The interior of McGuire’s skull was a vacuum, a dark empty place where nothing moved and only pain resided. In the morning Ronnie brought fruit salad and tea, and at noon some soup. He was nauseated and dizzy the rest of the day but by evening he felt something settling within him like a precipitate, heavy drifts accumulating in static waves, flake by flake, and he recognized it as strength.
He remembered Green Turtle Cay, his helplessness during the beating he suffered.
He thought about the final night he’d spent with Patty, how she cried in fear of her husband and pleaded with McGuire to take her away, she would go anywhere with him, anywhere at all. McGuire refused, he never wanted to leave the Cay and, besides, Patty was just another in a long string of women, one who drank too much. He couldn’t believe her husband was an animal who would try to kill McGuire the following evening and succeed in murdering his wife two weeks later.
For months he had thought of revenge.
When he was finished with the pills, he would tell himself. When I no longer need the pills I will find him and I will find those two men and I will correct what they did to me and to Patty.
Meaning what? he asked himself now. Meaning you will visit a city you don’t know and move among people you don’t know to break the bones of men who would prefer to see you dead?
He remembered an Arab proverb: Choose your enemies carefully for they are the people you will most resemble.
I’m sorry, Patty, he said silently. I’m very sorry, but I don’t think I’m capable of it. Of what I promised I would do.
As if she gives a damn now, he added.
Through the rest of the day he slept more soundly than he had in months, and when he awakened the following morning he showered and dressed himself in the worn corduroy trousers, button-down oxford shirt and crewneck sweater Ronnie had laid out for him. He walked unsteadily downstairs, following the aromatic trail of brewed coffee to the kitchen table where Ronnie looked up from her newspaper, rose to embrace him, then held his head in two hands and looked into his eyes.
“Welcome back,” she said, and McGuire nodded.
Fat Eddie had converted the third-floor squad room to a Task Force Center in which teams of detectives could assemble in their quest for the killer of Detective Tim Fox, centralizing everything. Centralizing things was a major part of Fat Eddie’s organizational strength. Extra telephone lines were installed, computers and desks were grouped together, and the room became a hive of round-the-clock activity.
It didn’t help efficiency much. The cops bitched about the noise and the crowding, but mostly they grumbled about Fat Eddie bringing TV crews and reporters up on the elevator and walking them to the open door, showing how he had organized things, impressing everybody with his management style, his battlefield tactics.
“There is nothing more heinous to a proud police department than the murder of a fellow officer,” Fat Eddie would say, like he was saying now, standing in the doorway ten feet from Donovan’s desk. An anchorwoman from one of the stations was holding a microphone in front of Fat Eddie, capturing every word, while some bearded grease ball aimed a camera into the room, panning it left past Orwin and toward Donovan. “As you can see, we have mobilized an entire task force of our leading investigative staff, dedicated to bringing the killer or killers to justice—”
The phone on Donovan’s desk chirped and the camera quickened its move toward him, the cameraman zooming in on what could be a break in the case.
“Thank you, Captain Vance,” the anchorwoman interrupted. “It looks like you may be getting another lead from a concerned public now.” She had straight shoulder-length hair and nice eyes. Donovan smiled up at her, knowing the camera was watching him, recording everything. Fat Eddie beamed.
Donovan said his name into the telephone receiver, very casual-like.
“Hi.”
He recognized her smoky voice right away. “What’s up?” he asked, leaning forward and reaching for a pen.
“Probably you,” Billie said. “Son of a gun, how do you stay hard so long?”
“Sorry, I can’t discuss details,” Donovan said, keeping a straight face. “But if you care to be more specific . . .”
“Specific?” Billie laughed. “What’s with specific? Is somebody watching you right now?”
“We have total surveillance, yes.” The anchorwoman was biting her lower lip, leaning way into the room with the microphone, picking up every word. The cameraman was squatting, shooting up at Donovan, capturing the tough big city cop taking another important lead in the case, the cameraman making him look like a hero warrior, thinking this’ll be the lead on the evening news for sure.
