Suspects Page 10

  He joined her with a bogus chuckle, but it was a very naïve thing to believe, if indeed she did believe it. “I’ve got some problems,” he said. “Let’s put it that way. I admit I’m running away from them right now. But I swear I’ll take care of them soon as I can.”

  She stared solemnly through the windshield. “You got a wife and kids.”

  His incredulous chuckle was genuine. “Oh, no!”

  “They have ‘em at a younger age than you,” said Molly. “Look, it’s none of my business.”

  “I’m not married.”

  “Me neither,” Molly cried with energy. “I don’t want to be tied down quite yet. Then there’s my dad to take care of. I don’t need kids on top of it. If I had a husband, he’d want to get me out of this rig, I bet. Even my dad don’t really like me driving. It’s only because he got hurt I got the chance. Which reminds me I have to give him a call soon. We’re out of range now from the CB home base. We want to get a cell phone one of these days, but the service costs an awful lot.”

  Molly continued to talk in this vein—a rig this size cost as much as some houses, and her dad could hardly keep up with the payments, and so on—and Lloyd felt so protected by the very banality of her concerns and way of life that he fell into the first untroubled sleep he had known in a long time and did not awake until the sudden change in that continuum of motion, monotonous sound, and sustained vibration was registered by his startled unconscious.

  They had stopped at the farthest island of pumps at an enormous gas station. Molly had left the cab. The sky was almost dark, but the vast terrain of concrete, under massed floodlights, glared as if in a noontime sun, the difference being that this illumination was so blue-cold as to cause Lloyd momentarily to shiver.

  But then there was Molly, smiling warmly up from the concrete below his window. “You want to use the john, you better,” said she. “This is the last stop till touchdown.”

  When he returned to the truck, Molly fired up the massive engine with a twist of the key and a thrust of her foot. After several strident changes of gear they were rolling along the highway again. Once off the glaring apron of the gas station, she had switched on the headlights, and now, with nothing on the road ahead at the moment, she hit the brights. The illumination inside the cab had changed by contrast. Her face was a kind of silhouette tinged at its edges, forehead, nose, chin, with reflected light from the dials on the dashboard. “I called my dad, and he’s set up another job, a load for the return. But pickup’s not till morning, day after tomorrow. That’ll leave a day to kill.”

  “Good,” Lloyd said, but realizing this was ambiguous, added, “It must cut down your profit considerably to go back empty.” He wondered whether she expected him to comment on the free day at her disposal. He did not want to get trapped in anything.

  Molly said she was looking forward to some rest first of all. “There’s a bunk right there, behind the curtain.” She gestured with her thumb at the vibrating partition of navy-blue cloth across the shelf behind their heads. “It’s real comfortable. I just pull in to a truck stop and climb up there. Usually I’m so tired I drift right off. They got toilets and showers at the stops, and most of them now have ones just for ladies, so that’s no problem.”

  “And you’ve got your gun,” said Lloyd.

  “That’s for a last resort.”

  During the ensuing hours Lloyd napped sporadically while sitting up, as he had earlier. He was psychically exhausted and needed sleep but did not dare surrender more than temporarily to what even so was not real oblivion but rather a state posing as such and therefore extremely treacherous. More than once Molly suggested he mount to the sleeping shelf, but he insisted that he felt fine where he was.

  Finally, after a longer nap than usual, for it had been black night when he had closed his eyes but was now gray morning, he was awakened by the lack of motion to find the truck at a loading dock of a factory building of some sort. He was alone in the cab. Men were coming and going on the ground outside. Looking down through the closed window, he exchanged indifferent glances with a few of them, but most were too preoccupied to look up.

  Molly climbed in to get a clipboard full of papers that had been hanging on one of the knobs on the dashboard. “Hey,” she said, “you’re awake. They’re almost finished with the unloading. In a minute we’ll go somewhere for a real snooze. I could use one.” Yet she looked as lively as ever. Her red baseball cap had been swapped for a clean one in royal blue.

  “I guess I wasn’t much of a companion the last few hours.”

