“This conspiracy, you mean.”
“If that’s what it is, then yeah. You have a network. ‘Elaborate’ is a word you used earlier, and the fact is, the network you’ve developed from in here and from your time in corrections is very elaborate.”
“How powerful you imagine me,” he said, sounding almost wistful. “And how magnanimous, as if, assuming I did know of some scheme to tear apart Joseph DeSantos’s life, I’d share it with you in order to save him.”
“I do believe you have power,” she said. “I believe you have free will and a soul. So maybe you’ll search yourself and tell me if there is something Joe deserves to know. Or not, but it’s my job to ask.”
“To ask, or to beg, on his behalf?”
“Just to ask. He wouldn’t want me to beg.”
“Understood. So if we are asking things, Ms. Bradigan, may I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“Why are you defending DeSantos?”
“Everyone deserves a defense.”
“But why you? I know for a fact that you did almost no defense work before this.”
“So he probably deserves better than what I can offer.”
“He chose you, though.”
“He did.”
“Yes, and you’re fighting for him.”
“I’m doing my job.”
“Ah, but I think you’re doing more than that,” he said, his eyes brightening. “You’re fighting for him, and I admire that.”
Aideen found that the longer she was in his company, the less creeped out—weirded out—she felt around him. She made a mental note to never be unmindful of that, because it seemed dangerous. “That’s why I’m here,” she said, having little else to say.
“Of course, but has anyone ever fought for you that way, Ms. Bradigan?” For a moment, Aideen was taken aback. She was fairly certain that she’d never been asked anything of the sort. Hathorne seemed not to notice.
“I’m sorry, fought for me?”
“Yes. Not in a dramatic sense, necessarily. Has anyone ever really stood up for you? I don’t mean your parents or siblings, in the roles they played in your upbringing. I mean beyond that. Has anyone struggled against others, or a system, so that you’d be more successful or more secure? More comfortable, even?”
Aideen hesitated, the pause less about being uncertain and more about how much she was revealing to a guy like Aaron Hathorne. She gave a more or less honest answer.
“No. Not really.”
“Then perhaps you can understand a person like me,” Hathorne said. She almost opened her mouth to say something time honored and publicly defensible, like God forbid I ever understand a person like you, but stopped herself. Most people might think a thing like that. Some might say it. But it was neither productive nor professional.
“I can understand feeling separated from the world,” she said. “Undefended. I doubt I could fathom what it’s like to be judged by it so thoroughly.”
“You certainly could not. And you may be the only person I’ve met in twenty years willing to even contemplate the idea. I admire what you’re doing for Joe DeSantos. I’ve never known devotion like that. You referred to the money I control through a trust. It has bought me legal competence. It has never—not once—bought me devotion. My lawyers have treated me much like my family always has. Like a filthy thing, a rat or a cockroach they were nevertheless responsible for.”
“I’m sorry for that.”
“It would be very appropriate not to be, but thank you. You’re a noble lawyer, it seems.”
“An honest lawyer is what I shoot for, that’s all.”
“Yes, like a fishmonger. One in ten thousand.”
“Maybe,” Aideen said. A tight grin. Hathorne had quoted Hamlet, but she couldn’t remember wherefrom. “I know you don’t cooperate with the doctors here, but there are good people in this environment, men and women who do care, at least about making you healthier so the rest of us feel safer.” He scoffed, and she sensed his contempt.
“The doctors fall into two categories. The first are naive or just foolish and think they can get close to us without being compromised. The second are wiser and harder. They last longer, but they’re equally worthless.”
They’re afraid of you, she thought. All of them. But she said, “It’s a tough job, I would guess.”
“I would also.” He let that hang in the air and then said, “The least among them, though, could explain Joe DeSantos to you. He’s passed as an enlightened, mostly healthy person for decades, and yet all that time he stewed in a darkness he didn’t even realize existed. Now the light has found him. He’ll soon be blinded by it.”