Chapter 108: What Theo Wanted
Theo Okoro was twenty-five by then. We had been speaking, on and off, for about two years.
I want to be careful here, because the temptation is to make this into something warm.
It was not warm. It was correspondence and then it was occasional coffee and it was never once easy.
He set the terms early. He would meet me in public places. He would not come to where I lived.
He did not want to be told I was sorry. He had six letters' worth of my being sorry and he had burned two of them.
We met at a place called Dunbar's on Wexford Street, in a booth, at half past three on a Sunday.
He got there first, which he always did. He sat facing the door, which he also always did.
I had come to tell him three things and I had them written on an index card in my pocket.
I did not take the card out. I had memorised the order on the bus.
The first thing was that the DA would probably charge Bree Halloway before Christmas.
He took that well. He had known it was coming. He asked what she would be charged with and I told him what Brandt had told me.
The second thing was the restitution.
I told him that fifty dollars a month had come out of my wages for sixty-eight months.
I told him the total. Three thousand four hundred and twelve dollars.
He did not look surprised, and that stopped me, because I had rehearsed the part after the surprise.
“I know,” he said. “It was on the estate accounting. Payor, then the amount, then the date. Every year.”
“Since when.”
“Since I was seventeen and my aunt showed me how to read it.”
“You knew it came from me.”
“Yes.”
“And you cashed it.”
“Every month. The rent was six hundred and eighty and my mother's wages had stopped.”
He said it flatly and without any apology in it, and he was right not to apologise, and I told him so.
Then he said, “Don't ask me to feel bad about that.”
“I'm not asking.”
“People do. People find out and they get a look on their face.”
The third thing was the annuity, and the third thing was the reason I had come.
He had been receiving eleven hundred dollars a month since he was seventeen. He would receive it until he was twenty-seven.
He had always known it came from the settlement. He had not known who placed it.
I told him. Halloway and Dettmer Insurance Services. Renata Halloway, agent of record.
I told him the commission. Forty-one thousand three hundred and eighteen dollars and seventy-five cents.
He sat with that a while. He turned his cup around twice on the table.
“So the money I lived on,” he said.
“Yes.”
“She earned a fee on it.”
“Yes. And she raised the coverage ninety-four days before, because she knew what her daughter did on Fridays.”
He got up and walked to the window and stood there for maybe ninety seconds with his back to me.
When he came back he did not sit down. He put both hands on the back of the seat.
“I want to say something and I want you to not answer it.”
“All right.”
“You're going to get your conviction thrown out. Everyone says so. Your lawyer says so.”
“It isn't certain.”
“You said not to answer. Don't you answer either.”
I stopped.
“For six years I had one thing. I knew who did it. I had a name and a number and a date she gets out.”
“Yes.”
“And it was wrong. So now I've got nothing that I had. I have to start it again at twenty-five, from the beginning, with a woman I've never met.”
He was not shouting. Two people looked over anyway, because a young man standing up in a diner draws eyes.
“I want her convicted,” he said. “That's what I want. Not your record. Not your name in the paper. Her, in a court, convicted.”
“I understand.”
“You don't, quite. Because if the two things ever pull against each other, you'll take yours. Anybody would.”
I did not say that he was wrong, because I did not know that he was wrong, and he would have heard it.
“I'll testify,” he said. “For her case. Not for yours. If they overlap, fine.”
“That's fair.”
“It isn't fair. It's just what I'm doing.”
He put six dollars on the table for his coffee and mine and did not let me put mine in.
At the door he stopped, the way that family stops at doors, and said one more thing.
“Her name was Nadine. You've never once said it out loud to me.”
I had not. In two years and forty-one pages of letters, I had not.