Expert Opinion

It was winter when the first call came in. That brief lull in domestic warfare that comes right before Christmas. No one wants to be in court that time of year. Not the lawyers, not the families. It has to be a life or death emergency to get on the docket. No judge wants to be playing Solomon in the manger.

I looked out my office window. The sky was gray and cloudy. The air was cold and dry without a hint of snow. Walking to my office, the day had the look and feel of marble.

The phone rang twice before I picked it up.

“Dr. Triplett, this is Larry Fortunato. I’m an attorney in Lawrence, New Jersey. I’d like to use you in a case.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Fortunato, but I’m buried in work right now. I’m not taking on any new cases.”

“How long until you can?”

“I won’t be starting any new cases’ for another six weeks, maybe two months. Can I refer you to anyone?”

“Not really, Doctor. You’re the one we want.”

“Is one of the parents down here?” I asked, wondering why a New Jersey lawyer was so keen to use me here in Virginia.

“No, the parents both live up here. I did some research. Your name kept coming up as the best, so I figured we’d go with the best.”

“That’s very flattering. What kind of case is it?” May as well find out what I was best at. I wasn’t going to take the case regardless of the answer.

“It’s a sexual abuse case. Mother claims the father abuses the little boy.”

“There are some very good people up your way. There’s—”

“I know doctor, but believe me we called all of them. I asked them the same question. If it was your kid, who would you want to do the evaluation? You ought to feel pretty good about this. Your name is always the answer. Well, not always. Some shrink across the state isn’t too crazy about you, but I heard you blew him away in court a couple of times.”

“That is nice to hear. This is a hard area to keep a decent reputation in. People don’t really want evaluations done. They want verification of what they already know is true. A lot of messengers get killed in this line of work.”

“No problem of that here, Doctor. Neither of the parties would be retaining you. It’s the little boy’s—”

“Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. Even if I took the case, I wouldn’t want to hear anything without all the attorneys on the phone. These cases are like tar pits. You make one false move and you can’t undo it. These cases are littered with the bones of evaluators who screwed up.”

“Okay. I respect that. Let me ask you one question. Hypothetically, if you were to take the case, how much would it cost?”

“My hourly rate is two hundred dollars. Not knowing anything about this case, I’d tell you the range is eight to twelve thousand dollars. These cases are very, very draining. I can only do two or three at a time. They take at least two months to complete. If I was taking any more of these that is.”

“Of course. Sounds like you need a little R and R.”

“Yeah.” I needed more than that. I needed a new how and why, but that was none of his business.

“Well, thank you for your time, Dr. Triplett. Take care of yourself.”

I cradled the phone and surveyed the cases on my desk. First up Tiffany Pearlman. A child so damaged that she could scarcely go a day without harming herself. Overdoses, auto wrecks, pregnancies, poetry in her own blood. A walking death notice lacking only a date. The county had no money to underwrite treatment. The parents were bankrupt from trying to pin the blame on each other. She was a slow motion suicide heading downhill. If I was lucky, I’d get her committed the first week of January and buy her a little time. She, of course, thought that she was fine and it was the rest of us who were crazy.

The rest of the pile was more of the same. Their trials were strung out over the next month. After that I was going to take some time off. See if I could reinvent myself.

The envelope was on my secretary’s desk a week later. She wasn’t in on Wednesdays so no one saw who delivered it. A large manila envelope with my name typed across the front. I got these packages all the time. First thing a divorce lawyer tells their client: keep a journal. Each parent documenting the outrages perpetrated by the other. Each hurt brooded over lovingly. No slight too small to remember or small enough to forgive. However long they spent preparing their case, it took at least twice as long to recover any sense of proportion. If they ever did.

I took the envelope into my office. I peeled it open and dumped out the contents.

The money was old and in wads held together by rubber bands. One fell on the floor. I picked it up and looked at the door. It was open. I felt naked and closed the door.

There was no letter in the envelope. Nothing. This was definitely not Publisher’s Clearinghouse. I picked up a brick. All hundreds. Did banks ever give people hundreds? I thought they were for interbank transactions. I did a quick total. Six thousand. Twelve bricks. Seventy-two grand.

The phone rang. I picked it up and said nothing. “Dr. Triplett. You received a package today.” The voice was smooth and even and unknown.

“Who is this?”

“That package contained an amount of money twice what you would earn from your caseload for the next two months, am I correct?”

“Who is this? I’m not going to answer any questions until I know who this is?”

