Nineteen

There was a folded piece of paper sitting next to Dooley’s coffee mug when Dooley came down to breakfast the next morning.

“A note for Mr. Rectal about your absence,” Jeannie said. He couldn’t tell if she was making an honest mistake or poking fun. Either way, he didn’t correct her.

“I’m working tonight, six to closing,” Dooley told her. “And I have some things I have to do after school, so I don’t think I’ll be home for supper.”

Jeannie just nodded. She didn’t give him the third degree the way his uncle would have.

School was torture, as usual. Well, except for the look on Mr. Rektor’s face when Dooley marched into the office and handed him the note Jeannie had given him. He stood there while Mr. Rektor opened it and read it. Dooley was pretty sure he wanted to say something about it, guessed he probably couldn’t think of anything because, after he’d scanned it, he put it back into the envelope. Dooley turned for the door.

“Terrible thing about your mother,” Mr. Rektor said. “And about your uncle.”

Dooley didn’t turn around to look at him. He could imagine any one of half a dozen expressions on Rektor’s face, and every one of them would only make him want to punch him. He left the office without a word.

Dooley sat at a table alone in the back of the cafeteria, a bottle of juice and a slice of pizza in front of him. So far he hadn’t touched either. He was thinking about Jeffie.

Jeffie had been watching TV and all of a sudden he’d perked up and told Teresa that his problems were over. He’d gone out right after that and had made a phone call at a pay phone. Then he’d come to the store and told Dooley that things hadn’t gone according to plan—meaning, maybe, that he’d gambled and lost—but that he was coming into some big money.

From what? More gambling? A big bet? Maybe someone tipped him to something?

But he had sounded so sure. He’d looked and acted one hundred percent confident that he was going to have the money to pay Dooley what he owed.

And then he hadn’t turned up.

Dooley thought about Jeffie outside the video store on Monday night, pumped, practically dancing, telling Dooley that with the money he was going to get, he would be able to go home. On a gamble? No, wait a minute. He said he’d seen someone. He’d seen a guy. No, not a guy. That guy. The one he had told Dooley about. The downtown guy. It had to be. He’d seen the guy, and the guy had been with someone. But who? Dooley had cut Jeffie off. He’d told him he didn’t care; he didn’t even want to know. All he wanted was his money. But Jeffie was jazzed, that was for sure. He was jazzed about a big payday and it had something to do with a guy he had seen and maybe, according to Teresa, something he had seen on TV.

One more thing. He’d said, If I’d known, I would have taken a picture.

What would he have done with a picture?

A picture of what?

He thought about what Randall had said. He thought about Edward-you-can-call-me-Ed Ralston, who had been in charge of Dooley at the group home for a couple of months until Jeffie had taken care of him. He thought about the other guy Randall said had made a complaint against Jeffie and then had dropped it.

What had Jeffie seen?

What had he been onto?

A shadow fell across his table.

Warren.

“Are you okay?” he said.

Dooley looked up at Warren’s thin face and thick glasses.

“It’s just, you know …” Warren said. Dooley didn’t know. He waited. “I heard some kids talking about your uncle,” Warren said. “And your mother.” Dooley didn’t doubt that there were plenty of kids in his school—teachers, too—who had heard about the whole mess by now and who had talked about it among themselves. He had caught a lot of looks in the halls and the cafeteria, in classrooms, in the can. But apart from Rektor, no one had said anything to him. “You never mentioned them to me.”

“Sorry,” Dooley said.

“I just wanted to say that if there’s anything I can do …”

Dooley stood up.

Warren recoiled and then, just as quickly, recovered.

“I’m sorry if I—” he began.

“It’s okay, Warren,” Dooley said. “I appreciate your asking. I’m okay. I just have to make a call. But thanks, okay?”

Warren blinked behind his glasses.

“Okay,” he said.

Dooley went outside and walked down the sidewalk a ways. Teresa had told him that Jeffie had used a pay phone to make a call the day before he’d disappeared. He’d used it before, too, to make other calls. Dooley knew all of his uncle’s numbers—home, his cell, his stores. There was no way Jeffie would remember any of those without looking them up. Or writing them down. He thought about the scraps of paper that had fallen out of Jeffie’s pocket. He pulled out his phone and punched in Teresa’s phone number. It took five rings before she answered, and then she sounded groggy.

