Traffic was light at that hour, and easy flowing. At Ed St. Onge’s instruction, I went down Arcand toward the central post office and Tsongas Arena and turned right onto French. No vehicle seemed to be particularly interested in us, but I cruised for another block or two. “Anyplace special,” I asked, “or are you a ‘journey, not the destination’ type of guy?”
He navigated and we crossed the river, which lay wide and silent, illuminated with the reflected lights of the city. None of the cars lingering in City Hall Square had trailed us, which, St. Onge guessed, meant that they were protestors keeping vigil. On the west side of Christian Hill we parked and hoofed down an alley between nondescript yellow brick buildings. The only indication that they were anything but tenements was the industrial fan vent on one, exhaling a boozy smoke into the branches of an ailanthus tree. At the metal-sheathed door, a beefy guy in a black T-shirt that read THE KILLING HAND in blood red across his chest rose from a stool where he’d been reading a comic book, recognized St. Onge, and nodded us in. About a dozen people were sitting at tables around the edges of a room the size of my kitchen. At the center was a billiard table, with enough space for someone to make most shots without rapping your face with the butt end of the cue. A few of the patrons were familiar
from around town, movers and shakers of one sort or another. I dug the irony. The narcotics squad was out busting kids for smoking pot, and here were city grandees, sopping up after-hours hooch, but that’d have to be someone else’s cause; my plate was full. The rosy-nosed leprechaun behind the bar knew St. Onge. “What’ll it be, lads?”
“Wild Turkey,” I told him. “Got the one-oh-one?”
“Just eighty.”
I nodded.
“Cola,” Ed said. “Lots of ice.”
“Cola?” I said when we’d seated ourselves in a corner.
“This arthritis stuff I’ve been on. Some kind of steroid. Alcohol is no go.” He grunted. “Believe me, I wrestle, but Leona says she doesn’t want to retire with some old stiff-leg.”
“How many women make that complaint?”
The air was thick with cigarette smoke. Since legally the place didn’t exist, neither did no-smoking laws. St. Onge hauled a deck of Camel lights from his coat pocket. He had quit for a while. I watched him tap one out, snap the filter off, and light up. “Why not just buy the plain old-fashioned cancer sticks?” I asked.
“Elementary. With a filter, you lose taste and potency, right?” He picked a speck of tobacco from the tip of his tongue. “I figure the companies spike up the nicotine in these brands even higher, so they’ll keep selling. Break off the filter, you’ve got a nice strong smoke, the way nature intended.”
“How did I miss that?”
He took a sip of cola. “One’s about all of these I can handle. You going to get to it, or do I have to beg?”
Over the click of pool balls and the clunk of an occasional ball falling into a pocket, I laid out for him what I’d been spinning on my mental wheel, the fabric of vague suspicions about a conspiracy of silence. He was impatient before I got the third sentence out, but to his credit he listened all the way through, though from the way he crunched the ice from his cup, I could tell he wasn’t happy. “That’s it?” he said when I’d finished.
“What’d you expect? The Big Sleep?” I had to admit, at this hour it sounded pretty thin.
“A cop,” he said simply. “That the theme?”
“Or cops.”
“I’m still listening for all the proof—the eyewitness accounts and the smoking guns. That coming next? I can’t believe you’re feeding me this. Your story’s got holes Brady could throw a football through blindfolded.”
“What chance have I had to plug them? I can’t move without cops getting in my face, Duross leading the charge.”
“It’s a reaction to frustration. Coping is easier if you’ve got a donkey to pin the tail on. But what do you expect? You’re gunning for them.”
“You’re wrong. I haven’t said this to anyone else but you.”
“Your actions speak. The TV editorials keep spading up rumors, till the city is a tinderbox. The department’s got a suspect in custody. They’ve been satisfied from the start, yet you give statements to the newspaper, show up at the crime scene trying to second-guess the professionals. It’s a reasonable view that you keeping pushing the furniture around to keep your meter running.”
“I haven’t been on the clock since Meecham left the case.”
“Okay, I hear that. Sounds like a loser all around, but that’s your business. Now what’s this about you firing a gun?”
I told him the story briefly. He shook his head. “So what are you, heading up the ’equal rights for circus tramps’ movement?”
“I’m not joining the ACLU,” I shot back. “I’m as mindful of vengeance as the next person, but we need to keep the justice system wobbling along until it comes up for overhaul. If we all leaned right when the thing went around a sudden curve, like some dimwits in this country want, it’d tip over and the wheels’d come off. And, for the record, I’m a professional, too.”
He grunted but made no comment. I think that meant I’d made a point. Even so, I had to wonder how long it would be before Troy Pepper’s remaining support vaporized. There wasn’t much left. I said, “And I know that Duross is Frank Droney’s nephew.”
