“Jesus … I think you ruptured … somethin’!”
“Sammy, answer my question. How much?”
“Twenny bucks. I saw … the kid had plenty … when he paid … one of the tolls.”
“He paid up, did he?”
“Yeah, yeah.”
I lifted his chin up gently. “Sammy, I don’t believe you. And I don’t think the cops will either.”
“Awright, awright. The kid didn’t pay. But I didn’t make him. … He just hopped out and … ran.”
“With a pack he outdistanced you? Do you figure your kidney needs a little more massage, Sammy?”
“No! No, the kid … ah, listen, man—you gotta keep this quiet. Around here, I’d be laughed at. I’d be laughed outta’ the place.” He winced and gritted his teeth. “Jesus, you hurt me.”
“Come on, Sammy. Give.”
“Okay, okay. He had a piece.”
“A piece?”
“A gun, man. A long thing like outta Star Wars. The kid fuckin’ went into his pack for the twenny and came out with the piece. I thought the fuckin’ little screwy was gonna shoot me. I backed off, and he took off, across a field.”
I straightened up. “Thanks, Sammy. You’ve been a swell guy and a great panelist.”
As I walked away I heard the telltale click. I wheeled around as Sammy was coming off the crate with a big clasp knife, open for business. His face was still contorted in pain, but a vengeful determination somehow shone through.
The booming voice behind me interrupted our little melodrama. “Sammy, you drop the knife or it’s the last piece of anything your fingers’ll ever go ‘round.”
I glanced over my shoulder at Al, standing with his cleaver hanging at his side and a somewhat calmer George next to him.
Sammy didn’t close the knife, but he visibly stood down. I walked toward Al and thanked him.
“I told ya he was a weasely bastard,” replied Al Bufone as I passed on my way out.
Nineteen
“I’M NOT SURE HOW far Granville is, but I expect it’s going to be an overnighter. You know how I hated to travel without you. And I can’t very well call with an update.”
The carnations weren’t there anymore. The kid in the jeans had probably scoffed them up as soon as I’d left the last time. I squatted down and arranged Mrs. Feeney’s red roses on the spot where the last flowers had been.
“The grandmother hasn’t played straight with me, Beth. I think I know where the kid is, or at least where he was headed, because one of the ranger stations is only four miles from Granville. But I have to check out a few things first.”
A puff of wind came off Boston Harbor and ruffled the roses. I foraged a rock to hold them down.
Off to the left, at another grave, I noticed an elderly man. He wore an old gray suit and held a Homburg in his hand. He was motionless, standing to the side of a headstone and staring at it.
I looked down at Beth. Funny, I almost never looked squarely at the stone. Probably because the stone wasn’t her, wasn’t where she was for me.
“This boy I’m looking for, Stephen. Must be some piece of work. His teachers think he’s at least exceptional and a doll in his class thinks he’s a genius and is crazy about him. Stephen’s father seems not to care about him, and his grandmother seems not to care about much anything else. Stephen’s apparently shy around most kids, but he has perseverance enough to search his father’s house over four years to find a gun, and then balls enough to take off and use the gun to stand off a shake-down artist twice his size.”
Something was wrong there. Like always, Beth sensed it before I did. But I couldn’t quite put it into a thought, and she couldn’t put it into words.
I needed to get something else off my chest, anyway. I took a breath and hunched down again.
“I did a necessary thing this afternoon, Beth. I roughed up a cheating, lying trucker. He was the shake-down artist. But I did a stupid thing before that. I spidered a big, bullying college kid into a short fight and his immediate humiliation. It wasn’t just my over-eager sense of righteousness, either. I was showing off. Showing off for somebody I was with. Valerie Jacobs. Sort of the way I showed off for you. But not quite. With you, I showed off for you. With Valerie, I showed off just to prove that I could still show off for somebody. Pretty dumb, not to mention a pretty boring description of being dumb. But then, you always put up with dumb, boring me much better than most.”
