The Lacey Confession(5)

                He still wore his hair long in the back. It had thinned on top, but not remarkably. It had, however, grayed considerably in the last two or three years. Still, some people continued to mistake Walter Sherman for a man younger than he was. His pale blue eyes and rugged, tan, leathery face highlighted the effects of a long stay in the Caribbean. Sure, fewer women found him attractive than had been his experience ten or twenty years ago, but he still got a look now and then. It never bothered him that the women doing the looking were getting older too. One thing he certainly didn’t grow tired of was the sight of his recently reacquired flat stomach staring back at him in the mirror. He wore the same kind of clothes since he came to St. John—loose-fitting jeans, a bit baggier as the years went by, and an oversized, pastel-colored T-shirt with no pocket. He was always clean-shaven and although some mistook his casual approach toward dress for messiness, they could not have been further from the truth. A man completely comfortable in his own skin, Walter Sherman carried nothing with him. No wallet. No personal ID of any kind. No money. No habitual paraphernalia, cigarette lighters and the like—he neither smoked nor chewed gum. The key to his car was all he had on him, in his right back pocket with nothing attached. He didn’t like shorts—he thought they looked silly on him—and was never seen in them. His only shoes seemed to be the old-fashioned, low-cut, white tennis sneakers. Unless he left the island, Walter never wore socks.

                His cholesterol was too high. His doctor prescribed drugs to lower it. He took a little blood pressure medication too and his prostate wasn’t the smoothly operating piece of machinery it used to be.

                “I’m not as old as you are—yet,” he told Ike one day. “But, I’m getting there. I piss in Morse code.” The two of them had a great laugh at that while Billy was left slightly bewildered.

                Retirement? Sure, why not. The time had come for Walter to call it quits. He didn’t need the money. He’d done well for many years and did one unique, unforgettable job—his last one—that set him up for life. When a man named Leonard Martin began his crusade, his relentless campaign seeking justice for his family, all of whom had died from eating ground beef tainted with E. coli bacteria, they turned to Walter Sherman to find him. In the beginning, Walter didn’t know—not about Leonard. He knew what he was searching for, but not who. Nor was he aware of the righteousness of Leonard Martin’s crusade. How could he have known these things? He had been deceived. The clients he worked for were, in fact, the ones responsible for Leonard Martin’s tragedy. They let it happen. They knew better. The corporate hotshots. The gang of criminals on Wall Street—the very ones who hired Walter. Millions of pounds of poisoned ground beef. They let it leave the packing plant. They let it go to store shelves. They let people—Leonard Martin’s family among them—eat it. Thousands sickened. Hundreds died. They did nothing to stop it. Too much was riding on the outcome. Billions actually. They chose the risk to people over the risk to money. In the end they miscalculated. And Leonard Martin extracted a heavy price. One by one he hunted them down. One by one he killed them. Those still alive at the time hoped Walter could find Leonard before Leonard found them.

                Walter found Isobel Gitlin first. An obit writer for The New York Times, she was the first to understand, to see beyond the fog and mystery. Leonard Martin was the one. For a while, Walter was her sole supporter. Together, Walter and Isobel searched for him. They searched for Leonard Martin, who was the Cowboy. And Isobel. It was still painful for Walter to even think about her. In the end, she betrayed him. She hurt him. He opened his heart to her and with callous indifference she thrust a dagger in it.

                Now, when Conchita Crystal smiled at him and touched his wrist, he was only months shy of being fifty-nine years old. For one magical moment she made him feel half his age. Ike saw it plain as day.

                Finding people was a young man’s game. For Walter it began when he was only nineteen. Because it seemed like a good idea at the time, Walter Sherman made the horrendous mistake of joining the Army on his eighteenth birthday. His birthday present was a quick trip to the killing fields of Southeast Asia. In no time at all he went from “Good Morning America” to “Good Morning Vietnam!” He survived. Many didn’t. It wasn’t just the bleeding, the dying, even the killing. It was drugs, disconnect from sanity, loss of a moral center. Saigon, and the tall grass, did many strange things to twenty-year-old American boys. But Walter made it. A year later he saved Freddy Russo’s life.