Two guilty men - the old murderer and his neighbor, in Charles Baxter's story

Still suffering from a bit of Red Sox aftershock, but the good news is will have more time for reading in the coming days, months - read one more story in Charles Baxter's collection "Gryphon," the very effective The Old Murderer - what a great title, by the way. Set-up is a man in a perhaps somewhat down-at-heels suburban neighborhood learns that his new next-door neighbor is a murderer who's presumably now out on parole, finished serving his term. The main character has the expected fears and trepidations, and then we learn that the character is an alcoholic trying very hard to stay sober - desperate one night, he calls his AA friend, a surgeon who drank his way out of the profession; we learn that the main character was pretty horrible to his ex wife and kids, and in bits of pieces we learn now horrible - he actually hit his daughter in the face with a book (if I remember this detail right), and of course the irony is that the old murderer next door, who killed his wife, still believes the crime was justified or at least comprehensible, whereas the main character tortures himself with guilt and remorse - and yet the two guys are not so different, you wonder in fact whether they will become friends, despite the obvious strangeness of the murderer: he has a very weird conversational affect, joking about building a spaceship in his basement, and you wonder to what degree he may still be a threat - once you've murdered you will also be a murderer, and there's no escape from that fact or fate. This is one of the more overtly ironic of Baxter's stories, effective in how it incrementally reveals character, but somewhat less plotdriven then his earlier stories - in these later stories Baxter is getting more open in form and slightly more unconventional in style and structure, though he will never be called avant-garde.