I laughed for her, then got serious again. “Valerie took offense, but I apologized, and it’s okay now. Except that she’s invited me to dinner, and I’m afraid she’s getting the wrong impression, that she thinks that I’m—”
I stopped because Beth and I had come to a decision. And it certainly seemed the only fair thing.
I stood up. The mini-yachts of the well-to-do who lived on the renovated waterfront were tacking and running in the harbor below. I looked down at Beth’s grave. Mrs. Feeney had done a nice job with the roses.
As I walked out of the cemetery, the elderly man with the Homburg was still standing over the other headstone. Still motionless.
Twenty
I STOPPED AT THE apartment. My tape had two hangups. I reset the machine and changed my clothes. I figured it would be colder in the Berkshires, and I wasn’t sure when I would be able to change again. I put on a flannel shirt and a pair of khaki pants. I strapped my Smith & Wesson Chief’s Special to my inside left calf and bloused the pant bottoms outside the tops of a pair of L. L. Bean’s Maine duck boots. I slung an old Army pack (with a jacket, canteen, and candy bars) over my shoulder.
There was some plain, white bond paper on my desk. I took a piece and wrote a short note, marked the envelope “Personal,” and put a return address under the name “Pembroke.” I stamped and mailed it on my way back to the car. Then I headed southwest.
The sun was still high, and children were out sunning and playing ball in seemingly every yard and field I passed. There was a constant gentle breeze of the kind that I remembered kept you from getting thirsty.
The flannel shirt was making me thirsty.
I took the exit that would bring me to Bonham Center first. Since Cal was a six-days-a-week cop, I stopped in at police headquarters and was told Chief Maslyk would be back in an hour. I had a late lunch at an uncrowded pub with a jukebox that played country-and-western. I returned to the station, and still had to cool my heels for twenty minutes until Cal Maslyk could see me.
I told him about my planned trip to the Berkshires. He asked me why I was telling him, and I said because I might need someone to come looking for me. He said he had some vacation time coming in September and that if I wasn’t back by then, he’d swing by Granville to check on me. I thanked him and left.
It was only 4:00 P.M. and I couldn’t see dropping in on Val that early. I decided to drive over to the Swan Street bridge. Thom Doucette had already poked a lot of holes for me in Blakey’s version of Diane Kinnington’s accident, but a professor of mine during my one year of evening law school always had stressed that we actually should visit the scene of any incident.
I crisscrossed Bonham roads for thirty minutes without hitting Swan Street. I ended back in Bonham Center. Too proud to stop and ask directions, I took a road with a sign that said “Meade Center 3.” Just past the center I came upon Swan Street. As I prepared to turn north onto it, a Meade police car drove through the intersection heading south. Officer Dexter was in the driver’s seat and otherwise alone. He seemed to recognize me.
I waved to him, but Dexter didn’t wave back.
I turned onto Swan Street back toward Bonham and drove a little over a mile before seeing the bridge ahead. I was surprised. I had expected it to be around a curve, or even a corner, but it was clearly visible along the straight road for nearly four-tenths of a mile. Diane Kinnington, or anyone else, would have had no blind pavement to negotiate that night.
When I reached the bridge, I slowed and checked my rear-view mirror. No traffic behind me. I slow
ed to a crawl and went across the bridge as Blakey told Doucette he had done that rainy night. The way Doucette had described it, there was a rock maybe twenty feet out whose crest was eight inches clear of the water line. There were slightly brighter replacement railings where Diane Kinnington’s car must have gone through, but the car couldn’t have been going very fast to land so close to the bridge. I studied the spot where the Mercedes must have rested. When I reached the other end of the bridge, I stopped and got out. Again I looked to where the Mercedes must have been. Then I checked for traffic, backed across the bridge, and angled my car in the way Doucette had placed Blakey’s cruiser. I tried to keep my eyes focused on the rock and the placement of the Mercedes as I sidestepped down the embankment. I stood at the river’s edge and stared across to the other bank.
If Doucette was accurate regarding the Mercedes’ reclining angle against the rock in the water and the compass angle to the far shore, there was no way that Blakey could have seen a license plate or hood ornament to know it was the Kinnington car out there, even without wind-and-rain conditions.
