12
As Brady is slapping yellow 50% OFF stickers on old Quentin Tarantino movies and Freddi is helping out elderly Mrs. Vera Willkins on the West Side (it’s her keyboard that’s full of crumbs, it turns out), Bill Hodges is turning off Lowbriar, the four-lane street that bisects the city and gives Lowtown its name, and in to the parking lot beside DeMasio’s Italian Ristorante. He doesn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to know Pete got here first. Hodges parks next to a plain gray Chevrolet sedan with blackwall tires that just about scream city police and gets out of his old Toyota, a car that just about screams old retired fella. He touches the hood of the Chevrolet. Warm. Pete has not beaten him by much.
He pauses for a moment, enjoying this almost-noon morning with its bright sunshine and sharp shadows, looking at the overpass a block down. It’s been gang-tagged up the old wazoo, and although it’s empty now (noon is breakfast time for the younger denizens of Lowtown), he knows that if he walked under there, he would smell the sour reek of cheap wine and whiskey. His feet would grate on the shards of broken bottles. In the gutters, more bottles. The little brown kind.
No longer his problem. Besides, the darkness beneath the overpass is empty, and Pete is waiting for him. Hodges goes in and is pleased when Elaine at the hostess stand smiles and greets him by name, although he hasn’t been here for months. Maybe even a year. Of course Pete is in one of the booths, already raising a hand to him, and Pete might have refreshed her memory, as the lawyers say.
He raises his own hand in return, and by the time he gets to the booth, Pete is standing beside it, arms raised to envelop him in a bearhug. They thump each other on the back the requisite number of times and Pete tells him he’s looking good.
“You know the three Ages of Man, don’t you?” Hodges asks.
Pete shakes his head, grinning.
“Youth, middle age, and you look fuckin terrific.”
Pete roars with laughter and asks if Hodges knows what the blond said when she opened the box of Cheerios. Hodges says he does not. Pete makes big amazed eyes and says, “Oh! Look at the cute little doughnut seeds!”
Hodges gives his own obligatory roar of laughter (although he does not think this a particularly witty example of Genus Blond), and with the amenities thus disposed of, they sit down. A waiter comes over—no waitresses in DeMasio’s, only elderly men who wear spotless aprons tied up high on their narrow chicken chests—and Pete orders a pitcher of beer. Bud Lite, not Ivory Special. When it comes, Pete raises his glass.
“Here’s to you, Billy, and life after work.”
“Thanks.”
They click and drink. Pete asks about Allie and Hodges asks about Pete’s son and daughter. Their wives, both of the ex variety, are touched upon (as if to prove to each other—and themselves—that they are not afraid to talk about them) and then banished from the conversation. Food is ordered. By the time it comes, they have finished with Hodges’s two grandchildren and have analyzed the chances of the Cleveland Indians, which happens to be the closest major league team. Pete has ravioli, Hodges spaghetti with garlic and oil, what he has always ordered here.
Halfway through these calorie bombs, Pete takes a folded piece of paper from his breast pocket and places it, with some ceremony, beside his plate.
“What’s that?” Hodges asks.
“Proof that my detective skills are as keenly honed as ever. I don’t see you since that horror show at Raintree Inn—my hangover lasted three days, by the way—and I talk to you, what, twice? Three times? Then, bang, you ask me to lunch. Am I surprised? No. Do I smell an ulterior motive? Yes. So let’s see if I’m right.”
Hodges gives a shrug. “I’m like the curious cat. You know what they say—satisfaction brought him back.”
Pete Huntley is grinning broadly, and when Hodges reaches for the folded slip of paper, Pete puts a hand over it. “No-no-no-no. You have to say it. Don’t be coy, Kermit.”
Hodges sighs and ticks four items off on his fingers. When he’s done, Pete pushes the folded piece of paper across the table. Hodges opens it and reads:
1. Davis
2. Park Rapist
3. Pawnshops
4. Mercedes Killer
Hodges pretends to be discomfited. “You got me, Sheriff. Don’t say a thing if you don’t want to.”
