Degree of Guilt Read online

  Paget refocused on the scallions. ‘And Jennifer is an only child?’

  Carlo nodded. ‘After her, she says, her parents gave up sex.’

  ‘Kids always think that.’ Paget smiled. ‘The alternative is too grotesque for any teenager to imagine.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Carlo’s voice took on a teasing edge. ‘I’ve never had much trouble with that.’

  ‘I suppose it’s that I’m single.’ Paget took a light tone, trying to decipher the meaning of his son’s remark. ‘I guess that makes my social life a little more conspicuous and makes it somewhat less likely you’ll confuse me with Ward Cleaver. Back to Jennifer: is your homework done?’

  ‘Yes – for hours. We’ve got a basketball game tomorrow, and I want to rest up. Anyhow, what does my homework have to do with Jennifer?’

  ‘If you have time, perhaps we could invite her to dinner this evening. I can make more chicken, and maybe Jennifer’s parents will feel better about letting her go somewhere they know there’s another parent and perhaps a few house rules.’

  Carlo grinned. ‘Like safe sex and a two-drink limit?’

  ‘If I were you, I would keep that line in the family.’ Paget looked over at him. ‘I sometimes wonder, Carlo, what lessons you’ve learned from me.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Carlo looked genuinely puzzled. Perhaps, Paget thought, there was less beneath the conversation than he had feared. ‘There’s enough to choose from,’ Paget finally said. ‘Your life hasn’t precisely been the Disney Channel.’

  ‘Did I ever accuse you,’ Carlo said, deadpan, ‘of murdering Mickey Mouse?’

  Paget put down the knife. ‘You are absolutely determined to make this hard for me. Okay, the message goes like this: The subject of the moment is sex. It can be wonderful – as long as you treat it with respect, it’s part of a friendship, and you’re as honest about your feelings as you would be with any friend when the subject truly matters. Sometime, making love will be there for you. When it is, don’t lie, don’t push, and don’t sleep with anyone you won’t care for next month. Is that succinct enough?’

  Once more, Paget saw the question in Carlo’s eyes. But his son let it go unspoken, as he had for eight years. ‘Maybe,’ Carlo said simply, ‘our generation will do better with all that.’

  ‘I think you’ll do better with everything.’ How, Paget wondered, to steer the conversation from this precipice. ‘The most important thing,’ he added, ‘is to listen, to be fair with each other, and to speak your heart without attacking your partner. But my own parents could neither show nor tell me, and I’ve only been able to tell you.’ And Paget thought silently, I’ve been all you had. ‘Maybe,’ he finished, ‘you can show me.’

  When the doorbell rang, his son was still regarding him, as if forming a thought or question. Paget smiled. ‘Dorothy Parker once asked, when the doorbell rang, “What fresh hell is this?” But in this case, someone’s just saved you from “Father Knows Best.”’

  Carlo raised an eyebrow. ‘Guess you want me to get that.’

  ‘Please.’

  Paget heard his son head past the dining room, feet padding on the hardwood floor. The living room was large, with a sprawling Persian rug and a ten-foot ceiling that tended to eat up sound, muffling Carlo’s footsteps as he moved toward the door. Paget resumed thinking about chicken piccata.

  ‘Dad?’

  ‘Yes,’ Paget called out.

  ‘There’s someone here.’

  Carlo’s voice sounded thin and a little strained. Paget put the knife down and headed for the living room.

  She stood with her back to him, looking at the prints as she had that morning in Washington, fifteen years before.

  He watched her, silent.

  Without haste, she finished her scrutiny of the last print, an exotic African landscape by Jesse Allen, lush trees and surreal birds that existed only in the artist’s imagination. Turning, she said, ‘It’s rather like your apartment on East Capitol. Of course, I recognize several of the prints.’ She smiled almost imperceptibly, pointing out the red-and-blue print of a geometric ball that seemed to roll as one approached it. ‘That’s a Vasarely, I believe you once informed me.’

  Speak of the devil, Paget thought, looking from the woman to his son. But they had not been speaking of her, not directly, and Paget found himself speechless with surprise and withheld anger.