“This is your new client, Dr. Triplett.”

“Oh, no, you’re not. I don’t work like this. You tell me who you are and where to send this money. I don’t want it.”

“You can’t return it, Dr. Triplett. No one will accept it.”

“Then I’ll give it away. I don’t want it.”

“If you give it away, it will be considered spent. Lie back and enjoy it, Doc. You’ve been bought and paid for.” After a moment of silence the voice returned, softer. “Take a deep breath, Doctor. Count it again. That’s a lot of R and R, Doctor. We’ll be in touch.”

I hung up the phone. My heart and mind were racing. I felt like I was swimming through Jell-O with my mouth open.

This was not happening to me. I looked at the money. Oh, yes, it was. I’m a psychologist. I don’t even do criminal work. I obey the law. I don’t even get traffic tickets. This is insane. There has to be something I can do.

I looked at the bricks of money again. Seventy-two thousand dollars worth of serious intent. Maybe I should call the cops. And tell them what? I was being forced at twice my hourly rate to perform unknown services, for an unknown person. I’m sure there is a crime in there somewhere. Any ideas, Officer? Sure. If they want you to do something illegal, or they threaten you with bodily harm, you call us. Gross overpayment won’t do? No.

I had to talk to this guy the next time that he called. That’s what I do best—talk to desperate people. People backed into corners, people who felt they had nothing to lose or everything to lose and no way to win. People who could not compromise or negotiate or yield. That’s what I did every day. End conflicts, build bridges, put doors into corners. That’s what put this guy onto me now. This time I was one of those people. I’d use my skills to get myself out of his life and him out of mine. I felt better already. I had a plan. I knew what I was going to do. I was good at this. The best, he’d said.

I looked at the money. First things first. This had to be put into the bank. I had to be able to return it and that meant guaranteeing its safety. My office safebox wouldn’t do, neither would the one I had at home.

I scooped the money into the bag, put on my jacket, turned off the lights and locked the office door. Outside, I fiddled with my key ring, looking for the front door key. I found it and locked the dead bolt. As I withdrew the key from the sticky lock, I heard a voice.

“Dr. Triplett?”

I turned toward the voice. There were two of them. Left wore a butterscotch leather jacket over a chocolate turtle-neck. His face was deeply pitted. Could have been acne, could have been shrapnel for all I knew. His hands were at his side. Right was the talker. His head cocked slightly to one side, a smile on his face. “Dr. Triplett, would you step this way please?” He turned sideways and pointed to a black limousine with tinted windows.

I looked from Left to Right. “And if I say no?”

Left reached up and pulled away his jacket to show me that the question had been rhetorical.

“Right here on the street. You’d shoot me?” I asked Right.

“In a fucking heartbeat, Doc. You have no idea how angry Mr. G is with you. Getting shot is the least of your worries. Step this way, please.”

He stepped off the curb and opened the door. All I could see was a pair of legs in the middle of the rear seat and an empty bench facing backwards toward the legs. I stepped between Left and Right, holding my bag like it was my lunch. Right’s cologne was cloyingly sweet. I ducked my head and slipped onto the bench with my bag of money in my lap. Right slid in next to me and pulled the door closed. Left came around the car, opened the other door and sat down next to me. I was pressed between them, feeling the pressure of their arms and legs against me from my shoulders to my shoes. I couldn’t move.

My host stroked his beard slowly, rhythmically, like he was petting himself. He lifted his chin, pursed his lips in thought and then backhanded me across the face.

My eyes watered and my muscles tensed. The pressure on me from both sides increased. I relaxed.

“Who the fuck do you think you are? Huh?” he asked. He was short and stocky, with black hair that swept straight back from a widow’s peak. With his sharp, curved nose, thick neck and bulging eyes, he looked like a great horned owl. I felt like a field mouse. His hands were pale and square with short, thick fingers.

“I asked you a question. Who the fuck do you think you are?”

“I think I’m terrified, that’s who.”

“That’s good. You should be. You should be wondering if you’re ever gonna get out of this car.”

He leaned back against the seat. “I called you and told you I had a problem. A serious fucking problem, and you were too fucking busy to help me. What do you think? You’re too good for me?”

The pale hand flew and my head snapped back. I closed my eyes to stop the spinning.

“I came to you with respect,” he said pointing a single finger at me. “We did our homework. You’re the best. You gave us a price and we doubled it. In cash. Up front. But you’re still too busy for me, for my problem. How’d you get so special, Mr. Terrified? You feeling special right now?”

