“ ‘Some of them, like the kennel guys, for example, those guys’ve got their own businesses, so she has got those that she does. And then there’s a lot who just work for a living, which is like most people do, but they also have her do their taxes. Some of her father’s law clients, because naturally he would recommend her to someone who he was their lawyer and they needed their taxes done, but also a lot of guys that didn’t use him. They never had Ev at all. They just heard good things about Olivia, and how her work was real good, and that’s what they’re after themselves; they want someone good, do their taxes. Because they’re afraid if they made a mistake there, well, they’re scared of the IRS, which most people are, everybody I know is. Scared of those bastards, I mean. So they all go to her and say to her: “Here, you do this for us,” and that’s what she does then, she does that. Fills out their tax-returns for them.
“ ‘Her clients all really like her, I guess. I know they all keep coming back, year after year, and I don’t think they would do that if they didn’t. Unless they moved away, or maybe they died, but if it was, you know, something like that, well, then that wouldn’t be her fault that they did that, not like it was something she did that made them go find someone else.
“ ‘Which all of this would make sense, of course; she’s a professional accountant there, and that’s what those people do. Got a paper says she passed this exam—she’s one of them, whadda they call alla those people there, got that, one of them CPAs there. Got it framed up there onna wall in her office, with her college diploma. I guess that’s how you get to be that, by takin’ some special test that they give you, and you pass it and they make you one. So it’s not like the paper by itself means that much; all it does is just say that they did that.’
“ ‘How about this guy Doug that you mentioned a while back,’ I said with elaborate nonchalance, ‘did she do Doug’s tax return too?’
“ ‘Oh yeah, she does Doug’s,’ the kid says to me, ‘she did Doug and Laura’s returns for years, ever since she got her computer, bigger one’n she’d had in college. That’s how she met Doug in the first place, I guess: he sold her computer to her, and then, he found out what she wanted it for, I guess he gave her the thing at his cost, if she’d keep his books for his business. Although it could’ve been, it could also’ve been, that they knew each other from school. Like they were in college together, knew each other before, and that was why she bought her machine from him. I know it’s a really expensive machine there, I don’t even know what it cost. She told me: “Oh, ’bout as much as a small car does, but it does things a car never could.” So that could’ve been it too, I guess. That could be the reason. I guess I really don’t know that. I have got to go though, I know that.’
“ ‘Well, okay,’ I said, ‘I can understand that. But just tell me this, if you will: this guy Doug that Olivia’s so friendly with, that she’s known ever since her school days? Do you know what his last name might be?’
“His forehead’s all wrinkled already,” Dell’Appa said, “but it wasn’t that my question bothered him. It was from the effort of concentrating all his inmost strength and resolve on keeping his ureter closed. If he’d had an odometer hitched to his ass, he would’ve logged seven miles in that chair.
“ ‘Yeah,’ he said through clenched teeth, ‘yeah, I know his name. Lemme think just a second here: Brennan’s his name, yeah, his name’s Brennan. I met him once, nice-looking guy, maybe six or eight years older’n I am. Lives over in Quincy, that’s where he is. The computer guy’s name is Doug Brennan.’ ”
“Bing-go,” Dennison said softly. He sighed almost inaudibly, sitting there in the gloom, visible only in silhouetted shadow to Dell’Appa, his dusky voice over a hundred years away. “So, you were right all along. All that’s left to get now are the details. Oh, shit.”
Dell’Appa nodded. The lamp next to him meant that Dennison could see what his face did as he spoke. “Yeah,” he said, keeping expression out of everything except his voice and eyes. “Sorry, boss, and I really do mean that. I thought I was right, right from the beginning. It hadda be something like that. I began to be sure, when I was at Coldstream, and Joey said ‘ferret-legging.’ There’s only one person I ever heard say that before it came out of his mouth, and that was our friend, Bob Brennan.”
“He got it from Bomber,” Dennison said. “Bomber in one of his moods. I know. I was there the same day. When Bob and I were both young troopers, back around the time that South Carolina decided to secede and see how that played up the coast, Bomber got the wind up him one day and told us about how the Highlanders, Scotland and Wales, put hungry live ferrets down the fronts of their pants and bet on who’ll stand it the longest.”