“Did I wake you?” he said.

“Yeah. But it’s okay.” She didn’t sound right, like maybe she was on something.

“Teresa, did Jeffie have a special place where he kept phone numbers?”

“In his phone, I guess.”

“I mean the ones he wouldn’t have kept in his phone.”

“What are you talking about, Dooley?”

“He wrote the numbers down sometimes, Teresa. He kept them in his pocket. Did he put them somewhere when he got home?”

“I don’t know, Dooley.”

If he’d had all those numbers with him when he was killed, the cops would have them, too—unless whoever had killed him had taken them. Or unless he’d been smart for once and had left them at home.

“What about that night you told me about? You said he went out to use a pay phone. Did he take a phone number with him? Did you see if he had a piece of paper or something with him when he was dialing?”

“I don’t think so. Why?”

Jeffie was terrible with phone numbers.

“So what did he do? Did he look up the number when he got down there?”

“Look it up?”

“In the phone book?”

“Have you used a pay phone lately, Dooley? They don’t have phone books in there anymore. They’ve all been ripped off.”

“Did you tell the cops about the pay phone, Teresa?”

“No.” There was a pause. “You think I should?”

“No,” Dooley said. “No, it’s okay.”

He wondered if he should tell the cops. Would they be able to find out what calls had been made from that phone that night? He bet they could. But did he want them to find out? What if Jeffie had gone out there to call Dooley’s uncle?

“That night Jeffie saw something on TV—you don’t have any idea what it was?”

“He was flipping channels. And then I was in the kitchen. I’m pretty sure he was watching the news—I heard the theme they play, you know? But I didn’t see it.”

“But you said it was Monday night, right?” Whatever he’d seen on TV, he’d seen it right before he’d started calling Dooley. Before he showed up at the store. He’d come up with some way to get the money he owed Dooley and he’d come down to the store to tell Dooley in person that he needed another day to pull it off.

“No,” Teresa said. “It was Sunday night, late.”

What?

“Are you sure, Teresa?”

“I’m positive. When he came back from making the call, he was smiling. He went out for a while, and when he came back, he was in an even better mood. We had a great time that night, Dooley. A really great time.” She started to cry.

Dooley felt his insides go cold when he came down the steps after school and saw Annette Girondin standing beside her car at the curb. Had something happened to his uncle? Had someone—maybe some guy who knew his uncle when he was a cop—attacked him in lockup? Or had the cops finally come up with something that would nail him good?

“What’s wrong?” he said.

“The police are going after a DNA warrant for you,” she said. “It’s in relation to the murder of Jeffrey Eccles.”

Dooley stared at her. He couldn’t tell from her face whether or not she thought he might have had anything to do with that.

But wait a minute. They’d already taken a sample from his uncle for DNA after they’d found Lorraine’s blood in his car. So if they were coming after Dooley now, then they must have ruled his uncle out on Jeffie’s murder—right? He asked Annette.

“I don’t know. They don’t share those things with me,” she said. She handed him a business card. “A colleague of mind has agreed to represent you. Call him before you talk to the police, Ryan. It’s what your uncle wants.”

Dooley glanced at the card.

“Okay,” he said. He tucked it into his pocket.

“I mean it, Ryan.” What she was really saying was, his uncle meant it.

“Tell him I said okay.”

The cops had ruled out his uncle as Jeffrey’s killer.

They had ruled out his uncle, but not Dooley.

He checked his watch.

He had some time to kill before he had to be at work.

Jeffie had told him that the downtown guy who was going to save his ass worked in one of the big towers. Teresa had said Jeffie had been inside the gold building. Dooley caught a bus and headed downtown to check it out. In the late afternoon this time of year, when the sun was sinking in the sky, it lit up the whole tower so that it looked like it was made of solid gold. Dooley wondered if the people looking out from behind all the glass saw the whole city in a tint of gold instead of in the dull gray it really was.