“Yeah, I know about surveillance,” Billie said, falling in with the joke. “I was watching you this morning, propped up there against the headboard, working away. Can you get over here tonight lickety-split, so to speak?”
“We’ll follow that up,” Donovan said. He was getting hard, thinking about it. “Would you repeat the address please?”
“Sure. How about eight inches south of my navel?”
“I know the location,” Donovan said. “We had a man in that vicinity all night long,” and Billie laughed so loud he pressed the receiver tighter against his ear in case somebody could hear.
“Listen, I called my mother a couple of minutes ago,” she said. “She always asks me if I’ve met any new men, meaning am I ever gonna get married, okay? So I say yes and out of the blue she says, ‘Is he religious?’ ’cause she’s tired of hearing me talk about the lowlife I meet. What she means is, is the guy respectable enough she can tell everybody about him, see?”
“Yes, that’s important to know,” Donovan said. The cameraman’s doing a duck walk toward him, camera hoisted on his shoulder, shooting up to fill the screen with Donovan’s face, bringing the talent and intensity of your police department right into the comfort of your living room, Boston. The anchorwoman is creeping behind him, whispering into the microphone to set the scene.
“So I say to her,” Billie is saying, “Yeah, he’s religious, Ma. He yells ‘Jesus!’ just before he comes,” and Donovan can’t help it, he snorts into the receiver and turns his head from the camera, his shoulders shaking with laughter while the cameraman and anchorwoman raise their eyebrows at each other and Fat Eddie glares from the open doorway.
“Haven’t got a thing.”
Ollie Schantz looked back at McGuire from his bed, his body raised to a half-sitting, half-reclining position. McGuire sat next to him, scanning the morning newspaper, catching up on his life.
“Talked to Stu Cauley yesterday,” Ollie went on. “Stu calls me couple a times a week. All they know is Timmy got it with a thirty-eight. It was either one hell of a lucky shot or one damn good one, depending on your point of view.”
McGuire nodded and set the newspaper aside. “Where was everybody?” he asked.
“Everybody?”
“Donovan. Peterson, the victim’s ex-husband—”
“Donovan? The cop? The hell’s he got to do with this?”
“You think somebody meant to shoot Timmy?”
Ollie blinked twice. “I know where you’re coming from,” he said. “Been thinking the same thing since I heard about it. Either they meant it for Timmy or they meant it for you.”
“Different motives, different perps.”
“Yeah, but Donovan? He’s got porridge for brains but hell, Joseph . . .”
“Think about it, Ollie. Either somebody’s waiting for me to show up or they’re surprised in the act of doing something. Because nobody knew Timmy was going over to my place.”
“One shot, Joe.”
“Which tells us what?”
“Either it’s all he needed . . .”
“Or he shoots in panic, surprise maybe, then sees who he’s got and gets the hell out of there.”
“You gonna do anything about it?”
“About what?”
Ollie’s right hand moved in a spastic, dismissive gesture and his voice became an angry bear’s bellow. “About some human shithouse killing one of your buddies on your own goddamn doorstep! You gonna leave it to Fat Eddie and those toe-suckers they got left over on Berkeley Street to screw everything up?”
“Like hell,” McGuire said quietly.
“The I.A. guy, what’s his name?”
“Zelinka.”
“That’s him. Been calling here couple times a day, wanting to know how you are. Had some surveillance teams cruising by too, nothin’ serious, just checkin’ up on your ass. Oh yeah, Danny Scrignoli and your ex-wife’ve been calling. Hell’s bells, Joseph, you’re gettin’ as popular as a bottle of bleach at a Klan convention.”
“How’s Micki?” McGuire asked.
“She could use a little pat on her head from you. Like everybody else, she can’t believe what happened to Timmy. Hell of a thing.”
“What do I owe her, Ollie?”
