about how she spent her last few months, what kind of stuff she was working on. I guess they want to feel she wasn’t wasting her time. I’m sure you understand.”
“Absolutely, Mr. Prager. I’ll be happy to help you any way I can.”
“Does the reference number HNJ1956 mean anything to you? Could it be a file number related to Moira’s work?”
“Sorry. That number don’t match anything in our office. Sounds like a license plate, no?”
Well, we were building a consensus on the license plate theory, but not much else.
“Sandra, what kind of work was Moira doing before-Was it anything that required her to do private research?”
“I’m not sure I understand. All research we do is for the people who live in our district and is funded through our budget. Now if Moira was doing some related research on her own, I would have no way of knowing that.”
“Okay, Sandra, thanks a lot. Do you think if I needed to, I could come down one day and look over the stuff Moira was working on when she disappeared?”
“It’s pretty boring stuff, but sure. Anything for you, Mr. Prager. You’re a big hero around here.”
Sandra was nice enough, but she needed a major priority readjustment. I was no hero. Heroes rescued people, not political careers.
Two pitches, two strikes. I was way behind in the count. I tried Moira’s mom down in Florida. She, too, was glad to hear from me and asked if the package she’d sent had done me any good. I told her it was too soon to tell. I asked about Moira’s apartment in the months after she disappeared. I wondered who cleaned it, who picked up her mail. She explained that she could never bring herself to clean the place. She thought it bad luck.
“We paid Moira’s rent for the first year,” she said, her voice quivering. “John and I took turns with the other stuff like collecting her mail. Why, is there something in particular you’re interested in?”
“A large brown envelope from a company called Headlines Search, Inc. I know it’s a long shot, but-”
“Would it have been filled with newspaper clippings?”
I couldn’t believe my luck. “That’s the one.”
“What about it?”
“Do you remember what the clippings were about or where they were from?” I asked, gripping the phone hard enough to crack it.
“I’m sorry, but no, Mr. Prager. I don’t think I even looked at them when I saw what they were. They were just old newspapers to me.”
“That’s okay. You had a lot on your mind.”
“Is it important?”
“To tell you the truth,” I confessed, “I don’t know. I guess I’m just really curious about Moira and maybe those clippings could have told me something. That’s all.”
“Maybe you should talk to John. He might know what happened to that envelope. I don’t remember throwing it out or anything.”
I tried the reference number on her and she voted for the license plate theory as well. We said our good- byes, each wishing the other well.
Well, I hadn’t struck out. Not yet, anyway. There was a package. It had clippings in it. Where it had gotten to, however, was now to be added to the mystery list. I picked up the phone to call Brightman and put it immediately back in its cradle. Maybe Moira was working on a special project for him, but Brightman, I realized, would be even less interested in me stirring up the ashes of this case than either Rob Gloria and Larry Mac. The cops had only been promoted in rank, while Brightman was on the threshold of political beatification.
Katy was intrigued as to why I was begging off dinner, but she knew not to press me on it. I promised to fill her in when I got home. Aaron, on the other hand, would not be so easily placated. It was one thing to have me miss work in order to save the business. It was something else again to have me blow off work to go chasing mysteries of my own creation. And that’s what this was, a creation of my own curiosity. Moira’s confessed murderer would be safely behind bars until the Second Coming. Ivan Alfonseca had been meticulously detailed about the whys and hows of his crimes against Moira. So there was nothing about this missing package of news clippings that would shine any new light on Moira’s death. Enough light had been shined there, anyway. I guess I was hoping the package would shine a little light on her life.
Adonis was back at the door at Glitters. He remembered my face, waving me in without even bothering to ask for the ten-buck cover. I’m not sure I liked that. It’s one thing to get a free pass at Madison Square Garden or the Metropolitan Opera. It’s quite another to get one at a third-rate strip joint in Times Square. Hopefully, I wouldn’t be making any more return trips and I’d be removed from the most-favored-clientele list.
John Heaton was at the bar, and one didn’t need blood work to tell he was hammered. Either the rules about drinking on the clock had changed or he was done with his shift. Under almost any other set of circumstances, I would have avoided further contact with him. Frankly, I didn’t much like him, and my distaste for the man had only worsened since the confession. Whereas the news about Moira had come as a sad relief to Moira’s mother and given her some sense of closure, it had had quite the opposite effect on John Heaton’s already charming personality. If anything, it had shortened his fuse and made his drinking worse-not a good thing for him or anyone else. He’d shown up to Moira’s memorial plastered out of his gourd with Domino in tow, nearly coming to blows with a reporter.
“Well, look who it is,” he sneered, waving his scotch at me. “Tawny, pour the man a Dewar’s.”
My initial reaction was to refuse the offer, but if I was going to get him to talk to me, I couldn’t afford to piss him off, at least not right away. I noticed Heaton kept looking at the empty stool to his right. There was an unfinished beer and a half-smoked cigarette burning in an ashtray in front of the empty stool. Domino’s stuff, I supposed.
“Thanks for the drink.” I accepted it with a smile and a nod.
“So what the fuck are you doing here?”
“I wanted to-”
“You wanted to what?” He raised his voice, edging forward on his stool.
“To ask you-”
Now he was up and in my face. “Ask me what?”
“Why don’t you sit back down, John?”
“Fuck you. You and your fuckin’ friends all made fistfuls a cash off my daughter’s bones. What, you come sniffin’ around to see if you could pick up some spare change?”
“Why don’t you shut your mouth and look in the mirror, Heaton? I just came here to ask you a question about a package Moira re-”
He grabbed my shirt, balling my collar inside his fists. “See, I fuckin’ knew it. You and your buddies-”
“This has nothing to do with my buddies, John, so leave them out of it. Now if you don’t take your fuckin’ hands off me, I’m gonna have to-”
He didn’t wait to hear the end of my threat and let go of my collar with his right hand. That wasn’t necessarily a good thing given he still had hold of me with his left. He cocked his right arm, but because most of his red blood cells had been replaced by scotch, his movements were slow and cumbersome. The punch, however, was quick enough, his knuckles grazing my cheek as I forced my head against his restraining hand. If he hadn’t still been holding on to my collar, I might have been able to avoid the punch altogether. The near miss just pissed him off, rage twisting his face into something ugly and barely recognizable as human. He reared back, but never got the second punch off. The cavalry had arrived in the body of Preacher “the Creature” Simmons.
“What the fuck you think you doin', John?” Simmons’s voice cut a wide swath through the din and darkness. His massive hands locked on to John Heaton’s shoulders. Heaton, no shrimp himself, looked like a scale-model human against the backdrop of Preacher’s six-eight frame. I was suddenly very happy the empty barstool hadn’t belonged to Domino.
“Thanks,” I said, rubbing my neck where Heaton’s left fist had dug into my flesh.
“What you want?” Preacher asked impassively.
“To ask your friend a question.”
“Ask it,” Heaton spoke up.
“Your ex-wife says you received a package of newspaper clippings just after Moira disappeared.”
