Twenty

Dooley was up early the next morning—too early. Offices don’t open until nine o’clock. By nine o’clock, Dooley would be on his way from homeroom to the first class of the day. Either that or he’d get marked late, and Mr. Rektor would be on him about it if he did, ready to make a federal case of it. He thought about asking Jeannie for a late note, but to do that, he’d either have to tell her the truth—which was far too complicated and, anyway, he didn’t want to have to explain all about Jeffie, especially since she’d helped Teresa—or he’d have to lie. Dooley didn’t want to start lying to Jeannie.

He stuffed a thick envelope into his backpack and headed off to school, making one stop on the way at a doughnut shop where he fed two quarters into a pay phone and tried the number in the self-help book again—and ended up again in voice mail.

At five to ten, in the five-minute period between classes, Dooley stepped out onto the playing field behind the school and called the phone number for the company that sounded like a law firm in the gold building downtown. He punched in the four-digit extension number and, shit, found himself in Ronald D. Malone’s voice mail. He tried again. Voice mail again. And again. Still voice mail. Fuck, fuck, fuck. One last time.

“Ron Malone,” said the same rich, smooth voice that was on the voice mail message—a voice that bothered Dooley because there was something familiar about it. “How can I help you?”

Dooley drew in a deep breath.

“Hello?” Ron Malone said.

“Yeah, hi,” Dooley said.

“May I ask who this is?”

“Jeffrey Eccles,” Dooley said.

There was silence on the other end of the phone, just a second or two, but enough that when Ron Malone said, “I’m sorry, but I don’t know any Jeffrey Eccles,” Dooley was pretty sure he was lying.

“Sure you do,” Dooley said. “We did some business.”

“Look, I don’t know who you are or why you’re calling—”

“I can give the pictures to you or I can give them to the police,” Dooley said.

“Pictures?” Ron Malone said, confused or managing to sound that way. “I’m sorry, but I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Jesus, did he or didn’t he? Was Dooley wrong about the ridiculously easy-to-remember phone number? Had Jeffie being doing business with someone else who worked in that building? All those companies with all those offices, Dooley bet there was someone else, maybe two or more people, who worked for different companies in the building and had different phone numbers but the same four-digit extension. He could think of only one way to find out.

“You have sixty seconds,” he said. “You call this number if you want to talk.” He rattled off his cell phone number. “If I don’t hear from you, I call the cops. I’m sure they’ll be interested in what you were doing back behind Jay-Zee’s. I hope you’ve got a good story.” He pressed end and stood there, holding his cell phone, wondering if he had done the right thing.

He counted to ten.

Eleven.

Twelve.

Thirteen.

His cell phone rang. He checked the read-out.

“You know where to find me?” Ron Malone said.

“Yeah. The gold building downtown.”

“There’s a food court under it. Meet me there at noon, in front of the sushi counter. We can talk.”

Dooley bet the food court would be jammed with office workers at noon—probably thousands of them. How would he recognize the guy? But he couldn’t ask—he’d just told him he had pictures. If he had pictures, he should know what Ronald Malone looked like.

“I heard there’s a restaurant at the top of that building where you can get a twenty-five-dollar hamburger. How about we meet up there? I’ll even make the reservations.”

“I think I can handle that,” Ron Malone said. “Noon. Be there.”

Dooley closed his cell phone and headed back inside. Warren was just about to go into math class when Dooley found him.

“I need to talk to you,” he said.

“But the bell—”

“Warren, I need a favor.”

Warren glanced over his shoulder into the math classroom. Dooley saw the math teacher—the same one Dooley had—up at the board. The teacher glanced at Warren before zeroing in on Dooley.

“I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important,” Dooley said. “And there’s no one else I can ask.”

Warren cast a nervous glance into the classroom, but he followed Dooley down the hall to the boys’ bathroom where Dooley scrawled some numbers on a piece of paper and told Warren what he wanted him to do.

“You might get Rektor up your ass for skipping—”

“I’ll tell my mom I had an allergy attack,” Warren said. “I’ll get her to write a note.”

Just like that. Without even asking what it was all about. Dooley didn’t understand Warren, but he sure was glad that he knew him.

Dooley left first, taking the back stairs and cutting across the athletic field to the bus stop.

Dooley squirmed as he rode the elevator up to the top floor of the office tower. People got on and off every other floor or so, and Dooley noticed that none of them was dressed in jeans and sweatshirts. He started to worry about what it would be like at that restaurant with the twenty-five-dollar hamburgers. What if some snooty maitre d’ wouldn’t even let him in? He’d look like a complete idiot.