Pete grows serious. “Jesus, if you weren’t interested in the cases that were hanging fire when you hung up your jock, I’d be disappointed. I’ve been . . . a little worried about you.”
“I don’t want to horn in or anything.” Hodges is a trifle aghast at how smoothly this enormous whopper comes out.
“Your nose is growing, Pinocchio.”
“No, seriously. All I want is an update.”
“Happy to oblige. Let’s start with Donald Davis. You know the script. He fucked up every business he tried his hand at, most recently Davis Classic Cars. Guy’s so deep in debt he should change his name to Captain Nemo. Two or three pretty kitties on the side.”
“It was three when I called it a day,” Hodges says, going back to work on his pasta. It’s not Donald Davis he’s here about, or the City Park rapist, or the guy who’s been knocking over pawnshops and liquor stores for the last four years; they are just camouflage. But he can’t help being interested.
“Wife gets tired of the debt and the kitties. She’s prepping the divorce papers when she disappears. Oldest story in the world. He reports her missing and declares bankruptcy on the same day. Does TV interviews and squirts a bucket of alligator tears. We know he killed her, but with no body . . .” He shrugs. “You were in on the meetings with Diana the Dope.” He’s talking about the city’s district attorney.
“Still can’t persuade her to charge him?”
“No corpus delicious, no charge. The cops in Modesto knew Scott Peterson was guilty as sin and still didn’t charge him until they recovered the bodies of his wife and kid. You know that.”
Hodges does. He and Pete discussed Scott and Laci Peterson a lot during their investigation of Sheila Davis’s disappearance.
“But guess what? Blood’s turned up in their summer cabin by the lake.” Pete pauses for effect, then drops the other shoe. “It’s hers.”
Hodges leans forward, his food temporarily forgotten. “When was this?”
“Last month.”
“And you didn’t tell me?”
“I’m telling you now. Because you’re asking now. The search out there is ongoing. The Victor County cops are in charge.”
“Did anyone see him in the area prior to Sheila’s disappearance?”
“Oh yeah. Two kids. Davis claimed he was mushroom hunting. Fucking Euell Gibbons, you know? When they find the body—if they find it—ole Donnie Davis can quit waiting for the seven years to be up so he can petition to have her declared dead and collect the insurance.” Pete smiles widely. “Think of the time he’ll save.”
“What about the Park Rapist?”
“It’s really just a matter of time. We know he’s white, we know he’s in his teens or twenties, and we know he just can’t get enough of that well-maintained matronly *.”
“You’re putting out decoys, right? Because he likes the warm weather.”
“We are, and we’ll get him.”
“It would be nice if you got him before he rapes another fiftysomething on her way home from work.”
“We’re doing our best.” Pete looks slightly annoyed, and when their waiter appears to ask if everything’s all right, Pete waves the guy away.
“I know,” Hodges says. Soothingly. “Pawnshop guy?”
Pete breaks into a broad grin. “Young Aaron Jefferson.”
“Huh?”
“That’s his actual name, although when he played football for City High, he called himself YA. You know, like YA Tittle. Although his girlfriend—also the mother of his three-year-old—tells us he calls the guy YA Titties. When I asked her if he was joking or serious, she said she didn’t have any idea.”
Here is another story Hodges knows, another so old it could have come from the Bible . . . and there’s probably a version of it in there someplace. “Let me guess. He racks up a dozen jobs—”
“It’s fourteen now. Waving that sawed-off around like Omar on The Wire.”
“—and keeps getting away with it because he has the luck of the devil. Then he cheats on baby mama. She gets pissed and rats him out.”
Pete points a finger-gun at his old partner. “Hole in one. And the next time Young Aaron walks into a pawnshop or a check-cashing emporium with his bellygun, we’ll know ahead of time, and it’s angel, angel, down we go.”
“Why wait?”
“DA again,” Pete says. “You bring Diana the Dope a steak, she says cook it for me, and if it isn’t medium-rare, I’ll send it back.”
“But you’ve got him.”
“I’ll bet you a new set of whitewalls that YA Titties is in County by the Fourth of July and in State by Christmas. Davis and the Park Rapist may take a little longer, but we’ll get them. You want dessert?”
