The Piano Room
He has told her about the case. A fifty-eight-year-old man, having spent twenty years in prison for a murder he almost certainly did not commit, has made a bargain for his freedom. The man on the other side of the imposing desk—the man with whom she is going to lunch—has picked up this other man’s file and entered his life. For seven years now he has stood by the man behind bars, pursuing pro bono every angle, following every lead, and in the end he has almost but not quite proved—“How could I, beyond all doubt?”, evidence having gone missing, witnesses having died—that the man has in fact not committed the crime. Plead guilty and walk free, he advises him. The man takes the deal. The gates open. The man walks out.
“One more signature, and I’m done.”
Into the air, a free man. Twenty years of his life gone, but free.
Leland turns the pen in his fingers, affixes his signature.
How could anything ever be proved beyond all doubt?
What she knows of Leland’s life, can attest to with her own eyes—not the knowledge he has unhesitantly supplied of the wife and three children and golden retriever in Westchester—is this: the mahogany desk at which he sits, the window behind him, the light streaming in. She raises her hand to shield her eyes. He puts down his pen, arranges his papers in a pile to his left. As he rises from his chair, his large body comes up before the window like a blind that lifts from below. The light is momentarily obliterated. He moves around his desk, takes her arm.
Her heels had wobbled on the cobblestones. The street was narrow and short. Rue D’Hiver. It didn’t lead anywhere. Curving past the café and ending in a cul-de-sac. They’d circled back, followed a street with an altogether different name. A name she couldn’t now remember. Red shoes. Ridiculously high heels. Nineteen, a little tipsy and insanely in love. He’d taken her arm…Steady, Jenny…slipping his hand high up between her breast and bicep. He gave her arm a little squeeze, she answered with the pressure of her breast. That night their son was conceived.
“We’re off,” Leland says.
“Where to?”
“You tell me.”
She knows he has already chosen the place, made a reservation, or his assistant has. Some place close.
Your pleasure, my dear?
She’d like to linger over lunch, have another glass of wine, but she understands that won’t be possible if they’re to make time for the hideaway.
“I’m a working man, you know.”