“Sure.”
“He’s getting a scrip filled there. Haul ass around the block as fast as you can. He told me he’s going home, and maybe he is, but if he’s not, I want to know where he does go. Do you think you can tail him? He knows my car. He won’t know yours.”
“No prob. I’m on my way.”
Less than three minutes later Jerome is coming around the corner. He nips into a space just vacated by a mom picking up a couple of kids that look way too shrimpy to be in high school. Hodges pulls out, gives Jerome a wave, and heads for Holly’s position on Garner Street, punching in her number as he goes. They can wait for Jerome’s report together.
22
Pete’s father does take Vioxx, has ever since he finally kicked the OxyContin, but he currently has plenty. The folded sheet of paper Pete takes from his back pocket and glances at before going into City Drug is a stern note from the assistant principal reminding juniors that Junior Skip Day is a myth, and the office will examine all absences that day with particular care.
Pete doesn’t brandish the note; Bill Hodges may be retired, but he sure didn’t seem retarded. No, Pete just looks at it for a moment, as if making sure he has the right thing, and goes inside. He walks rapidly to the prescription counter at the back, where Mr. Pelkey throws him a friendly salute.
“Yo, Pete. What can I get you today?”
“Nothing, Mr. Pelkey, we’re all fine, but there are a couple of kids after me because I wouldn’t let them copy some answers from our take-home history test. I wondered if you could help me.”
Mr. Pelkey frowns and starts for the swing-gate. He likes Pete, who is always cheerful even though his family has gone through incredibly tough times. “Point them out to me. I’ll tell them to get lost.”
“No, I can handle it, but tomorrow. After they have a chance to cool off. Just, you know, if I could slip out the back . . .”
Mr. Pelkey drops a conspiratorial wink that says he was a kid once, too. “Sure. Come through the gate.”
He leads Pete between shelves filled with salves and pills, then into the little office at the back. Here is a door with a big red sign on it reading ALARM WILL SOUND. Mr. Pelkey shields the code box next to it with one hand and punches in some numbers with the other. There’s a buzz.
“Out you go,” he tells Pete.
Pete thanks him, nips out onto the loading dock behind the drugstore, and jumps down to the cracked cement. An alley takes him to Frederick Street. He looks both ways for the ex-detective’s Prius, doesn’t see it, and breaks into a run. It takes him twenty minutes to reach Lower Main Street, and although he never spots the blue Prius, he makes a couple of sudden diversions along the way, just to be safe. He’s just turning onto Lacemaker Lane when his phone vibrates again. This time the text is from his sister.
Tina: Did u talk 2 Mr. Hodges? Hope u did. Mom knows. I didn’t tell she KNEW. Please don’t be mad at me.
As if I could, Pete thinks. Were they two years closer in age, maybe they could have gotten that sibling rivalry thing going, but maybe not even then. Sometimes he gets irritated with her, but really mad has never happened, even when she’s being a brat.
The truth about the money is out, but maybe he can say money was all he found, and hide the fact that he tried to sell a murdered man’s most private property just so his sister could go to a school where she wouldn’t have to shower in a pack. And where her dumb friend Ellen would be in the rearview mirror.
He knows his chances of getting out of this clean are slim approaching none, but at some point—maybe this very afternoon, watching the hands of the clock move steadily toward the hour of three—that has become of secondary importance. What he really wants is to send the notebooks, especially the ones containing the last two Jimmy Gold novels, to NYU. Or maybe The New Yorker, since they published almost all of Rothstein’s short stories in the fifties. And stick it to Andrew Halliday. Yes, and hard. All the way up. No way can Halliday be allowed to sell any of Rothstein’s later work to some rich crackpot collector who will keep it in a climate-controlled secret room along with his Renoirs or Picassos or his precious fifteenth-century Bible.
When he was a kid, Pete saw the notebooks only as buried treasure. His treasure. He knows better now, and not just because he’s fallen in love with John Rothstein’s nasty, funny, and sometimes wildly moving prose. The notebooks were never just his. They were never just Rothstein’s, either, no matter what he might have thought, hidden away in his New Hampshire farmhouse. They deserve to be seen and read by everyone. Maybe the little landslide that exposed the trunk on that winter day had been nothing but happenstance, but Pete doesn’t believe it. He believes that, like the blood of Abel, the notebooks cried out from the ground. If that makes him a dipshit romantic, so be it. Some shit does mean shit.
Halfway down Lacemaker Lane, he spots the bookshop’s old-fashioned scrolled sign. It’s like something you might see outside an English pub, although this one reads Andrew Halliday Rare Editions instead of The Plowman’s Rest, or whatever. Looking at it, Pete’s last doubts disappear like smoke.
He thinks, John Rothstein is not your birthday fuck, either, Mr. Halliday. Not now and never was. You get none of the notebooks. Bupkes, honey, as Jimmy Gold would say. If you go to the police, I’ll tell them everything, and after that business you went through with the James Agee book, we’ll see who they believe.
A weight—invisible but very heavy—slips from his shoulders. Something in his heart seems to have come back into true for the first time in a long time. Pete starts for Halliday’s at a fast walk, unaware that his fists are clenched.
23
At a few minutes past three—around the time Pete is getting into Hodges’s Prius—a customer does come into the bookshop. He’s a pudgy fellow whose thick glasses and gray-flecked goatee do not disguise his resemblance to Elmer Fudd.
“Can I help you?” Morris asks, although what first occurs to him is Ehhh, what’s up, Doc?
“I don’t know,” Elmer says dubiously. “Where is Drew?”
“There was sort of a family emergency in Michigan.” Morris knows Andy came from Michigan, so that’s okay, but he’ll have to be cagey about the family angle; if Andy ever talked about relatives, Morris has forgotten. “I’m an old friend. He asked if I’d mind the store this afternoon.”
Elmer considers this. Morris’s left hand, meanwhile, creeps around to the small of his back and touches the reassuring shape of the little automatic. He doesn’t want to shoot this guy, doesn’t want to risk the noise, but he will if he has to. There’s plenty of room for Elmer back there in Andy’s private office.