“You didn’t hear that from him.”
I agreed but didn’t bring up Grady Stinson’s name.
“He isn’t using Droney’s help. The kid is working hard to make detective, and he’s determined to do it on his own merits.”
“Yeah, I’m sure he’s a bright pip of a lad. But back to the point. I’ve got a feeling about this one.”
“Spare me.”
I leaned nearer. “What happened to hunches, horse sense? Gut feelings?”
He frowned. “What happened to carburetors, spittoons, and typewriters?”
“I still have two of the above.”
He forked smoke from his nostrils. “These days it’s all probability theory and statistical analysis. You know that. DNA nails bad guys, not ESP. But suppose—I’m not making this a blanket endorsement—but in this particular case, suppose you’re right. Suppose Pepper didn’t kill the girl, and someone else did.”
“Make it a cop,” I said.
His face looked gray. Maybe it was the palls of smoke in the air, but he obviously didn’t care for what I was saying. “All right. What’s that have to do with the whole department? Because that’s who you’re going to be throwing dirt all over if you’re not careful.”
“Probably nothing, but it gives someone discretionary power over how other cops are going to react to the crime, what paper gets filed, what happens with evidence. If the victim was killed someplace else, a cruiser might even have been used to transport the body over to where it was found.”
“Then how did her car get there?”
“I’m not sure of that. Somebody would have to have driven it there and left it.”
“And then there’s the crime scene evidence. Was that planted? You see where this is going? Nowhere. Now you listen. If there’s a grain of truth to this theory, we’ll find out. But I can almost guarantee you you’re wrong.”
“How?”
“How what?”
“You said we’ll find out. How’s that happen?”
“Let internal affairs work on it and discover what went down.”
“And what’s going to bring them into the picture?”
“I guess I’ll have to,” he said without enthusiasm.
“They won’t take more than a few months. And how likely is it IA will push it that far? I’ve never been a big fan of one hand washing itself.”
He butted his cigarette hard enough to make the big guy at the door look up from his comic. “You’re wrong,” St. Onge said in a warning growl. “Most cops are straight and law-abiding.”
“Oh, come on, Ed.”
“Come on yourself.”
“I’m trying to spare you making a sappy speech. I never said all cops were bad. We agree in principle, okay? I’m still talking cases here, and in this case the uncovering will take time—all right, not as long as the Big Dig, but there are people to find, subpoenas, testimony to gather, witnesses to track down. You’ll be eating cake at your retirement bash at the Club Passe-Temps before then, all your cronies cracking wise with Viagra jokes.”
“I just don’t want to see you end up in trouble, or … .” He broke off.
“Or what?”
“Worse.”
“Flying the marble kite?”
“It’s no joke,” he said glumly. “You go after cops, you’re crossing a line.”
I kept quiet a moment. “It would get ugly,” I admitted.
“Not really. No. This won’t be the Hatfields and the McCoys, some long, bitter war of attrition. There’s just you.”
“And a lot of honest law, you said it yourself. Loftis seems okay.”
“There’s just you. For Christ’s sake, cops don’t have to be bent, or against you, to stand with other cops. It’ll be just you and that popgun of yours. Where is it, by the way?”
“Droney drew my fangs.”
“You’ll go down hard, and that’ll be that. The department will spin it any way it cares to—disgruntled ex-badge, probably. Resisting arrest. The TV and papers will buy it, dredge up old news clips, and that’ll be your legacy.”
“No ‘Amazing Grace’ on the bagpipes?”
“Fuck you. There’ll be a short line of mourners, and snow on your grave by Christmas.”
At a sharp crack I jumped. On the pool table, a break shot sent balls scattering. None clunked into pockets. The shooter caught my glance, shrugged, and grinned. In an odd way, I felt a sense of refuge being there. We were all in this together, safe from the bigger, more menacing world outside, transgressors with a mutual acceptance of each other’s sins. To us. I drank off my glass and asked St. Onge if he wanted another cola.
“Definitely no. Let’s get out of here.”
The cars were gone from the square when we got back to JFK Plaza, and along with them, I supposed, the imminent threat of civil disorder. As St. Onge got out, I told him to hold off speaking with internal affairs. I asked him if he’d look into getting my weapon back, and he said he would. “And, Raz, go home. Don’t do anything stupid.” It had a sound of finality, so I only nodded. “I’ll call you first thing I hear,” he said.
It didn’t ring any tinnier than most of the other promises people made.
I did go home. I remembered the groceries in my trunk and brought them in and put things away. I locked the door and drew the shades. The phone message light was blinking. Someone named Frank from Walt’s Getty had called seven hours ago. It was probably nothing, he said, but guessed that I could decide if I wanted to come by and speak with him. He was getting ready to close up, but he generally got there early, he said. I glanced at my watch: 3:57 A.M. I doubted he meant that early.