Ollie Schantz knew what McGuire meant. Ollie had been there when McGuire discovered Micki’s betrayals and from that day forward, Ollie and Ronnie became more protective of him, aware of something fragile within McGuire that he had managed to conceal through all of his adult life. “You spent six years with the woman,” Ollie said. “I remember, every time you looked at her, you got an expression on your face like a ten-year-old kid on a new bicycle. What you owe her’s got nothin’ to do with it. It’s what you feel about her that counts.”
McGuire looked away, annoyed. “What did Zelinka and Scrignoli want?” he asked, still avoiding Ollie’s eyes.
“Dan’s lookin’ out for the good of your health, far as I can tell. Zelinka, I figure, may be needin’ some freelance help.”
McGuire frowned back at his former partner.
“Something’s going down over on Berkeley,” Ollie said. “Fat Eddie’s spinning his wheels so fast he’s got smoke coming out his ass. Does interview sessions all day long on Timmy’s murder, talking about theories and suspects and the like. Truth is, he hasn’t got two ideas to rub together and everybody knows it. Zelinka’s the one who’ll put this all together but he has to move slowly, there’re trip wires all over the place.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Your sister-in-law. Used to be anyway. The dead one?”
“Heather.”
“Yeah, her. The word is, she might have been dealing poon-tang to a cop. She said she was scared of somebody heavy, and the rumour’s there.”
“Sure as hell wasn’t me.”
“Some people think it could be. Think she gave you reason to lay some tattoos on her with a baseball bat. Hell, you gave them reason enough, Joseph. It’s your voice on the tape.”
“That was . . .”
“What?”
McGuire shook his head slowly. “She made me some kind of business offer. Wanted me to hold some money for her. Said her ex-husband was going to do it but she didn’t trust him.”
“What made her trust you?”
“She had something else.” McGuire rubbed his temples with his fingertips. “It comes back in little bits, the memory . . .”
“Maybe you better try harder to remember. Anyway, Zelinka and Scrignoli, they’re buying the idea it’s not you she was talking about. Fat Eddie, bunch of others’re working on the theory that it was you somehow.”
“Hell of a waste of effort, two separate investigations going on.”
“If both were horses coming down the stretch, which one’d have your money on it?”
“You mean you think I should help Zelinka?”
“Might as well. Hang around this place too long, Ronnie’ll have you baking muffins and changing my diapers.”
Within the next half hour the telephone rang three times and all three callers wanted to speak to McGuire.
“Hear you went clean,” Dan Scrignoli said. “Hear you cold turkey’d it.”
“I think so,” McGuire said. He was sitting at the kitchen table. Ronnie Schantz placed a plate of hermit cookies in front of him and he began to nibble one cautiously.
“Jesus, you’re one helluva piece of work, McGuire.” Scrignoli dropped his voice. “You know what’s going on down here? You hear about Timmy, what they’re looking for?”
“I heard.”
“Who told you?”
“Zelinka. He’s been talking to Ollie. Thinks I should help out, unofficially.”
A long pause. Then: “You gonna?”
“It’ll keep me off the streets.”
“Let’s get together, pool what we know.”
“I better talk to Zelinka first.”
“Okay, but we have to deal with this Heather Lorenzo thing. I’ll bring you up to speed on it, see where we go from here. Pick you up at Ollie’s in an hour.”
McGuire was working on his second hermit cookie, urging his stomach to quietude as he swallowed, when Zelinka called.
“We should talk.” The Hungarian’s voice was deep and gruff.
“About what?” McGuire asked.
“About trouble. Yours, mine, Captain Vance’s, everybody’s trouble.”
“You want me to help,” McGuire said. A flat statement.
“I want help from anybody at all. You’re nobody special. You’re just somebody who can assist me. Besides, I think I can trust you.”
“I don’t have to get involved.”
“In what? In these two murders? You’re right, McGuire. You don’t have to become involved. Just as I don’t have to become involved in preventing the prosecuting attorney from issuing a warrant for your arrest as a material witness in two homicides, including one of a highly regarded police detective. Who left a grieving widow and an orphaned young daughter.”