“No. Yes.” To the waiter he says, “You still have that rum cake? The dark chocolate one?”
The waiter looks insulted. “Yes, sir. Always.”
“I’ll have a piece of that. And coffee. Pete?”
“I’ll settle for the last of the beer.” So saying, he pours it out of the pitcher. “You sure about that cake, Billy? You look like you’ve put on a few pounds since I saw you last.”
It’s true. Hodges eats heartily in retirement, but only for the last couple of days has food tasted good to him. “I’m thinking about Weight Watchers.”
Pete nods. “Yeah? I’m thinking about the priesthood.”
“Fuck you. What about the Mercedes Killer?”
“We’re still canvassing the Trelawney neighborhood—in fact, that’s where Isabelle is right now—but I’d be shocked if she or anyone else comes up with a live lead. Izzy’s not knocking on any doors that haven’t been knocked on half a dozen times before. The guy stole Trelawney’s luxury sled, drove out of the fog, did his thing, drove back into the fog, dumped it, and . . . nothing. Never mind Monsewer YA Titties, it’s the Mercedes guy who really had the luck of the devil. If he’d tried that stunt even an hour later, there would have been cops there. For crowd control.”
“I know.”
“Do you think he knew, Billy?”
Hodges tilts a hand back and forth to indicate it’s hard to say. Maybe, if he and Mr. Mercedes should strike up a conversation on that Blue Umbrella website, he’ll ask.
“The murdering prick could have lost control when he started hitting people and crashed, but he didn’t. German engineering, best in the world, that’s what Isabelle says. Someone could have jumped on the hood and blocked his vision, but no one did. One of the posts holding up the DO NOT CROSS tape could have bounced under the car and gotten hung up there, but that didn’t happen, either. And someone could have seen him when he parked behind that warehouse and got out with his mask off, but no one did.”
“It was five-twenty in the morning,” Hodges points out, “and even at noon that area would have been almost as deserted.”
“Because of the recession,” Pete Huntley says moodily. “Yeah, yeah. Probably half the people who used to work in those warehouses were at City Center, waiting for the frigging job fair to start. Have some irony, it’s good for your blood.”
“So you’ve got nothing.”
“Dead in the water.”
Hodges’s cake comes. It smells good and tastes better.
When the waiter’s gone, Pete leans across the table. “My nightmare is that he’ll do it again. That another fog will come rolling in off the lake and he’ll do it again.”
He says he won’t, Hodges thinks, conveying another forkload of the delicious cake into his mouth. He says he has absolutely no urge. He says once was enough.
“That or something else,” Hodges says.
“I got into a big fight with my daughter back in March,” Pete says. “Monster fight. I didn’t see her once in April. She skipped all her weekends.”
“Yeah?”
“Uh-huh. She wanted to go see a cheerleading competition. Bring the Funk, I think it was called. Practically every school in the state was in it. You remember how crazy Candy always was about cheerleaders?”
“Yeah,” Hodges says. He doesn’t.
“Had a little pleated skirt when she was four or six or something, we couldn’t get her out of it. Two of the moms said they’d take the girls. And I told Candy no. You know why?”
Sure he does.
“Because the competition was at City Center, that’s why. In my mind’s eye I could see about a thousand tweenyboppers and their moms milling around outside, waiting for the doors to open, dusk instead of dawn, but you know the fog comes in off the lake then, too. I could see that cocksucker running at them in another stolen Mercedes—or maybe a fucking Hummer this time—and the kids and the mommies just standing there, staring like deer in the headlights. So I said no. You should have heard her scream at me, Billy, but I still said no. She wouldn’t talk to me for a month, and she still wouldn’t be talking to me if Maureen hadn’t taken her. I told Mo absolutely no way, don’t you dare, and she said, That’s why I divorced you, Pete, because I got tired of listening to no way and don’t you dare. And of course nothing happened.”
He drinks the rest of the beer, then leans forward again.
“I hope there are plenty of people with me when we catch him. If I nail him alone, I’m apt to kill him just for putting me on the outs with my daughter.”
“Then why hope for plenty of people?”
