All the Dead Yale Men by Craig Nova Page A

box, a slight insult, or hardly an insult at all) simply vanished, and for an instant I was compelled to feel it, as though the ancient historian and I were in perfect communication. And while I had thought that was it, a moment at three in the morning when I was having a slug of single malt scotch before going to bed, I was wrong.
    The next day the hand-shaking fury still existed when I played the tape made by the cab driver. I sat at Sally’s table with a view of the urine-scented yard. My trick had blown up. I had persisted by reading those old books, but now the feelings I had gotten this way were perfectly combined with a case I couldn’t resist.
    Something else reverberated back through those thousands of years: she had just wanted what was fair and what was right. The most basic of all desires. Her insistence, with such bravery, left me trembling with self-loathing. I had been cutting deals with people over deaths so tawdry as to seem impossible, and in doing so I had pushed aside Sally’s desire: what was right rather than what was expedient, and in this constant bargaining, I had become numb to the possibility of fairness that a woman from Lodi, New Jersey, had insisted on as a basic fact of life.
    Where did that leave me? A cynic? A cog in a machine I disliked? Screw it, I thought. That’s it.
    I sat in my office at home. In the street a garbage truck made a sound like a machine from the underworld that was grinding bones. I should have remembered a line that has come down through the ages, garbled, repeated, attributed wrongly toEuripides, but certainly could have been from him: “The gods first make mad those whom they are about to destroy.” But even if I had remembered, I would have thought that the gods had got themselves in for more than they had bargained for.
    We gave the grand jury the testimony of Sally’s friends, the fact that Citron had trouble explaining where he had been the night when, as nearly as we could tell, Sally had disappeared. We had testimony from Sally’s friends at the Braintree Beauty College, and we had her diary, in which her fury was obvious. We had the tape recording. We had witnesses from the beauty salon who had heard, on a Saturday night, a fight over the split of the take and Sally’s threat to open a place of her own.
    We didn’t have a body and we had no physical evidence, aside from the pair of underwear, which were found on the property line between Citron’s house and hers.
    All of this, the beginning of my trouble, took place about eighteen months before my father died. So he knew about this part, the trial with such a shaky case, the kind of thing that only an innocent or a man flirting with his own demons would consider. In fact, in the morning before the first day of the trial, I got up and shaved as carefully as on the day of my wedding to Alexandra, who was already dressed and waiting for me in the kitchen, where she had fluffed up some milk for our coffee and where she sat with a posture of understanding, her eyes never meeting mine, since it was unnecessary, although she had said, when I had not only decided that we were going to go ahead with this case but that I was going to try it myself, “You know, Frank, you wouldn’t have done this even a couple of years ago. What’s eating at you anyway?”
    Before I left the house the phone rang.
    â€œI’ll get it,” I said to Alexandra. “It’ll be my father.”
    â€œHey, Frank, how’s the hangover?”
    â€œYou think I have one?” I said.
    â€œBy god, I would,” he said. “You’d be amazed how a good, hard-hitting hangover lets you see what your circumstances really are. When you are on your hands and knees and your voice echoes in the toilet bowl as it begs for mercy.”
    â€œNot this morning,” I said.
    â€œIt’s not too late,” he said.
    â€œTo start drinking?” I said.
    â€œNo,” he