by Steven Gore

“It would’ve been better if he’d died before he became ridiculous.”

The whispered words emerged out of a dying gust of wind, spoken by a young man standing behind me at the gravesite. They were followed by the stifled laughter of another, and then a sarcastic, “Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid ... Jesus Christ. Did Chubb have to quote Raymond Chandler every time he left his office?”

Another laugh, this one anticipatory. “And that hairball sports jacket? He looked like roadkill.”

I glanced over my shoulder, catching the eye of the first speaker, then the second. They both reddened and stretched their necks against their collars as though they were hand-puppets manipulated by their embarrassment.

The wind gusted again. I watched a swirl of dead leaves rise above our heads and come to rest around the minister’s feet. I knew that a religious man would’ve found symbolism in it, a final gesture by nature, a returning of dust to dust. But I didn’t. We’re no different than squirrels in winter: The only meanings we can ever uncover in the disparate chains of causes and effects that come together in the coincidences of the present are ones we’ve buried in the past.

I looked down at Robert Chubbins’s casket suspended over the grave. At least the two men standing behind me could give a reason for attending the funeral, though I doubted that the one they claimed was any more than partly true. I didn’t even have that to explain why I’d driven the three hundred miles down the coast from San Francisco. And I doubted that the other men semicircled around the grave site could’ve given honest reasons either. They were men who’d suffered a small death when they retired from their jobs as cops or private investigators or attorneys, and who now felt alive only in the retelling of war stories. I suspected that for them Chubb’s passing away was nothing more than a chance for rebirth.

I gazed over the casket toward the low clouds that had crawled in from the ocean and reached over the cliff. They’d now surrounded the downtown office buildings and submerged the courthouse dome under whose cover those around me had found meaning in their lives. A cresting wave of fog then swept up the hill beneath our feet, filling the spaces between the headstones and dissolving the crescent-shaped city below.

Judge Malcolm MacDonald shivered next to me. For forty years he’d been the centripetal force that controlled the county: His word was law and his will unalloyed by doubt, by indecision, or by trembling hands. He shivered again and the overhanging shoulder of his ancient suit brushed against my arm, his arthritic body unable to steady itself. When I reached over to support him my hand met loose cloth draped over wasted muscle and bone, his body seeming like an eroded granite statue sheathed by dry moss.

The judge glanced up from under his thick eyebrows, but neither thanked me nor apologized.

“Can we talk afterwards?” he asked.

I nodded and looked back at the minister, now closing his Bible against the mist that had drifted in. He then concluded the formalities with the same hollowness with which he’d conducted them, and with an embarrassed silence, for he’d twice misspoken the name of the deceased. Chubbins had come out once as Chibbuns and later as Chibbans, and no one had intervened to correct him.

The minister turned away and started for his car. There was no reason for him to remain among the mourners, for Chubb had neither a wife nor children to comfort, nor parents to console about a reversed course of life.

When we reached the sidewalk at the bottom of the slope, the judge pointed at the passenger side of his Lincoln. I helped him into the driver’s seat, then walked around to the other side and climbed in.

“Chubb made me the executor of his estate without telling me,” the judge said, and then gave a little shrug, as though trying to squirm out of a straitjacket.

“Why you?”

I knew, but asked anyway, wondering whether the judge would acknowledge the truth. The real reason was that Chubb’s father had died rescuing MacDonald during the Korean War, and the debt had been passed on to the son like an inheritance.

But that wasn’t how the judge answered, for he never wanted to be seen as a man who needed saving.

“Even though we were a generation apart, Chubb thought I understood him because we both had lousy marriages. But he never grasped that we were unhappy in different ways. His love for his wife was twisted. Mine was nonexistent.” He crossed himself. “May she rest in peace.”

Because I’d never met Chubb’s wife, there’d always been an unreality about his early years. A serial murderer had killed Belle twenty years earlier when I was still in high school and before I’d decided to become a private investigator. She’d been the day-shift dispatcher for the police department. That was where they’d met in the 1980’s, when he was a thirty-year-old patrol cop floundering in his unfulfilled aspiration to be promoted to detective.

