“Ray, I have to tell you something,” Swanson said.

“What is it, Swan?”

“Second degree murder. It’s a minimum sentence of fifteen years. It’s not something we want to take to trial even if we think we can win.”

“All the more reason to plead,” Ray said. “What I’m telling you, Swanson, is that it won’t just be arson, it will be the beginning of a whole thing. And we can’t do it. Trial isn’t an option.”

“I’ll talk to the DA,” Swanson said.

And then the Thai food got there.

* * *

—

I guess I had thought that Swanson would make an appointment with the DA’s office, or that he would make a phone call, but he insisted that the best way to go about it was to drive to the Airport Courthouse and hang out in the hallway near a courtroom where the prosecutor handling the case was scheduled to be and then grab him on his way out. Ray and I were to stay out by the car in the parking lot and wait for him to come out and tell us what happened.

The Airport Courthouse was a building from the future, ten stories tall, with glass elevator shafts that made it look like criminals were ascending to the sky to be judged by the gods. I smoked a cigarette and leaned against Swanson’s BMW. Ray got out of the car.

“Can I have one?” he asked.

I handed him a cigarette and lit it for him.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many dinged cars in my life,” I said, surveying the parking lot. It was a sea of messed-up cheap cars interspersed with gleaming BMWs and Mercedes-Benzes. The accused and their attorneys. A minivan for the court reporter. A cluster of squad cars. And I thought that inside the building, the pageant of justice was being performed, as though the contestants had free will, as though anyone could blossom into a hero or a monster through sheer force of character. But out here in the parking lot, it was clear that if you were poor, your car simply had more dings in it. You were poor, you got a drug charge, you got a gun charge, ding, ding, scrape, scratch, because those were the problems that came from growing up in a poor neighborhood. They were not signs of individual moral turpitude.

These were problems that most kids in North Shore never even ran into. And I still believed that the fact that Ray and I were leaning against a BMW would be what saved Bunny. Not that she was innocent, not that she was worthy of love or dignity or mercy. Not that justice was blind or would be made manifest on earth as it is in heaven. I was counting on her rich daddy. I was counting on her milky-white, Aryan-wet-dream skin. I was counting on idiot Swanson and his correct sense of how to match a tie to a shirt. It was almost lavish, I reflected, the way Swanson was so obviously only quasi-competent. As a rich, white man, he could afford to let it show, the same way a skinny bitch with Kate Moss hips could wear unflattering avant-garde silhouettes. I trusted Swanson with Bunny’s case when I wouldn’t have let him run a girls’ softball team. He couldn’t have managed two toddlers at a mall. He was nothing but a floppy, spineless concatenation of wine trivia and pretentious sushi-ordering skills dressed up as a human man and walking around.

I didn’t like Ray or Swanson, and yet I found myself allied with them and it was causing me to hate them more intensely than I might have otherwise.

“I just want you to know,” Ray said, after taking a drag on his cigarette, “how much I appreciate you. It will not be forgotten. The way you’ve been there for Bunny.”

“Thanks, Ray,” I said, and prayed he would not continue talking. We were stuck here in this parking lot together, and I knew some amount of talking was unavoidable, but I hoped to keep it nugatory if possible.

“There’s one thing I’ve been wanting to bring up,” he began, and I felt my revulsion for him gathering in the base of my skull in a slow wave.

“That night,” he said, “that terrible night, where we had the misunderstanding about gay schoolteachers,” he said. “You mentioned about Allison driving into traffic.”

“I’m very sorry for saying that,” I began, thinking that what he wanted was an apology.

“No,” he said and waved me off. “I understand—I mean, listen, if people are saying that, I get it. I think a lot of people hated Allison.”

“Why?” I asked, aghast.

“Because she was beautiful and funny. She always dressed well. She had a kind of clique with the other mothers, and people could feel left out. If you weren’t in their group. I know Ann Marie’s mother often felt that way. And maybe there was a perception of Allison as being somehow cold. But she never meant to leave any of those women out, she just wasn’t thinking about how things seemed. She was shy. She hung out with only the same four women because she was shy. She was a very gentle person. Anyway, her tire blew out as she was going around a curve and she swerved into oncoming traffic on PCH.”

“Good god,” I said.

“But the thing is, it was a new car, a Ford Explorer. Why would a brand-new tire blow out like that? That’s how I met Swanson, actually. Well, we met in AA, but then during my share, I was agonizing about what I could have done, and maybe if I had taken it in for an oil change that week, they would have noticed something was up with the tire. I remember Swan interrupted, which is a big no-no, no cross talk, to ask what kind of car it was. I said it was a Ford Explorer and his eyes just popped out of his head because his firm was already handling the class action suit at the time. They were Firestone tires and Ford had lowered the psi on them to try and keep their SUVs from tipping—remember that? How they would roll in a sharp turn? They didn’t want to do a redesign, too expensive, so they put these low-pressure tires on it. So it was kismet, basically. I never would have known. I would have thought it was some freak thing, maybe she drove over metal spikes or who knows what, but without Swanson I never would have known.”

I believed him completely, even though I trusted Ray Lampert about as much as I would trust a talking doll on Halloween. It just made sense of too many things. I had known Swanson handled class action suits. He would always joke it was the only job where you could get paid millions to get your client fifty cents.

“And Bunny knows?”

“Oh god, yes,” he said.

“Well, I’m really sorry I said that, Ray,” I said. “I feel like a real turd.”

“You’re not a turd! You’re not. Someone told you that. Not your fault you believed them. Makes me sad people are saying that, though. Still saying that.”

“Did you at least get a big settlement?” I asked.

“Actually, yeah. I was a named plaintiff, and those get bigger payouts. For Swan it was a win because the story was just so perfect. Beautiful woman, a young mother, struck down in her prime. You know, no one was drunk, nothing to muddy the waters. And we work well together, and there’s a lot of—if you’re a named defendant, you’re deposed and you have to attend the trial and make decisions.”