stories are off-limits. But most members of the police department and the district attorney’s office are cynical about the press to begin with, and few would buy any of Frank’s explanations about our ground rules. Frank’s pressures at work quickly became pressures at home.
Perhaps peace would have been restored in our household if that were the only difficulty we faced, but problems rove in packs, it seems. Trouble arrived in a trio this time and left us silent and distant throughout Thursday, shouting at breakfast on Friday.
Friday afternoon, tired of worrying over the magnitude of our current rift, I had called his office. Big of me, I thought.
My noble intentions were wasted. He wasn’t in. I called his pager. No return call.
I tried a second and a third time, to no avail.
At home, while cooking too much dinner, I considered the possible explanations for his lack of response. One was that he didn’t have the pager with him. Unlikely, but possible. Another was that he hadn’t found time to call back. Maybe. Most likely, I decided, he was ignoring me.
By eight o’clock the leftover chicken was in the refrigerator. The dogs, Deke and Dunk, had been walked and fed. They lay at my feet but watched the door. Cody, my big tomcat, more attuned to my mood, was restless, prowling from room to room, tail snaking and snapping in displeasure. He went into the guest room, where the lights were out, and yowled. When I went in to see what his problem was, he sped out of the room, waited for me to settle into a chair, and then repeated the performance in the kitchen. We toured the house in this fashion. I had just about decided that I could make a nice pair of booties from his pelt when the phone rang.
I ran to catch it before the answering machine picked up.
“Irene?” a man’s voice said.
“Yes. Hi, Pete.” Not a good sign, I thought, to have his partner make the call.
“Is Frank there?”
“I thought he might be with you,” I said. My worries started to shift direction.
“No. Christ, I thought he’d be back by now.”
“Back from where?”
“Riverside.”
“Riverside?”
“He drove out there this morning. He had to talk to a guy out there. A witness.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah, I stayed here,” he said, and I could hear the edge of uneasiness creeping into his voice. “I had a lot of other stuff to follow up on. You know.”
Might as well face it, I thought. “He’s being kept out of the office because of the leak on the arrests, right?”
“Yeah, probably because of the leak. You know, if you’d just get that other reporter to name his source—”
“If that didn’t work for Frank, why the hell would it work for you?”
“I guess you guys fought about that this morning, huh?”
I sighed. “Did he tell you what we had for breakfast, too?”
“He said he left without breakfast.”
“Shit.”
“Don’t get all hot and bothered about it, Irene. Frank and I have been partners longer than you’ve been married.”
This is one of Pete’s favorite things to say to me whenever I object to his sticking his nose into our business. Before I could reply, his wife picked up the extension.
“Pete Baird, you are ten pounds in a nine-pound bag,” Rachel said. “What’s this, Irene? Frank isn’t home from Riverside?”
“No,” I said, suddenly feeling as if I were admitting that he might not want to come home. But Rachel was on a different track entirely.
“Something’s not right, Pete. Use the other line to call the department. Ask when he last checked in.”
As Pete hung up I asked, “What do you mean, something’s not right?”
“You sure he hasn’t been trying to call you? You been on the phone?”
“No. The only time I’ve used the phone was to page him earlier today. Who was this witness?”
“The witness? It was—”
Before she could name him, I heard Pete shouting to her in Italian. I couldn’t make out what he said, but he was obviously telling her not to talk to me about the case. The clean part of her response, also in Italian, was, “I’ll tell her if I want to,” and something to the effect of, “Here’s a nickel; with that you can buy twice as many brains as you’re using right now.”
To me, quite calmly, she said, “It’s nothing to worry over. The man he went to see, he’s an informant. Frank and Pete have talked to him before. He’s not a prince, mind you. Just a junkie. Never been involved in anything big. Never hurt anybody.”
I finally used a nickel’s worth of brains and saw exactly what she was trying to avoid saying to me.