“Why Chubb ever married her, I’ll never understand,” the judge said. “She always came at him like a cue ball, hard and spinning on the axis of her malice.”

In his phrasing, I heard an echo of his trademark use of billiard analogies from the bench.

Shall we rack ‘ em up and get this trial underway?

I think you snookered yourself, Counsel.

Scratch. Objection overruled.

“Sometimes she’d come at him low,” MacDonald said. “Pop him and pull back. Other times high with topspin, and keep pounding him and pounding him.”

The bitterness of her memory displayed itself in the judge’s twisted mouth. He noticed that I noticed and said, “As you get older it gets harder to conceal your emotions. She was an intolerable person and the least missed of all of the poor souls killed by that maniac.”

The two men who’d been standing behind us at the service walked past on either side of the judge’s car and got into an SUV parked three spaces ahead.

“You know who those smug guys are?” I asked him.

“From hunger. Hand to mouth P.I.’s that Chubb fed work to. They’ll be out of the business soon enough and back to stacking shelves at Ace Hardware.” The judge fell silent as we watched them drive away, and then said, “They were right, though. He’d gotten ridiculous. Cartoonish.”

I owed Chubb for giving me my start in the business, so I didn’t join in. But I knew what the judge meant. Something sweet can be rendered so long that it gags you, and Chubb had gotten sickenly earnest and moralistic over the years, like an ever-smiling priest trying to disguise his ever-consciousness of temptation and sin.

Instead I asked, “Why’d you want to talk to me?”

The judge stared ahead for a moment, as though he was coloring in his final image of Chubb, and then said, “I wonder if you wouldn’t mind going through his office and apartment. Find out what he was working on and hand out the cases to anyone who wants them.” He said the words in a way that suggested that it didn’t make a difference who handled them, as though the fates of Chubb’s clients had already been ordained. He then gestured toward the grave site. “And see if there’s anything we can sell to pay for this. I’m out five grand.”

I offered to split it with him.

“Take a look at what he’s got before you decide to do that,” the judge said. He then reached into his pocket and handed me Chubb’s keys. “Make up a list of what there is to sell. The probate judge will approve it if you sign off. It’s Ed Jennings. He’s still disappointed that you didn’t marry his daughter and take her with you.” MacDonald smiled like a conspirator. “He was counting on you to make his heart grow fonder.”

Driving away, I realized that walking up to Chubb’s grave site had led me into an obligation I could only fulfill by pawing through the relics of his life in the half shadow of his death. And I got a sick feeling that in fulfilling it I was going to do things I didn’t want to do, see things I didn’t want to see, and learn things I didn’t want to learn. For the truth is that we all do go home again, if only to rediscover why we’d fled.

* * * *

The furniture in Chubb’s office was laid out the same as it was when I quit ten years earlier. My old desk in the outer room was bare, as if it had retired at the same time that I left town and went out on my own. I figured that it might be worth fifty bucks to a college kid, and I recorded the item on a notepad I found in a drawer. The three file cabinets, maybe twenty-five each. They were lockable, but the keys had been misplaced long before Chubb hired me. The framed news clippings on the walls, yellowed remnants of Chubb’s big cases, were only worth the price of a memory.

Chubb’s inner door was closed. I heard a rustling from inside and a metallic clicking, like someone had pulled out a metal drawer. I flashed on the faces of the two young men at the funeral and wondered whether they’d decided to also pay their respects to Chubb’s office. But I dismissed the thought. They’d have hit the place the day Chubb’s heart failed him, not waited a week. I guessed that it was probably an obituary-reading burglar, come to empty the place on a day when he believed no one would be around.