  “I just liked having you there,” said she, swinging out the door and seemingly jumping to the ground.

  She was vigorously back before long, returning the clipboard and settling in behind the outsized steering wheel. She waved to someone on the ground on her side, whom Lloyd could not see, and said, “He claims he can get me a deal on a living-room set.” She turned to smile at Lloyd. “Ever notice how much furniture costs?”

  “I’ve never bought any.”

  “Even without the markup, it’s plenty.” She sighed and started up the engine. “This place makes furniture, I don’t know how good. My load was foam rubber. The best stuffs upholstered, I think. Anyway, you can make real good time with a light load like that. Going back, it’s auto-body parts. But there’s this twenty-four-hour layover. Don’t get me wrong. It’s a whole lot better than going back empty. But it’s no way to get rich.” She put the truck in motion. “He asked me who you were, and I said my brother. Do you mind?”

  “Not at all.”

  “I never tell people more than they should know,” Molly said. “It’s just a principle of mine.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “I got my reputation to think of.”

  “It’s fine, really,” said Lloyd. He sensed she wanted something more from him, but he was unable to provide it.

  “Did you see him?”

  “Who?”

  “The guy, the foreman. He’s as old as my dad, almost. He never saw me before. Why’d he offer to get me a living-room set wholesale? Think he’s putting the moves on me?”

  Lloyd struggled to get his brain working. “Not necessarily. In that case wouldn’t he offer to give it to you free? Whereas he wants money. I’d say he’s either talking about seconds that couldn’t be sold retail, or it’s furniture he pilfered from the plant. A man in his position could probably do that and stash it away there near the dock, where it could be sold on the side to truck drivers who come in, and loaded like legitimate shipments. The guys who work under him wouldn’t necessarily even have to know, or he might pay them off.”

  “Wow,” Molly said admiringly. “I’d never have thought of something like that. You got the mind of a cop.”

  “Or a criminal,” Lloyd said.

  “Should I be scared?” She was laughing.

  “Not with the gun you’re packing.”

  Eyes dancing, she said, “Hey, that’s right. I keep forgetting I’m not helpless.”

  “You wouldn’t be helpless without the gun,” Lloyd said solemnly and added, almost without thinking, “I envy you.”

  Unless he was working, Moody went to Walsh’s most nights rather than go home early enough so that he could be bothered by his fellow tenants, whom the super, disregarding his request, had told he was a cop, which meant neighbors knocked on his door every evening, bringing problems from trivial—noisy kids in the hallway—to grim: a young woman had been raped and beaten half to death on the tenth floor a month before he moved in, and people were still reporting sightings of evil-looking strangers. But that was a Sex Crimes case and not one for Homicide. When he explained as much, however, people were annoyed to hear that policemen pretended the arbitrary distinctions among themselves were meaningful and not just TV jargon.

  When you ordered either bourbon or rye by its generic name at Walsh’s, not specifying a brand, you got bar stock of indifferent quality, but, paying only from half to two thirds of what the known
labels would run you, you could not say you weren’t getting your money’s worth. The cheapest draft beer, a local product named Steinbräu (pronounced Stinebrow), was of a somewhat higher order and in fact superior to the other brews on tap, all nationally distributed dishwaters called Lite. Moody sometimes drank a Steiner to refresh his palate between shots of rotgut, but tonight he had only had one of the former to an uncounted number of the latter.

  Walsh’s was owned by two retired detectives, neither named Walsh. “I don’t know if there ever was a Walsh,” Sal Borelli was telling Moody. “Me and Howie bought it off this German guy, a big krauthead name of Gruber.”

  “I remember him,” Moody said. “John Gruber. My old man used to be a friend of his.”

  “It was already called Walsh’s at the time.”

  “Let me tell you this,” Moody said to Borelli, who was tending bar tonight, “if it was Irish, your corned beef would stink. And listen to me, I know whereof I speak: my old lady was Irish. I loved my mother but she couldn’t cook worth a damn, and it was worst of all when it was supposed to be Irish.”

