“Okay,” Charles said, dusting off his hands in satisfaction. “I’m done here and need to head out. I’ll leave you two to it.”
When it came to my having a capable someone to lean on, Charles Rickover looked a lot more promising than Harold Meeks.
“Wait a minute,” I said anxiously. “Where are you going?”
“Vegas,” Charles said. “One of Pop’s pals is retired Air Force. He keeps a little Cessna over at the Goodyear airport. He doesn’t fly at night anymore, but he says we can be wheels up by seven A.M. That means I’d better go home and grab an hour or two of shut-eye.”
Charles Rickover bailed at that point, leaving me holding the bag as well as two surprisingly heavy suitcases. “Where’s my bedroom?” Harold demanded irritably.
“Down the hall and to the right,” I said.
“Good,” he said. “Put my stuff in there, then come back and we’ll go to work. You got any coffee that’s fresher than that crap on the counter? Smells like it’s about three hours past its pull-by date.”
Which is how I spent the next three hours in the presence of a cantankerous old man who acted as though he’d as soon chew nails as listen to my sad story. Obligingly, I went downstairs to the restaurant, fired up the coffeemaker behind the counter and made a new pot. While I waited for it to brew, I stood leaning against the counter wondering how it was that my fate was now in the hands of this gang of old men—the lame and the halt—who, out of the goodness of their hearts, had joined forces to bail me out of my jam.
I knew Tim O’Malley, the guy Charles called Pop, was responsible. That meant that, by extension, so was Grandma Hudson.
I took the coffee upstairs, only to be ordered back down to retrieve cream and sugar. Since I drink my coffee black, I don’t keep cream and sugar upstairs. At Harold’s direction, I retrieved a yellow legal pad from the outside pocket of one of his bags. Then sitting at the dining room table, I began telling my story one more time, version 3.0, while Harold took notes, using a Mont Blanc fountain pen to cover one page after another with a totally indecipherable kind of shorthand.
The only time he asked questions was when I was going over what I had said to Jamison and Shandrow. Harold explained that the questions they had asked would probably reveal a blueprint of the kinds of evidence they had against me. As a consequence, I told him everything in the closest thing to word-for-word as I could manage.
Next, I gave him the lowdown on my employees. Again I did it to the best of my ability, but without being able to fall back on the paperwork hidden in those forbidden file cabinets, I couldn’t tell him the exact order of hiring, ages, dates of birth, physical addresses, or anything else that seemed to be of much use. Some of my employees, like Matty and Danielle, for instance, are holdovers from my grandmother’s day. The most recent hire was Jason, the nighttime bartender, but he always struck me as a straight shooter. Thinking about them one by one, I couldn’t focus on a single one that I would finger as the guilty party.
By the time Harold and I finished, it was six o’clock in the morning and I could hear the sounds of people downstairs coming on duty and getting ready to open for breakfast. I was bushed. Harold, on the other hand, was raring to go. It turned out his usual bedtime was five o’clock in the afternoon. So being up and going to work at two o’clock in the morning wasn’t exactly a hardship for him. But six A.M. was several hours past his usual breakfast time. I went downstairs and had Maxine cook up a plate of bacon and eggs. “Make that a double order of bacon,” Harold told me. “Hells bells, I’m ninety four years old. If bacon’s gonna kill me, bring it on, the crisper the better.”