He got off the elevator on the top floor. The entrance to the restaurant was right there. He crossed to it and approached a man in a black suit who was standing behind a little podium that had a big book open on it with names written in it. The man inspected Dooley’s jacket and sweatshirt and jeans before looking at Dooley. He waited for Dooley to speak.

“I’m meeting Mr. Ron Malone,” Dooley said. “He has a reservation.”

The man in the black suit took another look at Dooley’s jacket and sweatshirt and jeans. Then he raised a hand and flagged a waiter. The man in the black suit told him Malone’s name, and the waiter looked at Dooley’s jacket and sweatshirt and jeans.

“Follow me,” he said.

Dooley followed the waiter past the maitre d’ and across a big room filled with tables and booths and with floor-to-ceiling windows on two sides. The tables weren’t all jammed together like they were in most restaurants Dooley had been in. They were spaced out so that the people who were eating could talk to each other without the people at the neighboring tables hearing everything they said. They had white linen table cloths, and there were delicate little flower arrangements in the middle of each one. The waiter led Dooley toward a booth on the far side of the restaurant. Dooley stopped and stared at its occupant—a man with wavy black hair, generous lips, and piercing blue eyes. He was wearing a charcoal gray suit with a pale blue shirt and dark-blue-patterned tie. His right hand was wrapped around a glass of water, and Dooley could see that he’d had a manicure, either that or he spent more time on his nails than most girls did. He looked up at Dooley and held him with his eyes, his lips curled into the semblance of a smile. It was obvious he was loaded, with money, with confidence, with balls. Jesus, and this was the guy Jeffie had tried to snow?

The waiter had reached the booth and turned to locate Dooley. Dooley continued on to the table. The waiter stood aside so that he could slide onto the upholstered bench across from Malone. He set a menu down in front of Dooley.

“Don’t get too comfortable,” Malone said as the waiter withdrew. He slid out of the booth and motioned for Dooley to do the same. “This way,” he said, indicating a door off the main dining room.

Dooley hesitated.

“You come with me or you walk away,” Malone said.

“Your choice.”

Dooley followed him. The door opened onto a corridor.

“In there,” Malone said.

There was the men’s room.

The place was deserted. Opposite a row of urinals were four stalls. But these were more like little rooms, with walls that went right down to the floor and right up to the ceiling.

“The one at the end,” Malone said.

It was the wheelchair-accessible stall. Malone nudged Dooley inside. He came in with him and shut the door.

“Hey,” Dooley said.

“Strip,” Malone said.

“What?”

“You called me and said you were Jeffrey Eccles,” Malone said. “That’s that kid who was found murdered. I read all about it. He was known to the police. It said in the paper he was a drug dealer.”

“You said you didn’t know him. If that’s true, what are we—”

“Don’t give me that shit,” Malone said. “I’m here, aren’t I? But how do I know you’re not a cop? How do I know this isn’t some half-assed cop sting operation?”

“Sting operation?”

“How do I know you’re not trying to set me up?”

“I’m not a cop,” Dooley said.

“Did the cops send you here?”

“No.”

“Prove it,” Malone said. “Strip. No strip, no talk.”

Shit.

Dooley pulled off his jacket. He yanked his T-shirt and sweatshirt up over his head.

“Okay?” he said.

“The rest of it,” Malone said.

Dooley pulled off his boots. He unbuckled his belt and then hesitated.

“Go on,” Malone said. It seemed to Dooley that he was enjoying himself.

Dooley kept his eyes on Malone’s as he unzipped his jeans and lowered them. Malone went through Dooley’s pockets, paying special attention to Dooley’s cell phone. He seemed to know what he was looking for and he obviously didn’t find it because he handed the phone back to Dooley, who stuffed it into his jeans pocket. Finally Malone said, “Let’s have lunch.”

He leaned against the door of the stall and watched as Dooley got dressed again. He didn’t even check before he opened the door and strode out. Thank God there was no one else in the room.

Dooley followed Malone back to the booth.

Malone slid into his seat. Dooley saw that a drink had arrived for him while they were in the men’s room. It looked like scotch. A double. Malone took a sip.

“So,” he said, caressing the glass, “why am I talking to you? What do you want?”

Dooley looked at the amber liquid in Malone’s glass. He wished he had a drink, too, to take the edge off.

“I want what Jeffie wanted,” he said.

Malone looked evenly at him for a moment. Dooley wondered what kind of business he was in. A cold one, he decided, something to do with money and all the crap you had to do to make a lot of it.

“I believe you said something about pictures,” Malone said.

Dooley nodded.

“Do you have them with you?”

“First we make a deal,” Dooley said. “Then you get the pictures.”

