“I’m not interested in quality. I just want to know what’s on it.”
“Well, let’s find out, then.”
She took off her jacket and slipped into an apron that was hanging on a hook beside the door to her darkroom. Then she went in, leaving me with her photography magazines. I riffled absentmindedly through them, first sitting, and then adjusting myself so that I was lying on the sofa. After a few minutes, I dropped the magazine onto the floor and allowed my eyes to close.
I realized that Gloria had never answered my question. Was it a business meeting? Or did she get all dressed up for me?
Was it any of my business?
“Hey, there.” Her voice came from far away. Her hand was on my cheek, first stroking and then gently slapping. “Come on, big guy. Rise and shine.”
She was seated on the sofa, her rump against my hip, looking down at me.
“Must’ve dozed off,” I mumbled.
“The neighbors have been complaining about your snoring,” she said, smiling.
I craned my neck, then put my hand on it. “I shouldn’t have slept that way,” I said. “Got a stiff neck.”
“Sit up,” she said. I did. She went around behind me and placed both of her hands on my neck. She poked and probed, working at the hard muscles and tendons, from just behind my ears down to my shoulders, her thumbs strong and insistent. I arched against her massage.
“Mmm,” I said with a groan. “You should’ve been a masseuse. Preferably topless. Nobody can do that like you.”
“Nobody can do lots of things like me.”
I reached behind me, got my arm around her neck, and pulled her onto my lap. “Hey,” she said softly. But she allowed herself to be drawn down so that she sat on me. She ducked down and burrowed her face into my shoulder. I touched her chin with my forefinger, urging her to look at me. When she did, she was frowning.
“You must’ve had a late night, to conk off like that.”
“I didn’t sleep well.”
“I understand.” She twisted her face away.
I put my fingers in her hair and made her face me. “Gloria,” I said.
“Please don’t.”
Her lips were unyielding, her eyes wide open and staring myopically into mine. I pulled back from the one-sided kiss. “Sorry,” I said.
“I wish you’d make up your mind.”
I nodded. “Me, too.”
“You can’t have it all, you know.”
“I guess I don’t know that.”
She smiled. “You’re impossible.”
“I’m difficult. I’m improbable. But I’m not impossible. I’m very possible.”
She shook her head slowly. She moved her face close to mine. She hesitated, then, abruptly, she stood up. She smoothed her skirt against the fronts of her thighs. “Jesus!” she breathed.
“I’m sorry, hon.”
“This is a recording.”
“Ever notice how we do so much better by phone?”
She nodded. Her look was solemn. “Brady, I’ve got a date this afternoon.”
“A date.”
“Yes. A real live date. And guess what? He’s—ready?—he’s a lawyer.”
“Anyone I know?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think I’ll tell you his name. If you know him, you’ll just tell me why he’s wrong for me.”
“Would I do that?”
“You bet your ass you would.”
“Is he married?”
“What’s it to you?”
“Absolutely nothing.”
“Well, I’m not going to tell you that, either.” She turned away from me and bent to pick up the magazine I had dropped onto the floor. She put the magazine on the table and made a show of arranging the stack into neat, chronological order. Without turning back to face me, she said, “Do you love all the ladies you date?”
“In some ways I do. It’s all sort of relative.”
“I’m just starting to learn that. For a long time I thought there’s no sense in risking a relationship with someone you’re not sure you’re going to love. So I found myself saying no thank you to men I liked well enough. And then it began to occur to me that just because I didn’t love them the way—you know—the way I used to, the way I know I can, it didn’t mean I couldn’t—couldn’t go out with them.”
“Go out with them,” I repeated. “A euphemism, huh?”
She turned to face me. She nodded. “Yes. A euphemism.”
I cleared my throat. “I see.”
“Brady, for God’s sake. It was you who told me I was so stuck in the old double standard that I had lost my identity. I mean, that was what our divorce was all about, if I remember correctly. But the thing is, it’s you who’s got the double-standard problem.”
“I just don’t want you to be hurt.”
“You don’t want me to get laid.”
“Jesus, Gloria.”
“Hey,” she said, laughing now. “If you don’t want me to be hurt, don’t come on to me. Don’t tease me. And for Christ’s sake, don’t judge me. You think after eight years I shouldn’t go out with men?”
“I don’t know. None of my business anyway. Forget it. Be happy, if you can.”
“I’m trying.”
I stood up and went to her. I opened my arms and she came to me. I hugged her and kissed her hair. “I am sorry,” I said. “Can we be friends?”
She leaned back so she could look up at me. “I seriously doubt it,” she said. She stepped back. “Do you want to see those pictures?”
I nodded. She led me to her darkroom. “I made a contact sheet first,” she said. “There were twenty-four exposures. The first twelve of them were so badly underexposed that you couldn’t see a thing. Then there were five where you can make something out. Whoever took them was playing with f-stops and shutter speeds. The five that came out at all are still pretty bad. Wide-open lens, maybe a sixtieth of a second, maybe even slower. Very shallow focus, lots of tremor. Using a long lens, I’d guess. And film that fast just doesn’t get you much quality under the best of conditions. Anyhow, I made enlargements of the five that showed something.”
