‘Yes. Don’t worry about that.’
But Tina is plenty worried. She sounds on the verge of tears, in fact, and this makes Holly’s stomach contract into a tight little ball. ‘Oh boy. I hope he doesn’t hate me.’
‘He won’t,’ Holly says. She’s chewing her Nicorette at warp speed. ‘Bill will find out what’s wrong and fix it. Then your brother will love you more than ever.’
‘Do you promise?’
‘Yes! Ouch!’
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing.’ She wipes her mouth and looks at a smear of blood on her fingers. ‘I bit my lip. I have to go, Tina. Will you call me if you think of anyone he might have talked to about the money?’
‘There’s no one,’ Tina says forlornly, and starts to cry.
‘Well … okay.’ And because something else seems required: ‘Don’t bother with eye makeup. Your eyes are very pretty as they are. Goodbye.’
She ends the call without waiting for Tina to say anything else and resumes pacing. She spits the wad of Nicorette into the wastebasket by her desk and blots her lip with a tissue, but the bleeding has already stopped.
No close friends and no steady girl. No names except for that one teacher.
Holly sits down and powers up her computer again. She opens Firefox, goes to the Northfield High website, clicks OUR FACULTY, and there is Howard Ricker, wearing a flower-patterned shirt with billowy sleeves, just like Tina said. Also a very ridiculous tie. Is it really so impossible that Pete Saubers said something to his favorite English teacher, especially if it had to do with whatever he was writing (or reading) in a Moleskine notebook?
A few clicks and she has Howard Ricker’s telephone number on her computer screen. It’s still early, but she can’t bring herself to cold-call a complete stranger. Phoning Tina was hard enough, and that call ended in tears.
I’ll tell Bill tomorrow, she decides. He can call Ricky the Hippie if he thinks it’s worth doing.
She goes back to her voluminous movie folder and is soon once more lost in The Godfather Part II.
12
Morris visits another computer café that Sunday night, and does his own quick bit of research. When he’s found what he wants, he fishes out the piece of notepaper with Peter Saubers’s cell number on it, and jots down Andrew Halliday’s address. Coleridge Street is on the West Side. In the seventies, that was a middle-class and mostly white enclave where all the houses tried to look a little more expensive than they actually were, and as a result all ended up looking pretty much the same.
A quick visit to several local real estate sites shows Morris that things over there haven’t changed much, although an upscale shopping center has been added: Valley Plaza. Andy’s car may still be parked at his house out there. Of course it might be in a space behind his shop, Morris never checked (Christ, you can’t check everything, he thinks), but that seems unlikely. Why would you put up with the hassle of driving three miles into the city every morning and three miles back every night, in rush-hour traffic, when you could buy a thirty-day bus-pass for ten dollars, or a six-month’s pass for fifty? Morris has the keys to his old pal’s house, although he’d never try using them; the house is a lot more likely to be alarmed than the Birch Street Rec.
But he also has the keys to Andy’s car, and a car might come in handy.
He walks back to Bugshit Manor, convinced that McFarland will be waiting for him there, and not content just to make Morris pee in the little cup. No, not this time. This time he’ll also want to toss his room, and when he does he’ll find the Tuff Tote with the stolen computer and the bloody shirt and shoes inside. Not to mention the envelope of money he took from his old pal’s desk.
I’d kill him, thinks Morris – who is now (in his own mind, at least) Morris the Wolf.
Only he couldn’t use the gun, plenty of people in Bugshit Manor know what a gunshot sounds like, even a polite ka-pow from a little faggot gun like his old pal’s P238, and he left the hatchet in Andy’s office. That might not do the job even if he did have it. McFarland is big like Andy, but not all puddly-fat like Andy. McFarland looks strong.
That’s okay, Morris tells himself. That shit don’t mean shit. Because an old wolf is a crafty wolf, and that’s what I have to be now: crafty.
McFarland isn’t waiting on the stoop, but before Morris can breathe a sigh of relief, he becomes convinced that his PO will be waiting for him upstairs. Not in the hall, either. He’s probably got a passkey that lets him into every room in this fucked-up, piss-smelling place.
Try me, he thinks. You just try me, you sonofabitch.
But the door is locked, the room is empty, and it doesn’t look like it’s been searched, although he supposes if McFarland did it carefully … craftily—