Dennison chuckled. “It was a really great story,” he said. “He had all of us clutching our balls. And it was years later, I guess, ’fore I asked him one day, and I don’t know how it came up, what it was that brought it up, but I said to him: ‘Bomber, goddamn it, tell me something for just once now, will you? Is that story about ferrets true?’
“And he looked me straight in the eye and he laughed. ‘Of course not,’ he said, ‘I made it up.’ And I said to him: ‘Why, you bastard, why did you do that to us, nice innocent young guys like us? Because you know that we all believed it. We believed anything that you said.’
“And he said: ‘Yeah, I did know that, and that’s why I did it. To teach you you shouldn’t do that. You should never believe everything anyone tells you, no matter how good he is. He’ll lie to you then just for fun.’ ”
“Yeah,” Dell’Appa said, “well that was the beginning, after all these years, of a trail of breadcrumbs that was leading me right home. But then when I really knew, when I knew for sure, that I’m right and now we’re gonna prove it—which was when the kid said: ‘Doug and Laura,’ that was when it first hit me: Right, I was right, and we’re gonna prove it, all right. Because once he says it, we gonna have to prove it. Because from now on, we’re not gonna have any choice. I started to hope—and this amazed the hell out of me; not what I expected at all—I started to hope that we weren’t. That he wouldn’t tell me what I knew he was going to tell me, because I knew that it was going to be what I’d known, I had known all along. I wanted him to say something else, entirely, so I’d never even dreamed of what I knew. The trouble was that I had. It really made me feel sad, and I mean that. I really wish now I’d been wrong. That there was a way that maybe you knew, a way to un-find something out, to un-know something you knew. But I don’t think that there is.”
“No help for it,” Dennison said slowly and still almost inaudibly in the shadows. “He that increaseth wisdom increaseth sorrow. Some days, you get the bear; some days, the bear gets you. Come on, kid, I’ll buy you a drink.”
15
“Bob did not look good when he opened the door and came into Brian’s office,” Dell’Appa said to his wife in the golden light concentrated in their kitchen by the thickness of the early December evening outside. The chicken roasting in the oven had been expertly-fattened, and the aroma of it made him salivate. He was trying to hurry the process of opening the jug of cabernet sauvignon, in order to have something to put down his throat until the chicken was ready, so that he left the leaded collar torn raggedly around the top.
“He looked gray and bleached-out at the same time, like an old sweatshirt starting to fray around the cuffs and neck, pile all pilled-up and the shape mostly gone, not quite ready for throw-away yet, but right on the brink of it, ’thout any question—no more’n two washes away from extinction, and then into the rag bag. He looked like a big bag of shit, is really what the guy looked like. It’s possible he did have the flu.”
“ ‘Possible,’ ” Gayle said, “meaning: ‘Maybe I’d like to kiss a pig after all, maybe it’s not so bad.’ You don’t think so, that is, that he really had had a virus.”
“Approximately that, yeah,” he said. “I don’t doubt for a minute that he was sick; I’m sure he was as sick as a rat. I just do
n’t think he was sick with the flu. It was Thursday when I went down to Plymouth and hoovered the very lint out of Ernie Nugent’s navel. Until I left the jail, neither one of the Brennans would’ve had any way of knowing, any reason to suspect, that I’d gotten anything out of Ernie. The best they could’ve done, knowing I’d gone down there and the name of the man I wanted to talk to—as of course Bob would’ve known, working out of the same office, Thursday noon at the latest; he’s not a bad detective except when he wants to be, has a motive to be one—was that I must’ve run up against something that connected Nugent to Mossi.”
He had seated the corkscrew firmly and the cork came out of the neck of the jug cleanly enough, but when he poured the first glass the ragged edge of the leaded collar caused some of the wine to dribble over the lip of the glass, so that it puddled on the countertop. He said “Oh goddamnit,” put the jug down, used one paper-towel to mop up the spill and moistened another to clean the wine off the outside of the bowl of the glass. Then he trimmed the collar properly around the neck of the jug and resumed filling the glass, concentrating at the same time on not drooling. As soon as he had filled it, Gayle reached deftly around his back and filched it from the counter. “Hey,” he said, “that was mine.”
“You can pour another one,” she said, drinking from the glass. “You just opened it, you know. There’s plenty still left for you.”
