“Sooner than that. Remember, I am not calm, I’m not taking this in my stride. I am very nervous.”
“I hear you.”
“You call me, Trish. The minute you can get the smell of it and break away, you get on that phone.”
“I’ll call, but don’t get your hopes up. I think you’re gonna have to go in to get what you want. And the cops won’t be naming you citizen of the year.”
22
I stood under a hot shower, put on dry clothes, lay on the bed with the TV low, and waited uneasily.
She called just before eight.
“The cops on the case, Quintana and Mallory…I know them both, not well, but maybe enough to give you a reading. It’s not good news.”
“Of course not,” I said, sitting up on the bed.
“You might be able to talk to Mallory if you could get him alone. But it wouldn’t do much good, he’d take it all to Quintana anyway.”
“It’s pretty hard to hold out on your partner.”
“And then Quintana would be running it, and your troubles would just begin. Mallory’s the weak sister in this Mutt-and-Jeff show: you can’t ask him about the weather with Quintana in the same room—you ask him a question and Quintana answers it. Quintana’s an overriding presence, extremely inhibiting. He is tough, intelligent to the point of being cunning, and damned condescending to women and other small animals. I don’t think he’d look at a former cop with much sympathy. People call him supercop, and not all of them mean it the way he’d like to think.”
There’s one in every department, I thought. I’d had one for a partner myself, before Hennessey. It didn’t last long. Steed had had to split us up to keep us from killing each other.
The prognosis was obvious. Grimly I moved on to the next round of questions. Had the cops been able to make the Rigby connection from the “Rigby” record?
“I haven’t been able to get into that with them. They’re just not open with stuff like that, and everybody’s wondering what I’m doing here anyway. I told you I don’t do breaking stories. We’ve got other people covering this, and I’m bumping into them every time I turn around.”
“What’s your best guess?”
“About the record?…I can’t see them linking it.”
I lost my temper, probably because I couldn’t see them linking it either. “Goddammit, who does Seattle put on these homicide jobs, Peter Sellers? What’s the matter with these fucking cops, what does it take to get their attention?”
“You asked me what I think and I told you. I could be wrong. But I think they’ll figure the record as noise, to cover up what was happening in that house. The music will go right past them. A million people in this town like Beatles music—it might as well have been the Judds on that deck, or the Boston Pops. Why would the police think twice about ‘Eleanor Rigby’?”
“Because a woman by that name just went through their stupid nitwit court system!”
“You’re assuming the right hand knows what the left hand’s doing. In a system this big, you should know better. Anything’s possible: I just think it would take one brilliant cop or a stroke of luck for that to happen.”
I heard an emergency vehicle pass in her background, the siren fading as it went by on the way somewhere else.
“They’ll be putting a wrap on it soon,” she said. “Are you coming in?”
I thought of supercop. It was almost more than I could bear.
“Janeway…”
“I hear you. I’m just having a lot of trouble with it.”
“It’s the right thing to do.”
“What if I didn’t come in?”
“I think that would be a mistake.”
“What have I got to lose at this point, supercop’s gonna have my ass for breakfast anyway. They don’t need me, they’ve got you.”
“I think I’m still off the record. Did we ever get that straight?”
“If we did, consider it inoperative.”
“What do you want me to tell them?”
“Everything. Anything that helps them find Rigby. Tell them if they waste manpower looking for me, they’re a bunch of losers.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Start from ground zero, go till I drop.”
