WIN by Coben, Harlan (best book reader txt) 📕

It’s like…” The slur seems to be growing. “It’s like there’s a basement in my brain and what I did was, I packed that awful shit into a suitcase, kind of like that damned monogrammed suitcase you gave me, and then I dragged that suitcase down the basement stairs and I jammed it into a dank back corner, and then I rushed back upstairs and locked the door behind me and hoped I’d never see that suitcase again.”

“And now,” I say, “to keep within your colorful analogy, that suitcase is upstairs and open.”

“Yes,” she says. Then she asks, “Wait, was that analogy or a metaphor?”

“An analogy.”

“I’m terrible with that stuff.”

I want to reach out and put a hand on my cousin’s arm or do something innocuously comforting, but I’m very comfortable on the couch, enjoying the buzz, and I’m too far from her perch in Granddad’s chair, so I don’t bother.

“Win?”

“Yes?”

“The shed had a dirt floor.”

I wait.

“So I remember when he was on top of me. In the beginning, he would pin my arms down. I would close my eyes and just try to ride it out. After a while…I mean, you can’t keep your eyes closed forever. You can try, but you can’t. I would look up. He wore the ski mask, so I could only see his eyes. And I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to look at his eyes. So I would turn my head to one side. Just trying to ride it out. And he’d be holding himself, on top of me, and I remember his arm, and there…there was that butterfly.”

She stops now. I try to sit up, but it isn’t happening.

“So I would stare at it. You know? Like focus on its wing. And when he’d thrust and his arm would jiggle, I could imagine the butterfly’s wings were beating and it was going to fly away.”

We stay in the dark. We sip some more cognac. I am drunk so I start thinking about existential nonsense, about the human condition, perhaps, like Patricia, trying to block what I just heard. I don’t really know Patricia, do I? She doesn’t really know me. Do we all ever know one another? Man, am I drunk. I’m enjoying this silence. Too many people don’t get the beauty of silence. It is bonding. I bonded with my father when we would golf in silence. I bonded with Myron when we would watch old movies or television shows in silence.

Still, I feel compelled to break it: “You were in New York City the day Ry Strauss was murdered.”

Patricia says, “I was, yes.”

I wait.

“I told your friend PT the truth, Win. I go to New York City all the time.”

“You don’t call me.”

“Sometimes I do. You are one of the shelters’ biggest supporters. But you wouldn’t want me calling you every time I come to town.”

“That’s true,” I say.

“Do you think I killed Ry Strauss?”

I’ve been mulling that over for the past few hours. “I don’t see how.”

“What a ringing endorsement.”

I sit up a little. The liquor hits me, and I feel the head rush. “May I speak bluntly?”

“Do you ever speak any other way?”

“Hypothetically, if you did kill Ry Strauss—”

“I didn’t.”

“Ergo my use of the term ‘hypothetically.’”

“Ah. Go on.”

“If you killed him, hypothetically or otherwise, I would not blame you in the slightest. I might, in fact, want to know, so that we could get in front of it.”

“Get in front of it?”

“Make sure that it would never trace back to you.”

Patricia smiles again and raises her glass. She is fairly wasted too.

“Win?”

“Yes?”

“I didn’t kill him.”

I believe her. I also believe she isn’t telling me everything. Then again, I could be wrong on both counts.

“May I ask a hypothetical now?” Patricia asks.

“But of course.”

“If you were me and you had the chance to kill Ry Strauss, would you?”

“Yes.”

“Not much hesitation there,” she says.

“None.”

“Almost like you’ve been in that situation before.”

I see no reason to reply. Like I said before, I don’t really know Patricia, and she doesn’t really know me.

*  *  *

Years ago, I was at a private weekend “retreat” with a number of Washington, DC, politico types, including Senator Ted Kennedy. The location of said retreat is confidential, so the most I can tell you is that it was held in the Philadelphia area. On the final night, there was a party where—I kid you not—the United States senators took turns performing a karaoke number. I admired it, truth be told. The senators looked like fools, as we all do when we perform karaoke, and they didn’t care.

But back to Ted Kennedy.

I forget what song Ted—even though we had just met, he insisted I call him that—chose. It was something from the Motown family. It may have been “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.” Or was that Barbara Boxer? Or did Ted and Barbara do it as a duet like Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell? I can’t remember. Anyway, even though we disagreed on many issues, Ted was ridiculously charming and fun. He drank at the party. A lot. He started to stumble-dance, and if he didn’t put a lampshade on his head, it was only because he was too drunk. By the end of the night, Ted needed to lean on a loved one to get through the door and find his room.

Why am I telling you this?

Because the next morning, I had to depart the retreat early. I woke up at 5:30 a.m. and hit the breakfast room at six. When I arrived, only one person was up. You guessed it.

“Good morning, Win!” Ted called out to me. “Sit with me.”

He was reading the Washington Post with a cup of coffee, a mountain of food on the plate in front of him. Ted was clear-eyed and showered and wide awake. We had a spirited discussion on a variety of topics, but the gist is this: I have never seen someone handle spirits quite like that, and I don’t know whether that was a positive or negative.

My guess is,