The Last Page

The envelope arrived on the last Monday of November, and it was the plainest thing I had ever been sent.

It was cream-colored, medium weight, with no stamp and no postmark. It had come by a private courier, the kind who rings the bell, hands you a clipboard, and departs before you have finished signing your own name. There was no return address. There was no sender's mark on the flap. My name was printed on the front in a clean black typeface, the sort one sees on a good wedding invitation: Dr. Atticus Vaughn, Behavioral Consultant. And under it, no street, no suite, no case number. The courier had known precisely where to find me, and I had never given anyone that address.

I turned it over twice. I held it up to the lamp.

Inside lay a single card.

It was black. Not black like a dark gray, but black as the underside of a hat, a thick glossy stock that drank the light and gave nothing back. Around the edge ran a hair-thin border of silver. In the center, in a handwriting so fine and even that I would have taken it for engraving had I not seen the faint raised ridge of the ink, someone had written one line in white.

Thank you for closing the file, Doctor.

There was no signature. There was no date.

I read it once. I read it a second time. Then, because I am a thorough man, I read it a third time, slowly, moving my lips like a child. The words did not change.

…

I do not know exactly what I expected to feel.

I suppose, if I had been asked the day before, I would have said alarm. I would have said that a thing like that, a black card, a polite sentence, a sender who knew my address, ought to bring a man leaping to the telephone. I would have said that I would call Leo. I would call Vera. I would bag the envelope and take it to Ryder Okafor in the cyber lab and have it dusted for prints.

I did none of those things.

I put the card face down on my desk, and I sat looking at it, and what I felt was a calm so complete that I mistook it, for several minutes, for peace.

They know, I thought. They know I'm there. They have always known.

And then: They are thanking me.

It was Monday morning, at about nine, in my office on the fourth floor. The rain had come in again during the night and was beating on the window in long gray sheets. A cleaner was vacuuming somewhere along the corridor. On the wall over the filing cabinet a child's drawing curled slightly at one corner: a brown man with a pen, a red smile, a star. Through the partition I could hear someone telling a story about a parking ticket.

My telephone rang.

I did not answer it. I let it ring eleven times and stop.

…

The news came on at ten past ten.

I had not gone looking for it. A detective in the next office had a radio, and the music stopped, and a man with a deep, grave, well-rehearsed voice began to read the headlines, and I heard the name at once. One does. One hears one's own name in a crowd, and I suppose that one hears, with the same unerring ear, the name one has been waiting for.

Dominic Hargrove.

"—a stunning loss to the city of Philadelphia," said the radio. "Hargrove, thirty-three, chairman of Hargrove Capital Partners and last year's recipient of the Mayor's Philanthropist of the Year award, was found dead this morning at his home in Chestnut Hill. His housekeeper discovered him in his bed shortly after eight. Police say there is no sign of foul play. The cause of death is believed to be cardiac arrest, and an autopsy has not been ordered. Mr. Hargrove, who is survived by his mother, had no known health problems. In a statement, Mayor Alvarez called him 'a shining example of what it means to give back.'"

I sat quite still.

"Colleagues describe a man who gave generously to children's charities across the region, particularly those serving orphans and the homeless. A memorial service will be held—"

I turned off the radio, in the next room, with my mind. It is a trick I learned in my twenties. One simply stops hearing.

Dominic Hargrove.

I knew the name. I had seen it, in the past three months, on a banner outside the Convention Center, and on a charity gala invitation, and once on the side of a bus. Everybody had. A good-looking man with a square jaw and a smile like a lamp, who gave away enough money every year to put his name on a children's wing. A man who had been photographed with the Mayor, the Governor, a Cardinal, and a Phillies pitcher.

And I knew that I would have seen it, one way or another, in the file.

I did not know how I knew. I had not read the last page. I had not read the final entry, or opened the cabinet, or gone back to the brown paper parcel that lay at the bottom of my desk drawer. But I had the sense, an entirely clear and unreasoning sense, that if I turned the key and untied the string and lifted out the last leaf of that folder, I would find his name there.

Five names, I thought. Eight months. And a clean, quiet, tidy city.

It was a very good arithmetic. It was almost beautiful.

…

I stayed late that night.

I told myself it was for the bank manager. I had a report to write on a man named Hendricks, who had embezzled a hundred and twelve thousand dollars from a savings and loan, and I wrote it, in a firm hand, with only one correction. I sent it by courier at six. I ate a sandwich at my desk. At eight the cleaners came and went. At ten the whole floor was dark except for the green glow of an exit sign, and the lamp on my desk, and the faint blue flicker of a monitor in the squad room, where a night officer was playing solitaire.

I sat in the pool of the lamp with my hands folded.

At four in the morning I was still there.

I will tell you what I did. I will tell it as plainly as I can, because I have found over the years that the only honest way to describe a cowardly act is without adjectives.

I opened the bottom drawer.

The parcel was there. Brown paper, white string. It had not moved. I took it out and laid it on the blotter and looked at it for a long time, and the old pull came, the cold small tug somewhere beneath the breastbone, and I let it come. I did not resist it. I did not argue. I simply sat with my right hand lying flat on the cover, as one lays a hand on the head of a dog that has been run over, and I waited to see what I would do.

The wall clock said eleven forty-seven. It had said that for weeks. It had stopped on the night of the Ellie Kincaid case, in the middle of a downpour, and I had never replaced the battery. I do not know why. I think I had grown fond of it. It marked, as exactly as a monument, the hour at which I had walked out of Interrogation Room 3 and felt, for the first time in my life, that I might be of use.

Forty-seven, I thought.

Forty-seven hours, fifteen minutes. A girl in a tank. A rhythm on a table. I had been so good. I had been so very, very good.

I thought of Ellie's drawing. I thought of a star.

And I thought of the sentence on the black card.

Thank you for closing the file.

My hand lay quite still on the paper.

It would have taken ten seconds. A tug at the string, a turn of the cover, a page. I would have read the red ink in the margin of that final leaf, and I would have known who was doing this, or enough of it, and I would have gone down the long dark staircase that I could feel waiting behind that door, and I would not have come up for months, if I came up at all.

I thought of what it would cost.

I thought of the plant on the windowsill, which was alive. I thought of the bar at Mulligan's. I thought of Leo's face on the day that I closed the folder, wide open, unguarded, filled with gratitude, and the way he had said thank Christ.

They were dirt, he had said. Somebody did the city a favor.

I lifted my hand.

I lifted it slowly, from the cover, and held it a moment in the air. The fingers were steady. I noticed that, with a distant, clinical interest. I noticed that it was the hand of a man who had decided.

I picked up the parcel, and put it back in the drawer, and locked it.

I did not open it. Not that night, nor the next. Not in the winter, when the snow came and the sun went down at half past four; not in the spring, when the first cherry blossoms broke out along the Parkway and the news told of a pair of sudden deaths in the Main Line; not in the long hot summers, when the sky was a white blank and the city smelled of tar. I carried the key in my pocket for eleven years.

I never opened it.

Not ever.

…

THE END — Ending 1 of 8: Case Closed

Closing a door because you are tired is not neutrality. You won the small battle, and you lost the war you did not know you were in.

Somewhere in the city, someone was still designing rooms in which people could not breathe. The cases were clean. The cases stayed clean. And a man with a gold-rimmed pair of spectacles went on reading faces for a living, and never once learned how to read his own.

There are seven other endings. Go back to Chapter 5 to choose differently.