He held the list and asked why not.

I told him I wasn’t in shape.

He said he heard I had just ridden a hundred-mile race, and my first instinct was to tell him that it was one hundred and ten miles. Instead I told him it wasn’t a race. I pointed to the list and asked who he had interviewed. He studied the names for a longer time than should have been necessary for a man with fluency in English. Then he said no one. Although he wouldn’t mind interviewing Cory Gregory if I wanted.

3

.

IHAD A VISITOR AT HOME. IT HAPPENED RATHER LATE AT NIGHT.

I walked into the kitchen, shut the light in the ceiling of the carport, shut the kitchen lights, and started along the hallway to my bedroom when there was a tapping on the carport door.

It was an insistent tapping, as though the tapper had waited until I shut the lights, was sure I was going to respond and that I would share his or her interest in discretion. Given the fact that my last visitor had been Barbara on the day I had stayed in bed, I could not imagine who would be hitting my door like that.

I walked back, flicked on the carport light again, and opened the door. It was deep summer on Cape Cod. It was somewhere after 10:00 p.m. The crickets were chirping, the bullfrogs were croaking, and a man dressed entirely in black bolted past me and into my house.

He looked around, his eyes sweeping the room, then sat down at the kitchen table.

It did not register with me that the man dressed like Johnny Cash was actually Roland Andrews until he was seated in my kitchen. I made a silent promise to be more careful about how I opened doors in the future.

I asked if he wanted a drink. He laughed, as if men like him didn’t drink. At least not with men like me. They probably drank only like the Martin Sheen character in the beginning of Apocalypse Now, by themselves in hotel rooms, drank till they got totally wasted, then stripped off all their clothes and karate-chopped the stranger they saw in the mirror.

“There’s been a change of plans, Georgie,” he said.

I went to turn on the overhead kitchen light. He told me not to. He glanced out the sliding doors to the backyard and gestured that I should draw the drapes closer together.

I sat down in the gloom with him. There was enough light from the hallway behind me to make out his features. I said I wasn’t aware of any plans.

“We’re not going with Buzzy anymore. Too many complications.”

I nodded, giving him time to tell me what they were.

“Now that they’ve renewed the investigation,” he said, waving his hand as an indicator of how obvious it should be, “put you in charge. Brilliant move on their part.” He was leaning in my direction. He wasn’t whispering, but he might as well have been.

“On whose part?”

“The Gregorys’, who else? I mean, you don’t think Mitch White makes decisions like this on his own, do you?” Roland Andrews inched his chair closer to me. “Look, we go ahead and put Buzzy up, what’s he going to say now that the office has you working full-time on the Telford case? That you’re not investigating it? His buddy? The one he’s been cuckolding? You see? See what I mean?”

I thought, not for the first time, how much I would like to punch Roland in the face.

“I know how the Gregorys operate. I should, I’ve been watching them all these years. They let Buzzy announce his candidacy. If he says you’re not investigating, they immediately call in their journalist friends and tell them about the animosity between you two because you caught him hosing your wife. That’s the brilliant part. They dirty up both of you. He’s a cad and you’re an unmanly guy, bitter at everyone who seems to have a better life than you.”

He sat back. He smiled as if he expected me to share in his appreciation of the diabolism at work.

I played it out. I would swing, hit him directly under the chin, lift him out of his seat. If he didn’t get knocked cold he would be back at me in an instant. He would no doubt beat the hell out of me. But so what?

I would wear my wounds proudly. Use my face as a platform to talk about how I had been attacked by Josh David Powell’s henchman because of something that happened a long time ago in Palm Beach. Something involving an attractive young woman who had gone to a party at the Gregorys’ house to have a good time and who had ended up dead. Just like Heidi Telford. Two girls, used, abused, and cast aside. One figuratively, the other literally. I liked the idea. I didn’t take the time to think it all the way through; I just went with it.

I started down low because I was sitting, because my hand was already at my thigh. I shifted my weight onto my left buttock, dropped my left shoulder, and fired with my right fist.

Roland Andrews caught it in midair.

He twisted my wrist back, bent it until my fingers almost touched my forearm. I swung with my left. The two of us were still sitting in chairs and I couldn’t get much leverage.

“Oh, ho!” Roland cried as I made contact with his cheekbone and then he laughed and bent my wrist farther. He kept bending until I dropped to my knees on the linoleum.

I was screaming in pain and he cuffed me on the ear. The sound inside my head was as if a cannon had gone off. I went over. He let go of my wrist and I found myself lying on my own kitchen floor in a near-fetal curve. It struck me that no man should be in that position and I tried to do something about it. I could hear nothing, but I spun as best I could and made a dive for his legs. He kicked me away and then rabbit-punched me on the back of my neck. This time when I hit the floor I couldn’t spin, no matter how foolish I felt I looked. I was paralyzed.

“You done now, Georgie?” he asked, looking down. And I was surprised because I could actually hear him over the roaring in my head. I could hear, but I couldn’t feel. I was numb from fingers to toes and couldn’t answer.

Then, before I could get panicky, my wrist began to throb and for the first time in my life I felt joy at being in pain. I tried moving my feet and they did as I asked. I wanted to cry out in happiness.

“All right,” Roland seemed to be saying, “I went too far. I admit it, and I don’t blame you for attacking me.” He touched his cheekbone where I had hit him. “Surprised, maybe, but you showed more balls than I thought you had.”

He extended his hand to help me up, warrior to warrior, but I shook him off, figuring it might be a trick. I rolled onto my noninjured wrist and pushed down until I could kneel. Then I pushed again and staggered to my feet. I took a step or two to the refrigerator, leaned my forehead against it for a moment, then opened the door. “Want some water?” I asked.

“Nah. I’m good.”

I got out a small bottle, took the cap off with my teeth, spit the cap, and drank about halfway down. “You don’t have much time,” I said when I had enough breath. “Find another candidate.”

“Kind of campaign we have in mind, less time the better. It’s a nonpartisan election for D.A. All we have to do is go in at the last moment, blitz Mitchell White with the bad news.”

“Which is what?”

“Whatever you’ve got.”

“I don’t have anything.”

Andrews laughed. He thought that was great fun to hear me say that. “You’ve just come back from Hawaii by way of California and Costa Rica, my friend. You’ve got something.”

More evidence that I had been followed. Or somebody had talked. And I had a pretty good idea who it was. I already had seen Roland Andrews’s ability to plant women in my life. I finished off my water. “Who you thinking of putting up?”

“You’ve got two other buddies. I want to ask you about them.”