A Certain Justice

'People listen all the time, Kevin, they don't hear a damn thing.'

Kevin reached for another breath. 'Well, I want you to hear me, Wes. This is not right. I did not do this. I tried to save him. You hear me? You hear me?'

Wes simply shrugged. 'If you say so-'

'Goddammit…' Kevin lurched forward and swung for Wes's chin, grunting with the pain.

Wes stepped back, Kevin's fist missing him by half a foot, as Kevin's forward motion crumbled him to the ground. Bart jumped forward with a bark.

'Bart!' Wes cuffed at him and the dog slunk to the side.

Kevin was trying to get up. Melanie was down to him, cradling his head in her arms. 'You bastard.'

Wes backed away. 'I didn't…'

Melanie's eyes stuck with him. 'I don't care what happened to you,' she said. 'There's no excuse to explain somebody turning out the way you have.'

An hour later, about noon, Kevin was passed out in Wes's bedroom, the blinds drawn. Wes had a supply of Motrin and Tylenol with codeine and they had pumped Kevin full of the stuff, washed down with a clam-tinged Bloody Mary.

Barefoot, Melanie looked in on him after she came out of the bathroom. She had had a shower and changed into another pair of Wes's khaki shorts, held up with a length of laundry rope, and one of his white shirts, much like the one she had been wearing during the last twenty-four hours.

'He's passed out,' she said.

'He'll be okay as long as he doesn't operate any heavy machinery.' It was an attempt. Feeble, he knew.

But she understood and even appreciated it – the atmosphere had been uncomfortable for the last forty-five minutes. She sat at the opposite end of the futon ru

Wes was watching the news. It was another ba

Mohandas was on the screen now, carrying on about racism and calling for the ouster of Acting District Attorney Art Drysdale for approving the arrest of and allowing the charges against poor Jerohm, who had done nothing more than the other four hundred and sixteen citizens who had been cited with various violations over the past few days. No, he was saying, it was because Drysdale was white and Jerohm was black… that was why Jerohm was in jail. The only reason. No charge had ever been brought against him for Mullen's death.

'Hey, Phil!' Wes was yelling to the television. 'Here's a flash for you. Two hundred and eighty-six of the other guys were black, too.' Then, to Melanie, in a different voice. 'I hate that guy. I really do.'

One of the commentators was giving 'deep background,' dignifying Mohandas's charges – a recycling of Drysdale's past that presumably proved him unfit to serve in any capacity in the city and county. Seventeen years before, when asked about his stand on affirmative action in the DA's office, Drysdale had ventured the notion that perhaps there shouldn't be quotas used in hiring experts – for example, trial attorneys – that the people getting hired should be the people who could do the job, be they black, white, chartreuse, polka-dotted. 'Hell,' he'd said at the time, 'if monkeys could do it, I'd say hire monkeys. But they can't, so I wouldn't.'

Naturally, this was interpreted as meaning that Drysdale had called all black people monkeys, and saying he would never hire a black person. The misunderstanding had marked the end of any political aspirations Drysdale might have had (which were few in any event), and over the better part of the next two decades he had gone on to become the rock of the DA's office, a counselor to anyone of any color or creed who needed his help.

And now Mohandas was on him like yellow on a lemon. 'Poor Art,' Wes was saying. 'He's done.'

'You know him?'

'Everybody knows him. He's about the fairest man in the Hall of Justice.'

'But-'

'You watch. He's gone.'

They stared at the picture for another few seconds until one of those 'why-ask-why?' commercials made Wes mute the screen. He liked all kinds of beer, but he'd asked why too many times about too many things to have any idea of what the damn ad was about.

He sat, then, his bare feet flat on the floor, his elbows resting on his knees. 'Want a beer?' Although he didn't move to get one. Finally he sat back, patted the sofa, and Bart jumped into the space between him and Melanie, settling again with his head on Wes's lap. 'What did your parents say?' he asked her.

Hers was an unpractised moue. 'About what you'd expect.' Then: 'What happened to you, Wes?'

The abrupt segue wasn't clear, and he supposed he could have finessed it for a round or two, but of course he knew exactly what she meant. He had talked Kevin – both of them – into staying a while, into thinking through their strategy a little more carefully. At least get some rest.

And why had he done that? Why hadn't he just let them go? Maybe it was time to find out what he was made of, what he was going to do. Maybe open his battered soul's door a crack and take a peek inside, see if there was anybody there he wanted to get to know.

He wasn't very optimistic about it, but Melanie was here, listening – once again she reminded him of his daughter Michelle. All right, he could at least start, see where it went.

'Mark Dooher. I met him in seventh grade. One of those guys the light always shines on, you know? Great-looking kid, he smiled at you and everything was possible. A little like our friend Kevin in fact. In that way.

'And, lucky me, there's a chemistry. I'm not really in his shadow because I'm nothing like him – I've got to work at things, for example, and I swear to God Mark had it all without any show of effort. He once told me, said he didn't understand life – people working so hard to get someplace. To him, it just came. He told me if he had to work he'd probably fail at everything, but it just wasn't that tough for him – you believe that? And there was no arrogance about it, that was just who he was, some guy that everything broke for the right way.

'And I mean everything. Brains, looks, personality, talent, even luck – everything. I should have hated his guts. But a guy like that thinks you're his best friend, thinks you're cool, and that's the way it stays your whole life? Guess what? You figure in this one way maybe you've grabbed a little of his luck – for some reason, the gods like you too. You take it – figure it doesn't have anything really to do with you. Greater forces are at work.

'So we go through life, Mark and Wes. We play ball together – he's shortstop and I'm second base. We go to the Babe Ruth World Series together and damn if he doesn't win the thing with a home run in the bottom of the seventh… and who's on base in front of him? Moi. A sweet moment.'

He paused, scratching Bart absently. One of his feet was curled under him and Melanie thought that, in spite of the gray field of stubble, the long unkempt hair, he suddenly looked younger. He smiled, embarrassed. Perhaps there was something in Kevin choosing him as his friend.

'Anyway,' he went on, 'Mark went to Stanford and I went to Cal, but we stayed close. He met Sheila, and Lydia and I got together – thank God we didn't go for the same type of women, never did – and we both started law school in the same boat down in LA – pregnant wives, living if you can believe it on the same street in Westwood. It was a good life in spite of no money… LA in the seventies.

He did the first few bars of 'I Am, I Said,' got to the laid-back feeling point, and raised his eyebrows.