Fox is Framed by Lachlan Smith Page A

advance. Why are you so worried about money?”
    â€œWhy aren’t you? Why is anyone? It’s self-respect. If you’d been inside, you’d understand the code. I had a right to name my price when I got out. It was a fair price, but that doesn’t matter now. Bell’s dead, and I won’t pretend I’m not glad for that, when it’s just you and me talking.”
    His eyes went to the rearview.
    An unmarked Crown Vic rounded the block and veered to the curb, leaving one parking spot between his bumper and mine.
    â€œHe’s been with us the whole way,” Lawrence went on. “He picked me up as soon as I left the funeral home. Let’s sightsee a little. Take him for a ride. You know where I want to go. It’s about time I saw the old place again.” He glanced again at the mirror.
    With Shanahan following, I drove slowly up into Potrero Hill, to the apartment building where it had all begun. A light showed in the second-floor window. It was possible the people who lived here now had no clue what had happened years ago. Probably there were few people left in the neighborhood who did. “It’s almost like I could walk right back through the door, go back in time,” Lawrence said. “Although I wouldn’t want to walk back into that .”
    He glanced at me as if checking whether I was okay with him talking this way about our shared past. I stared up at the building. I’d been down the street plenty of times, of course, but never like this—never with him.
    â€œEven if you didn’t kill her, you came pretty damn close a number of times,” I said. “I remember one time you were hitting her, and she was screaming at you. Teddy finally called the police, but only because I begged him to.” Not for the first time I wondered what had been wrong with my brother that he didn’t intervene more forcefully, knock my father down the way the older brother is supposed to do in the movies. In any case, he never had.
    â€œI don’t expect you to forget that. There’s no excuse for a man to use his fists on a woman. The mother of his children. But I did my time for that, and I’m not the same man I was. No matter how much we may want to, neither one of us can undo the past.
    â€œGo ahead,” he went on, seemingly oblivious to the terrible thoughts that filled my head. “Ask me anything.”
    â€œI know Russell was lying. I don’t need to ask you that again.”
    He seemed to avoid answering the question I hadn’t asked. “I can’t imagine how that must have been for you, finding her. For years I felt it was my responsibility, to try to understand. But the mind just breaks down. Plus, I never saw you again after that day. You were a little kid. You didn’t have any reason not to believe people who told you I did it. There was a trial. None of it came out right. And just when you needed me the most, I wasn’t there. They wouldn’t let me see you. For years, it ate me alive. I wanted to reach out, try to make you see I was innocent, but Teddy thought it best to let you alone. I’m not so sure.”
    â€œIt’s my whole life,” I told him. “It doesn’t turn on a dime. Certainly not on this one.”
    â€œI know it, Leo, and I don’t blame you for it. If you can learn to trust me . . .”
    â€œNo more surprises,” I said. “You need to trust me . And you need to trust Nina.” I realized the question I should have asked, which was where he’d been the morning of Russell Bell’s murder, but somehow the moment for asking such questions had passed.
    Lawrence nodded. “No more surprises.” He rolled down his window, stuck out an arm, and waved the Crown Vic forward. The unmarked car flashed its lights and drew up alongside, and the driver’s side window slid down.
    Lawrence leaned to the window and shouted, “‘They do me wrong and I