Lawrence smiles. Sadly, it seems to me. “There’s always more.”
With that he takes his paper plate and paper towels, empties and deposits them into a big plastic trash can near the end of the trailer. Then he walks up the two wooden steps leading to the door of the trailer and disappears inside.
Tommy stops his pickup behind my car, gets out, and walks up the gravel driveway. He walks past me without saying anything and goes into the trailer. He’s inside with Lawrence for a good ten minutes. Then Tommy comes back outside, walks to the cooler. He pulls out two Miller Genuine Drafts and hands one to me.
“So,” Tommy says.
“So.” I look across the table at him. I’m feeling hurt and angry. He’d gotten himself into trouble. Again. I understand that. I can see how that would happen with Tommy. I don’t like it, but I get it. But instead of turning to me to help bail him out, my brother sought out Lawrence, a dirty cop he met one night in a bar. As I mull this over, Lawrence’s words come back to me: Don’t judge him. Tommy pulls an opened pack of cigarettes from the pocket of his dark-blue T-shirt. He taps one out, puts it to his lips, and lights it with a Zippo. He inhales deeply and coughs. We look hard at each other.
“So,” I repeat.
“Jennifer Yamura,” Tommy says.
Here comes the rest of the story.
“You were fucking her.”
“For a while, sometime back. Met her at O’Dwyer’s,” he says. Another cop bar. “Girl was a hard drinker. Whiskey, straight up. We had some laughs. She invited me back to her place.”
“To the house on Addison Street.” Now I know why Tommy suggested we get in for a scene inspection before the forensic guys came back. Somewhere in the house, there would be evidence of Tommy’s presence. Hair, prints, something. Now I also understand why Tommy showed such animus toward David.
Tommy smiles. “She showed me her kimonos.”
“And a whole lot more.”
Tommy smiles again. At least his mouth is smiling. His eyes look tired and beaten down. I can see that he isn’t getting a lot of sleep. “It’s all my fault,” he says. “The whole mess.”
I ask him what he’s talking about.
Tommy sighs. “That girl could screw,” he says. “But it was more than that. I thought so anyway. We talked. About everything. Her rich brother. Her parents. The shitheads she worked with. My fucked-up life. Her wacky relationship with your friend David, that piece of shit.” Tommy pauses, lights another cigarette, takes a couple of deep drags. “She had a way of pulling you in, making you feel like she was really into you. Like you could trust her. So I did. Bad move. Bad fucking move. I told her about my troubles with the mob. And how I was working to get free of them.”
“You told her about the drug ring.”
Tommy closes his eyes and nods. “And the grand jury. Devlin had a full head of steam by then. Lawrence had already testified.”
“You’re the source that Devlin Walker’s been after. The source of Jennifer’s story.”
“Yes. And no. I didn’t know a lot of what she wrote about in her story. Like who else besides Lawrence had testified before the grand jury.”
I think about what Tommy has just told me. “So you were the springboard. Once Jennifer knew from you that there was a story, she went out and got her hands on someone else. Someone who knew a lot more than you did about the details of the investigation.”
“Way I figure it.”
“Still, if Walker finds out about you, he’ll crucify you.”
Tommy’s eyes flatten. “He wouldn’t be the only one.”
“The bad guys,” I say, thinking of Lipinski being disemboweled by gunfire.
“The bad guys,” Tommy repeats.
Tommy and I sit at the table for a long time, neither of us saying anything. Until Tommy looks at me and asks, “So, Mick, what’s your take on all of this? How does it all fit together?”
I spread my hands. “I don’t know yet,” I say. “There’s still so much we don’t know. Like who the second source was. Who mowed down Lipinski? Why did Devlin Walker act so fast to nail David for murder one? Why’s Devlin so hot to get David to plead?”
“And, of course,” says Tommy, “who pushed Jennifer Yamura down the stairs.”
“Of course,” I say as something—I’m not sure what—flashes across Tommy’s eyes.
We sit there, looking at each other in silence. Then, abruptly, Tommy stands and walks into the trailer.
10
SATURDAY, AUGUST 11
I bolt upright in bed. My chest is pounding. I’m hyperventilating. Piper sits up next to me, grabs hold of my arm.
“Mick. Mick. Are you all right?”
I take a couple of deep breaths, tell Piper I’m okay. “Just a bad dream,” I say.
Piper lies back down as I get off the bed, grab my robe. The blue neon numbers read 4:15. It’s Saturday morning. I’ve only been asleep a couple of hours. By the time I got back from Tommy’s trailer in Jim Thorpe, it was well after midnight. My head was spinning when I went to bed, and it seemed like I lay there forever before sleep reached up and pulled me down.
Downstairs, in the kitchen, I use our Keurig to make myself a cup of coffee. I take the mug onto the back patio and sit down at the table. My hand shakes as I lift the mug to my lips.
What a mess.
“What a fucking mess.” I say it out loud this time. The murder, the crime ring, the grand-jury investigation. Tommy and Jennifer Yamura. David Hanson. All of them mixed up in it now. And Piper moving away from me, maybe soon lost to me forever.
I have to find a way to make this turn out well for all of us. A lone tear slides down the right side of my face. My mouth starts to quiver. But I stop it. I stop it cold.
“No,” I say. “No more.”
And deep inside my head, I hear the iron gears turning, tightening the hard-closed doors of my mind’s many compartments. I finish my coffee and make my way to the basement, pull some running shorts and a shirt from the dryer.
It’s not even 6:30 when I return, but Piper is already up and making breakfast. The table is set for just the two of us, which means Gabby is still in bed. She’s set out a large glass of orange juice for each of us. The bacon has already been cooked and is nestled in paper towels to absorb the grease. She’s working on the eggs.
“How was your run?” she asks.
“Good. You’re up and at ’em this morning.”
Piper uses a spatula to scramble the eggs. “How was Tommy?”
I nod my head. “He’s fine. They’re both fine,” I add. That Piper doesn’t ask me who I’m talking about tells me that she knows all about Lawrence Washington. A bubble of anger rises inside me, but I push it down.
Piper stares at me for a long minute. “Is Tommy in trouble? Are they going to find out about him? The district attorney? The bad cops?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “They haven’t found out about him so far.”