“Timmy was a good guy.”
“Here’s your chance to be one too. And stay out of Nashua Street.”
“You don’t believe I had anything to do with any of that shit,” McGuire said.
“No, and I don’t believe my eight-year-old boy will grow old and feeble and senile some day either because I will not be here to see it. But let us deal with reality, McGuire. Reality is, like it or not, that you are involved in these matters. You may try to avoid them, of course. But you cannot avoid the fact of your involvement.”
McGuire sat upright in the chair. “Why’re you handling this thing on your own? You’re I.A. What’s this got to do with you?”
He heard a long exhalation into the telephone before the Hungarian said, in a tired voice, “That is one of the things I want to talk to you about.”
McGuire arranged to meet Zelinka at an office in the old courthouse near Government Center at two o’clock. He had just left the kitchen on his way to visit Ollie’s room when the telephone rang a third time. Ronnie called him back to the table, holding the receiver in her hand and averting her eyes from his.
It was Micki.
“I’ve called every day,” she said. “Ronnie told me what you were doing, all on your own. I told her it’s just like you to do that, quit a habit like that on your own. . . .”
“Where are you?” McGuire said.
“At Heather’s. I’ll be staying here another day or so. It’s creepy but I couldn’t stand the tourist home anymore. The guy who runs it kept coming up to visit me in my room. And I didn’t feel like going back to Florida. Not yet, anyway.” Her voice began to crack. “My God, wasn’t that terrible about Tim Fox? I couldn’t believe it . . . and some people are saying it was you, that you did it.”
“You’re really staying at Heather’s? Must be tough.”
“You mean do I get the shivers?” She gave a short laugh, a release. “Yeah, a bit, I guess. But she’s got so many locks on the door plus the security system. And the guy who owns the art gallery downstairs, I’m pretty sure he’s gay but he’s really nice and comes up to see me now and then.”
Heather’s locks, McGuire reminded himself. Lots of security and none of it damaged. “Do you want to meet some place?” he asked. “Drinks maybe? Dinner, I don’t know . . .”
“That’d be great,” she said. “Dinner would be terrific. Any place special?”
“You choose it,” McGuire said. “I’ll meet you there, at Heather’s apartment. About six, something like that.” Then he added, “I, uh, I don’t have a lot of money . . .”
“Good,” she said. “Then you’ll let me pay for a change.”
The day was bright and unnaturally warm for November. The sun shone through bare branches of trees flanking the Paul Revere Mall behind the Old North Church, casting filigree shadows onto the brickwork forming the plaza. Italian mothers crossed the Mall pushing baby carriages with one hand and using the other hand to cling to a toddler or gesture at an elderly woman walking with her, the older women all wearing black skirts, sweaters, heavy stockings and bandannas, widow’s apparel.
McGuire watched them all, unmoving, unsmiling, feeling shudders race through his body. Take two, three pills, he was thinking. That many will get me through the day. Just taper them off, cut the dosage in half today, in half again tomorrow. . . . Why not? Why the hell not?
In the middle of the Mall, Paul Revere watched McGuire from astride his bronze horse. The animal seemed ready to rear up at some unseen danger in front of it, the sculptor’s unsubtle method of suggesting the horse was as sprightly and ferocious as its rider.
On benches or from their positions near the wall of the church, knots of Italian men watched the women solemnly, nodding their heads and smiling before leaning toward each other again to resume their conversations.
Sitting next to McGuire on the stone bench facing the Revere statue, his legs crossed, Dan Scrignoli licked a lime gelato and watched the scene with approval. In his heavy dark-patterned sweater over gold woollen slacks and brown Clark’s desert boots, he looked more like a Harvard liberal arts professor than a street-wise cop. Flecks of gray in his thick, curly hair were highlighted by the sun and his face creased into a smile as he studied the people in the plaza, commenting on them one by one.