I waited for more rustling to cover the sound, then eased the door open a few inches. Across the room, Venetian blinds snapped in the wind, rain splashing against the slats and spattering Chubb’s desk and blotter. I pushed the door against the breeze now surging into the office and made a path through the maniacal hopscotch pattern formed by the papers that had been blown onto the floor. As I closed the double hung window, I could see lights on upstairs in the bank across the street, the bodies of the workers inside appearing rippled and twisted through the downpour sheathing the glass.

An acrid odor rose up from the damp wooden seat. A furnace-like rage built inside me when I realized what it was. Staring down at it, I wasn’t sure what outraged me more: that Chubb had been discovered sitting in urine released by his bladder as he died, or that no one had bothered to clean it up. In my hurt and anger, I felt like a proxy for the humiliation from which his death had insulated him.

I retrieved a rag and a bottle of cleaning fluid from the utility closet in the hallway and tried washing it away. A knock on the outside door broke through the slop of the rag on wood. It was followed by a quick back-and-forth snap of metal on metal of the twisting doorknob. I dried my hands as I walked over to open it. It was the two men from the funeral. The short one stood facing the door, the taller was angled off, eyes watching the elevator at the end of the hallway as though he was a lookout. They were still dressed in suits. Both carried backpacks.

“You guys need something?” I asked.

The taller one turned toward me, while the shorter one shrugged and said, “We thought maybe you could use some help.”

He was quicker with a lie than I had anticipated.

“Doing what?”

“You being Chubb’s great success and us seeing you with old Judge MacDonald, we figured you were cleaning things up.”

He looked past me toward the inner office as though he was standing at the end of the line at the Salvation Army on Thanksgiving Day; not wondering what they were serving, but whether there’d be any turkey left by the time he arrived at the front.

I stepped aside to let them enter only because I wanted to learn what they were after. They walked straight through the outer office and into Chubb’s. From behind, I watched their heads move and stop; jerky, but targeted. Oil painting. File cabinet. Desktop. Oil painting. Stacked boxes. Bookshelves. Oil painting.

The short one stared at the painting as if he was having a Superman fantasy that he could see into the safe concealed behind it.

“What did Chubb have you working on?” I asked.

They turned toward me.

“Serving summonses and subpoenas in cases, stuff like that,” the taller one said. He pointed at files standing in a wire rack on Chubb’s desk. “Those are probably them.”

I walked over, wrote down the clients’ names and the names of their attorneys, and then handed the stack to him. He cradled them under his arm instead of placing them into his backpack.

Gesturing toward the wall to my left, I asked them, “How about you guys helping me move the desk over there? I want to use the middle of the room to organize things.”

They nodded and set down their packs. Even though they tried to do it gently, I heard thunks as the bottoms touched the wooden floor. It was the confession I had expected to hear. Concealed inside were tools they’d brought to pry the safe out of the wall. They pretended that they hadn’t confessed, and I pretended that I hadn’t heard them.

We pushed the desk, but it held firm, gripped by depressions in the damp oak floor formed over thirty years by its metal feet. We lifted and moved it in one motion, but then the leg at my end caught. I glanced underneath and saw that it was jammed against a water-warped plank. This hadn’t been the first time the window had been left open during a rainstorm. I raised the corner of the desk and we slid it the rest of the way.

“Why don’t you guys do the same thing out there?” I said, pointing toward the outer office.

They glanced at their backpacks, then headed off.

I rolled up Chubb’s damp blotter and jammed it into the trashcan, then pulled out his middle drawer and emptied it onto the desk. Taped to the back was the combination to the safe. I figured that the two guys were burglars, but not killers, so I risked opening it. It turned out that there was nothing inside worth killing for anyway, just news clippings about his wife’s murder and a bottle of eighteen-year-old scotch that was now six years older, based on the date on the note addressed to me, along with the words:

* * * *

From a tarnished and fearful man. Please remember me the way I had hoped to be.

Chubb

* * * *

He’d rightly assumed that after his heart disease finally killed him, Judge MacDonald would shift part of his executor’s burden onto me and ask me to attend to his earthy afterlife.

I wondered why he hadn’t asked me himself.