Pete considers this, then smiles a slow smile. “You have a point there.”
“Do you ever wonder about Mrs. Trelawney?” Hodges asks the question casually, but he has been thinking about Olivia Trelawney a lot since the anonymous letter dropped through the mail slot. Even before then. On several occasions during the gray time since his retirement, he has actually dreamed about her. That long face—the face of a woeful horse. The kind of face that says nobody understands and the whole world is against me. All that money and still unable to count the blessings of her life, beginning with freedom from the paycheck. It had been years since Mrs. T. had had to balance her accounts or monitor her answering machine for calls from bill collectors, but she could only count the curses, totting up a long account of bad haircuts and rude service people. Mrs. Olivia Trelawney with her shapeless boatneck dresses, said boats always listed either to starboard or to port. The watery eyes that always seemed on the verge of tears. No one had liked her, and that included Detective First Grade Kermit William Hodges. No one had been surprised when she killed herself, including that selfsame Detective Hodges. The deaths of eight people—not to mention the injuries of many more—was a lot to carry on your conscience.
“Wonder about her how?” Pete asks.
“If she was telling the truth after all. About the key.”
Pete raises his eyebrows. “She thought she was telling it. You know that as well as I do. She talked herself into it so completely she could have passed a lie-detector test.”
It’s true, and Olivia Trelawney hadn’t been a surprise to either of them. God knows they had seen others like her. Career criminals acted guilty even when they hadn’t committed the crime or crimes they had been hauled in to discuss, because they knew damned well they were guilty of something. Solid citizens just couldn’t believe it, and when one of them wound up being questioned prior to charging, Hodges knows, it was hardly ever because a gun was involved. No, it was usually a car. I thought it was a dog I ran over, they’d say, and no matter what they might have seen in the rearview mirror after the awful double thump, they’d believe it.
Just a dog.
“I wonder, though,” Hodges says. Hoping he seems thoughtful rather than pushy.
“Come on, Bill. You saw what I saw, and any time you need a refresher course, you can come down to the station and look at the photos.”
“I suppose.”
The opening bars of “Night on Bald Mountain” sound from the pocket of Pete’s Men’s Wearhouse sportcoat. He digs out his phone, looks at it, and says, “I gotta take this.”
Hodges makes a be-my-guest gesture.
“Hello?” Pete listens. His eyes grow wide, and he stands up so fast his chair almost falls over. “What?”
Other diners stop eating and look around. Hodges watches with interest.
“Yeah . . . yeah! I’ll be right there. What? Yeah, yeah, okay. Don’t wait, just go.”
He snaps the phone closed and sits down again. All his lights are suddenly on, and in that moment Hodges envies him bitterly.
“I should eat with you more often, Billy. You’re my lucky charm, always were. We talk about it, and it happens.”
“What?” Thinking, It’s Mr. Mercedes. The thought that follows is both ridiculous and forlorn: He was supposed to be mine.
“That was Izzy. She just got a call from a State Police colonel out in Victory County. A game warden spotted some bones in an old gravel pit about an hour ago. The pit’s less than two miles from Donnie Davis’s summer place on the lake, and guess what? The bones appear to be wearing the remains of a dress.”
He raises his hand over the table. Hodges high-fives it.
Pete returns the phone to its sagging pocket and brings out his wallet. Hodges shakes his head, not even kidding himself about what he feels: relief. Enormous relief. “No, this is my treat. You’re meeting Isabelle out there, right?”
“Right.”
“Then roll.”
“Okay. Thanks for lunch.”
“One other thing—hear anything about Turnpike Joe?”
“That’s State,” Pete says. “And the Feebles now. They’re welcome to it. What I hear is they’ve got nothing. Just waiting for him to do it again and hoping to get lucky.” He glances at his watch.
“Go, go.”
Pete starts out, stops, returns to the table, and puts a big kiss on Hodges’s forehead. “Great to see you, sweetheart.”
“Get lost,” Hodges tells him. “People will say we’re in love.”
Pete scrams with a big grin on his face, and Hodges thinks of what they sometimes used to call themselves: the Hounds of Heaven.
He wonders how sharp his own nose is these days.