There was a long silence. Hennessey had been my partner forever, it seemed: he had deliberately taken a more or less subordinate role because we did our best work that way. But he knew me inside out: he knew when I began to bend the rules because he had seen me do it often enough. He said, “Y’know, my bullshit detector’s going crazy here. The needle’s knocking the roof off.”
I ignored that. “What did you get from McKinley?”
He ignored that. “Cliff, what the hell are you up to?”
I said, “Actually, that elephant sandwich you’re eating doesn’t look half bad. Maybe I’ll have one.”
“C’mon, Cliff, stop screwing around. Look, I’ll ask you point-blank: are you messing around in this case? If you are, Cameron’s got a big package of trouble all wrapped and ready to dump right on your ass.”
“When I came back from the hills this morning, I sat down and made up a list of all the things that bother me. My psychiatrist told me to do that. It’s better than scream therapy, Neal, but you know what? I couldn’t find Cameron’s name anywhere on it.”
“God damn it, he’d better be on it.”
“Are you gonna eat that pickle?”
“Sure I am. Listen, do you want to talk to me or not?”
“I might, if you’ll pull the cork out of your ass and stop being a cop for thirty seconds.”
He took a long breath and held it. As he let it out, he said, “I’d just hate to see you take a fall.”
I gave a little shrug. “Are we all finished with the dance now? If we are, I’ll tell you something: the real truth, forty-carat, government-inspected stuff. You can take it to the bank, Neal. You ready? Here it is. This boy is dead meat. I don’t know who he is or where he’s hiding, but his ass is mine. He can’t go far enough and he can’t dig himself a deep enough hole. That’s on the record, and frankly I don’t give a fuck what Lester thinks.”
I picked up his pickle and bit the end off. “Does that answer your question?”
“Yeah,” he said grimly. “It’s also what I was afraid of.”
He ate the rest of the pickle fast.
“This is now my full-time job,” I said. “You want to talk turkey, fine. How much time do you have in a day? Did you guys ever get through checking out that U-Haul lead? Well I did, because I’ve got nothing else going with my time. My business is closed for the duration and I’m on this guy full-time. I can’t wait for you guys, Neal, because you’ve probably got ten other cases on your desk right this minute. Hey, I know how it goes. I also know you’ve got to get on something like this right now, because evidence tends to dry up. I’ve already found something that would be ashes now if I’d waited for you. No offense.”
“What evidence? What the hell’ve you found?”
“Only something that puts a whole new slant on things. Don’t ask for specifics if you’re not willing to punt the football. It’s a two-way street. That’s simple manners, and I know Mrs. Hennessey didn’t raise anything but polite little walruses.”
“You’re out of your mind. Cameron’d have a hematoma of the left nut if he thought I was sharing information with you.”
“It’ll give him something to play with. Look, I’ve got to go, I can’t sit here and bullshit all day. You’ve gotta make up your mind.”
He sat perfectly still, struggling with the forces of good and evil.
“Don’t hurry on my account,” I said. I looked at my watch. “I’m due at an appointment, where I’m getting my ass sued off, in thirty minutes.”
“One time and one time only,” Hennessey said. “What do you want to know?”
“All the good poop. What happened at McKinley’s. You can put in a lot of color. Tell me if her cheeks were rosy or pale when Lester broke her door open and wrestled her down just as she was about to throw the tape into the fire.”
“You should do stand-up comedy.” He fished in his pocket for a small notebook and leafed through the pages. “At eleven forty-eight yesterday morning, your police department, accompanied by officers from Jefferson County and acting on a warrant signed by District Court Judge Harlan Blakeley, scaled the fence at the mountaintop residence at the end of Road twelve, otherwise known as Crestview Street…”
“I think I’ve seen this one. In a minute it snows and turns into
He put his notebook away and looked at me long and hard. He was a cop who went by the book, and it broke his heart when he had to go the other way.
“She gave us the tape.”
“No kidding. Was it all there?”
“Seemed to be.”
“How about the part I erased?”
“Entirely different tape. You remember she had taken the tape out so she could play it for you when you