“See the guy over there in the green windbreaker?” he said, leaning toward McGuire and pointing with his gelato cone. “Name’s Poliziani, Mico Poliziani. How tall’s he? Maybe five-one, five-two? Nice harmless old guy, likes to sip espresso, play a little dominoes with the boys. Son of a gun’s a Bronze Star winner, Korean War. Back in 1950 he got left behind when the Chinese attacked and the Eighth Army panicked and retreated. Everybody took off and left the little dago lugging his Browning machine gun. Mico took a hit in the leg and when nobody went back to help him he rolled down into a gully, set up his Browning and started picking off the Chinese. One of our recon planes flew over and saw him there, bodies all around him, and sent a rescue team in to pull him out. He’s wounded three times, nearly out of ammunition, and they counted ten, fifteen dead men all around him, Mico still aiming with the Browning.”
Scrignoli shook his head and bit into his gelato. “They gave other guys Medals of Honour for less than that and what’s old Mico get? A Bronze Star. You know why?” He looked at McGuire. “You wanna know why?”
“Because he didn’t have blue eyes and his name ends in a vowel,” McGuire said. He leaned back against the bench, his arms stretched across the top, and felt the sun warm and cleanse him. Why not? Just a couple of pills, just for the headache. Why not?
“Damn right,” Scrignoli said, still staring across the mall. “Mico looked like a rat, smelled like a garlic patch and knew maybe thirty, forty words of English. So he gets a Bronze Star from some two-bit colonel and goes back to being a tailor over there on Commercial Street and if it wasn’t for people like the Italian-American Club, the Christopher Columbus Society, all of them, nobody’d know about it. Nobody still knows about it except people here in the North End and everybody thinks we’re all Mafia, Cosa Nostra types, running cribs of whores and pumping dope into the blacks.” He waved the gelato cone in front of his face. “Aw, hell, I get on my soapbox too much now and then. Sorry about that.” He looked at McGuire. “You okay? Can I get you something?”
McGuire turned his head slowly to face Scrignoli. “What happened to Timmy?” he asked.
Scrignoli looked away and stared down at his gelato as though he had never seen it before and had no idea how it had arrived in his hand. “Shit,” he said softly, then turned from McGuire and flung the cone into a concrete trash container. He lowered his head into his hands and stared at the cracked concrete between his feet. “He was a good guy, wasn’t he?”
“Yeah.” McGuire waited for him to continue.
“I don’t know what happened,” Scrignoli said. “Nobody knows what happened.”
“What do you think happened?”
Scrignoli turned his head to look at McGuire. “You got anything in your room somebody might need?” he asked. “Really bad?”
“Like what?”
Scrignoli shrugged. “I don’t know. But maybe that’s what Timmy was there for.”
“Or maybe somebody thought Timmy was me. We’re about the same size.”
“Yeah,” Scrignoli said. “Against the light like that, how could anybody tell who was coming through the door?”
McGuire nodded, lost in thought. Finally, “It’s got something to do with Heather Lorenzo, hasn’t it?” He rubbed his temples, where the roots of the pain were.
“What, Timmy gettin’ it?” Scrignoli sat upright, looking at McGuire. His eyes were wet and he was blinking as he spoke. “You think they’re connected? How the hell’s that work?”
“Timmy was working on it, far as I know. He wasn’t paying me any social call. He had nothing to do with the son of a bitch I worked over the night before, the one killing the girl in my room. Timmy was there to talk to me. And all he had to talk to me about was Heather’s murder.”
“What’d he want?” Scrignoli asked in a near-whisper.
“I don’t know.” McGuire leaned back again, staring up through the bare branches at the contrails of an aircraft flying far overhead, the white stream behind it like a gash across the sky, bleeding ice crystals. You don’t need the pills, he assured himself. I’m free, he thought. But his stomach began to churn and the pain began to flow, jagged and moving like a chasm in spring ice along the circumference of his skull.
“See, if we could find out what he wanted, we’d be somewhere, wouldn’t we?” Scrignoli was saying.