  ‘Carlo,’ he finally said, ‘I believe you recall your mother.’

  Carlo stood as if caught between them, uncertain of what to do or say. Flashing the boy a warm, almost intimate smile, she moved to him. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said dryly to Paget. ‘We’ve met.’

  Paget was struck by how alike they were: dark hair, olive skin, chiseled faces, a slimness that combined strength with a certain delicacy. In Carlo, her grace was still a tentative teenage dignity, which Paget knew, might well mature into the stylish ease that can capture a room. As she could.

  ‘What brings you here?’ he asked.

  ‘Work,’ she said dismissively. ‘Perhaps an interview.’

  If she had any further explanation, her tone said, it would not come in front of Carlo. The boy shifted from foot to foot, like a matchmaker watching a blind date go sour. Paget felt desperately sorry for him.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Mary said to Carlo, taking his arm. ‘He’s always like that around me – completely mesmerized. When he was twenty-nine, it was all he could do to ask me out. But then it was all I could do to accept.’

  Carlo grinned, still embarrassed, but relieved at her banter. ‘Then why did you?’

  ‘Oh, I was waiting for Kevin Costner to mature. And your father had a certain indefinable charm.’

  Paget stood there, grateful that she had put Carlo more at ease, unsettled by the artificiality of it all. ‘I’m not speechless. Just cooking. I can either skip this celebrity roast or burn the chicken.’ He paused at the look in Carlo’s eyes. ‘Can you stay for dinner?’

  ‘I can’t, really.’ Her half smile reflected how tepid he had sounded. ‘Go cook. Perhaps Carlo can show me the house.’

  Her voice was different, Paget realized. The trace evidence that she was second-generation Italian – a sort of Mediterranean intensity that underscored certain words – had become the studied diction of a stage actress. Television, he thought: flipping channels, he had seen her once by accident and stopped, bemused by her genesis from lawyer to ‘personality.’ Abruptly, he had snapped off the picture; some moments later, he had found himself staring at a blank screen.

  ‘Carlo’s room alone,’ he said now, ‘should make the tour worthwhile. There’s been nothing like it since Chernobyl.’

  She smiled again. ‘I’m Carlo’s guest,’ she said. ‘I’ll let him pick his spots.’

  Awkwardly, Carlo led her upstairs.

  Paget walked to the kitchen, still suspended in time.

  So much like Washington, she had said. Remembering the Vasarely as Paget remembered her standing in front of it, studying its patterns, wearing nothing at all.

  It was the last weekend they had ever made love.

  The Lasko case had not yet broken, and Paget had been certain that it never would – that he was at the end of things, that Lasko had killed a witness with impunity, and that Lasko’s source within the agency, the one who had monitored Paget’s progress, would never be detected. Trapped in a deep and solitary anger, feeling that Mary was opposed to him, Paget had meant to spend the weekend alone. Then Mary had come to his apartment unannounced, as she had come today.

  They were both in their late twenties, Paget reflected now, so sure of what they already knew, so disastrously unknowing. Alone in his kitchen, with Mary and their son upstairs, he felt the blindness of the moment as they lived it then.

  At first, the sense of things unspoken had hung between them. They played backgammon, drank wine, smoked dope. They did not speak of Lasko.

  Finally, gradually, they talked about themselves.

  ‘What do you want i
n a woman?’ she had asked him.

  Her voice wasn’t intrusive, just curious. Paget felt stoned enough to try to answer; drugs, and defeat, seemed to have lowered his defenses. ‘A lot of what I look for in anyone, I guess. Curiosity. Dislike for the easy answer. That in a good moment they can imagine what it’s like to be an old woman or a small child. That they are more than what they do or what they are.’

  Mary smiled through the haze. ‘You don’t ask much.’

  ‘Not much at all.’

  They slid down the couch, heads resting on opposite arms, legs parallel on the pillows. The next record fell on the stereo.

  The Starship began singing.

  Paget’s limbs felt numb. The darkened room became images in a field of black, suspended in black: the spotlit Vasarely ball rolling toward them; the two empty glasses; the last roll of the dice faceup on the backgammon board. Her eyes.

