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It's a fifth step meeting, one in which people talk about stepping across a line and admitting to God, themselves, and another person the exact nature of their wrongs. For many, it's not an easy moment.
Some of them are still zoned out, their eyes glazed with residual fear; those sent by the court try to hide the resentment and boredom in their faces; others seem to have the exuberance and confidence of airplane wing walkers.
Bootsie sits next to me, her hands folded tightly in her lap. She showered after supper and put on makeup and a new yellow dress, but in her cheeks are pale discolorations, like slivers of ice, and there's a thin sheen of perspiration at her temples.
'You don't have to say anything. Just listen,' I whisper to her.
They start to unload. Some of it seems silly—overdue library books, cavalier attitudes toward bills—then it turns serious and you feel embarrassed
and voyeuristic; you find your eyes dropping to the floor, and you try not to be affected by the level of pain in the speaker's voice.
The details sometimes make the soul wince; then you remember some of the things you did, or tried to do, or could have done, while drunk and you realize that what you hear in this room differs only in degree from the moral and psychological insanity that characterized your own life.
Only one speaker makes use of euphemism. That's because he's told his story before and he knows that not everyone in the room will be able to handle it. He was eighteen years old, ripped on reefer and pills, when he pushed a blindfolded VC suspect out the door of a Huey at five hundred feet; he so impressed the ARVN and American officer onboard that they had him do it twice more the same afternoon.
Bootsie's eyes are filled with hidden thoughts. I slide my hand down her forearm and take her palm in mine. Her eyes move to the doorway and the darkened stairway at the front of the room. Her breath catches in her throat.
'What is it?' I ask.
Her eyes close, then open, like a doll's.
'A man at the door. Dave, I think—'
'What?'
'It was him.'
I get up from the folding chair and walk across the oak floor to the front of the room. I step through the open door, walk down the darkened stairway. The door to the street is open, and rain is blowing out of the trees onto the lawn. The violet air smells of wet stone and burning leaves.
I go back upstairs, and Bootsie looks at me anxiously. I shake my head.
Before the meeting ends, it's obvious she wants to speak. She raises her chin, her lips part. But the moment passes, and she lowers her eyes to her lap.
Later the room is empty. I turn out the lights and prepare to lock up. In the hallway downstairs she puts her arms around me and presses her face into my chest. I can feel her back shaking under my hands. A loose garbage can lid is bouncing down the street in the darkness.
'I feel so ashamed,' she says. Her face is wet against my shirt.
I went in to work early and looked at the notes I had taken during my conversation with the lieutenant at the Toronto Police Department.
It was time to try something different. On my yellow legal pad I made a list of aliases that Will Buchalter might have used. As a rule, the aliases used by a particular individual retain similarities in terms of initials or sound and phonetic value, or perhaps even cultural or ethnic identification, in all probability because most career criminals have a libidinal fascination with themselves.
I tried W. B. Kuhn, William Coon, Will Kuntz, Bill Koontz, then a dozen other combinations, making use of the same first and last names, in the same way that you would wheel pari-mutuel numbers in trying to hit a quiniela or a perfecta at the racetrack.
But more than a name it was a literary allusion written by the dead Canadian detective on the barroom napkin that gave me a brooding sense I almost did not want to confirm.
I began writing out the word Schwert with the combinations of first names and initials that I had already listed. The sheriff walked into my office with a cup of coffee in his hand and looked over my shoulder.
'That looks like alphabet soup,' he said. 'You going to run that through the NCIC?'
'Yeah, I want to go through the feds in New Orleans, too.'
'It can't hurt.' He gazed through the window at a black trusty in jailhouse issue sawing a yellowed palm frond from the tree trunk.
'You don't sound enthusiastic,' I said.
'I've got bad news. The tail we put on your girlfriend… She went through the front door of a supermarket in Lafayette, then out the back and poof… Gone.'
'Who was the tail?'