“No,” I whispered.

“So tell me, what is it? I ain’t good enough for you? My money ain’t good enough for you?”

I took a deep breath. Telling him that his attorney had never gotten around to giving me his name was not going to derail this tirade. “It had nothing to do with you or your money. I’m full. There’s only so many of these that I can do at one time. I’m in the middle of three cases. I have to finish them. They’ve got court dates.”

“So? You think we couldn’t fix that? You don’t think we could arrange a continuance or two? Talk to the lawyers, the docket clerks if that’s what you needed? Did you come back and say that was the problem, could we work with you on that? No. Nothing. No interest. Just blew me off. Too busy. You busy right now, Mr. Terrified? I’ll bet you are. Busy holding your water, is what.”

My companions snickered.

“Since you’re not too busy all of a sudden, let me tell you about my problem.”

I smiled weakly. “Sure.”

“When I was younger, I met this girl. You don’t need to know her name. A stripper. Whew, God was she hot. Anyway, that’s another story. She got knocked up. Said the kid was mine. Now I’m married. I got two kids of my own. Coulda been mine, I’m not saying that. But I tell her you push this and he’s an orphan. Let it be and I’ll keep an eye on him. I’ll look out for him. She’s a smart girl. I don’t hear from her again. Until a few weeks ago. She calls me up outta the blue. Says my son’s in trouble. I gotta help him out like I said. So I say okay, what’s the problem. She says he’s getting divorced. I start laughing. That’s the fucking problem? No, she says the wife claims he’s diddling the kid. Won’t let him have no visitation. It’s killing him. He grew up without a father, now he’ll grow old without a son. Help him. Help him. You said you would. He’s your own flesh and blood. Look at him, just see him once and then deny him. Look me in the eye and deny him. Fuck.” He shrugged and rolled his eyes. “She gave me the address. I went by. Stopped me cold. I seen him walking down the street. It’s like I’m watching myself. Little things. The way he walks. The way he laughs. He looks just like me at his age. Okay, he’s my son. So I introduce myself to him. I tell him I’m a friend of his mother’s, that’s all. We sit down and talk. He tells me his wife, she’s getting boned by her boss and she wants out. She says she’s gonna take the kid. He pulls out his wallet, shows me a picture. What do I know? Kids, they all look alike. He tells me his name. The kid’s got my first name. It was his mother’s idea. Now so far neither of my other two kids are married. This is my only grandchild, a grandson. With my name. I say how’s she gonna do that? She’s sucking some other guy’s dick and she’s a fit mother, c’mon, am I right?”

I nodded in the understanding that passeth all reason.

“He says she’s saying the boy don’t want to go with him on visits. That when he comes back, he’s got nightmares. He wants to sleep with her. That his daddy’s mean to him. That he touched him where nobody should touch him. That his butthole’s red and sore when he comes back. My son, he gets down on his knees. We’re in a restaurant. He gets down on his knees and he swears on his mother’s life that he never touched the kid. That it’s a fucking lie. I tell him to get up, he’s drawing eyes. I tell him I’ll talk to her. Hear what she’s gotta say. I’ll get to the bottom of this.”

He leaned back. “You got any questions. Anything else you want to know?”

“No. Not now. If I do, I’ll ask, if that’s okay, of course.”

He smiled broadly. “Of course it’s okay. That’s why we’re here isn’t it? I tell you my problem and you listen and ask questions, right? I mean, I’m not paying 400 dollars an hour to a deaf mute, am I?” The smile spread. I was invited to reply and managed a wince of relief.

“Okay. So I go meet the wife. Jesus, what a bitch. I tell her how I’m Vito’s uncle and I hear that they’re having some problems, maybe I can help. Well, she unloads on him. He’s never been a provider to her. He’s always losing jobs. She’s worked two jobs to make ends meet. She also says he’s never been a real man in the sack. She thinks he’s maybe a little light in the loafers.” He wagged his left hand and pursed his mouth in distaste. “She liked the way he was at first—real gentle and all. But then she realized he was a mama’s boy. His mother, she never let him out of her sight. She was always afraid he wouldn’t come back, like the father. She was always running his life, calling him at all hours and him always going over there. She got tired of playing second fiddle to the mother. On top of that he was never interested in her as a woman. She had to get him drunk to do it and even then he wasn’t flying at full mast. So I ask her about her boss. She says he’s just a friend, that Vito’s paranoid that she’s sleeping around ’cause he wouldn’t give her what she needed. She says they just talk. I ask her about the kid. She tells me the same story as Vito. I ask if there’s anybody else has seen this stuff. She says no. She took him to the doctor’s to check out his butt. She said they couldn’t see nothing wrong. They stuck some camera up his butt, a colosto—something. I don’t know.”

