corrective. Just money. Take his advice from time to time about the outcome in a case. There would be money.
And she complied, always with regrets, but life by now was the misery between hits. One night there was a knock, a scene out of 1984 or Darkness at Noon. The U . S . Attorney and FBI agents were on her doorstep. She'd been nailed, for bribery, not narcotics. She cried and blabbed and tooted as soon as they were gone.
After that night, she'd turned to Duffy, her current landlord, a recovering alcoholic with long experience as a counselor from his days as a priest. She was sober when she was sentenced, her habit the only secret that survived a period in which she otherwise felt she'd been stripped naked and marched in chains down Marshall Avenue. She was not about to revive all of that now, surely not for Arthur Raven or for a murderer who had been beast enough to rape the dead.
Yet the sudden viciousness that had escaped her with Arthur had shaken her, like finding a fissure in the ground under your feet. Seeking to spare herself further shame, she had, instead, compounded it. For hours, she would be dwelling on Raven and the way his mouth had softened to an incredulous little V in the wake of her remark. She would need Duffy tonight, his quiet counsel, to keep her from drowning.
With that much clear, she stood from the small table and caught sight again of herself. To the eye, there was a lean, elegant woman, appointed with care. But within was her truest enemy, a demon self, who, even after imprisonment and disgrace, remained unsatisfied and uncurbed, and, except for its will to see her suffer, unknown.
Chapter 4
july 5, 1991
The Prosecuto r a wail, sudden enough to stop Muriels heart, broke out from the booth across from her as she sat at the soda-fountain counter. A black man in a full-length apron, probably the cook, had slid to his feet and the prospect of his departure seemed to have freshened the anguish of the woman there. Dark and thin, she was melted against him. The younger man, with a glimmering stud in his ear, lingered behind the two haplessly.
"The widow," whispered one of the techs, dusting the front case under the register. "She won't go home."
The cook eased her over to the young fellow, who reluctantly raised an arm to her shoulder, while Mrs. Leonidis carried on fiercely. In one of those moments of cold-blooded clarity for which Muriel was already noted in the P . A .'s Office, she suddenly recognized that Gus's widow was going through the standard gestures of grief as she understood them. The crying, the shrieking was her duty. A more genuine reaction to her husbands death, true mourning, or even relief, would come long from now in private.
Since the day she'd started as a prosecutor, Muriel had had an instinct for the survivors of violence. She was not sure how connected she'd been to her parents, or whether any man, including her dead husband, had ever mattered to the quick. But she cared for these victims with the radiant nuclear fury of the sun. It had not taken her long to see that their suffering arose not merely from their loss but also from its imponderable nature. Their pain was not due to some fateful calamity like a typhoon, or an enemy as fickle and unreasoning as disease, but to a human failure, to the demented will of an assailant and the failure of the regime of reason and rules to contain him. The victims were especially entitled to think this should never have happened-because, according to the law, it shouldn't have.
When Mrs. Leonidis was again under some control, she marched past Muriel to the Ladies'. The young man, who had escorted her halfway, cast Muriel a sheepish look as the rest-room door closed.
"I can't talk to her," he explained. "My sisters are on the way from out of town. They'll get her out of here. Nobody listens to me." Soft- looking and skittish, the young man was balding early and his hair was cropped as closely as an army recruit's. Up close, Muriel
And she complied, always with regrets, but life by now was the misery between hits. One night there was a knock, a scene out of 1984 or Darkness at Noon. The U . S . Attorney and FBI agents were on her doorstep. She'd been nailed, for bribery, not narcotics. She cried and blabbed and tooted as soon as they were gone.
After that night, she'd turned to Duffy, her current landlord, a recovering alcoholic with long experience as a counselor from his days as a priest. She was sober when she was sentenced, her habit the only secret that survived a period in which she otherwise felt she'd been stripped naked and marched in chains down Marshall Avenue. She was not about to revive all of that now, surely not for Arthur Raven or for a murderer who had been beast enough to rape the dead.
Yet the sudden viciousness that had escaped her with Arthur had shaken her, like finding a fissure in the ground under your feet. Seeking to spare herself further shame, she had, instead, compounded it. For hours, she would be dwelling on Raven and the way his mouth had softened to an incredulous little V in the wake of her remark. She would need Duffy tonight, his quiet counsel, to keep her from drowning.
With that much clear, she stood from the small table and caught sight again of herself. To the eye, there was a lean, elegant woman, appointed with care. But within was her truest enemy, a demon self, who, even after imprisonment and disgrace, remained unsatisfied and uncurbed, and, except for its will to see her suffer, unknown.
Chapter 4
july 5, 1991
The Prosecuto r a wail, sudden enough to stop Muriels heart, broke out from the booth across from her as she sat at the soda-fountain counter. A black man in a full-length apron, probably the cook, had slid to his feet and the prospect of his departure seemed to have freshened the anguish of the woman there. Dark and thin, she was melted against him. The younger man, with a glimmering stud in his ear, lingered behind the two haplessly.
"The widow," whispered one of the techs, dusting the front case under the register. "She won't go home."
The cook eased her over to the young fellow, who reluctantly raised an arm to her shoulder, while Mrs. Leonidis carried on fiercely. In one of those moments of cold-blooded clarity for which Muriel was already noted in the P . A .'s Office, she suddenly recognized that Gus's widow was going through the standard gestures of grief as she understood them. The crying, the shrieking was her duty. A more genuine reaction to her husbands death, true mourning, or even relief, would come long from now in private.
Since the day she'd started as a prosecutor, Muriel had had an instinct for the survivors of violence. She was not sure how connected she'd been to her parents, or whether any man, including her dead husband, had ever mattered to the quick. But she cared for these victims with the radiant nuclear fury of the sun. It had not taken her long to see that their suffering arose not merely from their loss but also from its imponderable nature. Their pain was not due to some fateful calamity like a typhoon, or an enemy as fickle and unreasoning as disease, but to a human failure, to the demented will of an assailant and the failure of the regime of reason and rules to contain him. The victims were especially entitled to think this should never have happened-because, according to the law, it shouldn't have.
When Mrs. Leonidis was again under some control, she marched past Muriel to the Ladies'. The young man, who had escorted her halfway, cast Muriel a sheepish look as the rest-room door closed.
"I can't talk to her," he explained. "My sisters are on the way from out of town. They'll get her out of here. Nobody listens to me." Soft- looking and skittish, the young man was balding early and his hair was cropped as closely as an army recruit's. Up close, Muriel
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