'Yes, it is,' I said. 'And he's probably right. I mean, I liked trying cases. Getting up in front of a jury. Waving my hands around. Seeing if I could make them love me. But n.o.body's sure I can handle the stress anymore and stay sober. Including me. Without that, I don't like it all. I'm just hooked on the money.'

I felt bruised, lying there, pounding myself with the truth. But I knew I was on the mark. Money was worse than booze or cocaine. G.o.d, it could just go in the sweet rush of spending. You start visiting the tailor, buy the Beemer, maybe pick up a little country house, find a club or two not picky enough to keep you out. Next thing you know, two sixty-eight before taxes, and you're looking in the b.u.t.ton drawer for coins to pay your bridge tolls. Not to mention being a drunk who used to arrive home routinely, pulling my pockets inside out under the light of my front porch, wondering, sort of abstractly, where it was all those twenties went. (As well as my house keys, which on one occasion I eventually realized I'd thrown into the tin cup of some beggar.) Now I had an ex with a nice German car and a house in the country and G.o.d to thank that I paid alimony and had something to show for the money I made.

'We all are,' she said. 'Hooked. To some extent. It's part of the life.'

'No,' I said. You meant what you told Pagnucci. You love it. You love G & G. You'd work there for free.'

She made a face, but I had her nailed and she knew it.

'What is it?' I asked. 'Seriously. I never got it. To me, you know, all these lawsuits, it's my robber baron's better than your robber baron. What do you get off on? The law?'

'The law. Sure.' She nodded, mostly to herself. 'I mean, all this right and wrong. It's nifty.' '"Nifty"?'

She came over and lay beside me, belly down. She had those bandy legs and her bad skin, but she looked awfully good to me, a perky little derriere. I patted her rear and she smiled. The flag was unfurling again, but I knew it was no use. Besides, she had her mind on the law now, and that, as I'd told her, was really the love of her life.

'It's the whole thing,' she said, 'all of it. Money. The work. The world. You know how it is when you're a child, you want to live in a fairy tale, you want to play house with Snow White, and I mean, here I am, hanging out with all of these people I read about in the Journal and the business pages of the Tribune.' Brushy, Wash, Martin, all of them, they kept track of the movements of big-time corporate America - financings, acquisitions, promotions - avid as soap opera fans, gobbling up the Journal and the local business press every morning with a hunger I felt only for the sports page.

'Like Krzysinski.'

She darted a warning look at me but answered straight.

'Like Krzysinski. And they like me, these people. And I like them. I mean, I think about what a mess I was when I got here. I was the only female lawyer in Litigation and I was scared to death. Remember?'

'Couldn't forget.' She had been on fire in the self-consuming fashion of the sun. Brushy knew she was a woman in a man's world - just ahead of the female gold rush to law school - and she confronted her prospects with a combustive emotional mix of h.e.l.l-bent determination and ravaging anxiety. She was the only girl in a family of five, born plug in the middle, and her situation here matched something that had faced her at home, some yes-and-no game she was always playing with herself. She'd do something brilliant, then come to one of her confidants - me or somebody else - and explain, with utmost sincerity, how it had all been accidental and would never be repeated, how she felt doomed by the expectations created by her own success. It was exhausting - and painful - just to listen to her, but even then I felt drawn to her, the way certain free molecules always react. I shared, I suppose, all these alternate moods, the brashness, the fear, the inclination to first blame myself.

'And now. All these people - they need me. I did this piece of takeover litigation for Nautical Paper a couple of years ago. My father worked there for a while, you know decades ago, but after we'd won the case I got this note from Dwayne Gandolph, the CEO, thanking me for the great work I'd done. It made me dizzy. Like inhaling Benzedrine. I brought it to my folks' home and we all pa.s.sed it around the dinner table and looked at it. The entire family was impressed with me - I was impressed with me.'

I understood what she was saying, perhaps more than she did, that her membership in this world was too hard-won not to be valued, too much a symbol to her to be understood as anything else. But she was smiling at herself for the moment. Gosh, she was great. We both thought so. I admired her enormously, the distances she'd dragged herself and her baggage. I gave her a smooch and we lay there necking for maybe ten minutes, two grown-ups, both of them naked in the daylight in a G.o.dd.a.m.n hotel room, just kissing and touching hands. I held her awhile, then she told me we had to go. There was G & G, the office, work to do.

