Free Dead Man's Thoughts by Carolyn Wheat Page B

throw away everything they’d known about him in life, to erase all that for one moment, frozen by death.
    Even Flaherty believed the lies of that last moment, not the truth of the living man he’d known and loved. I got up and walked out of the lunchroom without looking back.

T EN
    N athan’s office already had a forlorn, abandoned look. Just my imagination—or Nathan’s habitual neatness—I told myself.
    There was a little book on the corner of his desk. A paperback, beautifully put together by a small press, with a Japanese brush painting on the gray cover. Zen in the Art of Photography . I picked it up. Nathan had written in the flyleaf: “For Cass. You are the Photographer/You are the Photograph. Love, Nathan.” I crumpled into Nathan’s chair, put my arms down on his desk, and cried.
    After a few minutes, I dried my tears and stood up. Then I went to the file cabinet and looked under “B.” Blackwell’s file was right there. There was nothing in it but the court papers, neatly stapled onto the folder. No notes.
    This was serious. I knew Nathan had seen Blackwell at the House of Detention Wednesday; both Charlie and Nathan himself had said so. If I needed to, I could verify the visit by looking at the sign-in register at the jail. And yet there were no notes of the meeting in the file. The meeting had to have been pretty damn significant if Nathan was afraid to commit the details to paper. It’s like when you have a client who’s giving evidence to the cops. You approach the bench and put the facts of his cooperation on the record out of the hearing of the audience. You don’t want the world to know the guy’s an informer. Similarly, Nathan didn’t want Charlie’s file to contain information too hot to handle, in case the wrong people got a look at it. The blank file was in its negative way a confirmation that I was on to something.
    But my mind rebelled at the thought that conscientious Nathan would have kept the whole thing in his head. If he didn’t trust a Legal Aid file, fine, but he would have made some notes somewhere, if only to protect himself if Charlie should get an attack of nerves and start denying everything. But where were those notes? I was about to ransack the office when I recalled that Nathan had gone to the Brooklyn House on Wednesday. And by Thursday, yesterday, he was dead. He hadn’t been to the office since seeing Charlie.
    Were the notes in his apartment? If so, was that the reason for the destruction? No, I decided. The destruction was too wholesale for that. And where would the notes have been? Had the murderer gotten them or were they still there? I decided to call Button, distasteful as the prospect was, to find out.
    Then I remembered Nathan’s spiral notebook. The one he always carried in his breast pocket. In it he kept such things as grocery lists, to-do lists, phone numbers, book titles, and information about his extracurricular clients. That’s where he would have written shorthand notes of his meeting with Charlie. I was sure of it. I’d call Button and ask if such a notebook had been found. If it had, it would confirm my suspicion that something Charlie had told Nathan had been the murder motive. If the notebook was missing, it would go a long way toward disproving the Midnight Cowboy theory. What would a gay pickup want with Nathan’s notebook?
    Even though there was nothing in it, I took Blackwell’s file back to my office with me. I’d get a notice to the warden in Supreme Court and go to the Brooklyn House of Detention as soon as I’d covered my cases for the day.
    I called Button before I left for court. By some miracle, he was in. He barked his hello, and I tried to collect my thoughts.
    â€œDetective Button? This is Cassandra Jameson. About the Nathan Wasserstein case?”
    â€œYes, I remember.” There was a hint of dryness in his tone, but I had neither the