  “Jews make the best corned beef,” Borelli said, sipping charged water over chipped ice. “Howie buys all ours from some kosher outfit.” He put the tumbler down with a decisive thrust of hairy forearm. “I wasn’t looking for you tonight, Nicholas my boy. Ain’t you and Dennis on the Howland?” Though retired for some years, Borelli kept current with all ongoing investigations.

  Moody answered as if indignant. “We got to sleep sometime.”

  “This is sleeping?”

  “You know me, Sal. I can’t get to sleep any more without some help, and I’d rather give you the money than spend it on pills.” He jerked his chin at his full shot glass. “Hit me again.” He hurled his head back and emptied the whiskey into his open mouth, afterward lowering the little glass delicately between thumb and forefinger until it came to rest between the rings of moisture on the gleaming bar. He believed that no amount of alcohol had yet proved sufficient to affect his coordination. He was convinced he never staggered or slurred his speech, but he was aware that at a certain stage of drinking he gradually began to shed things that were the products of deliberate thought and give precedence to feeling. If he had not been drunk, for example, he would never have bum-rapped his mother’s cooking. It hurt him to do so, because she had not intentionally prepared corned beef that was dry and tasteless; in fact, she herself thought it perfect and was wont to boast about it while disparaging the version sold at Golden’s Deli, which it was doubtful she ever tasted and which happened to be great.

  “Golden’s,” he said when Borelli delivered the refill.

  “Huh?”

  “Golden’s Deli, over on South Main. They had terrific corned beef.”

  “Nobody’s got better than us, Nick,” Borelli insisted. “You should try some right now. You’re not sleeping, and I bet you forgot to eat. Let me order for you. Sandwich or the New England boiled dinner? Why not the dinner? Vegetables and all. And you don’t need no more hard stuff. Stick with a Steiner.”

  A large man leaned over the bar near Moody and after muttering something to Borelli turned his head and said, “Hiya, Nicky.”

  It was Walsh’s co-owner, Howie Hersh, who in his day, a decade earlier, had been the city’s most decorated cop.

  “You remember Golden’s cornbeef.”

  Hersh patted Moody’s shoulder with a heavy paw. “They’re my wife’s cousins own it now. The old folks passed on some time back. We get our meat here from the same supplier. Chicago.”

  “There you are,” Borelli said proudly. “If you’re on your way back to the kitchen, Howie, ask Denise or whoever to run a platter out for Nick.”

  Moody’s hands were raised, as if a gun were pointed at him. “I can’t go to bed on a full stomach. Be up all night. Just let me have another shot, and I’ll be on my way.”

  “Whadduh we gonna do with this guy?” Borelli asked.

  To show them he was not drunk, Moody made joking references to how heavy they were, Hersh being probably thirty or forty pounds over what he had been as a detective, but he had a massive frame. On the shorter Borelli the potgut was more conspicuous. The restaurateurs enjoyed being ribbed by another of their own breed, who could be counted on, drunk or sober, not to say anything really to offend them, and they would return the favor and never bring up the subject of women in Moody’s presence, at least nowadays.

  Hersh lumbered away, and Borelli poured the new drink. After downing it, Moody stepped off the stool to go to the men’s room. He needed all his resolve to walk steadily. The place was crowded with patrons, not all of whom were cops, whose numbers, counting even those who were retired, would not have been sufficient to keep a business in operation if it enjoyed only their trade. Some of the civilian customers, especially the females, were fans of the police and liked to be near them in a social situation, but there were always others who were ignorant of the basic character of the place and presumably found it only by chance.

  One thing you could say about the men’s room at Walsh’s: there were no phone numbers scribbled on the walls above the urinals and no filthy graffiti. Walsh’s was not exactly a family place, for liquor was served in quantity, but neither was it a dive. Hookers were not suffered on the premises, even though many detectives were on good terms with call girls and some were discreetly intimate, exchanging protection for free tail. Female police buffs, so long as they did not charge a fee for their beds, were more than welcome.