I heard a car crunch to a stop above me. I turned as a second car pulled alongside the first. Both were Meade police cruisers. Dexter and a big officer I hadn’t seen before got out of the first cruiser, Chief Josh Smollett and another big cop out of the second. All came to the upper edge of the embankment and stared down at me. I stared back.
Smollett wore a uniform parade hat, but civilian gray shirt and pants. He put his fists on his hips and broke the stand-off. “I thought I told you to get out—and stay out—of this town?”
“Sorry to correct you, Chief,” I replied as good-naturedly as possible, “but you told me only to ‘get’ out of your ‘office.’ You said nothing about ‘this town,’ or about ‘staying’ out, for that matter.”
The two big cops turned expectantly to Smollett. Dexter looked down at his shoes. Smollett looked down at me.
“You been bothering our citizens,” Smollett continued, not raising his voice. Now everyone was looking down at me again.
“Just which citizen, or citizens, am I supposed to have bothered?”
Smollett’s jaw worked a little before he answered. “Harold Sturdevant for one. He says you were in his house upsetting their daughter, Kim by name.”
“I was in his house with his wife’s permission talking with their daughter.”
“Hal said the girl was crying.”
“She was. Is he prepared to sign a complaint about it?”
“He don’t need to sign a complaint.”
“Sure he does,” I replied. “If you receive any complaints, I’d be happy to review them with you and the Department of Public Safety when my investigator’s license comes up for renewal.”
The two big cops had been following our exchange with their heads, like sideline spectators watching tennis volleys. Now they had their heads toward Smollett, and Dexter had returned to examining his shoeshine.
Smollett changed neither his pose nor his expression. Just his voice grew strident. “I don’t like wise-ass private dicks,” he said.
My neck was actually getting stiff from looking up at them. There was a boulder nearby about knee high. I walked to it, sat down, and leaned back. The rock’s surface was still warm from the June sun. “Maybe if we pooled our information on Stephen Kinnington, we could be more civil with each other.”
Smollett began to tremble, his uniform hat rocking slightly over his head the way a pot lid does as the water boils beneath it. “Bring … him … up … here,” he said, each word enunciated like a separate sentence.
The two big cops began sidestepping down immediately. Dexter reluctantly started, too. I said, “You know, Chief, there isn’t a snowball’s chance that Blakey could have identified the car in the river as Kinnington’s Mercedes that night.”
Dexter and the big boys stopped dead and looked from me to Smollett. “I said bring him up here,” this time all in one sentence.
Just as the troops resumed their advance and I searched futilely for another delaying line, a car came barreling down Swan Street from the opposite direction. The troops halted again as Smollett looked over to the vehicle. It stopped on the bridge, and two car doors opened and closed.
“Afternoon, Josh,” said a welcomed voice.
“Your car is blocking traffic,” growled Smollett in reply.
Chief Calvin Maslyk’s short, sturdy frame came into view. “Oh, there’s never much traffic along here this time on a Saturday.” A uniformed Bonham cop slightly larger than the biggest of Smollett’s men loomed into view behind Cal. Maslyk looked down at me. “Afternoon, John.”
“Chief,” I said, smiling.
Cal didn’t smile back, so I dropped mine.
“This is none of your affair, Cal,” said Smollett, an officious tone replacing the angry one. “You’re out of your jurisdiction.”
Cal shrugged, unbuttoned a shirt pocket, fished for something in it. “Mr. Cuddy and I have a date at our pistol range. When one of my boys picked up Dexter’s transmission to you over the radio scanner, I thought I’d come out and give him a lift.” Maslyk found a cigarette and resumed his fishing, I guessed this time for a match or lighter.
“Since when did your men start monitoring my radio frequency?” snapped Smollett.
Maslyk smiled soothingly as he came up with a small box. “Nobody was monitoring anybody, Josh. One of the boys was just scanning and picked it up.” Maslyk slid open the box, took out a wooden match, and struck it off his side-turned shoe. I hadn’t seen that in years. “You know how it is, Josh,” said Maslyk as he cupped his hands around the match and tilted his face forward to light the cigarette.