We both laughed when she poked her fist through the hole in her panty hose. She put them on anyway and asked how I was doing finding Bert.

'I'm not going to find him,' I said. She went quizzical and I told her what I hadn't yet said to anyone else - that I thought Bert was dead.

'How could Bert be dead?' she asked. 'Who has the money?' It required only an instant, I noted, for her to reach the question that had come to me after a week.

'It's an interesting window of opportunity, isn't it?'

She had sat down in the chair again, half-dressed and posed against the fancy brocade. I loved looking at her.

'You mean,' she said, 'if somebody knew Bert was dead, they could blame it on him?'

'That's what I mean.' I was off the bed, stepping into my trousers. 'But they'd have to know,' I said. 'They couldn't be guessing. If Bert shows up again, they'd look pretty bad.'

'Well, how would they be sure?' I looked at her.

'You mean someone killed him? From the firm? You don't believe that.'

I didn't, in fact. There was logic to it, but little sense. I told her that.

'These are just theories, right? Bert being dead? All of it?' She wanted more than my rea.s.surance. She was being her true self, relentless, beating the idea to death like a snake.

'Those are theories,' I told her, 'but listen to this.' I told her then about my meetings yesterday, first with Jake, then with the Committee. This time I caught her off guard. She sat far forward, her mouth formed in a small perfect o. She was too distressed to feign valiance.

'Never,' she said finally. 'They'll never agree to something like that. That kind of cover-up. They have too much character.'

'Wash?' I asked. 'Pagnucci?'

'Martin?' she responded. Brushy's reverence for Martin was even greater than mine. 'You'll see,' she said. 'They'll do the right thing.'

I shrugged. She could be right, and even if she wasn't, she was improved by thinking the best of her partners. But she could see she hadn't really persuaded me.

'And Jake,' she said, 'my G.o.d, how sleazy. What's wrong with him?'

'You just don't know Jake. If you'd grown up with him, you'd see another side.'

'Meaning?'

'I could tell you stories.' I fumbled in her purse for a cigarette. I was tempted to tell her about the bar exam, but realized on second thought that she'd think less of me than Jake.

'You don't trust him, right? That's what you're suggesting. He wasn't brought up to be trustworthy?'

'I know him. That's all.'

In the green chair, she was stilled by disquiet.

'You don't like Jake, do you? I mean, all that palling around with him. That's bull, isn't it?'

'Who wouldn't like Jake? Rich, good-looking, charming. Everyone likes Jake.'

'You've got a chip on your shoulder about Jake. It's obvious.'

'All right. I have a chip on my shoulder about a lot of things.'

'Don't wait for me to say you're wrong.'

'I'm bitter and petty, right?' She could tell what I was thinking: I'd heard the tune before, someone else had sung the words, another chanteuse.

'I would never say petty. Look, Mack, he's lucky. In life, some people are lucky. You can't sit around despising good fortune.'

'Jake is a coward. He's never had the b.a.l.l.s to face what he should have. And I let him make me a coward with him. That's the part that frosts me.'

'What are you talking about?'

'Jake.' I looked at her hard. I could feel myself turning mean, Bess Malloy's son, and she saw it too. She stepped into her pumps and fixed the clasp on her purse. She'd been warned off.

'This is attorney-client, right?' she finally asked. 'All of this. About Jake saying not to tell?' She wasn't being humorous. She meant that the communication was privileged. That she was forbidden to repeat it, to TN or anyone else, and thus that BAD could never criticize her for failing to come forward, as, ethically, each of us was obliged to do.

'That's right, Brushy, you're covered. There's no s.h.i.t on your shoes.'

'That's not what I meant.'

'Yes, it is,' I said, and she did not bother to answer back. A certain familiar melancholy attacked me midline, spreading from the heart. Ain't life grand? Every man for himself. I sank down on the bed, on the heavy embroidered spread which we'd never removed, and couldn't quite look at her.

Eventually she sat beside me.

I don't want you to tell me any more about this. It makes me feel weird. And confused. It's too close to home. And I don't know what to do. How to react.' She touched my hand. 'I'm not perfect either, you know.'

'I know.'

She waited.

