Compulsion by Keith Ablow Page B

Darwin Bishop’s rap sheet, and what North Anderson had told me about the romance between Bishop and Claire Buckley.  If Bishop was hiding behind gentility, if he was someone who had tried desperately to extinguish parts of his life, then he would find it that much easier to extinguish another life.  The dying embers of a man’s repressed pain have the unwieldy habit of catching fire, spreading underground, and burning down everything nearby.
    Billy might even have been expressing his father’s destructiveness when he torched property and tortured animals.  He could be what psychiatrists call the designated patient — the family member everyone points to as the insane one, the black sheep — when the truth is that that person is simply less able to resist acting on the pathological dynamics alive elsewhere in the household.
    But then there was Claire Buckley.  A wild card.  I knew almost nothing about her, other than that she was playing confidante and counselor to Julia while sleeping with Julia’s husband.  And she was the one Julia relied on to help care for Brooke’s surviving twin, Tess.  I felt glad I would be seeing Julia the next day.  Maybe there was a chance I could move her to let the baby stay with grandparents, or somewhere else off the Bishop estate.
    After half an hour lying there awake, wrestling with my suspicions, I realized a good night’s sleep wasn’t in the cards for me.  I got up, pulled on my boots, jeans, and black T-shirt, and headed out to the truck.  I felt like grabbing a drink, so I decided to grab a coffee at Café Positano.
    Carl Rossetti, my renegade attorney friend (and onetime patient), was standing at the espresso bar when I walked in.  His long black hair was tied in a braid.  I took the space next to him and nodded at Mario.
    "What’s new, chief?" Rossetti asked.  Before I could answer, he held out his pinkie, showing off a diamond solitaire that had to weigh over two carats.  "What do you think?"  He took a drag off a cigarette.
    "I guess it’s okay," I said.  "I mean, if you’re planning to get engaged and give it to your girl."
    He smiled and spewed a thin stream of smoke up toward the silver tin ceiling.  He probably thought I was kidding.  "I got it off Scotty Deegan as a fee," he said.  "I handled a drug case for him before Judge McClure in Federal Court.  Possession, intent to distribute five hundred pounds of weed.  We did good.  Thirty-six months in Allenwood.  Easy time.  Maybe a halfway house after two years.  So it was a score."
    "He came to the right person," I said.  I meant it.  If I were in trouble, my first call would be to Carl Rossetti.
    He waved his hand back and forth, admiring the stone as it caught the light.  "I would never cough up the cash for something like this, but when it falls in your lap, what the hell, right?"  He shrugged.
    "It’s a little flashy for my taste," I said.  "It may even be a little flashy for your taste.  And that’s saying a lot."
    "Sometimes you got to stretch," Rossetti said.  He slapped my shoulder.  "So tell me, already, what’s happening in your world?  You still hanging around that beautiful Brazilian from the other night?"
    It seemed like more than a few nights had passed.  I pictured Justine getting dressed in my apartment the morning North Anderson had run my doorbell.  "She’s back in Brazil," I said.  "I’d be over there myself if I hadn’t gotten called into the Bishop case.  You remember:  the baby on Nantucket."
    "Of course.  The Russian kid," he said.  "He’s pleading insanity?"
    "It doesn’t look that way.  He says he didn’t do it."
    He smiled.  "What else is he going to say?  Does he have a lawyer?"
    "Not that I know of," I said.
    "Put in a good word for me, if you get the chance."
    "Two nights ago you told me the kid was guilty, for sure."
    "He’s still gonna need an attorney," Rossetti said.  "And I could use that kind of payday.  My other clients aren’t