The Window

For a season after the murder and the miracle, the city forgot the annex on Fuller Lane. There was an anniversary to cover, a budget to fight over, a baseball team losing in the manner the baseball team deserved, and the name Wick went into the same drawer as the other unsolved ones, and the black card stopped moving money in Pioneer Square, and the freight door kept its padlock and its silence, and the rain came and went and came.

Merrin had his own ledger for that season, and it was shorter than Marsh's and worse. He had never told anyone the whole of the lane story. He was ashamed of the freeze that had kept his hands at his sides while two uncles did the work, but shame was not what kept his mouth shut; what kept it shut was that the parts of the story that stayed with him were the parts that made no telling: the snap of the padlock, which he could hear at will, two years later, in meetings, in the shower, at the opera; the polite contempt, which he had never seen on a human face before or since; and the arithmetic he had done on his own walk home, every night for a week after, of the four seconds of clearance the girl had had, and the swerve, and what it cost the world that the swerve had missed her spine by the width it had missed it by. He had started walking on Sundays with Marsh because of the padlock. He told himself it was to keep the older man company, and it was, and it was also that Merrin had learned the hard civic fact that a witness who says nothing for two years becomes an accessory to his own silence, and that the only disinfectant he had ever found for that was the company of a man whose whole profession was saying things out loud.

Cal Merrin, who had never entirely stopped looking at that corner on his way anywhere, was the one who noticed the change. He noticed it on a Sunday, which was the day he and Marsh had taken to walking together, because the two of them had discovered that a shared silence was cheaper than a shared therapy, and because Merrin had been the last man besides Marsh to hear the padlock snap.

The Voss residence stood behind the annex, a tall old house facing a planted courtyard with a gate in a wrought-iron fence, and on that Sunday, at three in the afternoon, the courtyard door of the house stood open to the mild air, and at the open window on the first floor, sitting in the sun with an open book, was Julian Voss.

He looked better than he had looked in two years. That was the first thing, and both men saw it at once. The hollowness was out of the face. He sat in the window in an old sweater, cleanly shaven, with the light on him, and he looked the way the portrait in the hospital atrium looked: like a man with nothing on his conscience heavier than a paper clip.

"Why," Merrin began, "that is the first time I have seen him look like the man on the lecture posters since the year of the will. There is something positively Renaissance about him today. We should go in. You have the standing to go in, and I have the cheek, and it is Sunday, and I have been wanting for a month to tell him to his face that his Foundation's little subvention saved the after-school program on Sixth. He will enjoy being thanked. He has not been thanked for anything in a year."

He had the gate half open when it happened, and he told it afterward the way witnesses tell things, plainly and out of order, because order failed. Voss had been looking down at his book. Then he looked up, and saw the two of them at the gate, and for one moment, Merrin said, the face was the poster face, pleasant, lighted, about to smile.

And then the smile did not come.

It was Thursday, the one afternoon Ostrow left the grounds for the weekly provisioning, and the courtyard was checked and empty, and Voss had taken the open window as his one unwatched breath of the season. The face, he said, was smooth and lighted, and then something above the cheekbones gave way, a settling of the whole structure, the way a wall moves when a floor below it drops, and fear came up through the settling and was gone again before it could be named; and the look lasted less time than it takes to shut a book, and the book shut, and the window came down like a guillotine, and the blinds went after it, and the courtyard door of the house closed with a sound that carried across the whole square, and the two men stood at the gate in the Sunday sun and looked at each other. Behind the glass, on the sill, in the moment before the blinds came down, Marsh had seen a drift of unopened mail gone soft at the edges, weeks deep.

"He saw us," Marsh said.

"He saw the devil," Merrin said. "I have stood in front of judges and lied to them fluently, Alden. I know what a man's face does when it is managing. That was not managing. Something came to that window from inside him and looked out at us, and I felt it from fifteen feet, through ironwork, on a Sunday."

They walked on without agreeing to walk on, three blocks in silence, and it was Marsh who broke it, at the corner where the newsstand had the police blotter in the rack.

"He has been in that house a season," Marsh said. "Since the murder, Ostrow tells me, he has gone out four times, and always after dark, and always in a car with the curtains drawn. His mail goes unopened. His institute is run by deputies and his name is on no agenda. And today, on the one fine afternoon we have had since spring, he sits at an open window like a man let out of prison, and we come up the walk, and the prison takes him back." Marsh stopped. "There is a version of this I have been refusing to draft, Cal. I am paid to draft versions. This one I have been refusing."

"Say it."

"That the doctor we saw at the window is the last of him. That the rest is in the annex with the padlock, and that what is in the annex comes out only at night, and has learned Ostrow's telephone number." Marsh looked up the street toward the tower cranes, and his face was the probate face, and his voice was not. "And that every day I sit in my office drafting trust instruments for other men, and every night my client's second ledger sits in a red-brick building one block from a school, and the only two men alive who know the combination are at this moment walking away from the window in opposite directions like a pair of widows."

He drafted it, that night, in the office, with the door shut. It was the version he had been refusing for a season, and once he let his hands do it, it took eleven minutes, because he had carried the provisions in his head for weeks. To the Director of the State Bureau of Investigation, copies to the Attorney General and to the presiding judge of the probate division: I, Alden Marsh, being an attorney licensed in this state, make the following disclosure of my own motion and against the interest of my own client. Then the items, numbered, in the engraving hand: the will and its substitution clause. The black card and the restitution account, with the two public payments and their dates. The handwriting opinion, unsigned, in the possession of a document examiner who would testify. The instructions given by his client to a caretaker concerning a voice. And the last item, the one his pen had slowed for, the one that was not evidence of anything yet but would be the first thing the subpoena found: the sealed statement of Dr. Miriam Adler, held in his safe at the written request of its author, to be opened on the death or disappearance of Dr. Julian Voss, and the fact, entered plainly, that he did not know, as of the date of the disclosure, which of those two events had already occurred. He read it twice. He printed one copy, and put it in the inside pocket of the coat he wore on Sundays, and he did not mail it, and he did not shred it, and the not mailing and the not shredding were, he understood perfectly, the two halves of the same cowardice, and he kept the coat by the door all the same, because a lawyer's first duty, he told the dark office, is to the instrument, and the instrument was not yet ripe, and the man who has a draft in his pocket is a man who has decided everything except the date.

The next Sunday it rained, and the window was shut, and the Sunday after that, before dawn on the Tuesday, a five-word note came to Marsh's house in Walt Ostrow's grid-ruled hand, and the week after that Marsh walked both statements into the courthouse, and what the envelope in the lawyer's safe had been waiting to say went on the public record, and Marsh never saw that window open again.