walls that wasn’t bought at the hotel starving artists’ sale. About what I expected.
There were lots of pictures-family, friends-in a cabinet in the corner as well. I stopped, stepped into the room, scanned everything out of curiosity more than anything else.
“I used to jog a lot,” I said, continuing the small talk until I got to the door. “Maybe we’ll go trot a few sometime.”
“That sounds great,” she said. “Call me.”
She stood on tiptoe and pecked me on the lips. A buddy kiss, not the one I was stupid enough to turn down in the other room. But a nice one, anyway.
Rachel felt good. There was still something there between us. I’m a detective; I can tell these things.
As I pulled slowly down the driveway, headed at long last to my grungy little apartment on the other side of town, the thought occurred to me that with all the family pictures, the homey little displays of friends, nephews, nieces, parents, grandparents, pets, and old school pictures, one thing was missing.
I couldn’t remember seeing a single picture of Conrad.
13
It was eleven the next morning before I wandered into the office. There were definite advantages, I’d discovered, to self-employment, despite never knowing where your next paycheck was coming from.
The swelling in my leg was diminishing. In fact, a decent night’s sleep had left it almost painless. I could make my ankle hurt if I twisted it a certain way, so I made a mental note not to do that. What little residual swelling was left on the back of my head was gone now, and I even managed to cover most of the bandage by combing my hair back over it. I was determined to spend the day as normally as possible.
I made a pot of coffee and settled back to sift through the mail. Nothing exciting, certainly nothing even potentially lucrative. No messages on the answering machine, either. I appreciated the chance to kick back, but I knew Rachel’s money wasn’t going to last forever. Pretty soon, I guessed, I’d be repo’ing cars with Lonnie again.
I drank coffee and stared out the window for the better part of an hour. I was feeling as flat as a two-day- old open can of beer. Outside, through the yellow film that had coagulated on the window from years of interior cigarette smoke and exterior pollution, the traffic drifted by in a never-ending spasmodic flow of belching smoke, color, and noise. The stream was more choked than usual, thanks to some fool in a long black Lincoln stopped in a loading zone down Seventh Avenue from Church. Inconsiderate jerk.
I watched the drama of honking horns and middle fingers while, in the back of my mind, I tried to figure my next move. Every place I’d looked, I’d been stymied. If Bubba Hayes didn’t smoke Connie Fletcher, then who did? And why?
I needed answers. I also needed lunch. I glanced down at my watch, realized it was 11:55, and that I was a twelve-minute walk away from my noon lunch with Walt Quinlan.
Some creative jaywalking and a little luck got me to Satsuma’s on Union Street just in time to join a line of lawyers waiting to get in. Walter was third in the group, and I stepped ahead of a group of high rollers in gray suits to join him.
“Hey, guy, sorry I’m late.”
“No problem, fella,” Walter said, in good spirits. “Today’s white bean soup and turkey supreme. Nothing can ruin that kind of day.”
“You seem unusually happy.”
Walt smiled deeply over the top of his silk paisley tie. “I decided that making partner’s not the world’s most important goal, that’s all.”
This from a lawyer? I thought.
“My God, don’t let these other suits hear you say that,” I said, looking around at the crowd. “They’ll have you committed.”
“Not to worry. The situation is well under control. If things work out as planned, I’m going to be set up. For good …”
“For good? What are you up to?”
The mischievous smile continued. The crowd moved forward four people. We were next in line for a table.
“Okay,” I said after a moment, “forget it.”
He folded his arms in front of him, the black sleeves of his Armani suit wrinkling loosely over his forearms.
“You’re cooking up some kind of deal, aren’t you?” I grinned at him.
The hostess pushed her way through the crowd and looked at us, a sweaty wisp of hair down across her forehead. “Smoking or nonsmoking?”
Walter, as he predicted, was soon slavering over the turkey supreme. I was raking up the white beans over corn-bread, washing it down with iced tea as sweet as pancake syrup.
“Ahh,” Walter sighed, wiping his mouth with a crumpled napkin. “Life in the fast lane.”
I leaned back, even sleepier and flatter than I had been up in the office. I’d hoped lunch would rekindle my pilot light. Instead, all I wanted to do was slide back into bed. I knew, with what little measure of self-discipline I still possessed, that this was impossible.
“Visiting hours start at two today,” I said. “You going?”
Walter looked at me, confused, as if for a moment he couldn’t connect. “Oh, yeah,” he said, shaking his head. “I’ll be there after work. When you going over?”
“I guess Rachel’ll be at the funeral home right at two. I’ll show up a little after that. I figure she’ll need moral support.”
Walter leaned back in his chair and ran his tongue over his front teeth. “And you’re just the guy to do that, aren’t you?”
I stared at him for a second. “Maybe. Being around Rachel again could become a habit. When the time’s right.”
His eyes narrowed. “Be careful, buddy. You don’t have any idea what you’re getting into.”
“And you do?”
Walter smiled. “Fair enough. I don’t have any idea what you’re getting into either. But I’d be very careful if I were you.”
“If you were me, you wouldn’t be wearing that suit. How much’d that thing cost you, anyway?”
“If you got to ask …” he began.
“I know,” I interrupted. “Believe me, I know.”
I managed to kill a couple of hours in my office, mostly running around in mental circles. Then I collected the Ford out of the garage and headed out West End. It was just before three, middle of the afternoon, which downtown means the rush hour had already started. It took twenty minutes to make it back out to the triangle where Division splits from Broadway.
Funny, I thought, the funeral home where Conrad Fletcher lay stretched out was only a few blocks up from Bubba Hayes’s stop-and-drop. I kept thinking that of all the people I’d met, or heard about, who didn’t care for Conrad Fletcher, Bubba Hayes was the only one I could imagine killing him. And yet something told me-for the time being-that he wasn’t a murderer. Maybe it was the timbre in his voice; maybe it was that if I didn’t believe him, he’d beat the snot out of me again. Either way, I just had a feeling that while he might know more than he was telling, he hadn’t killed Connie Fletcher.
I brought the Ford to a shuddering, smoking stop in the back parking lot of the funeral home. The last time I’d been here was when a distant uncle of mine died a few years back. As a child, funerals terrified me. As a man, they still do.
I walked in the back door of the funeral home, past a desk where a pasty-faced woman sat behind a telephone desk console that could have been the main switchboard at IBM. Didn’t know funeral homes were such busy places.
