The Brutal Heart Read Online Free Page B

stepped in front of me and blocked the way. She asked me if I believed in evil. I said I wasn’t a theologian; I was a lawyer. She said that the people who thought she was evil were wrong – that all she did was let people live out their fantasies.”
    “Had she ever said anything like that before?”
    “Not to me. Of course, she and I didn’t talk much. And today, I just wanted to get the hell out of there, so I told her I didn’t think she was evil. I thought she was like me, someone who provided a necessary service.”
    “And that satisfied her?”
    “I guess so. She let me leave, and I had the DVDS in my possession. Thank God for that. I wouldn’t want the boys and girls at the cop shop to be sitting around watching those right now.”
    “Were they that bad?”
    “Objectively, no. As sexual acts go, what Cristal did to Ned was pretty tame. In the romantic language of the courtroom, she fellated him.”
    “Why would Ned kill himself over that?”
    “Because all the time Cristal was fellating him, Ned called her ‘Evvie.’ ”
    “His dead wife’s name.”
    “Right, and when he was finished, he closed his eyes, stroked Cristal’s hair, and thanked her for taking him into her mouth and letting him be part of her private world.”
    Except for the sound of rain splashing through the eaves-troughs and hitting the ground, the room was silent. “That breaks my heart,” I said.
    Zack stroked my arm. “You’re a gentle soul. Ned was a realist. He knew that most people would just see the tape as sordid – an old man getting a blow job and fantasizing.”
    “So you made sure his private life was kept private.”
    “It was the least I could do,” Zack said. “Ned has always been on my side. The legal community here is tight. Everybody knows how everybody else operates, and everybody knows that the Law Society has rapped my knuckles on more than one occasion. A lot of people would be delighted if I really stepped on my joint and got disbarred, but Ned was a friend. If he heard that I was getting too close to the line, he’d invite me for a drink and, in the most gentlemanly of ways, remind me that discretion is the better part of valour.”
    I touched his cheek. “I’m glad you got the DVDS.”
    “I am too,” Zack said. “When I was trying to talk Ned out of committing suicide, I told him he had many, many reasons to live.”
    “But he didn’t see it that way.”
    Zack shook his head. “No. He said that in the end everybody loses everything – the only choice we have is deciding the order in which we lose the things that matter to us.”
    “And Ned decided he’d rather lose his life than his reputation.”
    “It wasn’t his reputation Ned was concerned about; it was Evvie’s. He didn’t want people to know the man whom Evvie had loved for all those years was incapable of remaining faithful to her memory. He said that satisfying himself with a prostitute cheapened everything he and his wife had been to each other.”
    “So he shot himself?”
    “As you said, Ned was a gentleman of the old school.”
    I straightened the sprig of forsythia in Zack’s buttonhole. “I love you very much.”
    Zack sighed. “Hold that thought, Ms. Shreve, because I have a feeling that we’re in for a rocky ride.” He tousled my hair. “But what the hell, as long as we’re together, there’s nothing we can’t handle, is there?”
    A bone-rattling clap of thunder shook the heavens, and I shuddered. Zack was sanguine. “Listen to that,” he said. “The gods are definitely on our side.”

CHAPTER
2
    Sean Barton drove Zack to the police station. Zack had had very little to drink – a martini in the afternoon and a glass of wine with dinner. The cognac I’d poured for him had remained untouched, but given the prickly relationship between defence lawyers and cops, he was always cautious about sliding behind the wheel. After the two men left, the party began the slow dissolve to finish. The clouds in the