BLIND TRIAL Brian Deer (best novels for beginners TXT) 📖

tires. At the sound, he’d twitch, mutter gibberish at the windshield, yawn, shake his head, and rub his face.

She’d brought nothing with her this morning for an overnight stop but carried her purse to the bathroom. She tugged the shower curtain, twisted the faucet, and adjusted the water to warm.

“Dr. Mayr,” Ben called through the open door.

“I hear you.”

“Can I ask something else? It’s nothing major.”

She stepped back into the room and pulled a towel from a rack. “Ask when you come back with the ice.”

“It’s just why you think people steal and do crooked stuff? I mean, not everyone, but people who do it all the time?”

“Why? Oh, you name it. Greed, poverty, laziness, low self-esteem, revenge, fear, shame, not being loved enough.” Then she shut the bathroom door, pulled down her underwear, and sat on the toilet to read.

BEN THUMPED down two flights of stairs to the lot, where the Sentra sat cooling by a wheelbarrow. Clutching a towel, he found a payphone. But Luke didn’t answer. No message. That avenue was closed. Then he hunted through his wallet and pulled out the business card that Sumiko had given him in the module.

Her number rang twice, then he heard Pearl Jam. He’d no need to ask if she was safe. She was safe alright. She was safe with Murayama. She wasn’t playing Binaural to her fish.

“S’me,” he said softly.

“It’s late.” She spoke loudly. “You realize it’s after one o’clock?”

“Hey, Sumiko, it’s me.”

“I’ll call you then tomorrow. Okay?”

“Look, we need to talk. Are you alright? I thought you’d want to know what we found out. Are you alone?”

“Yes, of course, I understand. Yes, tomorrow would be convenient. Okay? I’m rather busy now, and it’s late.”

He heard a bang—a wooden bang—a bottle on floorboards. “You alright. Is he there? Is he listening?”

“Yes of course, I see. Good. Okay. I’ll be calling you tomorrow then.”

“Sumiko. Hey Sumiko. Is he stopping the night?”

“I’m afraid it’s really much too late for work matters.”

“There’s stuff I got to tell you.”

“Thank you very much. Goodnight.”

HE SAT ON the stairs to the second-floor walkway and poked his swollen nose. Then he packed the towel with ice, pressed it to his face, and climbed to room 233.

The lights were still on, but Doc Mayr had crashed and lay on her side facing a wall. A wrinkled arm rested above a thin brown blanket, and a smell of burnt tobacco stained the air.

He crept to the bathroom, pulled off his shirt and pants, and studied his body in the mirror. Not just his face, but his throat was discolored. His right ear was grazed and bleeding. His knees looked undamaged but felt tender to touch. His ankles and toes seemed fine.

By the soap-skimmed washbasin lay Doc Mayr’s purse, plus a typescript of Wilson et al. She’d marked it with notes, numbers, calculations: in small writing too scratchy to make sense of. He kicked off his shorts, nudged the door shut, and climbed into the warmth of the shower.

When he stepped out and dried, the room was freezing. The aircon was running full whack. Every fifteen or twenty seconds it clank-clank-clanked, as if somebody fed it a spoon. The curtain ballooned. He raised a flap and shut it off. The clanking ceased, the curtain settled, and he sank onto a hard chair beside it.

He wore only a towel, but Doc Mayr was unconscious, breathing slow and rasping, almost snoring. He rose, killed the lights, returned to the chair, lifted the blue curtain, and looked out.

The Sentra wasn’t visible: only a yellow-bulbed light pole and a truck with its tail to the building. He let go the curtain, which brushed against his face: a brief contact of fabric with skin. It didn’t catch his bruises or his possibly broken nose. But that touch… That touch was enough.

How often had a drape, or a sheet, brought it back? A sensation: a bewildering heartache. One minute he’d be sitting, or lying in bed, and the next he was standing on a chair. He was standing on a chair after running through rooms to a wood-framed window with curtains. He was running to beat a car, tan-colored and boxy, rumbling on gravel outside.

He was five years old. He’d just started kindergarten. Most days he made this dash through the house. From the kitchen in the back to the living room in the front: the dash to watch his daddy leave for work.

He remembered a different man—black hair, white smile—to the pictures he’d see in the papers. Years later they’d show him all shifty and pale for his first trial, in federal court. The Trib made him look like a psychotic movie star. The Sun-Times: grinning like a reptile. But he was never like that reading bedtime stories or kicking a ball around in the yard.

The car rumbled outside. Ben remembered that sound. He remembered how it paused at the sidewalk.

Brake. Turn signal. Wheel left. Gas.

His daddy looked both ways and was gone.

SATURDAY JULY 26

Forty-eight

NORTH HALSTED was popping in the early hours of Saturday morning, and Luke felt good walking home. After the fight with Mario, he’d spent hours at a sauna, until every muscle and synapse relaxed. On North Cleveland Avenue, his Cuban heels clicked the sidewalk as he passed cold cars and dark windows. The sound was irregular: a useful reminder he was at least two steps past drunk.

This section of the Near Northside was once Italian-German, but more recently became a home for bank vice presidents and Board of Trade dealers, with their armies of accountants and lawyers. The streets were canopied with locusts and maples, and the sidewalks planted with shrubs. Outside 1804, he checked his Fiat Spider: looking seriously mean in the dark. Classic retro soft-top. One hundred forty horsepower. Black paint. Black interior. Black.

From his building’s front stoop, he climbed two flights, unlocked his front door, and was home. He wrenched off his boots and eyed the answering machine, now flashing to signal