Four expectant eyes were looking past me when I turned around.

I pointed at their packs. “You guys went to a lot of trouble for nothing.”

The taller one pretended he misunderstood what I meant, and said, “It wasn’t no trouble. We were glad to help out.” He looked at his pal, asking him to join in the lie. “Weren’t we?”

After they left, I drove to a hotel cupped along the cliff above the harbor. I heard the surf chewing at the beach below as I walked across the parking lot toward my room after I checked in. I left the scotch on the dresser and took the news articles I’d found in the safe into the coffee shop where I ordered a hamburger to make up for my missed lunch.

After reading the first story, published the morning after Chubb found Belle’s body lying on their kitchen floor, I was overcome with a feeling of childish voyeurism. As in every other notorious case, I knew that the succeeding articles would be less about the victims, and more about the anguish of their surviving families.

Chubb himself had never talked about those days, except to say that he was embarrassed to have been seen as so pitiful.

I set them aside and turned on my cell phone. It had been off since the start of Chubb’s funeral. There were a dozen messages, the last five from my secretary. She called again as the waitress walked up with my order.

“You on your way back?” Helene asked.

“The judge asked me to help clean up Chubb’s estate.”

I didn’t need to explain to her who the judge was. Helene was the mother of a girlfriend of mine from high school. She’d gone to church with Chubb and got divorced in MacDonald’s court. After her daughter and I broke up, Helene and I stayed friends. And about the time I sprung free of the town’s gravitational pull, she told me that she needed to escape what felt to her like an already-lived life, and asked to come with me.

“Clean up his estate?” Helene said. “Chubb didn’t have anything you can call an estate.”

“Legally speaking, it’s everything that wasn’t buried with him.”

“Does that include Belle?” She laughed. “I’ll bet she’s been saving up all of her barbs for twenty years, just waiting for him land next to her so she could start sticking them in.”

I was no more willing to join in disparaging Belle than I was Chubb, and I suspected that none of those people who did had ever tried to imagine Belle’s terror when Neil Smelser, the serial killer, made her the last of his victims. That was the reason why Helene always said it was better I handled white collar cases instead of street crimes: I always took in too much of the world by looking out through other people’s eyes.

I changed the subject back to what it was supposed to be.

“I got a bunch of calls from the lawyers for China Pacific Industries.”

“They need your testimony after all,” Helene said. “The witness from Beijing went sideways, and they want you in on Monday to set things straight for the jury.”

“Have them push it until Tuesday. I need to meet with MacDonald and the probate judge.”

After I disconnected, I noticed that the only thing lingering from the conversation was the name of Belle’s killer. Every region of the country had one like him. The Trailside Killer. The Zodiac. Jeffrey Dahmer.

For a decade after Smelser was convicted, gallows humor around the police department demanded that victims shot in the face be referred to as having been “Smelsered.” And a “Smelser Deal” became shorthand among the defense bar to describe defendants who deserved the death penalty, but received life without parole instead. And the combined names Smelser-Dahmer, who had also escaped execution, became the code phrase for everything that was wrong with the criminal justice system.

I thumbed through the articles as I ate. When I spotted MacDonald’s picture, it made me remember another bit of local shorthand. It was called, “Pleading Open to Mac.”

In the course of a generation, MacDonald had become, like the god of a civic religion, the one onto whom the community had shifted the burden of resolving the moral dialectic of hard cases: Adult crimes committed by confused children. Calculated murder by abused and desperate women. Rash acts by otherwise temperate men. And in these wrenching clashes, the defendant would plead guilty and leave his fate entirely up to MacDonald. Sometimes the judge would make the punishment fit the crime, other times he’d make the crime fit the punishment. In his hands, a robbery would be renamed a grand theft, or an assault with a deadly weapon would be renamed a battery, or a murder would be renamed a manslaughter, if it served in his mind to synthesize the opposing demands of law and justice.

His clerk sometimes referred to her docket as the Book of Genesis, for his naming so often seemed to be an act of creation.