“A colposcope. It’s called a colposcope.” My voice sounded like it was being piped into the car.

“That’s right.” My host smiled.

“That’s good. It’s a specialist’s instrument. Somebody with some training took a look at him.”

“Maybe, that’s good. I don’t know. All I know is my grandson has some camera shoved up his ass. He’s three years old for Christ’s sake. What the fuck is this?”

When I didn’t answer, he went on. “She says she ain’t gonna let Vito see the boy without a supervisor. A fucking supervisor. And not his mother. She doesn’t trust his mother on account of their relationship. He’s gotta go down to welfare and get a fucking social worker and pay to see his own kid. If he doesn’t agree she’s gonna call child protective services and have him charged with child molesting.

“Child molesting. My son molesting my grandson. Can you believe this shit? I asked if I can see the little boy. She asks why. I say I want to talk to him a second, that’s all. She says she wants to be there. Okay, fine. She brings the little boy in. He’s cute. He’s got these big, dark eyes, in this little face. He looks like a little bird, you know what I mean? Very serious face. He’s watching me. He’s sitting on his mother’s lap, holding on to her with both hands. I try to catch his eye, get him to come over, sit in my lap, talk. He keeps turning his face away. She says he’s shy. I think fuck, she’s gonna make him a freaking mama’s boy just like she complains about Vito. So I take out a silver dollar I got in my pocket, that and a couple pieces of candy I brought just in case I want to talk to this kid. He looks at the mother and she says, go, it’s okay. So he comes over and sits on my lap. I give him the dollar, tell him if he’s a good boy he can keep it. I ask the mother to step outside, give me a little privacy with the boy. She don’t like that, so I tell her to go to the front window, tell me what she sees. She goes over to the window, comes back, pats the boy on the head and leaves. Smart woman.”

Left and Right chuckle with amusement at the memory.

“So I ask the kid some questions. His daddy, he ever stick anything in his butt? He ever touch his pee-pee? Why don’t he like to go over his dad’s house? Don’t he know that if he’s lying his old man could go to jail? Why would he want to do that?

“The kid just looks at me with those big eyes. He don’t say nothing. I give him a piece of candy. He takes it and puts it in his mouth but he still don’t say nothing. Now all this time, I’m very calm. He starts to cry. He wants his mommy. I tell him we ain’t done yet. He can’t see his mommy until we’re done. He’s gotta answer my questions first. The fucking kid starts to lose it. He gets down and goes to run to the door. I gotta grab him by the shirt. He’s crying, I pick him up in the air and I shake him until he shuts up. I tell him I’m his grandfather and when your grandfather asks you a question you answer him. He just started screaming for his mother and he wouldn’t shut up. The mother started screaming for the kid. This wasn’t getting anywhere. I wanted to smack them both. I gave the kid back to his mother and told her not to talk to anyone about this, that I’d fix the problem.

“The bitch, she overheard me tell the kid I’m his grandfather. She calls Vito and tells him, ‘You know that old man came by, your uncle, he’s your fucking father.’ Vito, he calls me, he says stay outta my life. You think you can just snap your fingers and make it all good. No thank you. I don’t need your fucking help. You didn’t have time for me, well now I ain’t got time for you.” He shook his head in disbelief. “So here we are.”

Here we are indeed. Just click my ruby slippers three times and I’m gone. “What do you want from me?”

He looked at me incredulously, as if I had just barked or honked like a goose. “Ain’t you been listening? I want to know what’s happening here. There is no way anybody is gonna molest my grandson, no way. But if Vito ain’t doin’ it then there’s no way he’s gonna have a fuckin’ social worker with him, watching him like he’s some kind of pervert.

“This is my family. My son wants to be with his son, he’s gonna be with his son. I gotta know the truth. What’s happening. Then I know what I gotta do. I gotta know now. If my son didn’t do it then he should be out in the park with his son right now, this minute, throwing him a ball, whatever they want to do. If he did do it, then it isn’t gonna happen again, ever. That’s what I want. I ain’t waitin’ two months for you to get around to me. I want the truth, and I want it now.”

