The Most Dangerous Thing - Laura Lippman [104]
Last week even Doris Halloran showed up on his doorstep, casserole in hand. Unsure of the etiquette, he had his daytime aide invite her in to share it with him, which she did with an almost frightening alacrity. Silly Clem. Doris wasn’t looking for a mate. She wanted absolution. She unburdened herself to him and left, seemingly happy. The casserole, whatever it was, might as well be called the misery dish, for once he ate of it, he could never be happy again. What he had always feared, what he knew but did not have to admit, had been thrust on him: Tim killed the man in the woods. He told Doris so before he died. She defended her husband’s actions to Clem, said she believed it was the right thing. “Think of the other children he might have hurt, that man.”
Clem has thought of them. He thinks about them constantly. Yet he still cannot persuade himself that these potential crimes entitled Tim Halloran to murder the man. And it makes him nervous that Doris knows. She was not there; her husband is dead. Clem has long lost track of Rick. Doris has little to lose by telling others what happened. Clem’s entire life could be taken from him retroactively. Everything he has done and accomplished—the career, the children, the grandchildren—would be wiped out by the fact that a man was murdered in front of him and he kept his silence for sheer convenience’s sake. Why? Because he knew the man in the woods didn’t count, that no one would miss him. It was the coldest, most inhumane calculation of his life. He can never make it right.
“And then I got on Boo and he ran and ran and ran—”
“Galloped,” he corrects gently. “Horses gallop. Or canter. But you can say run, too.”
“I want to ride horses. Daddy says it’s too dangerous.” Annabelle curls into his side, looking up through her lashes. That is Gwen’s look, Gwen’s wheedling tone, Gwen’s feminine confidence.
“Well, daddies get to decide such things. Daddies know a lot about danger.”
Father knows best. If they’re telling stories, he might as well go whole hog.
Chapter Thirty-one
Tim is surprised and pleased when Gwen calls out of the blue and asks to meet him for lunch. It’s as if she has picked up on his own desire to talk about the past, about Go-Go. He asks her to meet him at the Towson Diner, in part because he likes it, but also because it’s bright and shiny, the kind of place where friends meet. He is sensitive to appearances, especially since he has begun toying with the idea of vying for state’s attorney in the next election, or maybe positioning himself for a judgeship. Gwen is a good-looking woman, and if Baltimore is a small town masquerading as a city, then Towson, the county seat, is smaller still. He never goes out for lunch or runs an errand without seeing someone from the courthouse or the police department.
Here in the Towson Diner today, he spots two homicide cops, good guys, not like the lunkheads who have handed him his latest loser of a case. Although, of course, it’s his boss who determines the assignments. He wonders if his ambition is showing. He would not run against the sitting county attorney, not unless there was a major fuck-up to exploit. That would be idiotic. Unfortunately, the time to run was probably four years ago, when his previous boss stepped down. Why didn’t he go for it then? But Tim’s late-blooming ambition has been fueled by watching someone no smarter than he is do the job. Now he knows he can do it. He doubted himself before.
Tim has often doubted himself, and although he hates the whole blame-your-parents school of thought, especially since he is now a parent, he can’t help thinking it would have been nice if his father and mother had been a little more rah-rah on his behalf. He was once doing something idiotic, and his father called him stupid. Doris, parroting advice gleaned from a woman’s magazine or daytime talk show, said: “They say you should never call children stupid, but say that their actions are stupid.” Tim Senior took his oldest son’s full