Injustice is censured because the censures are afraid of suffering, and not from any fear which they have of doing injustice (Plato)

Prosecutor Radavic leaned forward, squeaking his chair with authoritative mien. His long fingers were splayed, hands together, fingertip to fingertip, as though a spider were sideways on a mirror, doing push-ups in an agitated manner. His hair, just a tad longer than it really ought to have been, was slicked back on each side, giving the appearance of an attempted comb-over without actually going for it.

“Tell me that again, Detective Rourke,” he said. “I am having trouble believing my ears.”

The ears that were having this particular difficulty stuck out from the side of his head like a couple of car doors left open whenever Rourke’s wife would unload groceries from the back seat of her little Toyota, stacking them there in their short little driveway. “An SUV would be nice sometime, Daniel,” she would say when he came out to help her bring the groceries in. And Rourke fully intended to fulfill her wish, maybe for Christmas this year, and he used his periodic car-door interviews with Radavic as a little prompt or reminder to keep making the necessary financial arrangements. Shaw in the forensics lab had a nice little Bravada he was willing to sell.

Mike Bradford sat quietly, renewing his resolve to say nothing whatever during the course of this mini-drama. It was unfolding in detailed conformity to the script that he and Rourke had talked about at their office just before they crossed the street from the police station to come over to the courthouse. Just uncanny, thought Bradford. Rourke cleared his throat, and tried again.

“I am sure,” he said, “that there are some very fine evangelical churches out there, and maybe there are even some big ones. But this isn’t one of them. The place is a snake farm. There appear to be all sorts of activities there that would better be conducted under a flat rock in a dismal swamp somewhere. Some sincere people here and there it seems, but they are the ones who are largely clueless. Those who are there and who also have brains—and of those there are more than a few—are running a game that would make a cardinal’s mistress envious.”

Bradford raised one eyebrow slightly. Cardinals had mistresses?

Radavic furrowed his brow in what he thought was a gubernatorial way, a look he had been practicing in the mirror. “So,” he said, “the place is, as you call it, a snake farm. And yet, despite this clear-headed and level assessment, your bottom line recommendation here is that we give it a pass? Help me out here. Is it not part of our sacred duty to the public to be clearing out snake farms?”

“I was speaking of the morality of the place, not the legalities. With regard to the legalities, it appears to me that the main issue in all this—the Robert P. Warner angle—really is a trumped up mess. If Mystic Union is not running a bogus shakedown, I really don’t know my business. I think that is why they went the civil lawsuit route to begin with—easier to try the case in the papers, as is happening while we speak. And, as hard as it might be to believe, there may be some foul deeds in the world that were actually not committed by Chad Lester, and it is my view that this is one of them.”

Bradford had been nodding at certain key places so that Radavic would not come looking to him to contradict or undermine his senior partner. And yet he did not nod so much that Radavic would feel the need to wheel on him and demand that he defend the position himself along with Rourke. Thus far it appeared to be working. Bradford was not a coward, but he was a careful man. Besides, Rourke was doing great.

The prosecutor did some more push-ups with his splayed fingers, clearly unhappy. After a moment or two of awkward silence, he suddenly said, “Have you checked with any of the other counseling ministers over there? Perhaps this Robert P. is confused about which one he saw.” This was not so much a penetrating flash of insight as it was—to use a term popular with clinical psychologists who have studied this kind of thing—a lucky guess. A blind squirrel finds a nut every once in a while.

Rourke nodded carefully. “Yes, we thought of that. We checked the counseling logs of all the ministerial staff. The only one we haven’t gotten to yet is Pastor Martin’s logs. They had been stored somewhere and misplaced. They asked us to come back in a couple days. His secretary said she had some staff member hunting around in the basement archives, and they should be able to locate it in ‘just a matter of time.’ We will check back with them on that today.”

Of course, what Martin actually had going on was that a friend of Martin’s secretary, a young man who was an intermittent coy friend of Martin’s, a student at a nearby art academy, was sitting at home in his apartment, copying out a new counseling log for the dates concerned, only with Robert P. inexplicably omitted. It was good pay if you could get it. He had nice penmanship and, being an artist, was able to approximate the hand of the regular secretary. Not that it matters, but his name was Brad.