The five prints were laid out side by side. “Are they in order?” I asked Gloria.
She nodded. “He was bracketing them. There were some in between these that didn’t come out. But this is the sequence in which he took them, left to right.”
They were all taken at night outside somewhere on a roadside. In the background were the blurry lights of what appeared to be a storefront. All of the pictures were of a man and an automobile. Most of the light came from the storefront, so that the figures in the picture appeared almost as silhouettes. The car’s lights were on. In the first three frames, the man was leaning over to peer in through the passenger’s window, evidently talking with whoever was inside the car. Although his face was a shadow, and even realizing that I might be imagining it, the figure appeared to be Derek Hayden.
The fourth frame showed Hayden, if that’s who it was, entering the car.
The fifth was of the automobile itself. It was in a different position from the previous frames, suggesting it was pulling away from the curb.
“Do you have a magnifying glass?” I said to Gloria.
“Sure.” She handed it to me. I examined each photograph. I concluded that, unlike the previous set of shots Gloria had developed and printed for me, these offered no clues as to location. The backgrounds were composed of blurry shapes and spots of white. One of the photos showed the man in fairly sharp profile, deepening my conviction that it was Derek Hayden.
The last photo, even less well focused than the previous four, interested me the most. It showed the license plate from the rear, dimly illuminated by the light over it.
“See if you can read that number,” I said, pointing at the license.
Gloria took the glass from me. “One, five—the third digit is either a two or a zero. Let’s see. That’s a seven, zero, and either a four or an eight.” She hand
ed the glass to me. “You try.”
I had written down the numbers as Gloria read them to me. I pushed the pencil and paper at her. “You write what I say, now,” I told her.
I studied it through the glass. I was less certain about a couple more digits than Gloria had been, so we looked together and finally agreed on four of them. The last one, which Gloria thought was either a four or an eight, looked like a blob to me no matter what she said.
“What kind of car is it?” she said.
I shrugged. “Squarish. Midsize. It’s just part of a shape. If I can trace the license number, I won’t need to know the make of the car.”
“How are you going to do that?”
“Charlie.”
“How is old Charlie?”
“He still can’t beat me at golf. That pisses him off. Otherwise, he’s fine.”
She glanced at her wristwatch. “Well,” she said.
I nodded. “You’ve got a date. You’d just as soon I wasn’t here when he arrived.”
“He’s not coming here. I’m meeting him.”
“How very twentieth-century of you.”
“Sometimes I even call him on the phone.”
“What would your mother say?”
“The same thing she said when she found out you and I were sleeping together in New Haven.”
“She said, as I recall,” I said, “ ‘just as long as you plan to marry the young man.’ ”
She grinned. “Which, in this case, I am not planning to do. So I’m not telling her.”
“Perhaps I’ll give her an anonymous phone call.”
She punched my shoulder. “Don’t you dare.”
Gloria and I exchanged pecks on the cheek at the door, and I walked out to my car. I had the photographs in an envelope under my arm.
As I backed out of the driveway, I saw Gloria standing behind the storm door. She had her hand raised, her palm pressed flat against the glass.
I called Charlie McDevitt on Monday morning. When he came on the line, he said, “You still hanging on to that stick of dynamite?”
“One in each hand,” I said. “The fuses are burning down.”
“You want to talk about it?” I detected sincere concern in his voice.
“Charlie, you are a good guy, no matter what everybody says. I appreciate you. But I can handle it.”
He chuckled. “Right, counselor.”
“Anyway, I need a favor.”
“Another favor, you mean.”
“Right. I stand corrected. Can you use your considerable clout with the Registry of Motor Vehicles to trace a license for me?”
“Nobody, my friend, has considerable clout with the Registry. They are collectively the most arrogant collection of sons and daughters of birches—”
“Shit,” I said. “You mean—?”
“I mean, I’ll use my considerable clout with the state police, if it’s all the same to you.”
“It’s all the same. Here’s the number.” I read him the digits Gloria and I had interpreted from the photograph. “One, five, something, seven, zero, something.”
“What the hell are those ‘somethings’?”
“The first something could be a two or a zero. Something that looks round. The terminal something might be eight. Or four. Or three.”
Charlie’s sigh hissed in my ear. “My clout may be considerable,” he said. “But it ain’t unlimited.”
“Can’t they just ask their computers?”
“Sure. But a six-digit plate with two unknowns gives the possibility of one hundred different numbers.”
“You are quick, mathematically.”
“I am quick in several respects, some of them unfortunate.”
“A list of a hundred would help me.”
“Brady, you already owe me one lunch.”
“We can upgrade that one. Or we can make it two.”
“I’ll give it serious thought. I’ll call you when I’ve got something for you.”
It was Tuesday afternoon before he got back to me. “Their computers were down for a while,” he said. “And they seem to have strange priorities over there. Murders, shit like that, they like to work on. My friend was more than a little aggravated when he realized there were two unknowns in that license number. Now it turns out I’ve gotta buy him a lunch.”