The open pleas were prized by prosecutors and lower court judges because MacDonald would take the heat for low sentences in notorious, but weak cases. By defense attorneys, because it relieved them of the burden of defending the indefensible. By defendants, because MacDonald seemed to be the just and merciful father that none of them ever had. And by the public, because a hammering gavel seemed to sound like a coffin being nailed shut.

I once heard someone explain British voters’ throwing Winston Churchill out of office after World War II by saying that all politics is local. The allegory I discovered watching MacDonald over the years was that all justice is personal. And that’s exactly what “Pleading Open to Mac” meant.

No one in the city would admit that truth, for they all publicly embraced the founding myth that we’re a nation of laws and not of men, but all of them secretly feared that if they didn’t interlink their arms around it, the centrifugal forces of disorder would destroy their world.

The articles also reminded me of how the Smelser case ended.

An illegal police search of Smelser’s apartment had led to one of those volatile moments. It resulted not only in the discovery of the unusual .455 caliber bullets that tied Smelser to the murders, but also in a tainted confession that Judge MacDonald later threatened to suppress.

Fearing that MacDonald might actually do it, the prosecutor passed on seeking the death penalty and offered Smelser life without parole.

Fearing that he might not, the defense grabbed the deal.

Leafing through the stories, I remembered my impression of Chubb as I watched him on television after Smelser had been sentenced, speaking on behalf of all of the victims’ families: humble and heroic. Especially as he quoted MacDonald who’d said from the bench, “Hard cases make bad law and this court will not make bad law.” And Chubb forgiving the detective who’d fractured the case by breaking into Smelser’s apartment before the search warrant had been issued.

I think it was this crime that set me on the road to becoming a private investigator. Not because I thought capital punishment was a good thing, but because it struck me that there ought to be a way for people to find out the truth, the whole truth, even those parts filtered out by an evidentiary prism that too often refracted the most important facts to the invisible part of the legal spectrum.

Even though I was only a senior in high school, I sought Chubb out. He let me work in the office until I was eighteen, then sent me out to serve subpoenas. He started me doing witness interviews during my junior year in college, and took me on full time when I graduated. His graduation present to me was a copy of Raymond Chandler’s The Simple Art of Murder, from which Chubb adopted the melodramatic phrase about mean streets and unafraid men that launched him into the world each morning.

I never read the book, for fiction wasn’t the prism I wanted to use either. I preferred white light; unfiltered and unbent.

After finishing my meal, I went back to my room and changed out of my suit. I decided to take it upon myself to clean up Chubb’s office, maybe as a way to purge the past, so I stopped by a hardware store to buy a tool set and at an office supply store to buy bankers boxes.

It took me rest of the afternoon and evening to bare the walls and empty the file cabinets, drawers, and bookcases. By then, the rain had stopped and night had fallen. I rolled my old chair from the outer office into Chubb’s, and then turned off the lights and leaned back to rest. I noticed an older woman working upstairs in the bank building. Her blue dress and pale skin fluoresced under the harsh lighting as she rose from her desk and approached the window. When she stopped and stared toward Chubb’s dark office, I recognized her as the woman Helene had once pointed out to me as Chubb’s last girlfriend before he married Belle.

The woman’s eyes then went vacant the way they do when the past drops a partition against the present. A few moments later, she wiped her eyes with the back of her sleeve, then turned away. A minute after that, the lights went out.

I decided to intercept her as she left the building to give her a chance to share her burden of memories.

The roller caught on the warped floor plank as I pushed back the chair. I felt a rush of misplaced anger. Although I knew it was just sublimated grief now rising to the surface, it spread like blood from a head wound and made me want to punish something. I flicked on the light, grabbed the tool kit and a bag of nails, and kneeled down to hammer the plank flat.

But there was something odd about the piece of wood. The chaos of emotions within me withdrew into the background as I inspected the warped board. I pried it up with a screwdriver. A locked metal box was concealed underneath. It slipped from my fingers as I tried to pull it out. First I blamed the sweat on my hand, then I discovered that it was nailed to the floor joists.

