He headed back to Win’s apartment. When he opened the door, Terese’s suitcase was by the entrance. She stepped into the foyer.
“You’re packed,” Myron said.
She smiled. “I love a man who misses nothing.”
He waited.
“I’m leaving in an hour for Atlanta,” she said.
“Oh.”
“I spoke to my boss at CNN. Ratings have been down. He wants me back on the air tomorrow.”
“Oh,” Myron said again.
Terese pulled at a ring on her finger. “You ever try a long-distance relationship?” she asked.
“No.”
“Might be worth a try.”
“Might be,” he said.
“I hear the sex is great.”
“That’s never been our trouble, Terese.”
“No,” she said. “It hasn’t.”
He checked his watch. “Only an hour, you said?”
She smiled. “Actually, an hour and ten minutes.”
“Whew,” he said, moving closer.
At midnight Myron and Win were in the living room watching television.
“You’ll miss her,” Win said.
“I’m flying down to Atlanta this weekend.”
Win nodded. “Best-case scenario.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning you are the pitiful, needy type who feels incomplete without a steady girlfriend. Who better than a career woman who lives a thousand miles away?”
More silence. They watched a repeat of Frasier on Channel 11. The show was starting to grow on them both.
“An agent represents his clients,” Win said during a commercial. “You’re his advocate. You can’t worry about the repercussions.”
“You really believe that?”
“Sure, why not?”
Myron shrugged. “Yeah, why not?” He watched another commercial. “Esperanza said I’m starting to get too comfortable with breaking the rules.”
Win said nothing.
“Truth is,” Myron said, “I’ve been doing it for a while. I paid off police officers to cover up a crime.”
“You didn’t know the severity.”
“Does that matter?”
“Of course it does.”
Myron shook his head. “We trample on that damned foul line until we can’t see it anymore,” he said softly.
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about us. Sophie Mayor said that you and I do the same thing she did. We take the law into our own hands. We break the rules.”
“So?”
“So it’s not right.”
Win frowned. “Oh, please.”
“The innocent get hurt.”
“The police hurt the innocent too.”
“Not like this. Esperanza suffered when she had nothing to do with any of this. Clu deserved to be punished, but what happened to Lucy Mayor was still an accident.”
Win drummed his chin with two fingers. “If we put aside an argument on the relative severity of drunk driving,” he said, “in the end it was not merely an accident. Clu chose to bury the body. The fact that he couldn’t live with it doesn’t excuse it.”
“We can’t keep doing this, Win.”
“Keep doing what?”
“Breaking the rules.”
“Let me pose a question to you, Myron.” Win continued his chin drumming. “Suppose you were Sophie Mayor and Lucy Mayor were your daughter. What would you have done?”
“Maybe the same thing,” Myron said. “Does that make it right?”
“Depends,” Win said.
“On?”
“On the Clu Haid factor: Can you live with yourself?”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it. Can you live with yourself? I know that I could.”
“And you’re comfortable with that?”
“With what?”
“With a world where people take the law into their own hands,” Myron said.
“Good lord, no. I’m not prescribing this remedy for others.”
“Just you.”
Win shrugged. “I trust my judgment. I’d trust yours too. But now you want to go back in time and take an alternate route. Life is not like that. You made a decision. It was a good one based on what you knew. A tough call, but aren’t they all? It could have worked out the other way. Clu might have smartened up from the experience, become a better person. My point is, you can’t concern yourself with distant, impossible-to-see consequences.”
“Just worry about the here and now.”
“Precisely.”
“And what you can live with.”
“Yes.
“So maybe next time,” Myron said, “I should opt for doing the right thing.”
Win shook his head. “You’re confusing the right thing with the legal or seemingly moral thing. But that’s not the real world. Sometimes the good guys break the rules because they know better.”
Myron smiled. “They cross the foul line. Just for a second. Just to do good. Then they scramble back into fair territory. But when you do that too often, you start smearing the line.”
“Perhaps the line is supposed to be smeared,” Win said.
“Perhaps.”
“On balance, you and I do good.”
“That balance might be better if we didn’t stray across the line so much—even if that meant letting a few more injustices remain injustices.”
Win shrugged. “Your call.”
Myron sat back. “You know what’s bothering me the most about this conversation?”
“What’s that?”
“That I don’t think it’ll change anything. That I think you’re probably right.”
“But you’re not sure,” Win said.
“No, I’m not sure.”
“And you still don’t like it.”
“I definitely don’t like it,” Myron said.
Win nodded. “That’s all I wanted to hear.”
Chapter 40
Big Cyndi was totally in orange. An orange sweatshirt. Orange parachute pants like something stolen from MC Hammer’s 1989 closet. Dyed orange hair. Orange fingernail polish. Orange—don’t ask how—skin. She looked like a mutant teenage carrot.
“Orange is Esperanza’s favorite color,” she told Myron.
“No, it’s not.”
“It’s not?”
Myron shook his head. “Blue is.” For a moment, he pictured a giant Smurf.