six
He had known the man. This was his burden. He had sat across from him in rooms with long tables and watched him smile and deflect and perform. He had seen the intelligence behind the mask. The calculation. The absolute certainty that he was the smartest person in any room he entered.
That was fifteen years ago. Another case. The one that should have ended everything and instead ended nothing.
-----
The deal had not been his decision. This is what he told himself. He had been young then. Ambitious. There were calls from people above him and meetings he was not invited to and then one morning the case was no longer his case. It belonged to someone else. Someone who understood how things worked.
He had watched from a distance as the charges shrank. As the sentence became a joke. As the man walked out after thirteen months and resumed his life as if nothing had happened.
He had said nothing.
This was his guilt. Not that he had made the deal but that he had not refused it. That he had let his career continue. That he had risen to positions where he could have spoken but did not speak.
-----
Now the man was dead and everyone was talking about conspiracy. The guards who were not where they should have been. The cameras that failed. The bruises that did not match the story. The powerful friends who had reason to want him silent.
He listened to these theories. He read the articles and watched the documentaries and heard the whispered certainties.
He was not certain.
-----
He had seen the man up close. He had watched him in depositions when the mask slipped for a moment. He had seen the panic beneath the performance. The terror of being seen for what he was.
The man had built his life on access. On being needed. On walking into rooms where the powerful gathered and knowing that he was the one they called. The fixer. The provider. The keeper of secrets who held the keys to their darkest selves.
Take that away and what was left.
A number. An inmate. A body in a cell waiting to become old and forgotten and ordinary.
-----
He understood narcissism. He had prosecuted men who would rather die than be diminished. Who experienced exposure not as shame but as annihilation. For whom the loss of status was indistinguishable from the loss of self.
The man in the cell had been this. He had been nothing but this. A hunger for importance dressed in expensive clothes.
When the friends stopped calling. When the lawyers explained what the rest of his life would look like. When he understood that he would never again be the man who knew everyone and was needed by everyone.
What was left.
-----
The conspiracy theory was almost comforting. This is what he had come to understand. Murder meant they feared him. Murder meant he was dangerous to the end. That he had power even in that cell. That he might have talked and brought them all down and so they had to stop him.
Suicide meant something else.
It meant they knew. They knew he would never talk. They knew he would rather die than become no one. They knew his own nature would do what they could not risk doing themselves.
They did not need to send anyone. They only needed to walk away.
-----
He sat in his office with the door closed. The office he had earned by not asking questions. By understanding how things worked. By being the kind of man who rose.
Outside his window the city carried on. The courts and the lawyers and the criminals and the machinery of justice that was not justice but only the sound justice makes when it is performing for an audience.
The man was dead. The names would stay hidden. The black bars would remain.
And he would never know if it was because someone gave an order or because no one needed to.
He was not sure which possibility let him sleep at night.
He was not sure either one did.