For twenty-nine hours, he didn’t sleep. He listened to all his interview tapes again. Dug through his notes and reread the transcripts. He went out and knocked on doors. He scoured neighborhood bars, diners, Laundromats for someone he’d somehow missed two years before. He asked questions, took insults on the chin, kept going.
But the few people who agreed to talk to him gave him nothing new. No one was awake that night. No one saw anything, no one heard anything, to stand up to Mrs. Gobek’s account.
He went back to his apartment, looked over his notes. And around four in the morning, his hands lost their grip on whatever he was reading and he lost consciousness. He woke up five hours later, unrefreshed and dehydrated, ran a hand over his chin. He badly needed a shave.
And then he realized. No one was awake that night. No one saw anything. No one heard anything. And he knew what he needed to do.
He called Horowitz at the office.
“Wonicke? Jesus. Been a long time. How you doing?”
“Listen, can we meet? I need to talk to you. I need your help.”
There was a pause and then Horowitz said, “Sure. Tony’s?”
“No. Not Tony’s. Somewhere private. Somewhere we can’t be overheard.”
Another pause, longer this time.
“You know the old Regal Cinema off Park Drive East? The place they’re knocking down? I’ll see you in the parking lot in an hour.”
Pete washed quickly, shaved, put on a shirt with a cleanish collar. When he arrived, Horowitz was already there, leaning against the hood of his car, holding two paper cups of take-out coffee.
Pete took one, swallowed half of it in a single gulp. Shuddered.
“Thanks. I needed that.”
Horowitz eyeballed him.
“You look like shit. What you been doing?”
Pete sighed, ran a hand through his still-damp hair.
“I was in court last week. The Malone case . . . things aren’t going well.”
“What do you mean you were in court? You ain’t a reporter anymore—what were you doing there?”
Horowitz stood squarely and forced Pete to meet his eyes.
“The case isn’t going well for who? What the fuck have you been doing? What’s going on?”
Pete told himself not to look away.
“I went to see Mrs. Malone’s attorney.”
His face went pink. “What the fuck? Jesus, Wonicke . . .”
“I know, I know. Spare me the lecture. I wanted to help.”
“You wanted to help? Help who? You practically begged me to meet Devlin. The meet was on the basis you’d give him a decent write-up. Suddenly you’re fired from the paper, and now you’re . . . what the fuck are you doing?”
Then Horowitz paused and his face changed.
“Oh, I get it. You’re following your dick.”
“I’m not . . . It’s not like that.”
“It never is. Every single time, it’s different. When it happens to you, it’s always Romeo and goddamn Juliet.”
He sighed, looked away for a moment.
Then: “So what did you tell him, this attorney?”
“Not much he didn’t already know.”
A gull filled the silence with a scream.
“Then what are we doing here? Why did you call me?”
So Pete told him. He told him what he needed and he watched Horowitz’s face change again and his hand tighten around his coffee cup.
All the way up until the moment Horowitz tried to walk away, Pete didn’t know if he could do it.
Then he thought of Ruth. “I read about the Kaufman case.”
Horowitz’s eyes widened in shock. Pete swallowed, then pulled out his copies of the newspaper articles he’d found in the New York Public Library, just a month after the Malone murders. Spread them out on the hood of his car and watched Horowitz’s gaze drop to them, watched him take them in, and then shrug and try to dismiss them.
“And? That was, what, ten years ago? What does that have to do with anything?”
“Almost ten years. The fall of fifty-seven.”
“Ancient history. Why are you bringing this up now? The Kaufman case was straight down the line. Two dead guys. Open and shut. It was nothing like this.”
Horowitz was talking too much.
Pete took a deep breath. “Yeah, that’s what I thought at first. Guy comes under suspicion of killing his business partner. Not much of a headline. No proof it was even murder—the dead guy could have shot himself. But a nice neat suicide doesn’t make a good story.”
Pete took his time, drawing it out, hoping he wouldn’t have to keep going, hoping Horowitz would interrupt and tell him it was okay, that he’d help him, that Pete didn’t need to do this.
But Horowitz was silent.
“I couldn’t find any cases you’d reported on since then that Devlin had also worked. I figured that had to mean something. So I dug around a little.”
There was a pause. Pete could hear distant traffic noise. A gull screamed.
Then Horowitz cleared his throat. “This is bullshit, Wonicke. You’re . . .”
“I read the testimony you gave in court.”