  He began to feel lost in them. The notes of’Miracles’ came to him one at a time, from some great distance. He did not know or care how many moments had passed since anyone had spoken.

  Her voice broke the quiet.

  ‘You know, Chris, you’ve been very lucky. You’ve never wanted – or needed – anything.’

  It sounded like someone else, not him. But all he said was, ‘I keep hearing that.’

  ‘No, I mean it. Half the girls I knew growing up were married at eighteen. Sometimes I hate looking back.’

  Her words seemed to hang in the air. Paget realized that he had forgotten the bitterness she seemed to carry: about being Catholic; about her parents’ stillborn emotions and lack of encouragement; about the ex-husband who had wanted her to quit law school and have babies. Forgotten, more surprisingly, how much she needed to succeed. Forgotten her fierce pride at being assistant to the chairman of their agency, the ambition that had caused her to clash with Paget as many nights as they had made love.

  Tonight he wanted none of it.

  ‘No need,’ Paget answered smilingly. ‘You’ve done a lot. That’s something else I like in a woman.’

  She smiled back. Paget reached for her then. She looked at him with a clear black gaze. Then her arm rose in a graceful arc and pulled him down.

  They undressed each other slowly, mouths and fingertips stopping where they cared to. For a long time, they lay in a cocoon touching, finding, sounds that were not words. From one thing to another, mouth on her nipple, hand grazing her wetness, her hips rising, body twisting into him. Warm skin, thick clean hair against his face. Moments of suspended time, the absence of haste, the banishment of their ambitions and anything else that mattered in the daylight.

  Perhaps an hour passed before he was inside her.

  Even that felt different. Especially that.

  Her stomach and hips rose, pressing against him as if desperate to pull him inside, to touch as much skin with her skin as she could. When they moved together, it was without hesitance, subtle changes in rhythm passing between them without words, suddenly faster, almost desperate, until she shuddered as their mouths found each other and a half cry rose from her throat and met his.

  Afterward, no one spoke.

  It was as if, Paget thought, their bodies had learned something their heads did not yet know. Neither of them wanted to spoil that. Neither wanted to ask for anything.

  ‘You wanted to ask me something?’ she said now.

  He turned from the stove.

  She stood in the doorway, without Carlo. Paget sensed that she had been there for some moments and that, unusual for him, he had been too abstracted to sense her presence. He looked past her, toward the living room.

  She followed his thoughts. ‘Carlo’s waiting outside,’ she said in a quiet voice. ‘I told him I wanted to say goodbye.’

  ‘I might have wished,’ Paget answered with equal quiet, ‘that you’d bothered saying hello.’

  ‘He’s my son –’

  ‘A cat’s a better mother,’ Paget cut in. ‘You performed a storage function, that’s all. And we both know whom you did that for.’

  ‘Do we, Chris?’ Her smile was bitter. ‘Do we, really? Because I doubt you’ll ever know or understand.’

  Paget’s gaze was cold. ‘I’ve come to understand a great many things. About you, and about myself.’

  ‘Including why you did things? Or are your motives as pure as ever?’

  Paget stared at her, silent.

  ‘It seems,’ Mary said with muted irony, ‘that we’re beyond the help of a family counselor.’

  Paget kept watching her. ‘What I was going to ask,’ he said more evenly, ‘is why you’re here.’

  ‘As I told you, I’m here to do background for an interview.’

  ‘You could have come and gone. As you have a dozen times.’

  ‘I wanted to see him.’ She gave a small, almost helpless shrug; it was sufficiently unlike her to give Paget pause. ‘Needed to. For reasons of my own.’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘Is it really bad,’ she retorted quietly, ‘for Carlo to think I care a little?’

  ‘Why now?’ Paget shoved his hands in his pockets. ‘You could have called. I could have prepared him. I wouldn’t have stopped you.’

  ‘Then call it a moment of weakness, Chris, and trust the good outweighs the bad.’ She smiled faintly. ‘We’ve had those moments before.’

  Paget looked past her ‘He’s a nice boy,’ he said finally. ‘Normal. I think quite happy, for the most part.’

  ‘I can see that.’ She paused, then spoke with more feeling. ‘It was what I wanted to see.’