Radavic glowered. He squeaked his chair again. He grimaced and cleared his throat. “Well,” he finally said, “I want you to make a point of checking back in with Martin’s office today.  And get back to me on it. In the meantime, I have to tell you . . . and I mean nothing against you personally by this . . . that I am disappointed. You are policemen, and you are simply doing your job. Your job, as you see it, is to connect the dots, and if a few dots are missing, you believe that it is your duty simply to stop there. I do not. Sometimes you have to add some dots. So as a public servant with a great deal more responsibility entrusted to me, I have to tell you . . . I have a feeling in my gut about this one.”

So do I, thought Rourke. Me too, thought Bradford.

“I am sure that if we keep shaking this, the facts will come tumbling out. Sometimes you have to run ahead.”

Yikes, thought Rourke. Crikey, thought Bradford.

“After you talk with Martin’s office, unless you have positive evidence that indicates that someone other than Lester did this horrible thing, I will probably bring an indictment.”

With that, Radavic swiveled his head and looked straight at Rourke with what he thought was a steely, gray-eyed gaze, like in those TV legal office drama shows, at an especially tense moment when one of the handsome actors rivets another handsome actor with an unshakeable and hardened resolve and says, “Dammit, Trevor, this is our job!”

We really do need that SUV, thought Rourke.

* * *

Michelle pulled their gray Beemer into their spacious driveway, slowed down slightly as the garage door went up, and then pulled into the bay. Shannon and Kimberly both got out of the back seat, stretched, thanked their mom for the bonding time, grabbed their stuff, and headed off to their respective bedrooms.

The phone started ringing just as Michelle walked into the kitchen, carrying her overnight bag. She dropped it on the floor and picked up the phone.

“Brian! Oh, thanks for calling . . . no, we just walked in.” She paused for a moment. “No, dinner would be great. I’ll tell the girls. They should be okay. I know they have stuff to do. Shall I meet you at South of Texas? Our regular spot? Seven sounds great.”

She hung up the phone, and dashed up the stairs to freshen up. As much as she didn’t want to say so, the weekend of journaling and talking with the girls had done nothing for her at all. The more she wielded her shovel, the bigger the hole seemed to get. And now all she really wanted to do was talk with Brian. And she knew she was going to have to tell him about the divorce settlement sometime. Why not tonight? Still, she didn’t really want to.

Brian had been her investment broker, which is how they had gotten acquainted in the first place. He had recommended a local divorce attorney, a friend of his in their office complex, someone who “had real integrity.” But Michelle had decided that she actually wanted to go with a firm that used to represent her father back home. The reason for this move was Chad would know nothing about him or his reputation. And because the lead attorney in that firm—Joe Shattuck, Esq.–spoke with a thick Mississippi accent, this always put urban sophisticates off their guard. Shattuck had made a lot of money that way. At any rate, the plan he had worked out with Michelle had worked, and Michelle had gotten everything she had asked for in the settlement. She had paid handsomely for Shattuck’s expertise, but it had clearly paid off completely.

The ramifications of what all this would actually mean for Chad would not become apparent to him until after the divorce was final, when it would be too late, over and done. Chad would not be penniless, by any stretch, but Michelle was walking away with far more than Chad was currently anticipating that she would. His attorneys, some of the aforementioned sophisticates, had spent a great deal of time, after their periodic phone conversations with Shattuck, trying unsuccessfully to imitate the way he talked. “Rubes and cornpones are way too easy” was the general sentiment around the firm. After the divorce settlement went into effect, and Shattuck filed a few papers, these same attorneys would have a series of very painful conversations with Chad, with no attempts at mimicry involved at all. Not that they knew about it yet, but Shattuck had pulled all their shirts up over their heads, and rolled all their socks down, creating a little black wool bead around the tops of their expensive Italian shoes. Shattuck, for his part, during a weekly lunch with his partners at a local catfish emporium, was fairly expressive in how he explained what had happened. “Those boys couldn’t pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were written on the heel.”