The building was so big that it had entrances on all four sides, which meant on four different streets. But the street address was the same, no matter which side of the building you were on. Inside there were information desks in two corners diagonally across from each other and banks of elevators in between. Some elevators only ran halfway up. Others didn’t stop until they had reached the upper floors. Altogether, there were sixty-eight floors. Sixty-eight floors that could hold, who knows, thousands of people.

He strolled around the main floor until he found a building directory. There were dozens of companies on it, some of them occupying more than one floor as far as Dooley could tell. He skimmed the list. His heart slammed to a stop when he came to a company name he recognized.

Jesus.

He glanced around, looking for a pay phone and seeing an information desk instead. He headed for it and asked a surly-looking security guard for the phone number for Integra Financial Services. He repeated the number over and over until he was far enough away that the security guard wouldn’t hear. Then he punched in the number and asked to speak to Larry Quayle, his uncle’s financial advisor.

“It’s Ryan Dooley,” he said to the woman who asked if she could tell Mr. Quayle who was calling.

“Ryan, this is Larry Quayle,” a briskly warm voice said. “Your uncle has told me all about you.” Dooley doubted that. “What can I do for you?”

“My uncle came down to see you a couple of weeks ago—on a Tuesday afternoon,” Dooley said. “The thing is, he had my mid-term report with him. He’s been looking for it and he says now he thinks he may have left it in your office.”

“How is your uncle?” Larry Quayle said. Dooley wasn’t sure, but he got the impression that Larry knew his uncle was locked up.

“He’s okay,” Dooley said. “But he said I should try and track down my report.”

“I see he was here a couple of Thursdays ago,” Larry Quayle said.

“And then he came back the following Tuesday.”

“No, I’m afraid not,” Larry Quayle said. “I don’t have that in my appointment book. But, tell you what, I’ll take a look around and see if I can find that report for you.”

Dooley thanked him.

He was positive his uncle had said he was coming down here that Tuesday, the day before Lorraine died. Maybe his uncle hadn’t killed Jeffie—maybe Jeffie’s getting killed had nothing to do with what had happened to Lorraine. Maybe it had to do with the money he owed. But his uncle had lied to him about coming to see Larry Quayle that day. What if he’d arranged to meet Jeffie here so that Jeffie didn’t know where he lived? What if he was Jeffie’s downtown guy?

Monday night in the video store: a good night if the absolute last thing you wanted to do was slap a smile on your face and make nice with customers because, guess what, there were hardly any customers on Monday night. That invariably meant that the time dragged because, of course, Kevin insisted that Dooley do something constructive, which meant straightening up the shelves, putting things back where they belonged instead of where some customer had decided to drop them after he or she—usually he—had changed their mind for maybe the third time. It meant restocking the candy displays and refilling the pop coolers. It meant printing out a list of people whose late returns were about to morph into charges on their credit cards, and then it meant calling those people, which Dooley hated doing and had managed so far to avoid. But Kevin was on his case tonight and had stuck him on the phone before he went on his meal break.

“We can’t always have the fun jobs,” Kevin said. “We have to share the pain.”

Dooley thought about the pain he would like to share with Kevin.

As soon as Kevin left the store, Dooley went to the computer and got on the Internet. He pulled out his wallet and dug out the piece of paper on which he’d written the phone number he found in Lorraine’s self-help book. He went to the 411 site that Linelle had showed him and typed in the phone number—and got a message that said that the number he’d typed in wasn’t a published number. What had Linelle said about that? It meant it was probably a cell phone number. Or an unlisted number. The only way he’d be able to find out who it belonged to was to call it—and he wasn’t ready for that. He had no idea what he would say to whoever answered. He couldn’t come right out and ask, Excuse me, but was my mother in love with you? Besides, what difference would it make now?

Fuck it.