McGuire lowered his head and nodded, watching the old Italian men near the wall of the church, their eyelids creased and their mustaches drooping, speaking to each other in the language they had first learned sixty, seventy, eighty years ago. “Where was your guy when this happened?” McGuire asked.
“Guy?” Scrignoli said. “What guy?”
“The one you turned. The one Heather was blackmailing.”
“The broker? You want to know where he was? How should I know where he was?”
“You checked?”
Scrignoli grinned and passed his hand in front of his face. “Listen, I can tell you something. My man had nothing to do with this thing. Nothing at all. He doesn’t even know you’re alive, McGuire. He doesn’t even know the Flamingo exists, for Christ’s sake. Look, this guy never goes south of the Common unless his chauffeur takes a shortcut to the airport.”
“What’s his name?”
“What?” Scrignoli watching McGuire, still grinning.
“The broker. You never mentioned his name.”
“Hell, McGuire, this is a Team Green case, I told you.”
“Was she seeing a cop?”
“Who? Was who seeing a cop?”
“Heather Lorenzo.”
“Where’d you hear that?”
“She was afraid of somebody important, somebody who could hurt her. Could have been a cop. Maybe my voice on her answering machine started the rumour, who knows?” The pain was a living thing and its offspring were in McGuire’s stomach, kicking against the walls.
Scrignoli shifted his body. “News to me, she was doin’ it with a cop. News to me. But I did hear that tape with your voice on it. You were really pissed at her, weren’t you? What got your balls in such a knot?”
“I’m not sure. I took a lot of pills that night and drank some wine. Stuff used to do strange things to my head. I’d be awake, I’d be talking, moving around, and the next day there’d be nothing in my memory. Damn.” He felt the perspiration on his forehead, exquisitely cool and foreboding. “S’cuse me a minute.” He walked to a trash barrel, leaned over it and vomited.
When he collapsed on the bench again, his hands shaking and his eyes unfocused, Scrignoli touched his arm gently. “Bad, huh?” he asked, and McGuire nodded. “You’re a tough son of a gun,” Scrignoli said. “You’ll make it.”
McGuire nodded again. “Damn right,” he said weakly. Jesus, only a couple of pills. Why not? Why not? Why not?
Scrignoli leaned toward him. “You ever remember, you let me know, okay? It could be important.”
“Remember what?” The shivers were passing and the slight breeze was drying his skin.
“What this Lorenzo woman said to you. To piss you off so much.”
“You involved in the case? Heather’s murder?”
“I’m on the fringes, me and my broker partner. With Timmy dead, they’re lookin’ for connections allover. So I gotta be careful, right?”
“Too careful to tell me.”
“I need time to think about it, is what I mean.”
“Who’s DeMontford?”
Scrignoli’s head snapped around. “Where’d you hear that name?”
“That’s him, isn’t it? Zelinka asked me if I knew him. Said I was cross-indexed with him on a Team Green file. That must’ve been your file, Danny. So what am I doing on it?”
Scrignoli exhaled slowly. “You know.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Timmy asked Brookmyer to do a search on my guy. I don’t know where Timmy got DeMontford’s name but he did. Anyway, Brookmyer got access to Team Green files through I.A. codes and the stupid son of a bitch came up with your name.”
“There’s a link between me and DeMontford?”
“The computer thinks so.”
“I don’t even know the guy.”
Scrignoli shrugged. “You think somebody’s trying to fuck you over?”
“From the beginning.” McGuire watched two gray-haired Italian men playing checkers across the square. “How’d DeMontford’s name turn up at all?” he asked.
“Telephone records. They did a goddamn cross-search of Heather Lorenzo’s calls and made the connection. She tried to reach him that night at an apartment he keeps downtown and got the answering machine. Didn’t leave a message but the record was there.”
“So your cover’s blown.”
Scrignoli nodded. “My cover’s blown. But I’m still keeping it in the Team Green code. Limited access, I.A. and undercover only.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about it before now?”