I was too wired to sleep. I should clean my gun, having fired it, but then I remembered it was downtown. So I found myself standing there in that cocktails-to-the-dregs, butts-in-the-ashtray time that Sinatra had put his mood indigo on, when even the musicians had packed up and split and there was nothing to do but brood. I took off my coat, and when I went to hang it in a closet, I saw clothes on the floor. Amid the chaos I’d been living in, nothing had jumped out at me, but it did now. Pockets hung out of slacks, jackets were turned inside out, having been gone through. My ties lay entangled like a nest of snakes. The cartons stacked in the living room were askew, the sealing tape torn open. I put on more lights. I went back to the kitchen and realized that the plastic sheeting
over the broken window had been pried away and then reattached, but not securely. It flapped in the night wind.
My pulse throbbing, I tried to read method into the situation. Vandalism? A search? A threat?
I had no sense of what, if anything, might be missing. The intruder had been in a hurry. I had the thought to call St. Onge, but what was he going to do? Suppose it had been a cop? One name sprang to mind, but St. Onge had made his point: Cops would stand with cops.
After double-checking all the door and window locks, and stapling an extra sheet of plastic over the broken kitchen window, to keep out the wind if nothing else, I went into the living room and sat. I let the questions pile up.
Who had been here tonight in my absence? Who had violated my space? The police? Rag Tyme? The band of cowards I’d run off from the carnival site earlier? Someone from the carnival itself? The real killer—if that wasn’t Troy Pepper? It could have been any one of a lot of people; God knows I’d made enemies enough over the years. And what had the invader been looking for? Evidence he believed I might have? Because I was getting close to discovering something? Maybe Jessica Fletcher, my sharp-eyed neighbor, had seen something; but I’d have to ask her tomorrow.
So what did I do now?
When you were under threat, you could sit and wait for it to come to you, to make itself known, and just hope that you saw it when it did. Or you could act first. In motion you became a moving target, but you had a chance. I went down to the basement. On top of a beam, swaddled in a towel amid the dust and cobwebs, was the antique sawed-off shotgun that I’d acquired when an old pizza maker named Vito had found it and laid it off on me. I’d had it cleaned up with a cockeyed notion to sell it, but I hadn’t gotten around to that yet. And all at once, I was glad. Carrying the bundled weapon like a babe in arms, I brought it upstairs to the living room.
I found a box of cartridges left over from the one time I’d used the old 12-gauge. I loaded two and set the sawed-off on the floor beside the couch. I shoveled a handful of extra shells into the drawer of the end
table. I looked around. What else needed to be done? The unpacked cartons gave me a thought. I opened one that stood in a closet and flipped through my collection of LPs until I found what I was after. I slid the disk from the sleeve, holding it between my spread hands, and blew across the surface—vestigial moves from an earlier day—set it on the turntable and activated the tone arm. I turned out lights except for a lamp in one corner and the ones outside. Without getting undressed, I stretched out on the couch to listen to the Moses Maxwell Quintet, thinking that maybe a barrelhouse blues would energize me, but the first cut was a moody number, faintly familiar as I listened, trying to put a name to it, but in the musicians’ unique telling, and with my weary brain, I couldn’t quite …
The telephone’s ringing woke me, and I saw that the darkness beyond the windows was paling. I scrubbed at my face and sat up. I squinted at my watch. I’d been out for almost two hours. I picked up the phone.
“Mr. Rasmussen?”
The voice was low, familiar, but I was groggy. “Right here.”
“This is Moses Maxwell.”
“‘In My Solitude,’” I blurted. The song title had popped into my head.
“Say what?”
“What you were playing.” I used the silence to knuckle cobwebs from my eyes. For a little while I had forgotten the world, but it all came back now. The police hustle at headquarters, the sawed-off shotgun next to the couch, the lingering presence of an invader in my space.
“Are you straight?” Maxwell asked.
“More than you want to know.”
“Is Nicole with you?”
“Now?” I shook off the last of my weariness. “What’s going on?”
A heavy sigh. “She got a phone call a couple hours ago. She didn’t say who it was, and I didn’t ask. I always give her a little leeway, ’cause with Nicole, you crowd her, she sometimes takes it wrong and gets emotional. Anyway, she left the hotel on kind of a tear. I thought she might be looking for you.”
“Did you call the kennel? Maybe she went to visit the dogs.”
“Tried it. The carnival, too—I’m here now. Nothing.”
“How is Pop handling this?”
“He’s still sleeping, so he doesn’t know yet. I’m not eager to tell him.”
I thought a moment, then told him to sit tight and I’d get back to him. I checked my service, thinking Nicole might have called while I was conked, but there was only the earlier message from Walt’s Getty.