Free Known to Evil by Walter Mosley Page A

said.
    She didn't want a confrontation with me; not over Mardi Bitterman, at any rate.
    Bertrand stood there uncomfortably while I studied him. He could see that I didn't trust a stranger in my home. And he was right. I didn't know what trouble Dimitri was in. Maybe Bert was trying to get the lowdown on my son.
    No words had passed between us while Katrina was gone. She returned with a Bic and a wire-ringed notepad.
    "This was all I could find," she apologized.
    Bert took the notepad and started scribbling.
    "The first number is my cell phone," he said. "The second is the bakery, and I put down my e-mail address, too."
    "You got a home phone?" I asked.
    "No. Just the cell."
    He shook my hand and my wife's hand. Katrina walked him to the door.
    I remained in my seat, wondering if we lived on the eighteenth floor would I be retired by now.

16
    M y thoughts slowly merged with the pain behind my eye. I pressed a thumb against the bridge of my brow and the ache lessened maybe three decibels.
    "Leonid," Katrina said.
    The headache flared back.
    "Yes?"
    "What's wrong?"
    "Nothing. It's just a twitch."
    "I was hoping that we could talk," she said, lowering into the chair next to me.
    "I swear Dimitri's fine," I said. "The only trouble he's got is girl trouble. And you know young men been runnin' after that since buckskins were in style."
    "About us."
    "What about us?" I said, wondering at the brightness of the pain.
    "I've been back home for over a year now, Leonid."
    "Yeah?"
    "You're still so . . . distant."
    I looked at my wife then. She was a few months past fifty-one, but regular exercise, spa treatments, and minor cosmetic surgery had kept most of her youthful beauty intact. Those pursed red lips could whisper the nastiest things in the dark of night.
    It had been a long time since those lips had been next to my ear.
    "It's not you, Katrina," I said. "It's, it's . . . you know how you read sometimes about men going through midlife crises?"
    "Yes."
    "I'm having a goddamned lifelong catastrophe. The ship is sunk and white-tipped sharks are headed my way."
    "I don't understand," she said.
    "You see these hands?" I asked, holding up my mitts.
    "Yes?"
    "They look normal, don't they? Just some big hands on a stout man. But if you look close you can see the blood on them. Blood and shit and, and, and maggots turnin' into flies. I wash 'em every night, and every morning they're filthy again."
    "Is it because I left you for Andre?" she asked.
    "No, baby, no. That's the dirt on you. That's your guilt."
    "Why did you take me back if you don't love me?"
    "Because you asked me to forgive you."
    "But you never have."
    The pain broke through some kind of barrier and now it was behind both my eyes. I lowered my face into those hands and grunted.
    I stayed like that for a minute or two, and when I sat up Katrina was gone from the room.

    I HAD THREE TABLETS of Tylenol with codeine in the medicine cabinet. A dentist gave them to me after a tooth extraction. I took one and sat in my office chair with the shades drawn, the lights turned out, and my eyes closed.
    Thirty-seven minutes later, by my father's Timex, the only physical thing he left me, I opened my eyes.
    The pain was still there but it was as if it had been sent to another room. I felt it through the wall, pulsing and singing red. But I could think again. I could concentrate through the bifocal lens of the medication.

    I KEPT RON SHARKEY'S file in a locked cabinet next to my desk. It was quite thick, as it went back all the way to the time that I framed him and he was sent to prison.
    I opened the folder to the first page but realized that thinking about Sharkey at that moment would break down the fragile wall the drug had erected. So instead I pulled out a file from Rinaldo's briefcase that I had not yet perused. It was labeled RELATIONS.
    There were fourteen single-spaced typed pages, most with photographs paper-clipped to them, detailed synopses of Angie's friends, family, and daily