“I know I just opened it,” he said. “That’s why I opened it in such a hurry and made a mess of it. Because I wanted a glass of wine.”
“Mmmm,” she said, after rolling it around against the roof of her mouth with her tongue in a parody of tasting a vintage, “this’s really pretty nice wine. Considering that it’s only cheap crap, I mean. Much better than that other brand of cheap crap we’ve been drinking. My mouth was just watering for a glass of wine or something.”
“Well, you should’ve opened it, then,” he said, filling a second glass. “And this isn’t cheap crap, either. This is the wine that the people who actually make all the wine drink with their food in their own homes, not the pricey stuff in the bottles with the hoity-toity labels that they sell to all the doctors and professors in the stores, who if they ever even tried to grow a grape would probably grow it cubical. Vin ordinaire, that’s what this is, pour tout le monde ordinaire, which is what we are. And the person who opens the bottle always gets the first glass out of it. Everyone knows that. That’s the rule.”
He hesitated and glanced at her. “Not,” he said, “that it really should’ve been strictly necessary for either one of us to’ve opened another bottle tonight, given the fact that there was a good three-quarters of a litre left in the one that I recall opening last night.”
“The rule’s so the guests won’t be the ones who discover it’s become vinegar,” she said. “That’s why the rule is, I mean. Tell you to be sure to add plenty of oil to it before you pour it over the salad. Well, I’m not a guest, I live here. And besides, I was willing to take the chance. I don’t think you’d give me vinegar. So therefore I took the wine too, along with the risk I’d accepted. And it must be prowlers got in, while we were both gone today, and drank all the wine left from last night. ’S the only possible explanation. Good thing for us that’s all they wanted, half a bottle of cheap-crap red wine—they didn’t take anything else, huh?” She grinned, but then erased it when he did not smile back at her. “Yeah,” she said, sternly, “oh-kay, back to business, here, Gaylesie. Stan’ by your man an’ all that shit. You don’t think then that before you went down to see him, the Brennans knew about Nugent?”
“Probably not,” he said. “Oh, they might’ve had some dim awareness that there was some kid named Ernie who did things now and then for Mossi, but he would’ve been no more than a supernumerary to them, far as they’d’ve been concerned. He’d only met Dougie once, years ago at the kennel. Dougie probably wouldn’t even have remembered the kid, wouldn’t’ve known last week if you’d asked him, why the kid’d even been there. That day years ago when Dougie came over to see the Rollins woman about something or other, some minor thing, computer adjustment or something, Ernie happened to be there and she introduced them? That wouldn’t have meant much to him then. He’d probably forgotten the kid’s name before he got his car-door shut, leaving the place—just another one of those young racetrack-hustlers, a dime for a dozen, an extra one free with each order. Two-dimensional, basically, of no importance to Doug. Part of the scenery backdrop.
“Now, though, now Dougie would know if you asked him who this Nugent kid is, how he fitted into the frame, absolutely, and in great detail. But then the only knowledge they had before lunchtime was only that I’d gone to see Ernie. It would’ve concerned them, sure; I might be onto something or I might stumble onto something. But it wouldn’t’ve been enough to panic them; probably just enough to get them started on the phone. It was still possible, when they first found out, that all I knew about was the Reno-Chico-Franco connection that Joey used to get Ernie to babysit his brother ten or eleven years ago. That would’ve worried them, naturally, because whoever they talked to would’ve clued them in that Ernie’s not too bright, if they didn’t already know that. He might not have brains enough to keep his mouth shut about having worked for Olivia that same summer, and anyway, even whether in fact he’d learned anything damaging to them, as a result of working for her.
“But it wouldn’t’ve thrown them into a state of high agitation, because, after all, why was Ernie in the lockup anyway? For complete obedience to the code of omerta; he’s in the can for not talking. It has to be somewhat reassuring to find out that the guy who might hurt you, if he talks, is already in the jug because he won’t talk, and very likely wouldn’t know what he knows anyway, because he’s fairly stupid. Long as everything stays smooth, no ripples on the pond, well, then everything’s cool, and okay. All you’ve got to do is keep your nerve, your fingers crossed, and also a good tight asshole.