'I think this thing is frightening and out of control,' she said at last. 'All of it. I'm worried about you.'

'Don't worry. I may b.i.t.c.h a lot, Brush, but in the end I can take care of myself.' I looked at her. 'I'm like you.'

I wasn't sure how that sat and neither was she. She went to the chair and picked up her purse, then on second thought stopped off to kiss me. She had decided to forgive me, that things, everything, could be worked through. I held her hand for a second, then she left me there, sitting on the bed, alone in the hotel room.

XVI. INVESTIGATION APPROACHES CLIMAX, INVESTIGATOR GOES FURTHER.

My afternoon with Brushy left me in a state. Longing -real longing - took me as a walloping surprise. I reeled around in an adolescent fit, captured in transported recollections of the impressive qualities of Brushy's person, her pleasant scent of light perfume and body cream, and the pure transmission of some as yet unnamed form of human-emitted electromagnetic sensation which continued to grip my thorax and my loins. From my house that night I called her at home, reaching only her machine. I told myself that she was in the office, a number I did not have the bravery to dial.

I had called her doctor, who'd prescribed a salve, and I went to the John to give myself another treatment. In my sensuous thrall, I soon found myself otherwise engaged. Unspeakable activities. I sweated in my bathroom, imagining wild amours with a woman who'd been naked in my arms a few hours before, and wondered about my life.

I had just reholstered when I noticed the catarrh of an engine idling outside. I was stabbed at once by the kind of probing guilt my mother would have cheered, chilled by the thought that Lyle and his pals might have seen my filmy shape through the wobbled gla.s.s blocks of the bathroom window. I would have made quite a sight, backlit, bending and swaying as I squeezed the sound from my own sax. I heard the front door bang and gave some thought to remaining locked up there. But that was not my approach with Lyle. In any circ.u.mstance, I felt committed to staring him down.

I encountered him as he galloped up the stairs. In his various rangy parts, he looked a little more organized than usual; I suspected he was with a girl. His spume of hair was combed and he had on a Kindle County Unified Police Force leather jacket, not mine but one he'd purchased from the cop supply house on Murphy Street and which he wore in unspoken comment on the time when I had what he judged a more authentic life. He stomped past me, muttering something I did not catch at first.

'Mom's downstairs,' he repeated.

'Mom?'

'Remember her? Nora? It's boys' night out.' I wondered if it meant anything positive that he was treating his parents' foibles with humor rather than undiluted contempt. We were in the dim interior hallway between the upstairs bedrooms, and after a few steps he turned back to me with a smirk. 'Hey, man, what the h.e.l.l were you doing just now? In the John? We were like taking bets.'

'You and your mother?' I asked. I summoned all my courtroom dignity and told him I was blowing my nose. Frankly, he could not have cared less, but when he walked off down the dark corridor, I felt so hollowed by shame I thought I might stumble. Often humiliated and seldom saved. Is it just a Catholic thought that s.e.x will always get you in trouble? G.o.d, I thought. G.o.d. What a moment that must have been. A boy and his mother laying odds on whether the old goat's actually up there having a w.a.n.k. I headed down in an appropriate mood to see my former wife.

Nora was standing in the bright lights of the front entry, framed by the white molding and the storm door, holding on to her purse and not venturing any farther inside. I kissed her cheek, a gesture she received stoically.

'How are you?' she asked. 'Jolly,' I said. 'You?' 'Jolly.'

Serve and volley. Here we were, a total standoff after twenty-one years. After flips and swirls and curly dos, Nora had let her hair go straight, so that it hung lank and fine and almost black, looking as it does on those j.a.panese gals who seem to have surrounded their faces with a lacquer frame. She had given up makeup too. I saw Nora infrequently enough that she was starting to look different to me. The work of time was no longer undetectable for being observed day by day. Her chin was getting full and her eyes were sinking into shadow. She looked okay, though, except for her manifest agitation at being here.

Nora had a different life now, one that she thought of as better and truer than the decades she'd spent with me. New friends. New interests. A big-city life. Female circles princ.i.p.ally, no doubt, with meetings, lectures, parties. I'm sure that days went by before she woke to any recollection of me - or Lyle. One foot inside this house and something fearsome gripped her, I suspected, not nostalgia, but the terror that she would be confined again, imprisoned, held hostage once more from her real self.

