I let that sit.
"Primarily," he said.
"The truth is the truth," I said. "I don't alter it. But I also don't add to it."
He held my gaze for a long moment. Then nodded, once.
I put the paper in my pocket.
They left. I stood there with the paper in my pocket and understood that the deal I'd just made was the most dangerous one yet. This time, I was the leverage.
* * *
Chapter 24: Fosse
The address on Salas's paper was a house in Metairie.
Not a safe house, just a house. A beige ranch-style on a quiet street, the kind of neighborhood that had been built in the sixties and had stayed exactly itself ever since: same trees, same driveways, same distance between one life and the next. Gerald Fosse had been living there under the name Gerald Fontenot for eleven years. The mailbox said Fontenot. The car in the driveway was registered to Fontenot. The retirement income that covered the mortgage came from a pension account belonging to Fontenot.
I had confirmed all of this in forty minutes that morning using tools that were technically within the bounds of my professional authorization and practically well outside anything I would have done six weeks ago.
I had confirmed it and not thought twice.
* * *
They went the next morning. Early, seven-fifteen, before the neighborhood was fully awake, before the calculation of the previous night could settle into something that changed their minds. I had not slept well. Not badly either, I had lain in the dark in the specific state of a person who has run out of things to process and is waiting for the machinery to be ready again.
Dominic drove. He had tried, twice, to raise the question of whether I wanted him to come inside or wait. I had looked at him both times and he had dropped it both times, which was oneof the things about him I had come to rely on without deciding to.
They parked in front of the house at seven-nineteen.
I knocked.
* * *
The man who opened the door was seventy-two and looked older.
Not in the way of someone who had lived hard, in the way of someone who had carried something heavy for a long time and it had compressed him. He was gray, careful, wearing the kind of clothes that had no occasion. He looked at me and then at Dominic and I watched the recognition move across his face: not of them specifically, but of the fact of them. The thing he had been waiting for that had arrived as two people on his doorstep at seven in the morning.
"Mr. Fosse," I said.
He stepped back from the door.
* * *
The living room was neat in the way of someone with no one to be neat for, everything in its place and nothing out of its place, but the order of maintenance rather than life. He sat in an armchair that had the permanent impression of a single person. Dominic and I sat on the couch across from him.
He didn't offer coffee.
He didn't say anything. He folded his hands in his lap and looked at me with the expression of someone who has long since finished rehearsing what he would say and is now just waiting to say it.
"You knew my mother," I said.
"Yes." His voice was rough, not from sleep, from age, from something that had settled in his throat and stayed.
"You signed my death report."
"Yes."