“By noon on Friday all of those things’ve become much harder for them to do. By then Bob’s been into the office and seen that there’s lots going on, some of it involving me, in which no one sees fit to include him. The water’s all muddy where he is, and there aren’t ripples on it, there’re whitecaps on it. But he’s too far downstream, down-current, whichever, from whatever’s roiling it up, to see what the hell it might be, and he can’t seem to find anyone who’ll describe it to him. They all explain: it’s nothin’ personal, it’s just that they’re all just too busy, and besides, it’s my wild-west show now and I’m in charge, so to find out, he’ll have to ask me. And I’m nowhere to be found.
“My guess would be that by twelve-fifteen or twelve-thirty, either someone from Rollins’s office or someone from Doug Brennan’s bunch has found out that Ernie is gonzo, and now he’s been gone a whole day. They took him out from Isolation to talk to someone Thursday morning. The Brennans of course know who this is. But then he missed lunch, and the evening meal, too, and, then Friday morning he still wasn’t around, and some deputies came in and packed up all his stuff, dirty clothes and smelly socks, and took it all away someplace else. No one there seems to know where Ernie went. All they know is where he isn’t, hasn’t been: he hasn’t come back to his cell there since I came to see him on Thursday.
“Now both the Brennans are very upset. If Doug doesn’t know what all of this means, Bob does; he knows very well. He knows because he used to do it, before he turned slightly rancid. When the guy in the can goes to talk to a cop, and he doesn’t come back from the chat, the guy in the can told the cop something hot, and the cop didn’t want it to get cold. As it would’ve if the guy who gave him the hot thing got back in with the wrong type of guys. So by the middle of Friday afternoon Bob has to know that I’ve gotten the feds to let me borrow Ernie for a while—and why not; they weren’t getting a helluva lotta use out of him—and stashed him in a fifty-dollar-a-night suite with a bring-your-own-sweetie-special-hot-and-cold Jacuzzi in a traveling-salesmen’s-paradise motel, Mount-Vernon-b
y-the-Filter-Beds, four big-tall-white pillars—if you wanna, you can count ’em, but there’s really four of them—in some South Shore industrial park right next to some six-lane highway somewhere, eighteen-wheelers roarin’-by, day and fuckin’ night, and then when the sun is down, rabid raccoons everywhere—I’d think twice if I was you, I went out after dark; couple of our younger and more dashing dudes with shotguns watching CNN, ESPN, and probably dirty movies with him, washing Domino’s pepperoni pizza down with Giant Diet Cokes. Oh yeah, them’re the days, in the life of your above-average buckaroo, memsahib, and Bob knows ’em himself, knows ’em good.
“What Bob doesn’t know, though, is which Days Inn, or Quality, or HoJo it is, or even what town I picked, for a hidey-hole to stash Ernie in, and this is a good thing for Ernie. Because if Bob did, then Dougie would know, and when he knew, well, Franco would know. And Franco would then get ahold of Short Joey, and say to him: ‘Aw right now, we found out, and this’s the place. This’s where that little shit is, this’s the place they have got him. So go there at once and shoot him a few times, and then shoot him two more for good measure.’ But what Bob does know now, and knows sure as shit, as sure as if I’d told him, is that I got something real tasty from Ernie, and it’s brown-shorts-time now in the ol’ bunkhouse, boys, so hunker down and jes’ wait ’til your turn comes ’round, in the old three-holer outside. Bob left the office early, around three-thirty, quarter-four. Said his stomach was upset, and that, I am very sure, was the honest-to-God Gospel truth.
“On Monday morning, after putting in what I’m also sure was one weekend in Hell with his brother, calling anyone and everyone they could think of who might have some idea of how just much shit was in the fan and just whose shit was involved, and most likely calling upon every bit of Dougie’s wizard-hackery to safecrack into the master motel-registries on the off-chance they can find out where the hell I’m bastin’ Ernie nice-an’-even on the grille—with a tape-recorder and two VHS minicams running every goddamned minute, case Short Joey does find him, and pack him off to meet Jesus, and a steno taking notes, we’ll still have his testimony—Bob called the office, on my line. Which he had no reason in the world to do except for the one he couldn’t admit to: to find out what the hell I was doing, and how far I’d gotten doing it, if I was any closer to him—and of course once more I was the man who wasn’t there, he had met upon the stair, on Friday; again I wasn’t there.
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