The Knowland Retribution by Richard Greener Page B

shabby diner on Alpharetta Highway. He hated eating in public but this place was almost always empty—for excellent good reason. Along the way he bought a New York Times from a vending box.
    â€œCould you bring me some coffee please?” he asked, “and eggs and bacon, and ham, and toast . . . whatever you’ve got is fine.” He glanced at the headlines, skimmed the first section, turned to the sports, checked the hockey and basketball scores, didn’t recognize some of the teams: Wizards, Avalanche, Thrashers.
    When he got his hands on a paper now, he always read the obituaries. Before he never looked at that page. But after , it seemed to matter. He started with McKinley James Houston , seventy-eight. After lengthy illness. Architect of some renown in England. Pronounced How -ston. Lester Shapiro , fifty-three. Heart attack last night at a charity dinner. Owned office buildings in New York City. Survived by his wife Sylvia, five children, three grandkids. Dr. Ganga Roy, forty-one. Noted research scientist/teacher. No survivors. Apparent suicide. Suicide . The word stopped his eye. He read the piece twice. Found by cleaning woman. Died by taking poison. Born in India. Colleagues praised her work at the Rockefeller Institute. Well-regarded at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Victim of unsolved hate crime seven months earlier. Apartment burglarized and burned. Anti-terrorist slogans painted on walls. Leonard stirred his coffee till it was cold. Suicide .
    Two days later Leonard squinted into the bright Georgia morning, and set a course for the end of his driveway. He picked up a batch of local papers lying there and opened his overstuffed mailbox. He hadn’t done that since . . . sometime last week? He brought the mail inside and tossed it all, unopened, onto a kitchen counter, knocking several other envelopes onto the floor. One of these caught his attention: a brown six-by-nine with a Postal Express label on it. In the upper left-hand corner, gracefully scripted in blue ink above a New York address, was a name he thought he recognized.
    The envelope contained a single computer disc. A paisley-patterned notepad page fluttered out of it, to the floor. He picked it up. Across it were written the words “Forgive me,” and at the top Leonard read: “From the desk of Dr. Ganga Roy.”

St. John
    Nathan’s outburst and the tension it uncorked had distracted all but Walter from the single dark cloud approaching them out of a bright sky at an altitude not much above the house. Conversation stopped abruptly as a very local, very surprising tropical downpour threw warm sheets of water onto the deck. The roof was so constructed that Walter had stayed put in precisely that spot during three hurricanes. He looked forward to rain in the closing moments of a hot Virgin Islands afternoon. It was a perfectly wonderful thing. Tom, Nathan, and Wesley apparently disagreed. The three of them maneuvered their legs prissily under the table to keep their silk trousers safe from water bouncing off the glistening planks.
    â€œWon’t last long,” smiled Walter, mightily amused.
    Tom checked his companions, as though to be sure that neither was going under. He resumed in his calm, rehearsed tone:
    â€œThis is your kind of work and we need your help. I know many of your clients are celebrity types, show business people. I’ve heard about some politicians. Maybe our needs are somewhat different from the ordinary run . . .”
    Walter raised his hand, palm out. Tom stopped.
    Walter’s hard look took them all in and he spoke with calibrated impatience that sharpened as he continued, “The first thing most people give me is a name. The first thing. Then I get a photograph and a description. They give me a story. Usually, they tell me a lot more than I want to know. They parade their hopes and dreams and the names of their pets. I see love and hate they keep from their shrinks.