He thought instead about who Jeffie had called that night before he came to the store. Suppose it was his downtown guy, the guy in the gold tower. Suppose it was someone other than Dooley’s uncle …

He typed in the address from the gold building. Up popped a long list of companies, with their phone numbers. Jesus, Jeffie could have called any one of these numbers or none of them at all. But, wait a minute—what had Jeffie said the night he came to the store? The number of his downtown guy was a pizza number. What did that mean? That the guy worked for a pizza company—maybe a pizza company that had its main office downtown? Dooley scanned the list but didn’t see anything like that. He shook his head in disgust. What a waste of time! All Jeffie had said about the guy was that he was downtown and he liked to party. Besides, it was a stretch to think that Jeffie had called any of these numbers. He could have called someone else altogether.

Still, he kept reading down the list.

And came to one of those phone numbers you’d have to be brain-dead to forget, the same three numbers followed by four zeros, the kind of phone number you’d hear on a commercial or in a jingle. An easy-to-remember phone number, like—was it possible?—like the number of a pizza chain. A pizza number—a number that even Jeffie couldn’t forget.

Dooley reached for the phone, punched in the number, and got a recorded message telling him what company he had reached—it was a string of names that sounded like it might be a law firm or something—followed by the numbers he could punch to get their mailing and shipping addresses, the number he could punch to get the staff directory, the number he could punch to talk to an operator, and, if he knew the four-digit extension of the person he was trying to reach, he could enter that at any time. Dooley punched three to get to the staff directory, which turned out to be alphabetical. He’d listened to nearly twenty names before he got out of the A’s and B’s and into the C’s. The company was huge. There must be hundreds of people working there. You either had to know who you wanted to talk to or you had to have an extension number.

He hung up the phone and stared at the computer screen and at the number you’d have to be a moron not to remember. After a few moments, he picked up the phone again and dialed Teresa’s number.

“Did you clean out all of Jeffie’s stuff yet?” he said.

“I was going to do it today,” she said. “But I couldn’t get started, you know?”

It sounded like she’d been crying again.

“Jeffie had a piece of paper in the top drawer of his dresser,” Dooley said. “It looks like it was ripped out of a newspaper. It has four numbers written on it. Can you do me a favor, Teresa? Go and get it and read me the numbers.”

“Okay.” She didn’t ask how he knew what was in the top drawer of Jeffie’s dresser. Dooley heard her put the phone down. He heard a shuffling sound, like she was walking across a bare floor in slippers. He heard a drawer being pulled out. Then more shuffling. “Four-two-eight-one,” she said. “What do they mean, Dooley?”

“I’m not sure yet, Teresa,” he said. “When I find out, I’ll let you know.”

He ended the call and dialed the number on the screen again. This time when he got the automated voice system, he pressed four, two, eight, one.

“Hi. You’ve reached the voice mail for Ronald D. Malone,” a voice said. “I’m sorry I can’t take your call right now, but if you leave a detailed message after the beep, I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”

Dooley hung up the phone.

The electronic buzzer over the door went off and Kevin came back into the store. He smiled when he saw Dooley put the phone down.

“See?” he said. “It’s not so bad, is it?”

Twenty minutes later, Dooley’s cell phone rang. He checked the readout. It was Beth’s home phone number.

“I’m taking my break now,” Dooley said. He ducked out from behind the counter and answered his phone on the way to the door.

“I missed you,” Beth said. “I wish you weren’t working tonight.”

“Me, too,” Dooley said. “When can I see you? After school tomorrow?”

“I have a debate. Don’t worry, it’s with another girls’ school,” she said. “Meet me in front of the library after supper. Seven o’clock.”

“I’ll be there,” he said.

Dooley stopped at a phone booth on his way home. He dug a slip of paper out of his wallet and stared at the phone number he had written on it. If Lorraine had written this number in her book, she’d done it sometime in the past six or seven months. She’d drawn a heart around it, too, and Gloria Thomas had said she’d had the impression that Lorraine was cleaning up her act for a man. Dooley told himself that he didn’t care, that he didn’t want to know. She was dead, and his uncle had been arrested for killing her. What difference did it make who she’d been seeing?

Except that it did. It mattered.

What if whoever she’d been cleaning up for was serious about her? What if he’d seen a Lorraine that Dooley himself had never seen? What if she really had been turning her life around? What if—?