  Paget nodded. ‘Now you have.’

  She turned to leave. Turning again, she paused in the doorway. ‘You look well, Chris.’

  ‘And you.’

  She smiled again, as if some private thought amused her, and was gone. Paget stood there, suddenly quite certain that she intended never to see him again.

  Now a day later, she had called.

  ‘If you need me,’ Terri Peralta was saying, ‘I can call a neighbor, see if someone can pick up Elena.’

  They were standing in the elevator on the way down to the parking garage. He had been lost in memory; it took him a moment to respond.

  ‘Thanks,’ he answered. ‘Just go home, be a mom.’ He saw her puzzlement, realized how dismissive he might sound. ‘She’ll want a referral, that’s all.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Positive. It’s never good to represent someone you know, and she’s far too smart to want that. Plus I haven’t done homicide in years.’

  Terri was studying him intently. She doesn’t miss much, he thought, but this is more than she will ever understand.

  The elevator opened. Paget said good night and walked quickly to his car.

  Chapter 3

  Mary waited in a witness room on the sixth floor of the Hall of Justice.

  The room was sparse: a bare table, white cinder-block walls, gray linoleum floors. A squat female cop watched through a glass window to ensure that Mary did not harm herself.

  She turned her back to the guard.

  The monastic simplicity helped her concentrate. He would want to know what happened; unless the years had changed the way he thought, no detail would be too minute.

  He would not, she was determined, find her desperate and without resources.

  What would help most was to trace what the police had done. To remember, moment by moment, the four hours that had passed since she stood staring at Ransom’s body, telephone in her hand.

  ‘What happened?’ Emergency had asked.

  She had envisioned the tape spinning, capturing her words and tone of voice. ‘There’s been an accident.’

  ‘What kind of accident?’

  She hesitated. ‘A gun went off.’

  ‘Someone’s been shot?’

  ‘Yes.’ The stain was spreading on the rug. ‘I think he’s dead.’

  It sounded so foolish that the tremor in her voice startled her. ‘Where are you?’ Emergency was
demanding.

  ‘The Hotel Flood.’ She went blank. ‘I can’t remember the room.’

  ‘Who is this?’

  ‘Wait. . . . It’s registered to Mark Ransom. A suite.’

  ‘Who is that?’ the voice repeated.

  ‘Just come,’ she said.

  When the two police officers and three paramedics burst through the doorway, they found her sitting in front of the tape recorder, legs crossed, staring across his body at the drawn blinds of a window.

  The paramedics ran to the body. They flipped it on its back, opened the bloodstained shirt, placed pads on its chest. To her, their near frenzy seemed close to pantomime, like practice for a paramedic class. It was standard procedure, Mary supposed; only she knew how very dead he was.

  ‘It’s a coroner’s case,’ one of them said.

  The others nodded. Much more slowly, they turned Ransom on his stomach, as he had been before. When they rose, stepping back from the body, she saw that Ransom’s eyes were still open. With a rush of nausea and anger, she remembered how he had looked at her in the moments before he died. Once more, she hated him.

  ‘What happened?’ a policeman asked her.

  He was a big man, with a creased young-old face and light-blue eyes that looked immensely sad. He seemed to know who she was; for a moment she wanted to talk to him until she had nothing more to say. Then she caught herself; like the 911 tape, everything she said would be sifted by the police, the district attorney, the media.

  ‘He tried to rape me,’ she answered.

  The cop looked her up and down, pausing at the bruise on her cheek. She became aware that the second cop, a small, wiry man with glasses and a brown moustache and a notepad, was staring at the tape recorder. ‘Did he?’ the first cop asked.

  ‘Did he what?’

  ‘Penetrate you?’

  ‘No.’ She realized that she had folded her arms.

  ‘Do you need a doctor?’

  ‘No. Please. It’s the last thing I want – someone touching me.’

  Slowly, he nodded. ‘Could you tell us your name, ma’am?’

  The respectful ‘ma’am’ carried a certain irony: she did not date the loss of youth from her fortieth birthday but from the first time the salesgirl at the Saks cosmetics counter had called her ma’am.