But there was a deeper instinct, an instinct shared at fires in paleolithic times, when men clasped sons against the night, and the instinct had been passed down through the blood of man, and it coursed through the veins of Peter Byrnes, and Byrnes could think only
And so he had talked levelly and calmly, exploding only once or twice, but even then exploding only with impatience and not allowing the disgust to overrule his mind.
His son was an addict.
Irrevocably, irreconcilably, his son was an addict. The caller had not lied on that score.
The second half of the lie turned out to be true, too. Byrnes checked his son's fingerprints against those that had been found on the syringe, and the fingerprints matched. He revealed this information to no one in the department, and the concealment left him feeling guilty and somehow contaminated.
The lie, then, had not been a lie at all.
It had started out as a two-part falsehood, and had turned into a shining, shimmering truth.
But what about the rest? Had Larry argued with Hernandez on the afternoon of the boy's death? And if he had, were not the implications clear? Were not the implications that Larry Byrnes had killed Anнbal Hernandez perfectly clear?
Byrnes could not believe the implications.
His son had turned into something he could not easily understand, something he had perhaps never understood and might never understand-but he knew his son was not a murderer.
And so, on that Thursday, December 21st, he waited for the man to call again, as he had promised; and he bore the additional burden now of a new homicide, the death of Anнbal's sister. He waited all that day, and no call came, and when he went home in the afternoon, it was to a task he dreaded.
He liked a happy home, but there was no joy in his house now. Harriet met him in the hallway, and she took his hat, and then she went into his arms, and she sobbed against his shoulder, and he tried to remember the last time she had cried like this, and it seemed very long ago, and he could not remember except that it was somehow attached to a senior prom and a corsage and the insurmountable problems of an eighteen-year-old girl. Harriet wasn't eighteen any more. She had a son who was almost eighteen now, and that son's problem had nothing to do with senior proms or corsages.
"How is he?" Byrnes asked.
"Bad," Harriet said.
"What did Johnny say?"
"He's given him something as a substitute," Harriet answered. "But he's only a doctor, Peter, he said that, he said he's only a doctor and the boy has to
"I don't know," Byrnes said.
"I thought this was for slum kids. I thought it was for kids who came from broken homes, kids who didn't have love. How did it happen to Larry?"
And again, Byrnes said, "I don't know," and within himself he condemned the job that had not left him more time to devote to his only son. But he was too honest to level the entire blame on the job, and he reminded himself that other men had jobs with long hours, irregular hours, and their sons did not become drug addicts. And so he started up the steps to his son's room, walking heavily, suddenly grown old, and beneath his own feelings of guilt ran the pressing undercurrent of his disgust. His son was a junkie. The word blinked like a neon sign in his head: JUNKIE. Junkie. JUNKIE. Junkie.
He knocked on his son's door.
"Larry?"
"Dad? Open this, will you? For Christ's sake, open it."
Byrnes reached into his pocket and took out his key ring. He had locked Larry into his room only once that he could remember. The boy had broken a plate-glass window with a baseball and then flatly refused to pay for the damage out of his allowance. Byrnes had informed his son that he would then deduct the money from the meals Larry ate, and that all meals would stop as of that moment. He had put the boy in the room and locked the door from the outside, and Larry had capitulated shortly after dinner that night. The incident, at the time, had not seemed terribly important. A form of punishment and really, really now, if Larry had still refused, Byrnes would certainly have fed him. Byrnes had felt, at the time, that he was teaching his son a respect for other people's property as well as a respect for money. But now, looking back, he wondered if he had not behaved wrongly. Had he isolated his son's affection by punishing him in that way? Had his son automatically assumed there was no love for him in this house? Had his son assumed Byrnes was taking the side of the shopkeeper and not that of his own flesh and blood?