“In other words, you don’t have them with you.” Malone smiled at Dooley. “There are no pictures.” He said it smoothly, as if there was no question about it.

“Yeah, there are,” Dooley said. “Jeffie told me he saw you back behind Jay-Zee’s. He took pictures.”

“Jeffrey was mistaken about seeing me,” Malone said. “And since he was mistaken, there are no pictures. He admitted as much to me.”

He came across like a smart guy, but there was just one thing.

“If you weren’t there like Jeffie said you were, and if there are no pictures, why did you agree to meet me?”

Malone picked up his glass, swirled the liquid around in it, and took another sip.

“I was curious. I knew Jeffrey slightly. I think you know how. He knew that I have money. He knew I liked to enjoy myself. Instead of being discreet as someone in his business should be, he tried to take advantage of me. He tried to blackmail me, if you can believe it. Then I read in the paper that he died.”

“He was murdered,” Dooley said.

“And the next thing I know, you pop out of the woodwork. I wanted to see what you would do, how you would play it. I wondered what kind of person imagined he could squeeze money out of me with such a ridiculous bluff.”

Yeah, confidence and balls.

“Well, I guess now you know, huh?” Dooley said.

“You’re wasting my time,” Malone said.

“I sure don’t want to do that. So maybe I should be a good citizen and go have a talk with the police.”

Malone laughed.

“You think that’s funny?” Dooley said.

“Forgive me, but you don’t seem the type to go running to the police.”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t used to be. But now I try to do the right thing.”

“Like blackmailing me.”

“Like telling the cops that right before he died, Jeffie went to see you—to try and blackmail you, just like you said.”

“He was bluffing. He was an idiot.”

“He was murdered. And I think he was murdered because he tried to blackmail you. Okay, so maybe he didn’t have pictures. But he did see you behind Jay-Zee’s. He saw who you were with.”

“You think I killed Jeffrey?

“You have an alibi for when he was murdered?”

Dooley didn’t like the way Malone kept smiling at him.

Was he wrong about this guy?

“What possible motive would I have for killing Jeffrey Eccles? As I’ve already said, he was mistaken about what he thought he saw.”

“Was he?” Dooley said. “So it won’t matter to you if I tell the police what Jeffie told me? You’re that sure no one else saw you that night, no one else saw who you were with? You’re sure no one saw your car? You’re sure that if the police start looking into it, they’re not going to find anything? Because one thing I’ve learned about cops, they’re not as dumb as some people think they are. You want to take that risk? Your alibi for that night is solid?”

A cell phone trilled—not Dooley’s.

Malone dipped into his jacket pocket.

“If you’ll excuse me,” he said.

Dooley snuck a peek at his watch. Right on time.

“Pizza?” Malone was saying, annoyed now. “You have the wrong number.” A pause. Then louder, pissed now, his sharp eyes even sharper, like knives, so that it wasn’t hard to see him pressing a lit cigarette into warm flesh: “What are you—deaf? I just told you. You have the wrong number.” Dooley felt his belly clench as he watched Malone flip the phone shut and drop it back into his pocket. He wished it was his hand wrapped around that glass instead of Malone’s. He wished he could raise that glass and smash it right across Malone’s face.

Malone turned his attention back to Dooley. “What is it that you want? Money?” He nodded as if, of course, it was. “It’s always about money, isn’t it?”

“You know what they say,” Dooley said. “You do the crime, you have to pay—one way or another.”

Malone seemed to like that. He raised his glass in a salute to Dooley, swallowed the rest of the scotch, and then he held the glass up, a signal for the waiter to bring him another one. “How much do you want?” he said.

“Twice what Jeffie asked for.”

“Twice?”

“Twice the crime, twice the price,” Dooley said.

“Twice the crime?” Malone said, amused. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but no one has established that I committed any crime at all.”

“That’s the point, right?” Dooley said. “You don’t want anyone to establish that.”

The waiter brought a fresh drink for Malone and took away the empty glass.

“You’re wasting your time and mine,” Malone said, swirling the ice in the amber liquid. “I’m not paying you anything. I have no reason to.” He leaned back in his chair, manicured, polished, smug.

“Even if you ditch that phone,” Dooley said, “there’s going to be a record somewhere of the number and the fact that it belonged to you. You can count on that. They’re going to find out that you knew her.”

“Knew who?” Malone said.

“Lorraine,” Dooley said.

“Lorraine?”

Dooley had to hand it to Malone; the guy gave away nothing. It was as if the name meant nothing to him.

“Lorraine McCormack. She had your cell phone number.”

Malone smiled. “A lot of people have my number.”

