“That’s almost as hard to swallow as the other,” he said after a moment.
“Almost.”
“It’s upside-down. Who’d buy it?”
“Us, for two. It makes Goss less of a monster. Ogre, maybe. Or a dog. Just not the cutthroat kind.”
I watched him boring holes through the windshield with his eyes. The greenish dashboard lights reflected off his features, like neon off cast iron. The motor was still running. It was as if it had forgotten it was still running, not that he’d neglected to turn it off. It was his personal car, not an unmarked city unit, with rear, front, and side-mounted cameras. You’d have to be invisible to sneak up on us and eavesdrop, yet we were talking almost in whispers; the subject was that volatile.
Someone had to break the silence. That was me. “It’s far-fetched. Yesterday I’d’ve passed it by like the front page of the National Enquirer. Compared to what we’ve been kicking around, I’d take it even if I couldn’t prove it.”
He said, “I don’t like hypotheticals. They’re worse than conspiracy theories. If we can’t prove it, why waste time?”
“Maybe we can get him to furnish the proof. Did you tell young Cochran not to leave town?”
“No, and I didn’t tell him to freeze either. Try to stay in this century. Dumb fuck that he is, he knows better than to skip under just the threat of indictment. That would seal the deal.”
I told him what I had in mind. He heard me out; opened and closed his fists on the wheel again.
I got tired of waiting for him to answer. My patience was no match for his. “Think he’ll go for it?”
“Depends on whether I can scare him enough. It’s shaky as hell. The prosecutor would need plenty of convincing to push a case against an officer that’s too weak to stick. There might not even be a crime. The April Goss investigation wasn’t reopened, officially, so it isn’t a matter of sharing confidential information with a civilian; which in itself isn’t technically illegal.”
“He confessed to bribery.”
“He wasn’t under oath. Any lawyer would advise him to recant. Even if he didn’t, Goss would deny it, and then it’s a rookie’s word against a solid citizen’s, and a public figure to boot.”
“Cochran’s a dope. If you lean hard enough, he won’t have time to think it through. He doesn’t have the equipment.”
He looked at me sideways. “I thought you said it wasn’t such a rotten world.”
“Stupid’s not rotten. It’s common as dandelions, and we live with those. You just have to be scary enough: Freddy Krueger meets the Headless Horseman. You can do it, John,” I said when he turned my way. “You’re doing it now.”
“Stop buttering me up. I can’t pull this off solo. I’ll need a Jekyll to my Hyde.”
“Use Kopernick. He should be in on the kill. He’s earned it.”
“Uh-uh. That’s bad cop, worse cop.” He threw the car into gear. “Put on your game face. You’re my first-round draft pick.”
At night, Geronimo Circle was an oasis of gentle, slightly pinkish light, provided by carriage-type lamps mounted on poles. It was still early, and most of the houses were lit up, set each in its own private space, a marvel of geometrical logistics that created the illusion of country homes miles apart. The Gosses’ low stone house was no exception, but only one window was illuminated. That seemed strange for a place where two people lived. There’s usually some traffic between living room and kitchen, and only the obsessively frugal bothered to turn off the light in one room when leaving it for another. The host of a popular nationally televised reality show didn’t pinch pennies, at least not in that area.
I parked against the curb a couple of houses down, cut the ignition and my lights, and sat for a while, smoking and listening to the motor making ticking noises as it cooled. I needed the quiet time. The session with Officer Cochran had wrung me out. Playing the nice guy, calling a suspect quietly by his first name, patiently lecturing his partner to keep cool, takes energy; especially when the suspect is as dumb as a doorstop and makes you want to yank off his clip-on tie and shove it down his throat. By comparison, Alderdyce, having gotten the poison out of his system grabbing the twerp by the hair and shouting into his ear, had emerged from the scene in a dream state, like someone stepping out of a hot tub. For him it was office routine, like sorting paperclips.
But the job was done. Provided it stayed that way.
My last drag took the cigarette down to the letters. I cracked the window and snapped out the butt. It made an orange arc in the darkness outside the nearest pool of salmon-colored light and blinked out on the dew-damp asphalt. I jerked the key out of the ignition, tipped up the door handle, and got out: the unchanging routine, so familiar I usually wouldn’t remember doing it; tonight, every little step remained separate and worth concentrating on. It’s always that way en route to the finish.
If it was the finish. It depended on too many things not to threaten to turn under on one little detail; like that one lonely window alight in the house cohabited by Chester and Vail Goss.