“Hey, I’ll take you both to lunch. Place of your choosing.”
“Just so you understand.”
“I understand.”
“He sent a cop over with the printout. Two solid pages, single-spaced. Eighty-seven numbers, with names and addresses. I guess the other thirteen possibilities aren’t in use.”
“I’ll be right over.”
I grabbed my coat and went out to stand beside Julie, who was on the telephone. She glanced up at me, scowled her automatic disapproval, which seems to be the one predictable response I can instantly arouse in a woman, and then returned to her conversation. It consisted mostly of her listening and injecting a “certainly” or “of course” here and there into the available spaces. When she hung up, she said, “That was Mr. Barth. Complaining about having to go to another meeting with his wife. He wants you to take care of it.”
“How’d you leave it? He’s really got to be there.”
She grinned. “Oh, he’ll be there. He’s really hung up on those arrowheads.”
“Did you leave him smiling?”
“Of course.”
“How’d you manage that?”
“I agreed with him.”
“On what?”
“He said he guessed you weren’t competent to handle it by yourself.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“Now where are you off to?”
“Gotta go see Charlie McDevitt. Why don’t you hang out the Gone Fishin’ sign and go home?”
“Somebody’s got to watch the shop, Brady. What’s up with Mr. McDevitt? You two poring over brochures about fishing for Arctic char in Newfoundland?”
“It happens to be business,” I sniffed.
It took me at least ten frigid minutes to persuade a cab to stop for me and another several to persuade the hack to understand my destination. He was swarthy and full-bearded, and all he said to me was, “Yah?” along with a number of incoherent mutterings, and he said them in a distinctly foreign accent. Something Middle Eastern, I guessed. Boylston Street was jammed. Charles Street was a mess. It took nearly half an hour to get to Charlie’s office. I paid the cabbie, and when I waved away the change he tried to give me, he said something that sounded like, “Gubba malloon.” His broad, yellow-toothed grin told me he was pleased and would love to drive me someplace else.
Charlie is a demonstrative Irishman. He hugged me when I entered his office and offered me a shot of Old Rubber Boot. I accepted. He slid the computer printout to me while he went to the cabinet where he hid his booze. By the time he returned to his chair at the desk with a bottle and measured out two glasses of amber liquid, I had scanned the list.
I accepted the glass from him. “Thanks, anyway,” I said.
“No help?”
I folded the printout and shoved it into my pocket. Then I tilted back my head and downed the shot of bourbon. I held my glass to Charlie. He took it and poured in another two fingers. This I decided to sip.
“That,” he said, “does not excuse you from your obligation, you know.”
“Lunch for you and your pal over on Commonwealth Avenue.”
“We were thinking the Café Budapest.”
“Whatever. That’s a nice place.”
“Expensive. We wanted something expensive. My pal has this attitude toward lawyers.”
I shrugged. “It’s our cross.”
Charlie leaned toward me. “You’re really hung up on this lady, huh?”
I shook my head. “That’s not it. I just thought I had a handle on what happened to Les Katz. But none of the facts seems to fit.”
He nodded. “You do tend to go off chasing windmills, friend.”
&n
bsp; “I’m aware of that. The thing is, these windmills don’t even turn out to be windmills. Nothing but mirage and illusion. It’s discouraging.”
“In that case,” said Charlie, “there’s only one thing to do.”
“And what is that?”
He lifted the bottle. “Have another.”
12
THURSDAY NIGHT. THE ELEVEN o’clock news was all good, if one is willing to discount continued strife in the Middle East and layoffs at the Framingham General Motors plant. The blizzard that paralyzed Chicago didn’t strike me as bad news at all, nor did Larry Bird’s backache or a caustic review of Robert Redford’s recent film.
I flicked off the television, stretched and yawned, and was on my way to brush my teeth when the phone rang.
I detoured to the bedroom, flopped on my bed, and picked up the receiver. “Coyne,” I said.
I heard labored breathing.
“Hello?” I said. “Who is this?”
“Oh, Brady…” The voice sounded far away.
“Becca? Is that you?”
“Yes. Oh, God…”
“Hey, take it easy. What’s the matter?”
“I told him. I didn’t want to. I’m sorry. But I told him.”
“Who? You told who what? Becca, what is going on?”
“Brady, please…”
“Do you want me to come over?”
She was crying softly.
“Becca?”
“Yes. Please come. Oh, please.”
“I’m on my way.”
I pulled up in front of her house twenty minutes later, having violated about a dozen traffic regulations along the way. The light was on over her front door. I jabbed at the bell and instantly heard the upstairs door creak. A moment later Becca unlocked the door that opened onto the porch where I stood. She wore a big bulky robe with the collar turned up around her ears. I bent to kiss her, but she drew away from me and averted her face. She turned and trudged up the stairs into her apartment. She moved painfully. I followed her.
She led me into her living room. A small table had been knocked over and the rug was mussed up. The sofa had been shoved backward.
Becca sat on the sofa, her head dipped into her hands. She began to cry.
I sat beside her and put my arm across her shoulders. “What can I get you?”
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