Chapter 104: What Dean Said
Dean came to the office on a Wednesday at twenty past four.
He did not call ahead. He stood outside for eleven minutes first. I watched him do it through the glass.
He was thirty-six. He had put on thirty pounds and lost the part of his face that used to work on people.
Marisol saw him before I did and asked, without looking up, whether she should call anybody. I said not yet.
“Say the word and it's a phone call, not a discussion.” I said not yet again, and she went back to her screen and left the receiver where it was.
He came in and the bell over the door did what it does, and he stood on the mat and did not come further.
“You filed something,” he said.
“It's public. Clerk's office, room 210. Twelve cents a page.”
“They sent me a subpoena.”
“That isn't from me. I don't issue subpoenas. I scan documents for a woman who writes bail bonds.”
He looked around the office as if he expected it to be something else. A bail bonds front room is four chairs and a counter.
“Can we sit down.”
“No.” I had a stack of forfeiture notices on the counter and I kept my hands flat on them.
I want to be exact about my hands, because I have been wrong about my hands before.
I put both palms flat on the counter, on the paper, and I left them there for the whole of it.
I did not go around the counter. I did not touch him. The counter was between us the entire time and I meant it to be.
He started talking without being asked anything, which is what he does when he is frightened.
“They're saying it wasn't me driving.”
“I know what they're saying.”
“They've got the seat thing. The engineer. My lawyer says the photographs are bad.”
“I know.”
“Cass, I never—” and then he stopped, because he could not find the end of that sentence.
He stood there for a while. Then he sat down on the floor.
Not on a chair. On the floor, against the wall, under the licence frame, with his legs out in front of him.
A grown man on the floor of a bail bonds office at four thirty in the afternoon.
I stayed where I was. I did not go to him and I did not tell him to get up.
“She was driving,” he said.
The clock on the wall does a thing at the half hour. It did it. Neither of us moved.
“Say it properly,” I said.
“Bree was driving. I was in the passenger seat. I'd had two. She'd had more than that.”
“Where.”
“Coming back from the Sedgewick. Friday night. She always drove on Fridays, because I always had more than she did.”
“Then what.”
“There was a bang. I didn't see it. I felt it. I thought she'd hit a post.”
“And then.”
He put his hands over his face for a second and then took them away again and looked at the floor between his shoes.
“I got out. I walked round the front. I opened her door and I took her out by the arm and I put her in the passenger side.”
“And you got in the driver's seat.”
“No.”
That was the first time in nine years he had told me something I did not already know.
“Say that again.”
“I never sat in it. I stood by the door and I waited. The seat was where she left it. I never touched it.”
Twelve seconds, maybe. That is what it took to say, after six years and eleven months of my life.
He had not moved the seat because it never occurred to either of them that a seat was a witness.
They thought a witness was a person. Everybody thinks a witness is a person.
“Who called it in,” I said.
“Her mother. Bree phoned Renata before she phoned anybody else.”
“Before the ambulance.”
“Yes. About four minutes before, they reckon.”
I did not say anything for a while. He filled it, the way he always fills it.
“They're offering me something. My lawyer says if I go in first, I get the best of it.”
“Then go in first.”
“Would you—” and he stopped again, and then he made himself say it. “Would you write something. That you forgive me.”
“No.”
“Cass.”
“No. Not because I want you to suffer. Because it would be a document, and it would not be true, and I am done signing things that aren't true.”
He got up off the floor slowly, using the wall, and he took a long time about it.
At the door he said he was going to say it anyway, all of it, whether I wrote anything or not.
He has, to his credit, never once claimed that was a favour to me.