Francis Greer was the most complicated of my old friends. He was easily the most intelligent, the most cunning and untrustworthy. Greer had been in prison when Randy Chung was murdered in my garage. In the intervening years I had married Greer’s sister, which was a complicated story in and of itself. I’d known Janice since we were kids, and had an on-again off-again relationship with her going back almost twenty years. The fact that she was helplessly related to Greer (and felt a genuine affection for him) had already created numerous problems in our relationship. Every time Greer got out of jail or needed something he was certain to show up on Janice’s doorstep. Between his two prison terms and a handful of stints in county jails and workhouses, I had long since lost track of his criminal offenses, which always seemed to be compound infractions that ranged from driving under the influence and all manner of moving violations (improper registration, failure to provide insurance, suspended license, stolen plates) to automobile theft, receiving of stolen property, possession and distribution of narcotics, burglary, and parole violations.
Greer had, by this time, spent nearly a third of his life behind bars and he had apparently always approached prison as the ultimate leisure. I’ve said that he was intelligent, and I’ll be damned if he didn’t come out of prison the first time speaking Latin. Over the years he had read more books than I would ever have the time for, had supposedly translated poetry from Spanish, and had spent so much time in prison weight rooms that it seemed like no matter where I went I was sure to encounter a photograph on the refrigerator of a half-naked Greer flexing his muscles.
Thanks early on to our old friendship and later to my relationship with Janice, Greer had maintained a running correspondence with me in the years that he was away. Once, while I was teaching at a junior college in a suburb of St. Paul, he had tried to scam me into signing off on some non-existent coursework he needed to complete a degree. My refusal to do so had resulted in a serious strain in our friendship, and his letters to me became increasingly hostile and condescending.
Around this same time—I was in my late twenties—I wrote and published a crappy little novel, a formulaic thriller that looks increasingly dated and implausible. An agent who was an old college acquaintance of my father sold the book as a paperback original to a fairly prominent publisher, and I received an advance that was nothing if not modest. I was excited by the prospects and felt certain that I was on my way to a career as a writer. There were several delays in the book’s publication—which I was assured was quite routine—and I had to wait more than two years for its arrival in bookstores, only to have all my confidence instantly transformed to outright shame by the appearance of a blurb—attributed to, of all people, Karl Malden—splashed across the front cover: “
As far as I know the book received exactly one review, a brief and entirely dismissive notice in the Minneapolis paper. Greer, from his cloister in prison, somehow managed to get his hands on that review, which he was kind enough to send to me along with a snide critique of his own.
* * *
The Friday afternoon that Greer was released from prison, Janice had driven out to Stillwater to pick him up. That evening we hosted—very much against my wishes—a party at our home in northeast Minneapolis. This was the second time I’d been forced to celebrate in a similar manner Greer’s surely undeserved freedom, and I couldn’t for the life of me understand what there was to celebrate. My wife, unfortunately, had inherited her mother’s denial as surely as Francis had received his no-account criminal disposition from his father.
It was a mercifully small gathering. Slim Chung and Gilbert Borocha were there, as well as Greer’s mother (lurching around the room with a cigarette clenched in her teeth and her oxygen rack gripped in her emaciated fist) and a handful of people who were mostly strangers to me. I had to hand it to Greer. He was a smooth and handsome character, a first-rate actor who could charm the pants off the most chaste woman in any room. He worked the party like he was running for office, and as the rest of the guests became progressively more inebriated, he never seemed to show the effects of the prodigious amounts of alcohol he was consuming.
It had been my understanding that Francis would not be staying at our house the night of the party, but as had so often been the case, my understanding was seriously flawed. After the last of the guests departed, he was still there at my kitchen table regaling Janice with some story, and a short time later my wife was hauling blankets and pillows out into the living room to make up Greer’s bed on the couch.