“What if you can’t have that?” I asked, aware of a faint stirring of pleasure at his impotence.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, what if the truth can’t be known. Can’t be proven. What if there’s doubt about if anything really happened?”

“No.” He shook his head rejecting that possibility. “It either did or it didn’t happen. That’s all you gotta tell me. I gotta know for sure. I can’t be worrying the rest of my life, I made a mistake; that’s he’s sticking his fuckin’ cock up my grandson’s ass—you hear me? That ain’t gonna happen.” He got right in my face and jabbed home each word with the end of a finger, typing out his frustration on the keyboard of my chest.

I reached out and grabbed his wrist. “I get the point. Now you’re paying me a lot of money to help you with this problem. Do you want my expert opinion or do you just want to break my ribs?”

Our eyes met like two dogs over one bone. Neither of us looked away. I let go of his wrist and he sat back. “Okay, what’s your opinion?”

“When I asked you what you wanted, you said you wanted the truth. Suppose that isn’t possible? Suppose you will never know without a doubt what happened? Can you accept that? Can you live with being wrong, with not protecting your grandson or with ending your son’s relationship with his child for no good reason?”

“No, that’s not acceptable. Those prices are too high. I want the truth. If I know the truth, I know what to do and what I do will be right.”

“Then I can’t help you.”

“What do you mean you can’t help me? You’re supposed to be the best, you wrote the book, you know all there is about this shit. You’re a fucking doctor, for Christ’s sake.”

“But I’m not God. Maybe I do know all there is, but that’s a lot less than what we need to know. Even if I had an opinion about what happened, even if that was a result of all the research I know and all the skill I have, that would just be the best we can do right now, I could still be wrong. I can’t guarantee you the truth, nobody can. If you can’t accept that then I can’t help you.”

He shook his head like a buffalo beset by flies. “I don’t get it. Why is this so hard? Okay, I don’t know how to talk to little kids, but you do. That’s your job.”

I had to stifle the impulse to talk down to him, to rub his nose in his need, to hit him with fists of sarcasm, and remember that somewhere inside there was a confused parent trying to do the right thing for his kid, doing his best no matter how far it fell from being good enough.

It was also my best chance of seeing the outside of this car.

“This is why it’s so hard. First, you have no witness. Whatever is or isn’t happening, the only ones there are the boy and his father. He isn’t going to confess. He hasn’t. He denies it. Maybe it’s the truth, maybe it isn’t. What are you going to do? Torture it out of him? Even if he says he did it, you’ll never know if that was just to end the pain. You can torture people into saying what you want to hear but not into telling you the truth. Pain trumps truth, unless you’re a saint. There’s no physical evidence. They checked out his butt and didn’t find any fissures. But that doesn’t prove anything. There’s all kinds of abuse that doesn’t leave physical evidence. He could be masturbating the boy or fellating him, or having the child do him. The nightmares, the fears, wanting to sleep with his mother, not wanting to go with his father, that means nothing. You see that very often with kids of his age when parents separate, especially if there’s a lot of conflict. They don’t want to leave the mother if she’s been the primary caretaker, but after the transfer they have a good time with the dad. They return and they want to reestablish that closeness with the mother, they regress, they want to sleep with her. You don’t have to have sexual abuse to explain all of that. That’s one of the biggest problems. There’s no set of symptoms that separates sexual abuse from other phenomena and that always shows up with sexual abuse. Sexual abuse is a complex thing. Is the violent rape of a ten-year-old girl by a stranger the same as a father masturbating in front of his sleeping six-year-old son? No, but sexual abuse covers both things. Some kids are abused, there’s no physical evidence, they make no disclosures and no one notices anything wrong from the outside. That’s why this is so hard. Not only that—”

“What about him telling his mother that his daddy touches him?”

“So far, all we have is her word that he said that. Suppose I interview him and he says nothing. Does that mean she’s lying, or it didn’t happen, or just that I couldn’t get the information from him? Suppose he recants. He catches on that everybody’s upset, that he might never see his dad again, that he loves his dad, that he wants his dad so badly he’ll put up with that other stuff, that it isn’t so bad after all. It takes a lot for a kid to give up on a parent, usually it’s the other way around. Does that mean it didn’t happen? No. I’ve had cases where the victim was in one room recanting to me, while next door the parent was confessing to the police.

“Suppose the kid does make a disclosure to me. I do a clean interview, no suggestions, no leading questions, I get a disclosure but not a lot of details, it’s a little inconsistent, the effect’s unremarkable. Not a great disclosure. Does that mean nothing happened? No. Kids are abused and may never give a ‘great’ account of what happened to them. You get the picture? This is a high wire act on a razor blade over a minefield. Very hard to keep your balance and anywhere you come down could blow up in your face.”

