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rocks at the hotel bar and found a quiet table away from the TV. I took out the list of names and numbers Mary White had given me and punched the first number into my cell.
    I left three messages before I got a live human being on the phone. Too bad, in a way. I was just perfecting my message.
    Hi, my name is Moe Prager. I knew Jack White a long time ago in New York, and his sister Mary tells me you and Jack were close. I was
just wondering if you wouldn’t mind spending a few minutes of your time talking to me about Jack. It would mean a lot to me if you could. My numbers are …
    But like I said, someone picked up on my fourth call.
    “Yo.”
    “Hello, is this Marlon Rhodes?”
    “Who da fuck wanna know?”
    “My name’s Moe Prager.”
    “Dat name s’posed ta mean sumptin ta me?”
    “How about the name Jack White?”
    That got Mr. Rhodes’ attention. “Say whatchu gotta say.”
    “I knew Jack White a long time ago in New York. He was close with my brother-in-law Patrick. I was thinking about Jack this week and I asked his sister Mary if she could put me onto any of Jack’s old students because I knew he meant a lot to you guys.”
    “Don’t be lyin’ to me, man. Dis about dat graveyard shit, right?”
    “Right.”
    “You Five-O?”
    “A cop? I used to be.”
    “Fuck y’all.”
    So ended our conversation. I waited a few minutes and called back. He didn’t answer, so I left my finely honed message on his machine. I got two more of Jack’s former students on the phone and though the conversations were longer and more polite than the one I had with Marlon Rhodes, they were equally unproductive. Both liked and admired Jack and both had, on occasion visited his grave, but neither had made a habit of it and neither had been there for months.
    I drank another scotch, ate a bowl of awful chili, and went to bed. I had a long dreamless sleep without insight, vision or revelation. It was just exactly the kind of sleep I needed.

CHAPTER SIX
    DURING THE PLANE ride home I realized I was doing it again. I was keeping secrets under the guise of protecting someone else. That’s crap. Secrets protect their keepers. I hadn’t told Katy about what had happened to Jack’s grave or that I was going to Dayton. When I spoke to Sarah, I severely minimized the extent to which the Maloney gravesite had been desecrated. If it hadn’t suited my purposes, I probably wouldn’t have shared all the details with Mary White. Had I shared them all? It gets hard to know. But if there is any justice, it’s that the protection of the secret keepers doesn’t last forever. For when any two people share knowledge, their secret is a shared illusion.
    Looking back twenty-two years, it seems like madness to have not confessed to Katy what I knew about her father and brother. I was afraid to tell her I had found her brother and that I had let him go. Afraid to tell her that her father had been thrown off the NYPD in the early ’60s for a brutal assault and that it had been covered up. Afraid to tell her that her father and brother had been locked in a perverse game of chicken. Afraid to tell her that her father had ordered two of his underlings to beat the piss out of me on a SoHo street. The truth would have hurt her, sure, but it might’ve hurt me much worse. There’s a reason people say, “Don’t shoot the messenger.” I wasn’t willing to risk losing the only woman I had ever loved by being the bearer of bad news. And my original mistake was compounded by the day, by the week, by the year, by the decade. Even now there were things I hadn’t told her, things she had a right to know.
    It’s strange how they say you can’t teach instinct. Learned behavior is learned behavior. Instinct is inborn. Yet it’s become nearly impossible for me to distinguish between the two. Once you replace reason with self-preservation,
secret keeping becomes reflexive. For me there was little difference between a secret and the blink of my eye.