Walter Diplock looked around the room at the various framed diplomas and awards. A lifetime of work and achievement, and for what, he wondered. Justice? This isn’t justice. This is some incomprehensible random string of incredible coincidences, each one with odds of millions to one, all falling into place. A dead girl, a man, his family, his business all ruined as some one or thing watches and laughs from the sideline. He eyed his pipe, tamped the dead tobacco and then, as he did in every meeting with Rockwood, looked closely into the eyes of his client. He asked himself one more time. Was he staring into the eyes of a killer? Diplock considered himself a pretty good judge of character, and he believed in Rockwood’s innocence. After decades of familiarity, one knows. Rockwood wasn’t a killer. As they left his chambers and made their way to the small courtroom to hear the judge declare sentence, Rockwood’s fate, Diplock put his arm around his client’s shoulder. Diplock had done his best, but the cards were stacked against him. He knew where this was heading. As if by telepathy, Rockwood said to him, “You did what you could, Dips. Sherry and I know that. Don’t ever think you could have done anything differently. Some things don’t have answers.”

The death sentence had long since been announced, and now, a year after the trial and numerous legal appeals, John Rockwood, looking frail and defeated, loving husband and father, former business leader, sat by himself in a small jail cell at 3:30 in the morning. The bright orange prison garb that now covered his pallid skin did not sit well on Rockwood’s once athletic frame. He had stopped trying to figure out why or how he found himself in this unlikely predicament. There were no answers. As usual he couldn’t sleep, and it was the little things that kept him alive, although his existence was a far cry from what one could accurately call living. He suppressed the odious smells and sounds of his current quarters; rather, he was determined to remember only the nice things, those uplifting moments he once enjoyed and took for granted. Rockwood smiled. He could almost smell Sherry’s perfume, or hear the twins’ giggles as he teased them about their “bloody fingertips” after the girls polished off bags of red-stained pistachio nuts. Even the thought of Diplock’s acrid latakia tobacco was less repugnant than the stench to which he was constantly subjected.

Mechanically, Rockwood picked up the safety razor from the cold metal sink, lathered his face with the prison-issued grimy green soap, and began shaving. He paid little attention to the nick he just inflicted on his neck and continued shaving. As he had done for his entire adult life, Rockwood made a mental note to be more careful the next time he shaved. While splashing handfuls of water on his face, he dabbed at his cheeks, this time taking more notice of the little trickle of blood on his neck. The filthy, peeling, cracked mirror Rockwood stared into, reflected a bizarre, split image at this ungodly hour of the morning. The top portion, above the jagged diagonal crack, revealed Rockwood as he once looked, strong and confident and carefree. The bottom half showed a haggard, beaten, old man with blood slowly oozing from the small self-inflicted razor wound. As if discovering a long lost item that one had long ago stopped searching for, Rockwood, for the briefest fraction of a second, froze. The epiphany was sudden. His towel dropped into the sink, soaking up the tepid soapy-water-whisker mixture accumulating at the base of the drain. Rockwood paid it no attention. He screamed.

On the afternoon of Deanna Oh’s final day on this planet, an unshaven, unctuous, very disturbed man, parked himself in the ladies room on the first floor of the building housing the Rockwood Insurance Agency. He looked into the freshly cleaned mirror and ignoring his own face, admired the blue shirt he wore. Never did he ever expect to own such a nice piece of clothing. Thirty minutes earlier, he had picked it up from the mission, the generous gift of an anonymous donor. The man took no notice of the small blood stain on the inside front collar, because he was too busy admiring the fit of the shirt and the initials, JR sewn onto the right sleeve cuff.

THE END