“Wanted to know how much you knew. How much the guys on Berkeley have been spilling, jerkoffs like Donovan and Fat Eddie.”
“You could ask them yourself.”
“You know damn well I couldn’t. Soon as I mention a name, they’d be off and running. Without Team Green protection, Donovan’ll be crashing in on my guy and the whole outhouse hits the fan.”
“So Fat Eddie, Donovan, none of them know about DeMontford?”
“Not yet. Not unless you or Zelinka tells him. Or somebody else accesses the file, goes fishing for DeMontford.”
“But Timmy knew.”
“Yeah. From the stuff Brookmyer gave him.”
“Brookmyer tell Vance, anybody else?”
“He checked with me. Told him I’d look after it, investigate the connection.”
“And?”
Scrignoli exhaled slowly. “Harley DeMontford was in Palm Beach making a speech to the American Investors’ Society at the exact moment Tim Fox got shot. Two, maybe three thousand people sat there and watched him. TV cameras covered it. The Wall Street Journal reported it. You can look it up.”
“So Brookmyer’s not chasing that one.”
“Not anymore. Doesn’t go anywhere.”
McGuire absorbed it all for a moment, took a new tack. “Why wouldn’t you use a code for DeMontford? “
Scrignoli sighed, smiled and looked away. “Don’t need one for Green Files. There’s supposed to be restricted access.”
“And Vance, Donovan, none of them know anything about the link, about Heather and DeMontford?”
“Only Timmy.” Scrignoli shrugged.
“You gonna tell them?”
“Not unless I have to.”
“You’re concealing information about a murder investigation.”
“No, I’m not. Zelinka’s the connection. I’m covering my ass that way.”
McGuire nodded. Something had begun to turn in his mind. Cogs engaging, facts falling into place.
“Whattaya think of Donovan?” Scrignoli asked. He was sitting back again, staring across the square, working a thumbnail between his teeth.
“He tries too hard.”
“Heard you belted him one. Heard he’s ready to charge you with assault.”
“Hasn’t yet.”
“He can be a mean and stupid bastard, can’t he?”
“What’re you trying to say?”
“The guy’s an animal is all.”
“You got more on your mind.”
Scrignoli shrugged and turned away.
“What’s the time?” McGuire asked.
Scrignoli checked his watch. “One thirty. You got somewhere else to go?” He stood up and scanned the Mall, nodding and waving to people he knew.
“Drop me off at the Common,” McGuire said. “I need to think.”
“Zelinka shouldn’t’ve said anything about DeMontford to you,” Scrignoli said.
“He’s involved in Timmy’s murder. He’ll do whatever it takes, Danny. You know that.”
“But they’re not connected, Timmy and him. No way at all.”
“Yes, they are,” McGuire said, standing up. “One way or another they are. And I’m it.”
“You think Brookmyer or Zelinka’ll tell Donovan or Fat Eddie about DeMontford? Or the Lorenzo thing? After I told him there’s no way he could be involved, he was with me that whole night?”
“I don’t know.”
“Couldn’t have yet, could he? Or they’d be on my guy like flies, right?”
“Probably.”
“You know what I figure?” Scrignoli leaned forward to catch McGuire’s eye, his brow furrowed. “I figure Zelinka’s fingered Donovan somehow. He’s got me telling him DeMontford’s not it and if Vance goes after DeMontford and blows it, we screw up two cases. And he’s already got something on Donovan. What d’ya think?”
McGuire shrugged. “Zelinka . . .” He hesitated, thought better of it. “Zelinka’s a strange guy. Anybody in I.A.’s gotta be a little strange. So who knows what he’s thinking?”
“Yeah,” Scrignoli nodded. “Who knows?”
McGuire smiled to himself and he stood there and stretched his arms above his head in the morning sunshine. The realization that he hadn’t thought about the pills, Django’s candy, for several moments elated him, like a man who had been climbing a mountain for several days and finally had a handhold on its peak.