The following morning, Pete sat in a diner with a plate of pancakes and a glass of milk, the help wanted pages open in front of him. He had no idea what to do next. Being a reporter in New York City was all he’d ever wanted.
And yet, even as he circled ads for store assistants and filing clerks, his mind was still on Ruth Malone. He felt as though he was halfway through a book, and he wanted to know the ending.
He asked the waitress for a copy of the Yellow Pages and change for the phone, then looked up the names Gina had mentioned, and made some calls. Neither of them would talk: Johnny Salcito hung up on him; he didn’t get past Lou Gallagher’s secretary.
He decided to try a different tactic. He sat in his car outside the station house and waited until he saw the guy Gina had identified as Salcito. Pete followed him for nine or ten blocks, to a rundown dive where there were no other cops. He sat at the end of the bar, and watched him drink.
Salcito drank like a man who wanted to get drunk: he never looked at the television screen, never lifted his head when someone made a joke or raised their voice. He drank blended Scotch, steadily, without ice or soda or apparent enjoyment. He stared dully down at the bar or the beer mats; occasionally at a newspaper someone had left behind. He loosened his tie, ran his finger around his collar, dabbed his forehead with a dirty handkerchief. Then he pushed his glass forward half an inch and waited for the bartender to pour.
Pete looked at the purple veins on his nose, at his frayed cuffs. His hands shook and Pete thought about what Gina had said, that this was a man who owed money to the wrong kind of people.
For two nights, Pete watched Salcito arrive straight from his shift and leave around eleven. On the third evening Pete kept an eye on the clock, paid his check, and went out into the parking lot ahead of him. Saw Salcito stumble toward his car, his breath white smoke signals in the night air. Saw him fumble for his keys and drop them on the icy ground and bend and take a while to stand straight and get his balance.
Finally they were on the highway, Salcito occasionally weaving over the center line. Pete thought about Frank’s statement, about how he’d gone out to Huntington to find Salcito. It looked like they were headed in the same direction now.
Pete tried at first to stay two or three cars back but the darkness made it difficult, and he figured Salcito was too far gone to notice him. So he stayed close and took the exit when Salcito did and rolled through the dark suburban streets with him.
There was something strangely intimate about that drive that haunted Pete for a while afterward; something about the silence and the empty streets, about the familiarity of silver frost-tipped lawns, gleaming moonlit fences, black windows. It was the midnight landscape of every small town in America. It felt like a homecoming and Pete and Johnny Salcito were the only men alive that night to feel it.
Pete let the car drift across an empty intersection and saw Salcito pull into a driveway ahead. He drove by with one hand on the wheel and his eyes on the road; an ordinary guy heading home to his wife and kids at the end of a late shift, noting the number on the mailbox and the shape of the tree at the end of the driveway, and the street name on the corner.
Good night, buddy. Good night.
He stopped at the next corner and wrote down the details and found his fingers itching to describe Salcito’s heavy walk, his lost expression. But he told himself he would not do that because it was unnecessary. It was unprofessional. When, in fact, he did not want to make this man human. He was not a character in a story to be identified with: he was a possible witness, a possible accessory, a possible killer.
So just the facts. The address. The tree. The tilt of the mailbox. The Realtor’s sign on the lawn next door.
And the next morning Pete drove back to the neighborhood while Salcito was working a shift, taking the facts with him in order to identify the house. But when he reached the street, he thought he might have been able to find it anyway. The overgrown lawn and the damage to the mailbox, the smears on the windows and the missing fence posts—all of that was probably enough of a clue to the kind of man who lived here that he could have found the house from the street name alone.
Pete thought again about Frank’s statement, about how he’d said that Huntington was the kind of place you’d want to bring up kids. He called the Realtor’s number on the sign next door and found that the houses were large. Four or five bedrooms, built with families in mind. But while the other houses on the street had bikes in the yards and swings hanging from trees and basketball hoops over the garage doors, this house was empty. Gina had said that Salcito was married, but Pete felt sure that if he were to walk inside, the master closet would be half-empty, the carpets marked with the feet of ghostly furniture and the walls checkered with the faded echoes of vanished pictures.
That night, Pete took the stool next to Salcito, ordered a beer, looked over at him.
“Hey.”