One Outing a Month

The January outing was approved on the ninth, by a one-word order in the margin of her motion, and by the sixteenth Linnea had spent seven days not letting herself count the hours.

She had chosen the Starlite. She had not told him why. The Opposition, which arrived with the toast, was four lines long: Respondent does not oppose. Escort to be at a distance of Respondent's choosing. Movant is reminded that Clause 4 provides for communications with her closest friend and that Respondent will not be listening. Beneath it, in his small black hand: He will be in the building.

He was Ruddick. She'd learned to read the pronouns. Everything in the house had a second sentence.

They reached Sunset Park at noon. It had snowed in the night, a dirty inch that had frozen into ridges on the curb, and the diner's windows were fogged to the sills with the breath of the lunch crowd. She got out of the car with Dunne at her elbow and the gray Ford idling half a block behind, and she stood on the sidewalk in her navy suit and her old wool coat, and for a moment she simply stood there and let the city hit her face.

Fourth Avenue. A bus. A man yelling about a parking ticket. A smell of frying onions and diesel and cold. She had not understood, until this second, that she had been holding her breath since October.

"Mrs. Varga," said Dunne apologetically. "We should go in."

"Miss Calder."

"Yes, ma'am."

She went in.

…

Greer was already in booth six, with her back to the wall and her coat on, and when she saw Linnea she did not stand. She sat very still. Her eyes went over Linnea's face as though checking each feature against a list, the eyes, the mouth, the new thinness under the cheekbone, and then, with a small bright shaky exhale, she smiled.

"Hi, counselor."

"Hi."

"You look like hell."

"Thank you."

"You look like expensive hell. Like hell with a stylist." Greer's voice wobbled on the last word. "Sit down before I do something embarrassing."

Linnea sat. Across the room, at a table by the cash register, Ruddick had installed himself with a coffee and a newspaper in the pose of a man who has never met either woman. Dunne took the stool at the counter. Dolores, going by with the pot, gave both guards one long flat look, the look of a woman who has seen a lot of men with earpieces, and poured Linnea's coffee without asking.

"Two years she's been comin' in here with that face on," Dolores said to nobody. "Now look at her."

"Amicus?" said Greer quietly, over the rim of her cup.

"Amicus."

"Say it like you mean it."

"Amicus," Linnea said again. "Greer, I'm fine."

"You are not fine. You are in a cage."

"I'm in a very well-appointed house with a library and a legal database and a woman who knows how I take my coffee."

"That's worse!"

"I know."

They stared at each other. Then Greer started to laugh, helplessly, with her hand pressed over her mouth, and Linnea felt it catch her too, ridiculous, rising from nowhere. They laughed until Dolores returned with a plate of pie nobody had ordered and set it between them, wiping her eyes with her apron.

…

"I need to tell you about Pratt," said Linnea, when the laughing had run out.

"I know about Pratt."

"How do you—"

"Coat-check girl. Don't ask." Greer tilted her head. "Is he hurting you?"

"He hasn't touched me."

"That's not what I asked."

It took Linnea a moment. She watched her friend's face and saw nothing there but love, the fierce, unlovely, uncompromising kind, and she found that the words she'd prepared stuck in her throat.

"No," she said. "He isn't hurting me."

"Do you want to be there?"

"I want to know what he is."

"Lin."

"I'm not saying I like it." She turned her cup in its saucer. "I'm saying he's the first person who's ever argued with me and lost. He stripped a man of his career in four minutes at dinner, and then he came to my study and asked what I thought of the wording. Do you know what that's like? I don't know whether to be afraid or—"

She stopped.

"Or what?" said Greer softly.

"Or something I'd rather not name in a restaurant." She picked up her fork and put it down again. "Tell me what you've got."

Greer's mouth thinned. She looked past Linnea's shoulder at Ruddick's newspaper, and when she spoke, it was in the low even murmur of someone reading a eulogy.

"Ambrose Pell," she said. "The customs broker. Do you know the name?"

"No."

"He was my source. A good one. He gave me a drive. And on Monday morning they pulled him out of Newtown Creek."

Linnea went cold.

"The cops said he slipped. Drunk, probably, on the way home. He had a blood alcohol of point one eight." Greer's hand curled around her mug. "Pell didn't drink either. He had a sister who ran a Methodist soup kitchen. He didn't drink, Lin."

The word landed twice. Didn't drink. And again, behind it, like the second wave of a swell: Dennis Hale didn't drink.

"I need you to listen," said Greer. "Because I haven't said this to anyone. Not even Marty." She reached across the table and took Linnea's hand in both of hers. "Two years ago, a man named Dennis Hale was the senior auditor at the Port Authority. He went in the water at Newtown Creek. Same creek. Same story. Drunk, accident, case closed. Eleven days later the Authority named his replacement."

"Who?"

"Your father."

The booth tilted.

"Warren," said Greer. "Warren Calder. They gave him Hale's desk, Hale's files, Hale's clearance. A man who'd been an inspector for twenty-five years. Promoted overnight. And a year later he's in federal court, charged with a murder predicate for Hale's death."

"Count Four," Linnea whispered.

"Count Four. Which disappeared. For free." Greer leaned in, her voice no more than breath. "Somebody wanted your father in that seat. And then somebody wanted him out of it. I don't know which one was Varga and which was Brannock. I only know one of them put him there, and one of them took the charge away, and you've been married to the second one for three months."

Linnea heard her own pulse in her ears.

Who went quiet? Judith had said. Somebody always pays.

