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of time resenting you for it. He simply resigned himself to the space you’d hemmed him up in and commended you for having had the foresight to corner him first.
    ‘I knew you’d come back,’ he said to me now, ivory smile beaming with self-satisfaction. ‘I just didn’t think it’d be so soon.’
    ‘What can I say? Guess I’m still the fool you’ve always said I am.’
    ‘Not a fool. Just an alarmist. We’ve got nothing to be afraid of, Handy. R.J.’s murder had nothing to do with us.’
    ‘And you know that how?’
    ‘I know it because I’ve talked to people familiar with the case who’ve told me so, that’s how. Have you?’
    He paused for me to answer him, forged ahead when I didn’t. ‘Look, I can’t be getting involved in this thing, all right? I stuck my neck out farther than I should have just by going to homeboy’s funeral. The press ever puts me and R.J. together, they’re gonna go back to where the three of us began and start digging. And I think you and I both know where that could lead.’
    I didn’t have to tell him that I did.
    A waiter came around to ask for our order, and we used the interruption to get all the unavoidable small talk out of the way. We asked each other about wives and kids, O’ confessed to having one of the former and two of the latter, and I told him what little there was to tell about Coral. He took the info in without much visible reaction, but I was certain the story saddened him all the same, because it saddened me just to relate it. A forty-nine-year-old man who’d never married but had a grown daughter he rarely saw and barely knew, turning screws on broken toasters and washing machines just to eat . . . The only thing that could have made my life more disheartening to describe was its belonging to someone who deserved better.
    ‘So when was the last time you’d seen him?’ I asked, forcibly steering our conversation back toward the business that had brought me here.
    ‘R.J.? Brother, I was gonna ask you that. I hadn’t seen R.J. in a hundred years.’
    ‘That right?’
    ‘Come on, Handy. I just told you: I couldn’t get anywhere near R.J. Burrow. And even if I could have—’
    ‘We had an agreement. Sure we did. But what if R.J. tried to reach you all the same? Twenty-six years is a long time to stay away from people you used to look upon as family, O’.’
    Bellwood’s mayor shook his head. ‘Didn’t happen,’ he said.
    ‘But if it had. What would you have done?’
    ‘I’d have taken his call, same as I would have taken yours. Hell, what are you getting at here? You don’t think I had something to do with his murder?’
    ‘If one of us was ever going to talk out of turn, it would have been him,’ I said. ‘I think you and I have always known that. Nobody had a harder time dealing with what we did than R.J.’
    ‘We didn’t “do” anything,’ O’ said tersely.
    ‘You really still believe that?’
    ‘You’re goddamn right I do.’
    I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was. I had thought his sense of denial on the subject would wear down after twenty-six years. Instead, its edge seemed as keen as ever.
    ‘OK, how’s this,’ I said. ‘Nobody took what “happened” to us harder than R.J., and maybe after wrestling with his conscience all this time, he found the need to vent.’
    Just as I sometimes do myself, I thought, but did not say.
    ‘Vent to whom? The police?’
    ‘There wouldn’t have been much point, but the impulse would have been a natural one just the same. Only, R.J. wouldn’t have wanted to go to them alone. He’d have wanted one or both of us to go with him.’
    ‘And you’re suggesting that, if he’d come to me, I would have killed him to keep him quiet. Shot his ass full of holes and left him in that car to die down by the pier.’
    I didn’t say anything.
    O’ shook his head at the ceiling and chuckled, deriding the absurdity of my thinking. He leaned hard across the table toward me, said,