, lastly, I want a list of all the ways and all the hours you volunteer in the community and all the ways you help out your family—including that garden.”

“You mean the garden Spencer had us plant?”

“Yup. That one. You must have helped him weed it or something.”

“I spent all of Memorial Day Weekend over there putting the damn thing into the ground.”

“Excellent. That’s three days right there you were helping him when you could have been taking the gun to a gunsmith. That is, after all, half the problem here. You never brought the gun to a professional.”

“The other half, I presume, is leaving a live round in there in the first place?”

“Okay, the problem should be divided into thirds, not halves. Forgive me. You left a live round in the chamber. You failed to bring the weapon to a gunsmith. And then you left the rifle where a child could get it.”

“It was only where a child could get it because I was actually going to see a gunsmith roughly thirty-six hours after Spencer was shot. That was the whole reason the rifle was in the trunk of my car.”