Michelle was pleased with how it was going to work out, and the divorce would be final just next week. The only thing that troubled her was how she was going to explain it to Brian. He was an honest broker, and a really decent sort, and since he would still be handling all her investments after the divorce, he would surely ask some questions about where all the money was coming from. There was no way she could keep it from him—not that she really wanted to—but she was also half afraid that he would disapprove at some level. Or something. She hated the thought of him disapproving . . . but not as much as she hated the thought of Chad getting the best of her. But she would tell Brian tonight.

They were halfway through the dessert before she made her first serious attempt to bring it up. She tapped on the remains of her crème brulee with her spoon. “Brian, there is something we have to talk about . . . something financial.”

“Business?” he said. “Mixing romance and business?”

“No, not business details. You can do all that at the office. It’s something about the divorce.”

Brian reached across the table and took her free hand in his. “Tell me,” he said.

And so she laid it all out. She told him about how shrewd Shattuck had been, and how the whole thing was perfectly legal, and how furious Chad would be. He would be mostly furious because he took great pride in being a world class finance meister, but a good portion of his anger would be because he had not suspected that Michelle would try to get back at him that way. She was still astonished that she had succeeded.

“And so I wanted to tell you about it before it all became final. I . . . I wanted to know what you thought of it.”

Brian had a blank look on his face. After a moment, he said, “Look, honey, I don’t know what I think of it. I have a hard time feeling sorry for Chad over anything. But obviously, you have some level of concern about it. I don’t know. It sounds legal, but I don’t know that I would like that being done to me. You’re asking what I think about the ethics of it, right?”

She nodded, and they both sat quietly for a moment. “Here,” he finally said. “Give me a day or so to think about it. Would that be all right?”

Michelle felt curiously let down. “Sure,” she said. Then, a second later. “You’re not going to talk to Pastor Mitchell about this, are you?”

He said yes, and the following quarrel took about twenty minutes. It was a nice restaurant, and so the quarrel stayed subdued and quite civilized. They mostly patched it up near the end, but she didn’t go home with him to his apartment. They kissed in the parking lot, somewhat perfunctorily, and went to their separate cars. She pulled onto the freeway in an agitated frame of mind. That was the only problem with Brian. Everything else was perfect. Why should he care what this Mitchell character thought? Well, she sure didn’t.

* * *

Earlier that day, standing outside the courthouse, Rourke and Bradford waited at the crosswalk for the light to turn. Rourke had pushed the big flat button on the gray metal pole for a walk signal, and then put his hands back in his pockets.

“Bradford,” Rourke said, “when we get back to our offices, the first thing I am going to do is write a memo to the prosecutor following up on our little visit with him. I will make sure that the memo is from the two of us, and represents our sentiments exactly. In that memo, I am going to make it clear—in an understated and respectful way—that our recommendation had been to not proceed with an indictment. This will not be done in such a way as to enflame our ambitious friend, but the point will at least be registered. I am sure he will not even notice, but in the cold light of day afterwards, our position will be cogent and clear and I would be unembarrassed to read about this memo of mine on the front page of USA Today. I will email you a copy of the memo, and you will email it back to me a couple times, with some sort of clear approval indicated. We will archive this sentiment in numerous places. I bet reporters with their freedom of information requests will have no trouble finding it at all.”

Bradford snorted. “Rourke, I do believe that this is an exercise in what a cynical person might call ‘covering your tail.’”

Rourke smiled grimly, looking at the sky, which had become agitated during their visit with Radavic. The gray clouds were tumbling over one another, each one trying to get to the front.

“Well, Bradford, what should I say if, looking at a sky like that, I said aloud that I thought I should wear a raincoat, and you said, ‘You are just doing that because you think it might rain’? Would an objection of this caliber disturb me? Bradford, it would not unsettle me, not even a little bit. Not even for a little while.”

“Ah,” Bradford said. “You are telling me that there are times when tails need to be covered.”

“You betcher. Nothing else you can do about it when some public servant in authority over you gets his high ambitions all tangled up with moral indignation. Time for the old raincoat memo, I says to myself. Remember that Nifong character and the Duke lacrosse players? I had an old friend from the academy who was involved in that one. Boy, was he glad for the old memo move. To this day, he is still able to make the mortgage payments on his house. His wife is happy and I, as an old friend, am also happy.”

“Ah,” said Bradford. This is what mentoring was all about.