Even in the winter the town square was impressive, but Shadow knew that this place was meant to be seen in summer: it would be a riot of color, of poppies and irises and flowers of every kind, and the clump of birch trees in one corner would be a green and silver bower. Now it was colorless, beautiful in a skeletal way, the bandshell empty, the fountain turned off for the winter, the brownstone city hall capped by white snow.
“... and this,” concluded Chad Mulligan, bringing the car to a stop outside a high glass-fronted old building on the west of the square, “is Mabel’s.”
He got out of the car, opened the passenger door for Shadow. The two men put their heads down against the cold and the wind, and hurried across the sidewalk and into a warm room, fragrant with the smells of new-baked bread, of pastry and soup and bacon.
The place was almost empty. Mulligan sat dowfa at a table and Shadow sat opposite him. He suspected that Mulligan was doing this to get a feel for the stranger in town. Then again, the police chief might simply be what he appeared: friendly, helpful, good.
A woman bustled over to their table, not fat but big, a big woman in her sixties, her hair bottle-bronze.
“Hello, Chad,” she said. “You’ll want a hot chocolate while you’re thinking.” She handed them two laminated menus.
“No cream on the top, though,” he agreed. “Mabel knows me too well,” he said to Shadow. “What’ll it be, pal?”
“Hot chocolate sounds great,” said Shadow. “And I’m happy to have the whipped cream on the top.”
“That’s good,” said Mabel. “Live dangerously, hon. Are you going to introduce me, Chad? Is this young man a new officer?”
“Not yet,” said Chad Mulligan, with a flash of white teeth. “This is Mike Ainsel. He moved to Lakeside last night. Now, if you’ll excuse me.” He got up, walked to the back of the room, through the door marked POINTERS. It was next to a door marked SETTERS.
“You’re the new man in the apartment up on Northridge Road. The old Pilsen place. Oh, yes,” she said, happily, “I know just who you are. Hinzelmann was by this morning for his morning pasty, he told me all about you. You boys only having hot chocolate or you want to look at the breakfast menu?”
“Breakfast for me,” said Shadow. “What’s good?”
“Everything’s good,” said Mabel. “I make it. But this is the farthest south and east of the yoopie you can get pasties, and they are particularly good. Warming and filling too. My speciality.”
Shadow had no idea what a pasty was, but he said that would be fine, and in a few moments Mabel returned with a plate with what looked like a folded-over pie on it. The lower half was wrapped in a paper napkin. Shadow picked it up with the napkin and bit into it: it was warm and filled with meat, potatoes, carrots, onions. “First pasty I’ve ever had,” he said. “It’s real good.”
‘They’re a yoopie thing,” she told him. “Mostly you need to be at least up Ironwood way to get one. The Cornish men who came over to work the iron mines brought them over.”
“Yoopie?”
“Upper Peninsula. U.P. Yoopie. It’s the little chunk of Michigan to the northeast.”
The chief of police came back. He picked up the hot chocolate and slurped it. “Mabel,” he said, “are you forcing this nice young man to eat one of your pasties?”
“It’s good,” said Shadow. It was too, a savory delight wrapped in hot pastry.
“They go straight to the belly,” said Chad Mulligan, patting his own stomach. “I warn you. Okay: S&ryou need a car?” With his parka off, he was revealed (as a lanky man with a round, apple-belly gut on him. He looked harassed and competent, more like an engineer than cop.
Shadow nodded, mouth full.
“Right. I made some calls. Justin Liebowitz’s selling his jeep, wants four thousand dollars for it, will settle for three. The Gunthers have had their Toyota 4-Runner for sale for eight months, ugly sonofabitch, but at this point they’d probably pay you to take it out of their driveway. And if you don’t care about ugly, it’s got to be a great deal. I used the phone in the men’s room, left a message for Missy Gunther down at Lakeside Realty, but she wasn’t in yet, probably getting her hair done down at Sheila’s.”
The pasty remained good as Shadow chewed his way through it. It was astonishingly filling. “Stick-to-your-ribs food,” as his mother would have said. “Sticks to your sides.”
“So,” said Chief of Police Chad Mulligan, wiping the hot-chocolate foam from around his lips. “I figure we stop off next at Hennings Farm and Home Supplies, get you a real winter wardrobe, swing by Dave’s Finest Food so you can fill your larder, then I’ll drop you up by Lakeside Realty. If you can put down a thousand up front for the car they’ll be happy, otherwise five hundred a month for four months should see them okay. It’s an ugly car, like I said, but if the kid hadn’t painted it purple it’d be a ten-thousand-dollar car, and reliable, and you’ll need something like that to get around this winter, you ask me.”
“This is very good of you,” said Shadow. “But shouldn’t you be out catching criminals, not helping newcomers? Not that I’m complaining, you understand.”