He punched in the number. He had nothing to lose. Whoever was on the other end wouldn’t be able to trace him. He didn’t even have to say anything if he didn’t want to. He could just listen, see what the guy sounded like. He could maybe get his name, look into him a little before he decided whether or not he wanted to take it any further.

The phone rang once. Twice. Three times. Then it kicked into voice mail.

Dooley listened to the voice mail message—no name, just Hi, sorry I missed your call, leave a message and I’ll be sure to get right back to you. Linelle was right about cell phones. You couldn’t tell who you were calling or even where you were calling. He didn’t leave a message.

He didn’t sleep that night. Couldn’t. There was too much noise in his head, too much stuff going on. His uncle who wasn’t really his uncle was in a cell somewhere, charged with killing Lorraine. His upright, uptight uncle, who had lied to him from the get-go. He’d known about Dooley the whole time. He’d known and yet he had never come around, not once. Why was that? Was it because he hated Lorraine for all the grief she had caused, or was there some other reason, like Randall seemed to think? He’d been paying her, too. A thousand a month, for a couple of years now. What was that all about?

Lorraine.

She was dead, and for the first time ever Dooley felt some regret with regard to her. Maybe it was because he was older. Maybe it was because he was straight. Maybe it was all that bullshit therapy that they made him sit through. But he felt—too late—that maybe he had a sliver of insight into her, not that it was going to do him any good. It was too late for that.

Because someone had killed her.

And then there was Jeffie. Also dead. After being tortured. Why? By whom?

He knew what the cops were thinking: Dooley’s uncle knew Jeffie. Jeffie had drug connections. Dooley’s uncle could have got the drugs from Jeffie that had ended up in Lorraine’s arm. Dooley had even managed to develop his own theory on how that could have happened. Maybe his uncle had run into Jeffie down there while he was on his way to or from a meeting with Larry Quayle and Jeffie was contacting his pizza-number guy. Maybe his uncle had arranged to meet Jeffie there again that time he was supposed to have been at Larry Quayle’s office but wasn’t. Yeah. And he could see Jeffie assuming that this cop from his past worked there now, maybe in security. Theory: Dooley’s uncle had bought drugs from Jeffie and then had offed him to get rid of any loose ends.

But then why did they want to test Dooley for DNA? That must mean that they’d eliminated his uncle as Jeffie’s killer.

Or had they?

What if they’d found two specimens—his uncle’s and someone else’s? He thought about all the questions Randall had asked him. What if they thought that Dooley had been in on it with his uncle?

Dooley shook his head. That couldn’t be right. Even assuming he could imagine his uncle killing Jeffie—or anyone else, for that matter—he couldn’t imagine him doing it with someone else. Why take the risk?

Jesus, listen to yourself, Dooley.

Someone killed Jeffie.

Maybe the guys he owed money to.

Or … What about those pictures?

The non-existent pictures—the ones Jeffie said he wished he’d taken.

Think, Dooley.

Jeffie had said he’d seen his downtown guy out behind Jay-Zee’s. He’d said the guy had been with someone, but he hadn’t said who. He’d said the guy hadn’t seen him. He’d said he wished he’d taken pictures. And he’d been dancing around out there on the sidewalk the whole time he was telling it, jazzed, excited about getting Dooley’s money back and even more—enough to move back down east. This had been on Monday—the day after he’d seen something on TV. According to Teresa, he’d been watching the news. The late news. What on earth had he seen on the late news to make him dance like that?

Dooley had watched the news late that Sunday night. But the only thing he remembered about it was Lorraine’s face and that he’d been glad that Beth wasn’t around to make the connection between that and the woman she’d seen outside Dooley’s school.

Jeannie had also seen Lorraine’s face that night and heard her name. It had reminded her that she felt like strangling Dooley’s uncle.

But what about Jeffie?

Jeffie had seen something, too, something to do with his downtown guy, his guy in the gold building. Jeffie had seen an opportunity. What?

How could a person sleep with all those questions, all those fears, running through his head?

But he did. He must have, because he woke with a jolt. It had been right there the whole time, practically staring him in the face. He spent an hour staring at his ceiling, his heart racing, trying to decide what to do. Finally he got up, pulled out a notebook, and started to write.