I didn’t want to waste time searching for a key, so I punched the lock. Inside I found two antique Bowie knives and three Civil War-era revolvers. A Uhlinger, a Starr, and a Webley. All loaded and in mint condition.

I wondered whether in them alone I had found enough value so that Chubb could pay for his own funeral. I called Helene at her home, read off the makes and model numbers, and asked her to check on the Web to find out how much I could get for them. She called back a few minutes later. About twelve thousand altogether. She then laughed. “Gives new meaning to stashing something away for your old age.”

I then let MacDonald know that I’d be dropping by his house with the knives and guns. I didn’t trust leaving them in Chubb’s safe and had nowhere else to store them. He sounded relieved that neither one of us would have to bear the final costs.

The drive up the long hill toward his house took me back to my youth, when I delivered newspapers on my bicycle. None of the other kids wanted the route because it demanded a hard ride to make a single delivery. The judge had showed that he appreciated the effort by tipping me fifty cents every Sunday.

MacDonald was sitting at his desk when I arrived. As I stepped inside his study, I remembered the first time I’d walked into the high-ceilinged room. Despite its enormity, it had seemed to enlarge his stature, and this was long before I understood either the alchemy of power in the city or the mysterious transubstantiation of a man into a judge.

But I’d changed since then and my world had gotten larger, and now the room seemed to dwarf him like he was a penitent in St. Peter’s.

I set down the knives and guns along with Chubb’s bottle of scotch on the desk in front of him. He collected two highball glasses from the bar. I poured and we toasted Chubb.

After sitting down, MacDonald pointed at the Bowies. “I sold him these about ten years ago,” the judge said. “I never liked knives.” He then picked up the Starr, turned it over in his hand, then set it down and reached for the Uhlinger.

“I know this model,” MacDonald said. “I had an uncle in Iowa who was a collector.”

“I’ve been told that it’s worth about seven thousand alone,” I told him.

He set down the Uhlinger, then picked up the Webley.

“Interesting thing about the Mk V1,” MacDonald said, looking up at me. “Did you ever see the movie Zulu with Stanley Baker and Michael Caine?”

I shook my head.

“It was supposed to cover events that happened in 1879, but the Webley model the actors used in the film wasn’t manufactured until 1917. The thought of it would turn my uncle livid, purple with rage.” MacDonald gave me a blank look. “So we tried not to let him think about it.”

Instead of diluting his last sentence of meaning, his expression concentrated it. I thought about what he’d said earlier about age and emotion.

“Another interesting thing,” he said. “Sherlock Holmes used a Webley Mk. Given his literary bent, I guess it would be in the tradition for Chubb to own one too.”

I left him with the guns and his speculations and drove back to the hotel. I read the rest of the news articles before trying to fall asleep. It turned out to be more like a half sleep, my mind trying to put together pieces of puzzle from memory, each one shifting its shape as it drew my focus.

I skipped breakfast the next day and drove to the courthouse. It took the criminal clerk about an hour to locate the Smelser file in the storage room. It consumed the rest of the morning to read through it, and I didn’t like what I found.

Then to the police department across the street. I told the records clerk that I was working on something for Judge MacDonald. It didn’t take her long to find the dispatch record I wanted. I didn’t like what I found there either.

I made a stop in town, then drove to the judge’s house, where I found him in his study. Lined up on the desktop in front of him were the .455 caliber bullets that had been chambered in the Webley.

“Where’s the gun?” I asked him.

Judge MacDonald gazed up at me, his face bearing the same blank expression as last time.

“The moment I saw it,” he said, “I knew it you’d try to build a story around it.”

“It’s not a story,” I said, feeling rage once again building inside me. “It’s the truth. I read the court file. Smelser claimed he had an alibi for the night Belle was killed. No one even took a first step in checking it out because he’d already confessed to the other four murders, and the slugs from all five killings matched.”