“And Lorraine was one of them. And someone killed her, in case you missed that on the news.”

Still nothing.

“That phone call you just got,” Dooley said. “That was a friend of mine. I gave him your number. Lorraine had it written in a book—she drew a little heart around it.”

Malone laughed. “So?”

“She was cleaning herself up,” Dooley said. “She was getting her life together. I talked to her sponsor, you know, from the meetings she used to go to. She said she thought Lorraine was doing it for a guy. She was doing it for you, right?”

“I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

“Cut the crap,” Dooley said, louder than he had intended, loud enough that a couple of suits at the next table turned in his direction. “Jeffie saw you with her.” Sunday night on the late news, for the first time in his life, Jeffie had set eyes on Lorraine. He didn’t know she was Dooley’s mother. But he did know that he’d seen her before, back behind Jay-Zee’s with his downtown guy who worked in the gold office building. “That’s what this is all about—Lorraine.”

Malone glanced around. Maybe to the people at the tables around them he looked calm, unruffled. But Dooley saw the tightness around his mouth when he smiled.

“You said there were no pictures,” Dooley said. “But you’re wrong. There’s one. You give me a hard time, you try to bullshit me, you don’t tell me what I want to know, and I’ll take my story and that picture to the cops and they’ll be all over you, making their case and making your life miserable while they do. I can guarantee it.”

“What picture?” Malone said.

“A picture of you and her”—he was going to say, and me, but he couldn’t make his mouth form the words. “From sixteen or seventeen years ago.” He waited to see if Malone would make the connection. If he did, he didn’t show it. “You knew her. You dumped her. And she was trying to get her act together again so she could be with you. Am I right?”

Malone said nothing.

“Am I right?” Dooley said, raising his voice again. This time more people turned to looked at him. “You answer my questions or I walk—now.”

Malone took a sip of scotch.

“I heard what happened to her,” he said finally. He kept his voice low, soft, like a man trying to soothe a vicious dog before it decided to take a bite out of him. “And I’m sorry. Okay, yes, she contacted me. And, yes, I agreed to see her. But a lot of water had passed under the bridge. We were together for a few months, but that was a long time ago, and her life …” He shook his head.

“Did you love her?”

“What?”

“Did you love her?”

“Is that important?”

Dooley surprised himself when he said, “It is to me.”

Malone contemplated his glass of scotch for a moment. “She was a fun girl but, no, I didn’t love her.”

“She loved you.”

“So she said. She was pretty intense, you know what I mean?”

He was talking to Dooley now like he knew for a fact that Dooley had known her, that she wasn’t just some woman he had seen once, like Jeffie had. Dooley wondered if Lorraine had talked about him.

“My situation wasn’t like hers,” Malone said. “I took a year off school, had some fun, but then I had to get on with life.”

“So you just split?” Dooley said, wondering if Malone would mention that there had been a child.

“Something like that.”

“Then what?”

Malone shrugged. “Then nothing—much. A few teary phone calls at the beginning. A few idle threats—”

“Threats?”

“She was going to hurt herself—or so she said.”

She’d managed that just fine.

“After that?”

“Nothing.”

“Until maybe six or seven months ago, right?” Dooley said.

Malone didn’t answer.

“Right?” Dooley said, raising his voice again.

“More like nine months ago,” Malone said. “We ran into each other. She made a fool of herself. I thought that was it. Then, somehow, she found out where my office was, and she called me. She showed up at my house, for Pete’s sake.”

“So you killed her?”

“No.”

“What was she doing with you behind Jay-Zee’s?”

“I told you,” Malone said, working now to stay smooth, but not doing well with it. Dooley was getting under his skin. “Jeffrey was mistaken. Lorraine had a substance abuse problem. She never did know when to stop. People like that are prone to overdose.”

“She used to cry about you.”

“I can’t help that.”

“She cleaned herself up for you.”

“I never asked her to. I never asked her to do anything for me.”

“It wasn’t right the way she died,” Dooley said. “It took the cops almost a whole day to even find out who she was.”

“That doesn’t surprise me,” Malone said. “The way she lived—that’s what it’s like down there. There are people who see a body lying half-naked behind a dumpster and what do they do? Do they call the police, like any normal person would do? No, they take her money, her wallet, any pills they find that they think they can sell. That’s the kind of people she hung around with.”

Dooley studied Malone while he thought about what he had just said.

“You know who I am, right?” he said.

“Some scumbag friend of Jeffrey Eccles,” Malone said.

Right.

“Did she put up a fight?” he said.

Malone stared evenly at him.

“They said there were bruises on her arms. Did she put up a fight?”

Nothing.

