Free Suicide Season by Rex Burns Page B

offered, “We should be back around six or seven. After dinner at McDonald’s.”
    “I’ll be by about seven. I may have to ask you a few things about some of the items. A lot of the abbreviations and phrases don’t make much sense to a stranger reading them.”
    “All right. But perhaps you should come a bit later then. After the children are in bed. Say around eight thirty?”
    “Better yet, if you can arrange for a sitter, I can arrange for a quiet place to have a drink and something to eat. You’ll need it after a day at the zoo.”
    When she finally replied, I could hear the surprise lingering in her voice. “That does sound good.”
    “At seven, then.”
    I hung up and Bunch, shaking his head, caught my eye. “So it’s ‘Margaret’ now? Lunch with Haas’s secretary, dinner with his widow. Devlin, you’re moving right into the man’s life.”
    “It’s a client, Bunch. Business.”
    “And I know what kind of business. Devlin Kirk, the widow’s comforter. You have absolutely no shame, my lad. It’s the only redeeming virtue I’ve ever found in you.”
    “Well I try not to pay my debts and I’m never on time.”
    “True, there may be hope for you yet.” He gathered up the printout of Haas’s lists of appointments. “Run yourself another one of these. I’ll take this home and see what I can come up with. Susan sends her regards. Though if she heard you lining up all those women, she wouldn’t bother.”
    “She’d start analyzing it.”
    “She analyzes everyone but me, Devlin. She just can’t help herself.”
    “And you can’t be analyzed?”
    “That’s what she says—I’m too integrated. An indivisible mass.”
    “In other words, a blockhead.”
    “No, an elemental force of irreducible masculinity.” The elemental force quivered the landing as it went downstairs, and I began listening to the old tapes relate their fragmented account of a life whose end I already knew.

CHAPTER 6
    M ARGARET MET ME at the door. She wore a skirt and jacket of muted plaid and a cashmere sweater that set off her eyes and emphasized the softness underneath. She seemed more girlish than when I saw her in the office, and certainly far less strained and tense, and as I stared, a tinge of color came to her cheeks, an echo of that vulnerability I had seen so nakedly the night her husband shot himself. “Is this all right? I wasn’t certain what to wear.”
    “You look very nice.”
    “Thank you.” The color deepened. “It’s the first time I’ve been out since the funeral. But it’s all right, isn’t it? This is a business meeting, after all.”
    “Of course it’s all right.” I asked about the visit to the zoo and listened while I drove as she detailed what the children saw and did and said. It interested her, certainly, and it was good to hear the animation in her voice and to see her gradually lean back against the seat, tired from the effort but now relaxing and satisfied with the knowledge that she had given her children a day they would remember with pleasure.
    “I’m boring you. Nothing’s so boring as hearing a mother talk about her children.”
    “I’m not bored—I like kids.” Which was true, and in fact I’ve occasionally wondered lately what kind of society we have when a statement like that has to be offered as an apology. It should be a given: an adult likes kids because they’re the future, the continuity of life. But maybe that was the problem: kids did represent human life, a thing that so many adults were increasingly careless about—their own as well as others’. “I remember the elephants from when I was a kid. How they loomed up there against the sky and yet moved so smoothly and big and carefully as if they were afraid of stepping on me. It was always kind of surprising to look up that big gray hairy side and see an eye stare back at me.”
    We told other things that we remembered from childhood in the way that one memory will lead to another, and by the time I