I let that settle in him for a moment, and then said, “I looked at the dispatch log for the afternoon before Belle was murdered. It showed an incoming call from a kid who found a gun. I talked to him today. The dispatcher told him to put it back where he found it, and that someone would be over to retrieve it.”

“So?”

“Belle worked the day shift, but it wasn’t a woman who answered the dispatch line. It was a man.”

I watched the judge’s jaw clench, but his eyes held still. I pointed my forefinger between them.

“And you made sure there’d be no trial so no one would ever find out that Chubb used that gun to murder his own wife.”

The judge smirked. “You expect people to believe that Chubb just happened to be in the police department, just happened to be in the dispatch center, just happened to pick up the phone when Belle was away from her desk—”

“How would you know that?”

He pushed on as if he hadn’t heard me.

“And the call just happened to be about a random gun that just happened to be the one Smelser used to kill all those people? That would be like breaking the rack and having all of the balls roll into the pockets and leaving the cue ball in the center of the table. Coincidences don’t happen like that in real life.”

I shook my head. “The only thing that makes it look like a coincidence is that Chubb killed her with that particular gun. He would’ve grabbed any gun as long as he had no connection to it beforehand.”

MacDonald didn’t respond. He sat in silence for a few moments, then glanced at the bottle of scotch on the bar. Finally, he took in a long breath and exhaled as though in resignation, and said:

“That’s not the reason Chubb went after that gun. When the kid said it was a .455 Webley—about as rare a caliber as there can be—Chubb guessed it was the serial killer’s gun. He grabbed it so he could play the hero and shame the department for not promoting him to detective.”

“But then he decided to kill Belle with it and let the blame fall on Smelser.”

The judge dismissed the accusation with a wave of his hand.

“Belle found the gun in Chubb’s dresser. She guessed what it was too. She started dancing around with it, taunting him as a failed wannabe. They fought over it and it went off.”

“You mean, that’s what Chubb said happened.”

“What he said matched the evidence.” MacDonald’s voice turned hard. “And I wasn’t going to see Chubb’s life go to ruin because of that bitch.”

“The public had a right to decide that for themselves.”

The judge pounded the desk. “Screw the public. If I say something is rape, it’s rape. If I say it’s murder, it’s murder. If—”

“You decided that Chubb wasn’t guilty, then he wasn’t guilty.”

He gazed at me as if he was a teacher disappointed in a slow-witted student.

“Justice in this town is done inside my head, and that’s where everyone wants it done. That’s why they call it Pleading Open to Mac. They prostrate themselves before me because they need someone to define the truth for them and bear the burden of—”

“Sin?”

“Of error.”

MacDonald rose and walked to the window behind him. He gazed at the city below, as if he was the Pope looking down at the faithful below, and said:

“If these people come to doubt the Smelser verdict, they’ll doubt them all.” He glanced back at me. “And they couldn’t handle it.”

“You haven’t answered my question. Where’s the gun?”

He gestured toward the ocean stretching from the rocky shore toward the last flare of sunset dying at the edge of the earth.

I didn’t believe him.

But driving down the hill later, I found that I did believe him about something else: My exposing the truth about Chubb would transform the centripetal forces that held the city together into centrifugal ones that would tear it apart—

So ... what? It wasn’t my town anymore.

But as I drove through the darkening city, I was drawn toward the bar where those who found meaning in their lives under the courthouse dome gathered each evening. I parked and walked in. I paused in the shadow just inside the door and inspected their faces. I then understood what MacDonald saw as he looked down from the bench. They were like aging caged parrots, cackling and mimicking and laughing, and fearless in their captivity.

MacDonald hadn’t made himself the god of right and wrong. They had, and not in their own image.

Looking past them at my reflection in the grayed mirror hanging on the wall beyond the pool table, I also understood what the judge saw when he looked at me: someone who would walk away—who had walked away—rather than lift the cover off of the cage.

And he was right.

I walked from shadow into darkness, got back into my car, and headed north.