  When Moody emerged from the toilet he saw a neat blond head above a cute round behind just leaving the adjacent ladies’ rest room. She headed the other way, toward the eating area, but then halted suddenly and turned back. It was Daisy O’Connor.

  Fond as he was of her, Moody hated to see her when he was in this condition. It did not help to notice her briefly flinch and then cover it up by asking briskly, “Hey, Nick, how you doin’?”

  “How’s your mom these days? I’ve been meaning to check in on her but haven’t been able to lately with all—”

  “She’s fine,” Daisy said, gesturing impatiently with her short un-colored fingernails. Moody could remember her from the days when she used to bite them and would pout if kidded about it. He always thought it strange that in the case of the O’Connors it was the daughter who had followed her dad into the department and none of the boys, but Bill was a career Marine. Terry had something to do with computers and was married to an Italian girl, who in fact was a niece to Walsh’s co-owner Sal Borelli. Patrick worked for a Catholic charity and had a manner that had always seemed swishy to Moody, who however, in deference to his old partner, the late father of this family, would not speculate further.

  Daisy gestured again, and he saw the coin between her fingers. “I got to make a call.”

  He realized he was blocking her way to the wall-hung phone but was careful not to apologize too profusely, drunk-style. He stepped aside. “Great job you did finding that address book.” He was aware of her aim to be a detective like her dad. Ordinarily this would happen only after some years as a uniformed patrolman, but practices were changing now when it came to women. Daisy had been sent fresh from the Academy to a special FBI course in forensic identification procedures. She might well be able one day in the not too distant future to step from Ident to one of the detective bureaus without an interlude in a car, dealing mostly with that formerly standard duty of the female officer, the family dispute.

  Daisy gave him a severe but not unkind stare. “You haven’t had any sleep in two days, have you? Go home and go to bed, Nick.”

  “Remember how you used to hate to go to bed as a kid, Daze?” As the only girl in the family, she had a room of her own, while the three boys were quartered in the dormitory into which the former attic had been remodeled. The only O’Connor who slept by herself, Daisy had been lonely at bedtime. Moody hoped this was not still the case and that she was not looking for some bum at Walsh’s to take her back to his place. She still lived w
ith her mother in the family house.

  “I got some sense when I grew up,” she said now, passing him. “I just wish you did.” She had gone by but stopped abruptly and turned. “I didn’t mean it the way it sounded, Nick. What I meant was, you really ought to take better care of yourself. We all want that, you know.” She turned away just as quickly and began to use the telephone.

  Moody was touched by her words, sufficiently so that all at once he got himself together and plodded toward the door, past the bar, where he said good night to an obviously relieved Borelli, and then onto the sidewalk outside in the fresh air and, when he got beyond the canopy, under a sky full of stars that seemed at once smaller than usual but much brighter. His car was parked nearby in a forbidden loading zone marked with a sign and glaring yellow stripes, but no vehicle in Walsh’s vicinity was ever ticketed unless it obviously belonged to some civilian interloper.

  He was trying to insert the key in the door when he heard a sound behind him. His faculties were instandy in working order and focused. As he was turning, hand on the revolver clipped to his belt, he had a millisecond in which to think: now the muggers are going too far.

  But it was Daisy O’Connor. If she noticed his unarmed hand falling to his side, she ignored it. “Nick,” she said, “let me drive you home.”

  “Aw, I don’t need that.”

  “Don’t take it that way. You’re tired. You’ve been working two days straight.” She reached toward him, fingers twitching. “Let me do something for you for a change. Gimme the keys.”

  “You do plenty, in your job,” Moody said. “Your dad would be proud.”

  Her eyes sparkled in the reflected light from Walsh’s windows. “Don’t make me hurt you. I was real good at hand-to-hand at the Academy.”

  “I bet you were. I wouldn’t want to tangle with you.”

  “Dammit, Nick!”

  “Thanks anyway, kid. Go back in to whatever you were doing. If it’s a date, I’m sure your taste in men is a lot better than mine in women, so I won’t try and give you advice.”