Smollett fumed silently, then gestured to his troops with his head toward their cruisers. Dexter looked relieved and scampered back up. The two big ones looked disappointed and went sulkily back up, one stumbling to a knee to add insult, and dry-cleaning, to injury. The four got into their cars, backed out, and gunned both engines down the road toward Meade Center.
I was sweating a bit more heavily than my flannel shirt and the rock’s radiant heat could account for. “Thanks, Cal,” I said quietly as I stood up.
“This time you were lucky. I can’t have a man assigned to listen in on Smollett’s transmissions. And hell, next time they’ll use phones anyways.”
I was halfway up the bank. “I agree.”
“Meade is not a good town for an outsider. Not when he’s poking into old, important deaths.” Cal jerked his hand at the bridge and river.
“I agree,” I repeated as I reached the top.
“So, you got any questions?” Cal asked.
“Just one,” I said. “Where do you get those matches? They’re borderline amazing.”
Chief Calvin Maslyk flicked the ash off his cigarette and stomped toward his own cruiser, motioning his driver to follow. “Goddamned wise-ass private eyes.”
Twenty-One
CHIEF JOSH SMOLLETT’S UMBRAGE at my being in his town gave me a coward’s way out for Valerie Jacobs’ dinner. Instead, I decided to drive there directly and settle things.
I turned onto Fordham Road and stopped in front of Number 17. I climbed the steps and rang her bell.
“John!” It was barely five-thirty, and she was dressed in a blue, terry-cloth robe. Valerie threw her arms around my neck and hugged hard. She smelled of scented soap.
“Does tenure protect small-town teachers against charges of moral turpitude?”
Valerie gave a little laugh and let me go. Her eyes were bright as she smiled. “Just got out of the tub. You’re early, but I forgive you. Come in.”
She took my hand, and I swung the door shut. Her living room had a sunny bay window. Living in Back Bay and Beacon Hill, I’d grown used to fireplaces. There was none, but the room had a nice dining alcove under a beam near the kitchen. A half-closed door on her far wall showed the foot of a bed.
Valerie brought me to the couch and began talking as we sat down. “Aren’t you dyi
ng in that heavy shirt?”
I wondered if I also smelled rancid after the bridge encounter. “It is a little warm.”
Valerie released my hand and leaned forward to get up. As she did, her robe bowed forward and back. I was very much aware of her right breast and the tan line around it.
“Take it off,” Valerie said, still smiling.
I blinked up at her.
“Your shirt,” she said, the smile growing broader, “take it off. There’s a T-shirt I use as a nightie that ought to fit you.”
“No, thanks. Really,” I said uncertainly. “I’m all right.”
Valerie planted her fists on her hips, then looked resigned. “Well, if I can’t make you comfortable, at least I can get you a drink. What will you have?”
“Orange juice,” I said, and cleared my throat. “And a little vodka, if you’ve got it.”
“I’ll just be a minute,” and she trotted off—to the kitchen for the drinks, not to the bedroom to change.
Well, John-boy, what now? Beth now. Beth and my decision. The question was how to put the decision into words. Or actions. And when. Something was beginning to make me perspire again. I blamed the flannel shirt.
Valerie returned with drinks. From across the room, mine appeared awfully pale. Unless she reconstituted her frozen o.j. with a lot of water, she’d mixed me one whale of a screwdriver.
Valerie presented my glass as though the ritual was part of a Japanese tea ceremony. As she sat down, her robe did another callisthenic. I was positive she had known that it would.
“To lasting friendship,” she said, with a nice try at a naughty wink.
I took a sip. Almost pure vodka. “You should leave the orange peel in a little longer next time.”
Valerie rolled the ice around in her glass and looked me up and down. “You know, John, you have a great sense of humor, but you shouldn’t let it affect your taste in clothes.”
We both laughed. “Actually, I’m on my way to find Stephen.”
Valerie jumped forward and nearly spilled her drink as she set it on the coffee table. Her robe bowed out again and stayed that way. I kept looking into her eyes. Mostly.
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