“This way they’re never wrong.”
“That’s it exactly. ‘Well, we said only a ten percent chance of rain and it poured all day, so all that means is a long shot came in.’ Just because you’re a meteorologist doesn’t mean you don’t feel the need to cover your ass.” He took a breath. “I never asked you this, but do you prefer Matt or Matthew?”
Either’s fine with me, but it only confuses people to tell them that. “Matt’s good,” I said.
“Matt, why do they insist on a formal identification? He was in prison, he has a police record, they’d already identified him from fingerprints. Suppose there was nobody around who could do it. They’d get along without it, wouldn’t they?”
“Sure.”
“I really didn’t want to see him like that. My father’s funeral was open-casket, and there he was, like something from a road-company Madame Tussauds, and that’s the image I was left with, this lifeless waxen effigy. We had our problems, God knows. I was not the son he’d had in mind, as he made all too clear. But we made it up during his last illness, and there was love and mutual respect there at the end, and then that final hideous glimpse of him eclipsed the strong and vigorous man I wanted to remember. I knew that would happen, I dreaded it, but at the same time I couldn’t not look. Do you know what I mean?”
“How long ago was this?”
“A little over a year. Why?”
“Because time will probably change that,” I said. “The earlier memory will supplant the other.”
“That’s already begun to happen. I didn’t know whether I could trust it, whether it was real. Or just some form of wishful thinking.”
“Wishful thinking may have something to do with it,” I said, “but it’s still real. We wind up remembering people the way they were, or at least the way we knew them. I had an aunt with Alzheimer’s, she spent the last ten years of her life institutionalized, while the disease ate her mind and her personality and everything that made her human. And that’s how I knew her, and how I remembered her.”
“God.”
“And that all faded out after she was gone, and the real Aunt Peg came back.”
Over coffee he said, “I barely looked at him just now. All I really saw were the wounds.”
He’d been shot in the mouth and the forehead. They’d shown the corpse with a sheet covering him from the neck down, so if there were other wounds we wouldn’t have seen them.
“I hope you’re right,” he said. “About the image fading. It can’t fade too soon for me. Thank you for that. More than that, thanks for making the trip.”
I hadn’t much wanted to keep him company, but it was a hard request to say no to.
“I didn’t want to go at all,” he said, “and I certainly didn’t want to go by myself. I could have found someone else to come, some AA friend of Jack’s, but you felt like the right choice. Thank you.”
We’d headed north on First Avenue when we left the morgue, and stopped at a coffee shop called Mykonos just past Forty-second Street. When he ordered a grilled cheese sandwich, I realized it had been a while since I’d eaten, and said I’d have the same.
“Besides,” he said, “there’s something else I want to talk about.”
“Oh?”
“The two men at the back of the room. They were police officers.”
“Somehow I sensed as much.”
“Well, I didn’t need radar, because I saw their badges when they interviewed me. In fact they were the ones who asked me to make the formal ID. I asked them if they were close to solving the case, and they said something noncommittal.”
“That’s no surprise.”
“Do you think they’ll solve it?”
“It’s possible they’ve solved it already,” I said, “in the sense that they may know who did it. Of course that’s not the same as having sufficient evidence to bring a case to trial.”
“Could you find out?”
“Whether or not they know who did it?” He nodded. “I suppose I could ask around. An ordinary citizen wouldn’t get a straight answer, but I still know a few people in the department. Why?”
“I have a reason.”
One he evidently preferred to keep to himself. I let it go.
I said, “I’ll see if anybody wants to tell me anything. But I can make an educated guess right now as to who killed Jack.”
“You can?”