'You can sit.' I swung a hand beyond the black slate of the foyer to the worn meal-colored carpet of the living room.

'It's just a minute. He wanted to stop for money. He's going to take me out.'

'Money?' With that, I heard footsteps overhead. He was in my room, rooting for cash. Nora heard the same thing, and gave me the wrinkle of some happy, suburbanized expression she'd seen on TV.

'He's no better,' I told her. 'Not a bit.'

The plainness of this observation seemed to catch us both; somehow a sense of tragedy reared up between us so large that I thought we'd both go down like bowling pins. You could never get around the future with Lyle, the way he was now and the suspicion that it foretold something grim, that he was worse than an unhappy kid, but was one of those people - everybody knows several - who turns out to be lame, crippled, not even up to the dismal functions, like holding a job or hanging in with someone else, which allow us our meager share of daily satisfactions. In the moment of recognition n.o.body - not Nora, not me - could run from the unhappy evidence that our lives were once one thing, not merely a failure of spirit but an inst.i.tution of cause and effect of which neither law nor will could annul the unfortunate consequences. Those would roll on through another generation or two.

'And whose fault is that, Mack?' she asked. The answer, if we were going to be honest - which we weren't - was probably elaborate. We could start with Grandma and Grandpa and go on from there. But I knew Nora. We were starting a game of Matrimonial Geography, in which Nora would point out how all roads on the map of blame led only to me.

'Desist,' I said, 'cease. Let's fight about something less predictable. A new subject. Just skip Lyle, money, or me.'

'Look at your life, Mack. You're Mr Entropy. What can you expect from him?' Her observations through the bathroom window seemed to have emboldened her, though ordinarily she did not need much excuse.

Mr Entropy, I thought. There were entire universes saved from self-reproach by that remark. Jesus, this was one person who didn't take long to get under my skin.

'He's thirty years younger than me and doesn't have the same well-worn excuses.' I smiled tightly and she made various faces, implying it was all right, she could take being stiff-armed. We confronted one another in simmering silence until Lyle returned and blew past me, taking his mother in tow.

In the aftermath, I settled by the TV in the living room. The Hands were playing UW-Milwaukee the usual tough first half - both their bench and self-confidence would give out in the last twenty minutes, when they would resume their role as this decade's Mid-Ten doormat. Within, I continued prolonged fomenting. Nora f.u.c.king Goggins. Entropy! How long had she been storing up that one? There was always a hundred megaton warhead in her silo.

When I stopped drinking, Nora used to tell me I was really no fun anymore, a line that served the great principle of relationship transitivity by which she could both put me down and make excuses for herself. If I was no fun, she should have fun on her own. We reached a seven-week period where she went off for weekend conventions three times and then finally a mid-week night when my bride of nineteen years simply did not come home.

When I marched through the door the next evening, the house was clean, I could smell a hot meal, a relative rarity, and I immediately made out the plan: life as normal. The idea was that I should ask nothing. Neither of us had enough fingers and toes to count the occasions when I'd pulled more or less the same stunt in those nineteen years, nights when I was so drunk that I sometimes felt I had to hang on to the gra.s.s to keep from falling off the earth, though usually the barkeep knew enough to give her a call. Nonetheless, about 9:30 I finally glued together my courage.

I was with Jill,' she answered. Jill Horwich, her erstwhile manager and bartime buddy.

I know you started out with Jill. I want to know who else you were with.'

'n.o.body else.'

'Nora, don't bulls.h.i.t me.'

'I'm not bulls.h.i.tting.' When I fixed her with one of those looks she might have given me, she said, 'I don't believe this is happening.' She was on her feet, twisting the wedding ring around on her finger, posed in a corner of the living room where a lovely bra.s.s vase with gladioli was arranged. I was, I admitted, struck at that moment by the enduring phenomenon of beauty. 'Mack, leave it be. I know I don't have the right to ask that. But I am.'

'Motion denied,' I said. 'Let's go. The sticky truth.'

'You don't want to know.'

'You're right, I don't. But I'm asking anyway.'

'Why?' She looked at me bleakly.

'I suppose I sort of think it's important.'

Silence.

'So who's the guy?'

'There is no guy, Mack.'

'Nora, who were you with?'

'I told you, Mack, I was with Jill.'