AT A QUARTER PAST SEVEN, MAUREEN WAS ON THE second floor at DAFT, walking toward Jack’s office, when a voice from what she thought was an empty room said, “What, are you here all day every day now, are you, Maureen?”
Maureen jumped and then was relieved to see Fox. She was kind of hoping that she might run into him and thought that because of their “incident” in Montreal, he might be a bit more sympathetic.
“No, I’m not here all day every day, Fox, but . . . ” Maureen paused as she stepped over the threshold of his office, and she felt her resolve slip and her courage fail just a little. “But where I gotta go see the cops tomorrow, it just occurred to me that maybe I should talk to you first.” She looked him right in the eye. “Talk to you, you know . . . before I go . . . to the cops.”
“Oh yea, why do you want to talk to me, Maureen?” Fox looked at her with a totally flat, but at the same time hard, gaze.
“Well, see,” Maureen said, talking fast now, “I’m supposed to meet Jack here, but before he gets here, I wanted to tell you, before I told the cops, that I heard you and Jack at the apartment that night when you were looking for Jack’s AA chip.”
“Did ya?” Fox said, never taking his eyes off Maureen.
“Yea, and where Jack was the last person to see Bo alive . . .”
“Was he?” Fox said.
“And now, see, where the cops are looking at me ’cause Bo . . . well he . . .”
“Beat the shit out of you.”
“Yea, but when I talked to the cops, I never told them anything about you guys bein’ in the apartment that night. They asked me all about you guys, about DAFT, if Bo worked for you and all that, and all I said was that he built boxes.” She was still facing that same flat, hard look.
“Yea,” she went on, “I heard Jack say to you Bo was still alive when he left him there at the apartment that day, but . . . Jack was the last person to see him alive, and I don’t wanna say anything to the cops, but . . . I don’t know.”
“Yea, that’s kinda funny, Maureen, ’cause you weren’t with Bo on Tuesday, were ya? You left Bo and the apartment late Monday night or early Tuesday morning and went down to”—he hesitated and looked down at a paper on his desk—“George Taylor’s house on King’s Road, where you spent Tuesday and Wednesday night and where the police found you on Thursday morning.”
“Well, so what? That got nothing to do with anything.” Maureen was rattled, really rattled. How did Fox know she was down to George’s? Were they following her? They must be. Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. Was she just being paranoid? But like they said on those psychedelic buttons, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.” Hardly anyone knew that she’d gone down to George’s—only the police and George. Had George sold her out? Or were the police in with DAFT?
“Look,” Maureen said, “I’m just here ’cause I don’t want to cause any trouble.”
“Bit late for that,” Fox said, not looking up.
“I don’t think I’m threatening you or anything—”
“You’d better not be.” Fox, again, didn’t look up, but something about how totally still he was frightened Maureen.
“Look, Fox, they’re going to be asking me questions and they might even arrest me, and I can’t very well lie to them when they ask me what I know.”
“Why not, Maureen? You already did.”
“But I can’t keep lying to them, can I? I gotta tell ’em about Jack being the last person to see Bo alive. And if that means they come sniffing around DAFT, well . . . I mean . . . you can’t very well let Jack bring down the whole organization, can you?” Maureen looked at Fox mournfully but had to quickly avert her eyes when she saw the look he was giving back. She knew she was playing a very dangerous game. On her way down here, Maureen had worked it out in her mind that if she could get them to turn against each other, if she could convince Fox, or one of them, that it would be better for DAFT and their “big operation” to turn Jack in to the cops, then she’d be safe, and if DAFT kept going, they’d continue to take care of Carleen. But what if the police were in with the boys? Maureen couldn’t let her mind go there. It would mean that there was nothing solid, nothing left in the whole world to count on at all.
Maureen started talking even faster. “If they start lookin’ into Jack and Bo and Tuesday afternoon . . . well, how long is it going to be before they figure out”—she shot Fox a look and managed to stammer out—“everything?”
Fox rose from behind his desk and parked himself on the corner, right in Maureen’s face.
“Everything like what, Maureen?”
“Well, I don’t know, do I? You know.” Maureen was nervously trying to move back in her chair and making little sounds almost like laughs, hyperventilating, trying to get as far away from Fox as she could.
“No, I don’t know,” said Fox, as he moved in even closer. “Why don’t you tell me?”
He was so close that for one mad moment, Maureen thought she was going to kiss him, like she’d kissed him in Montreal, but she didn’t. Her throat felt like it was closing over, and she could barely squeak out, “Well, I don’t know anything, so how am I gonna tell you anything?”
“You are fucking A right you don’t know anything to tell me. And you don’t know anything to tell the cops, either, do you, Maureen?”
“Well, what about . . .” But nothing else came out of Maureen’s mouth. All her energy was engaged in shoving her chair back and trying to stand up. At the door, she bumped right into Jack, who had been standing there, she didn’t know how long.
“Jack! . . . Jack, you said to meet you at seven-thirty.”
“Yea,” Jack said, grabbing her roughly by the arm and leading her out of Fox’s office. She saw Jack shoot Fox a look that she couldn’t quite read, but that look made her feel even more frightened.