My host sat silent and slack, pummeled by something he couldn’t bully into submission.

“I’m not done yet. Let me throw a wrinkle into all this. Suppose I make a mistake, then what?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean. Suppose I tell you your son didn’t do anything. That’s my expert opinion. You tell the wife that he can have visits with his son. A year later they rush the boy to the hospital with a torn anus. What are you going to do?”

A smile appeared and disappeared, as enigmatic and unmistakable as the Mona Lisa’s. “I’d kill you, you fucked up like that.”

“Right. So the smart play for me is to tell you that your son did molest the boy. If I’m right, he doesn’t get a chance to do it again. If I’m wrong, how will you ever know? The boy is being protected from something that never happened. And it keeps on not happening. I don’t even need to do an evaluation. I just have to look out for myself and cover my tracks. You said it yourself. I’m the best there is at what I do. Who’s gonna catch me? I go through the motions. I build a case. The evidence could go either way. I say your son did it. Now you have to worry about whether that’s what I truly believe or what I want you to believe because it’s best for me. You can’t have certainty, it’s not there. Not for you, not for me, not for anyone.

“This is not me being too good for you. This is not about me or you. This is about the truth. The truth is the same for all of us, you, me, everybody. Nobody can get a leg up on this one. What you want, I can’t deliver. No one can.”

“So, what should I do, Doctor? What’s your expert opinion?”

“I think you have to accept that you may never know for sure what happened. That you can live with the possibility of being wrong. If you can, then an evaluation can be a useful thing to do.”

“And if I can’t?”

“Then raise him yourself. That’s the only way to be certain.” Like an open parachute on the ground, I quickly packed up my frustration before it blew me away.

“Or maybe you decide it isn’t your problem. You don’t have to fix this. Just because someone presents it to you doesn’t mean you have to accept it. It’s not your problem until you accept it as one. You said your son didn’t want your help anyway.”

He looked at me like I was a talking ferret.

“My son is accused of diddling my grandson and I’m supposed to nod my head and say my, my isn’t that something. You all get back to me when you sort that out. It isn’t my problem. You’re in my prayers. That’s what’s wrong with you people. I hear this, it is my problem. I’m not gonna walk away from it. I’m gonna fix it. That’s what I do best, Doctor. I fix problems. That’s why people come to me. You think I’d be where I am today if I said well, that’s tough, wish I could help you with that. Come back next time with an easy one. Sorry doesn’t feed the bulldog, Doctor. Problems need fixin’. Tears and sympathy, that’s for women.”

He leaned back and reached into his pockets. “So, what do I do with you? You think you earned that seventy-two grand?”

I pushed the envelope toward him. “Absolutely not. Here, keep it. I don’t want any of it.”

“Really? You sell yourself short, Doc. Maybe you didn’t solve my problem, but you cleared up my thinking. That’s worth something. How long we been talking, Tommy?”

Left checked his watch. “About an hour Mr. G.”

“Okay, that’s what, four hundred? Yeah. Tommy get that out of the bag.”

Tommy reached in and counted off four one hundred dollar bills and handed them to me.

“That was for services rendered, Doctor. That means that all of this is privileged and confidential, am I right?”

The question itself was a pardon and a release. “Absolutely. Not a word of this to anyone.”

“Now, get out.”

No one moved, so I leaned over Tommy, grabbed the door handle, unlocked it and stumbled out into the afternoon’s fading light. I turned around and tempted fate. “Just for curiosity’s sake, what did you get out of all this?”

“Watching you twist and turn on my hook reminded me that when you bring a problem to me, you make a problem for me. And there’s a price for that, too.”

I closed the door and the limousine pulled away. Low and sleek, it turned the corner and disappeared.

I had my life back, just as I left it. Or so I thought.

A week later, I was sitting on my patio, drinking a cup of coffee and eating a bagel. The sun was bright overhead, the air crisp and cool. Winter and spring had a truce. I was skimming the newspaper. There it was, midway down page A8:

Vito and Carla Battista were found shot to death in a parking lot outside Ms. Battista’s lawyer’s office, where the estranged couple had just left a meeting. Police believe the murders were a botched carjacking. The couple’s only child, Salvatore, age 3, is in the care of his grandfather, reputed mob boss, Salvatore Giannini.