A Private Sorcery Read Online Free PDF Page A

had to be taken care of.”
    It’s the first time he’s looked straight at her and she’s startled by his eyes: a brilliant pale blue that unnerves her, suggesting, it seems, either utter sincerity or madness. They pass through a waiting area with a secretary’s cubicle and then into his office. She’d expected a room with dirty windows and overflowing trash cans, but it’s clean and orderly with large windows facing east. The Brooklyn Bridge looms so close and clear, it appears unreal. The opposite wall is covered with photographs: Morton with judges, Morton with a group of men in baseball uniforms, Morton with the Pope. On top of the desk, there’s a picture of a little boy, three or four, grinning beside a fishing pole with a silver bucket by his feet.
    Morton sits behind the desk and they sit in two chairs across from him. He takes a legal pad from a bottom drawer, pushes back his chair and swings his feet up onto the desk. “Okay, you tell me first what you know. Then I’ll tell you what I learned today and we’ll talk about where to go from here.”
    It takes Rena about ten minutes to tell Morton basically the same story she told Leonard. Morton takes copious notes, interjecting with questions of the when precisely was that and how do you spell that variety. When she gets to the arrest, he asks a lot of questions about what the police did and where they looked.
    â€œAnything else? Anything at all?”
    She catches Morton’s glance at Leonard, and it occurs to her that he’s thinking maybe she doesn’t want to talk in front of Saul’s father, an idea that hadn’t crossed her mind before but is, she realizes now, partly the case.
    â€œThere’s something I thought of on the subway here.” She pauses, reluctant to open this door. “There’s someone I know, Reed—actually, he’s a lawyer, too—from a long time ago. We were roommates in San Francisco. He used to have a drug problem, before I met him, when he was a kid, really. Marijuana, LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, that sort of hippie experimental stuff. We lost touch for quite a while. Then Saul and I bumped into him. We were at the Whitney Museum and we ran into him in the stairwell. We went for lunch, the three of us, got togethera couple more times after that. Saul and Reed started doing things, just the two of them, and I remember feeling pleased because there aren’t too many people Saul finds as interesting as a book.”
    Hearing herself, she feels embarrassed—the excess words, the apologetic tone that Saul, master of nuance, had taught her to notice in herself.
    â€œWhat would they do?”
    â€œBasketball games, mostly. Reed would get box seats at the Garden through clients and he’d take Saul.”
    Leonard looks at her, confused, she imagines, to hear about Saul, who’s always viewed his arms and legs as little more than vehicles to transport his mind, attending basketball games.
    â€œIt didn’t last long. By the end of the year, Reed started flaking out. Once, we invited him for dinner and he showed up two hours late with some story about the subway. Another time, he and Saul were out somewhere and Reed went to the men’s room and never came back. Saul said Reed was edgy, like he was jumping out of his skin. It seemed clear to me he was using something.”
    Rena can feel Leonard staring at her, and she doesn’t know if it’s because he’s stunned that she’d introduced someone like Reed to Saul or because her face betrays how upset, in fact, she’d been to realize that Reed was using drugs again—Reed, who’d taught Gene, her halfbrother, how to throw a football, been her only friend when she’d first moved east.
    â€œI left a half-dozen messages on his home machine. Finally I called him at work, only to discover that he’d either been fired or quit. I guess it’s possible that Saul was