“You mean what we’re doing now?” Lucy frowns. “The office in New York? He couldn’t have known about that unless you mentioned to him you were thinking about going into your own business.” This she says to McGovern.
I divide the dough into smaller parts and begin kneading again.
“I’ve always thought about going private,” McGovern replies. “But I never said anything about it to Benton. We were pretty consumed with the cases up there in Pennsylvania.”
“Understatement of the century,” Lucy adds blackly.
“Right.” McGovern sighs and shakes her head.
“If Benton didn’t have a clue about the private enterprise you planned to start,” I then say, “is it possible he’d heard you mention The Last Precinctthe concept, the thing you say you used to joke about? I’m trying to figure out why he would label a file with that name.”
“What file?” Lucy asks.
“Marino’s bringing it over.” I finish kneading one portion of dough and wrap it tightly in plastic. “It was in Benton’s briefcase in Philadelphia.” I explain to them what Anna told me in her letter and Lucy helps clarify at least one point. She feels certain she mentioned the philosophy of The Last Precinct to Benton. She seems to recall that she was in the car with him one day and was asking him about the private consulting he had begun doing in his retirement. He told her it was going all right but it was difficult handling the logistics of running his own business, that he missed having a secretary and someone else answering the phone, that sort of thing. Lucy wistfully replied that maybe all of us ought to get together and form our own company. That was when she used the term The Last Precinctsort of “a league of our own,” she says she told him.
I spread clean, dry dish toweJs over the countertop. “Did he have any idea you might be serious about really doing that some day?” I ask.
“I told him if I ever got enough money, I was going to quit working for the fucking government,” Lucy replies.
“Well.” I fit thinning rollers in the pasta machine and set them at the largest opening. “Anybody who knows you would figure it was only a matter of time before you made money doing something. Benton always said you were too much a maverick to last in a bureaucracy forever. He wouldn’t be the least bit surprised over what’s happening to you now, Lucy.”
“In fact, it had already started happening to you from the start,” McGovern points out to my niece. “Which is why you didn’t last with the FBI.”
Lucy isn’t insulted. She has at least accepted that she made mistakes early on, the worst one being her affair with Carrie Grethen. She no longer blames the FBI for backing away from her until she finally quit. I flatten a piece of dough with my palm and crank it through the machine. “I’m wondering if Benton used your concept as the name of his mysterious file because he somehow knew The Last Precinctmeaning us would investigate his case some day,” I offer. “That we are where he would end up, because whatever was begun with those harassing letters and all the rest of it wasn’t going to stop, even with his death.” I turn the dough back through the machine again and again until I have a perfect strip of pasta to lay flat over a towel. “He knew. Somehow he did.”
“Somehow he always knew everything.” Lucy’s face is touched by deep sadness.
Benton is in the kitchen. We feel him as I make Christmas pasta and we talk about the way his mind worked. He was very intuitive. He always thought far ahead of where he was. I can imagine him projecting himself into a future after his
death and imagining how we might react to everything, including a file we might find in his briefcase. Benton would know for a fact that if something happened to himand he clearly feared something wouldthen I most certainly would
go through his briefcase, which I did. What he may not have anticipated was that Marino would go through the briefcase first and remove a file that I would not learn about until now.