She thought of her father's face in the visiting room. The shutter closing. Anselm.

"He knows more than he told me," she said, very low. "My dad. He's frightened of something. It isn't Brannock, not only. It's a thing he did."

"Or a thing he saw."

"Or both."

"Find out," said Greer. "Please. If you're going to be in there, find out." She squeezed the hand. "And Linnea? Don't trust the first thing you find. Pell told me the one thing nobody wants to say. The first answer is always a gift. And somebody's always paying for the wrapping."

…

They talked for an hour. Linnea told her about the margins in the Admiralty reports, the Docket, the way he'd answered her motion with footnotes. Greer, in turn, told her about the drive: a hundred and one payees, a trail of cargo, a little pencil watch in the margin beside every name.

"A watch?"

"Like a signature. A hobbyist's mark." Greer gave a dry little laugh. "I looked it up. Hollis Brannock collects timepieces. Rumor is he keeps one for every man he's, quote, persuaded. A private museum. Nobody's ever seen it."

I took a very fine watch from a man once. Linnea had not heard that. She didn't know what made the hairs rise on her arms. "Greer, your car. Someone's been following you."

"Black sedan. Since October." Greer shrugged. "I figured it was Varga's. You know, to keep me in line."

"Maybe."

"Or maybe it's the one who's more scared of what I know." Greer finished her coffee. "Either way, I'm still alive. I'm choosing to take that as an endorsement."

At twenty past one, the check came and Dolores slid it between them with a look of profound reproach.

Linnea reached for it.

"Don't you dare," said Greer.

"I never let you pay."

"You never let anyone pay. It's your whole thing." Greer grabbed it. "I'm letting you owe me one pie. I'm going to hold it over you for years."

Something in Linnea's chest unclenched, just slightly. She slid out of the booth. She was reaching for her coat when Greer caught her wrist, not roughly, and said, so softly it was nearly mouthed:

"Is the pen working?"

"Yes."

"Anything?"

"Not yet." Linnea held her gaze. "But I'm going to be very good at it."

Greer closed her eyes for a second. When she opened them, they were wet and furious and proud.

"Then that's my girl," she said.

…

Anselm was waiting in the library when she came in at six.

He was standing at the window, with his back to the room and his hands behind him, looking at the frozen lawn and the black ribbon of the river, and he did not turn when she entered. The lamps were low. The fire had been lit. On the table by the reading chair, a pot of tea sat steaming beside a plate of untouched shortbread, and she understood that it had been put there for her and that he had stayed here for hours to make sure it stayed warm.

"How was the diner?" he asked.

The question was perfectly gentle. She went still.

"Which diner?"

"The Starlite, on Fourth. The booth by the window. You had the pie." He still hadn't turned. "Ruddick tells me Miss Halloran did most of the talking."

"You said you wouldn't be listening."

"I wasn't. I said I wouldn't." A beat. "Ruddick reported afterward. I'd have been a fool not to ask him."

She had known it. She had known it. She had even said it to herself, in the car, with her nails digging into her palm: He'll know where you went. But hearing it, in the low even voice, with the fire popping and the lamp throwing her shadow long across the floor, brought it home with a kind of cold clarity that made her want to hit something.

"You had me followed."

"You were escorted."

"That's the same thing."

"It is not." He did turn then. His face was tired, the skin under his eyes faintly bruised. "A man who follows you wants to know where you go. A man who escorts you wants you to come back. I'm aware the line is thin. I'm aware I'm standing on it."

"Then why are you telling me?"

"Because there's something I need you to carry back to Miss Halloran."

She stared at him.

"Ambrose Pell," said Anselm. "I understand he's dead."

The fire popped. Somewhere deep in the house, a clock began to chime the quarter hour.

"How do you know that?" she said.

"I know because I had him watched. For two weeks. I wanted to know who he was talking to." He did not look away. "Not to hurt him. To protect him. Hollis learned he was meeting a journalist and I wanted a man within reach. I was a day late." Something moved in his jaw. "The man I assigned found him in the creek at four in the morning. Face down. There was no one else on that street."

She said nothing.

"Tell Miss Halloran," said Anselm, "that Pell is dead and I didn't kill him."

"You expect her to believe that?"

"No."

"Then why—"

"Because it's true. And because I would rather it were said, even if it is not believed." He stepped toward her, one pace, and stopped, and she saw the effort in it. "I don't expect you to believe it either. I only ask that you remember I said it first."

She looked at him. She looked at the scar, the hollows under his eyes, the stillness in the shoulders of a man who has stood at a window for hours. She looked for the lie, the smoothness, the seam she had named at the dining table in October. She searched his face the way she'd searched the contract for a flaw.

It wasn't there.

Every answer he had given her cost something. This one had cost him more than the rest.

I want to believe him, she thought.

It was the most dangerous sentence she had ever formed. It sat in her head like a lit match in a room full of paper. She had read ten thousand pages of fine print in her life, and she had never once, until now, wanted a document to be true.

"I'll tell her," she said.

"Thank you."

"I won't say I believe you."

"I wouldn't ask." He looked at the tea, steaming gently on its tray. "Drink that, please. It's gone cold twice already."

He left. She stood in the lamplight with her hands at her sides and her coat still on, in a room that smelled of woodsmoke and lemon oil and old paper, and the card from Perry Lindqvist burned a small cold hole in the lining of her wrap upstairs.

Tell him, she thought.

Tell him one thing, at least. You owe him one true thing.

She poured the tea. It was still warm.