I climbed out of the car, stretched, popping every joint involved and a few that weren’t, and strolled along the sidewalk toward the house. In neighborhoods like that, strolling is the gait to use after dark. Between the baleful single eye of the Neighborhood Watch and police patrols timed to the minute, a brisk pace or furtive behavior was liable to bring down the hammer of God. In any case I was in no hurry. If I took enough time, maybe a tornado or a nuclear attack would intervene and spare me the agony of a showdown. You could work it out in your head beforehand, plan your own moves and anticipate your opponent’s, and all your opponent had to do was kick over the board. No battle plan ever survives the first engagement with the enemy.
It was a mild evening. For the first time since October I couldn’t see my breath. I left my topcoat unbuttoned and let the tails spread before a breeze from the south. Crickets chirped, frogs sang on the margins of municipal retention ponds; whistling past the graveyard. But then maybe they didn’t know how many more times they’d have to freeze before winter gave out.
The gong when I pressed the bell this time sounded sharper, like a coin striking the concrete floor of a huge empty warehouse. Goss must have been waiting for it. The door swung open before it died.
“‘You jumped the shark,’” he said.
He was dressed for home, in a Lions jersey, the trousers from an old suit, and tasseled suede slippers. The light coming from an overhead fixture softened the pleats in his face.
I’d called ahead, using those same four words. Now I said, “Friendly warning. When Fonzie sailed over a shark on water skis, Happy Days was on its way out. Most of what I know about the entertainment industry I got from TV Guide. The trouble with having a popular series is you’re always only one shark away from cancellation. Are you alone?”
“Vail’s visiting her aunt in Toledo. An old friend of her mother’s, actually, no relation.” He turned from the door. His name was lettered on the back of the jersey.
For a television personality, he was an unaccomplished liar. He’d given me too much information about something that meant nothing to me; so of course now it did. Whether he’d gotten her out of the house so he could meet with me privately or she’d left on her own, it amounted to the same thing. Here and now was the border crossing, the point of fracture, the end of one thing and maybe the beginning of another.
I followed him from the green-and-white-tiled foyer through an unfamiliar doorway into a big living room with a high copper-coffered ceiling, deep armchairs, and a hearth faced in onyx or black marble, with a fire laid but not burning. Thick throw rugs made rectangular patterns on a floor built of broad planks.
A sleek silver box with twin speakers buzzed and crackled on a bookshelf. The volume was turned down so low the voice transmissions blended in with the static. He would have a police scanner. He would deduct it as a business expense.
“Drink?” He swung down a drop-leaf shelf belonging to an antique radio-phonograph cabinet, exposing a bank of bottles and assorted cocktail glasses.
“No thanks,” I said. “Empty stomach.”
“Cheese? Crackers? Vail’s the cook, but she always leaves me with survival items.”
“Pass.” There’s a point in every job where I like to have the blood flowing to my brain instead of my gut.
He poured something amber into a cut-crystal Old Fashioned, squirted in seltzer from a leaded glass bottle, and tipped a palm toward one of the armchairs. He sat facing me, crossing his legs and balancing his glass on his knee with a finger on the rim.
“I didn’t figure you for a deep thinker. Not that you’re dumb. The reason I offered you that security job is you strike me as the type that acts from instinct, and fills in the rest after the crisis is past.”
“That wasn’t the reason.”
He took a sip. Something crackled; not ice in the glass, because there wasn’t any. The air was full of electricity; the on-and-off crackling from the scanner made it worse. I missed Vail Goss; more specifically, the wary calm she surrounded herself with, wary but stoic, a cloak against the elements. Chester wasn’t using his TV voice—Rod Serling marinated in Lester Holt—but there was an edge to him tonight. Not the confrontational one that had ended our first meeting, but something submerged and waiting to breach. It sucked all the oxygen out of the room.
I was feeding it, of course. It had started with my phone call to let him know I was coming, and now that I saw how successful it was my game plan opened before me like a carpet runner unrolling down a steep flight of stairs.
I shoveled on more coal. “As much as you know about crime, you’re an amateur at it in practice. If you hadn’t told me you air an annual rehash of material from the past season, I’d still be picking through five years of episodes. That shortcut led me straight to Kenneth Whitelaw.”
“I heard he was identified.” He tilted his head toward the scanner. “If you say he showed up on the program, I’ll have to take your word for it. They all run together after all this time, unless they have a reason to stand out.”
“Like Abrahim Ibn Said. He earned the two full hours you spent on him. A guy like him would keep bin Laden awake nights.”
His face smoothed out. In anyone else it would have been a sudden pallor. But his expression remained politely interested.
“I guess your man in the department didn’t get around to telling you Dan Corbeil’s attacker was identified.”
“He was attacked?” He’d collected himself. He was an experienced interviewer, after all. No matter how unexpected the answer is to a question you asked, you must never show confusion. “Is he—?”
A phone rang. It couldn’t have come at a better moment. I’d had a hell of a time not sneaking a look at my watch waiting for it.