“I bet Jeffie did, though,” Dooley said.

“Look, you came to me for money—I’m sure we can come to some kind of agreement. You give me that picture of Lorraine and me. You forget she had my phone number. We can work it out. What do you say we get together tomorrow, somewhere a little more private, where we can do the exchange?”

“Now you want to pay me off, even though you weren’t behind Jay-Zee’s that night and you have nothing to do with what happened to her?”

“My clients pay me well for my advice—for my reputation. It’s worth it to me to keep the police out of my life.”

“So you want to meet me and pay me and maybe do me like you did Jeffie?” Dooley shook his head. He started to get up.

“Be reasonable,” Malone said, soothing, very soothing. “You give me something I want, I give you something you want.”

“What does the D stand for?” he said.

“What?”

“The D—Ronald D. Malone. What does it stand for?”

Malone’s lips stretched into a smirk.

“David,” he said.

David. Not Dooley.

“She fed you a line, huh?” Malone said.

Apparently she had, not that Dooley minded, not now that he’d met the guy.

He glanced around and was surprised to see Randall coming past the maitre d’ so soon. He hadn’t been sure whether Warren would be able to get hold of him. But he had. Myers was right behind him. A couple of uniformed police officers followed. Forks and glasses paused in midair as people turned to watch them march through the dining room and stand at the opening to the booth where Dooley was sitting.

“Jeffie fought back,” Dooley said. “They have blood. They’re going to go for DNA.”

Malone sat where he was, but he wasn’t smiling anymore.

“Ronald Malone,” Detective Randall said. “We’d like to talk to you about Lorraine McCormack and Jeffrey Eccles.”

Dooley called Beth and told her he couldn’t meet her at seven o’clock after all because the police needed him to make a formal statement. He said it would help to get his uncle released.

“They found the person who did it?” Beth said.

“Yeah,” Dooley said. He knew he would eventually have to tell her who that person was. But when he did, it would be in person, not over the phone. “I’ll call you, okay?”

“Sure,” she said. “Tell your uncle I said hi.” There was a pause. “That sounds kind of lame, doesn’t it?”

“I’ll tell him you were asking about him. He’ll like that.”

Dooley’s uncle got out the next afternoon. The first thing he wanted to do was go home, take a shower, and put on some clean clothes. The next thing he wanted to do was cook what he called a decent meal. He wouldn’t let Jeannie or Dooley do a thing. He poured some wine for Jeannie and a Coke for Dooley and sat them down at the kitchen table. They could watch—in fact, he seemed to want them there, although he didn’t come right out and say so. He didn’t say anything about what had happened, either. He just cooked and drank wine and smiled at Jeannie, and then they all ate together. Dooley left them both in the living room while he cleaned up the kitchen. But his uncle didn’t stay there. He came into the kitchen and put on an apron to help Dooley.

“It’s okay,” Dooley said. “You stay with Jeannie.”

“Jeannie’s okay on her own for a little while,” his uncle said. He rinsed a couple of plates and put them in the dishwasher. He said, “Your friend Jeffrey could have saved everyone a lot of grief if he’d just come out and told you he saw Lorraine.”

“He didn’t know I knew her,” Dooley said. “He never met her.”

His uncle digested this. He rinsed some cutlery and put that in the dishwasher.

“About the money,” he said.

Dooley had the tap running, filling the sink with hot water so he could tackle the pots and the broiler pan. He turned it off and looked at his uncle.

“I wanted you to have a chance,” his uncle said. “The first time I went to see you, you were so messed up, you were practically climbing the walls. You remember that? And what you did—you were fifteen years old. When I was a kid, fifteen-year-old boys were out playing hockey or softball. They weren’t doing what you were doing. Getting locked up was probably the best thing that ever happened to you.”

Dooley wasn’t sure he’d go that far.

“I wanted her to stay away from you, that’s all,” his uncle said. “She’d made a mess of her life and yours. I didn’t want her to make things worse, not when it looked like you might have a chance. Maybe I shouldn’t tell you this. Maybe you don’t want to hear it. But she was willing, Ryan. I didn’t exactly have to twist her arm to get her to take the money and stay the hell away from you.”

“She knew,” Dooley said. He had been chewing it over ever since he’d visited the cemetery. “You said they never told her about your sister, but she knew. I figure she found out when she was thirteen or fourteen.” Dooley explained about the picture he had found. “Did you tell her?”

“No.”

“You think maybe your parents did?”

“If they did, they never told me.” He looked hard at Dooley. “I have something for you, Ryan,” he said at last.

Dooley waited.

“It will have to wait until tomorrow, when the bank opens,” his uncle said.