Free Bomber's Law by George V. Higgins Page A

house like this one. It
has
to overlook the water. No option. Mandatory. You can’t have a house as tight-assholed as this on any site where the surroundings—the terrain and vegetation, no matter how spacious and open they might look to some Bronx tenement refugee, someone who’d grown up in a city—’re going to give even the slightest hint that something may be closing in on you. But that didn’t matter. That fact didn’t matter and neither did the architect’s opinion, which I can state with assurance even though I never met the chap and don’t even know who he was. The architect knew, one this good would’ve known this, had to’ve known this, that if you build a house like that, in a place like that, where you cannot see the ocean from a minimum of one major window in every important room, every room where anyone’s going to spend any amount of time, and then you go and live in it long enough, sooner or later you will find that you’ve begun to lose your mind. But that’s the location that our architect’s customer owned, and the one he’d picked, and where he wanted his dream house to be built, which carried a certain amount of weight in the decision: he was, after all, the fellow who was going to be paying for the fucking thing. The first time it got paid for, at least. So it didn’t matter to him that everyone who lived in it after he got through with it would begin to lose their marbles fairly soon after they moved in.”
    â€œCommunications with the spirit world, all that sort of thing?” Dell’Appa had said.
    â€œWell, sure,” Dennison had said, “but in the old lady’s case, that was nothing especially new. She’d started having regular conversations with dead people right after Tory’s father died. Only well-known dead people, though. Virginia was very picky. About everything.”
    â€œWell, that’s not uncommon,” Dell’Appa had said. “Lots of widows that my mother knows, friends of hers that’ve lost their husbands, they have those kinds of conversations. She brought it up one night when Gayle and I were over for dinner, my father was griping about some trivial thing or other—she’d left the porch-light on all night or something, and he was saying he’d have to give some more thought to getting a divorce if it happened again, part of their standard routine—and she said she supposed he’d gotten so he liked nagging her so much he’d come back and do it after he was dead. Like his old friend Mike was doing to Rose now. And my father didn’t like that at all.”
    â€œDeath’s never been his favorite subject,” Dennison had said.
    â€œUh-uh,” Dell’Appa had said, “not by any means. He just clams up when it’s mentioned. I think making a good living, doing something he thought he might like to do, and being good at it; I think all of that was probably only part of the reason he went to law school. The other part was that he figured there must be a loophole somewhere in the rule that says we’re all gonna die. Death and taxes, right? The two inevitables. The inescapables. But taxes aren’t, inescapable, at least not all taxes, when you come right down to it. They’re not all inevitable, I mean. A good many of them can be avoided, if you’re careful and determined. Lots of loopholes in tax laws. So then, if it’s possible that a good lawyer can show you a way to skate around the tax law, maybe a good lawyer could also find an escape hatch in the death law, and help you duck around that. Of course you’d probably then find out that for tax-purposes it’d still be better if you died, say, by the end of your current fiscal year. ‘If all else fails, you might even consider hiring that batty doctor out in the Midwest who helps people kill themselves. Not that I’m suggesting you’re incurably