might still be in his car.” He called the uniform over and told him to go out to the car and see if there was a book by somebody named Irwin Shaw in it.
I was playing a wild card, a little too sure that the book would be there and would easily be traceable to that store in Golden. If we were lucky there’d be a receipt with a date and maybe even a time printed on it, and there’d be a price sticker on the spine, color-coded to tell approximately when the book had been put out for sale. Each week in stores like that, books were marked down according to the sticker colors. It wouldn’t be conclusive: just another small piece of evidence that the man was telling the truth.
So far I had been playing Whiteside’s game his way. Now I said, “Where is Mr. Ralston?” and Whiteside backed out of the light and looked at my face, keeping his own in shadow. “He’s where I want him to be.” “Okay,” I said pleasantly.
“What’s your connection with Ralston? Other than this hunt for books you sent him on, what’s he to you?” “I’m his friend.”
“I guess that’s good. He’s gonna need a friend.” I felt my anger boiling up but I kept it in check. I heard a movement and the uniform came in carrying the book, suspended from a pencil under its spine like a pair of pants draped over a clothesline. I saw the blue thrift-store sticker on the jacket and the receipt peeking out of the top pages, and I thanked the book gods that it hadn’t dropped out when the cop picked it up that way.
I said nothing for a moment: it would be far better to let White-side discover these things for himself. But when the cop continued holding the book that way, I said, “I imagine that’s the receipt sticking out of it.” Whiteside said, “Bag it,” and the cop dropped the book, receipt and all, into a plastic bag.
“Well, Mr. Janeway, it was swell of you to come in. If we have any more questions, we’ll be in touch.”
I knew I was being dismissed with malice but I nodded, still the soul of reason, and said, “I’d like to see Mr. Ralston, if that’s okay.” Whiteside gave a dismissive little laugh and that’s when I knew it was going to turn ugly.
“Are you charging him with something?”
“That remains to be seen, doesn’t it?”
“Well, until you decide, you have no right to detain him.”
“I don’t have to charge him with anything in order to question him.”
“You’ve got to inform him of his rights if you intend to detain him. And he doesn’t have to answer anything if you come at him with a hard-on. Come on, Randy, we both know the rules.”
I had never called him Randy in my life. I held up my hands in a peace gesture. “Look, I’m sure he’ll talk to you, I know he will. But the man just lost his wife, for Christ’s sake. Give him some time to get the wind back in his sails. Can I see him?”
“Not till I’ve talked to him first.”
“Then how’s this for a deal? You talk to him in my presence. You be civil and I promise to be quiet.”
“No way. I can’t believe you’d even ask me something like that. How long were you a cop, Janeway?”
Long enough to know a prick with a badge when I see one, I thought. But I said, “Look, I promise you this man didn’t do this. His heart’s just been ripped out and I can’t sit still while you rip it out again.”
“You’ve got jackshit to say about what I do.”
“Maybe not, but I can have a lawyer downtown by the time you get there. Then you can go piss up a rope and talk to nobody.”
“Shit,” he said. But he thought about it a moment.
“You just sit there and keep your fuckin‘ mouth shut. That the deal?”
“Absolutely,” I said with my great stone face.
I moved out to the kitchen table and watched as they wound up their work. The house seemed incredibly small for the number of people bustling about. I looked into the bedroom and felt an almost crushing wave of sadness. I could see Willie Paxton in the other room talking to a woman I knew, Joanne Martinson, also from the coroner’s office. I could see Denise’s arm, flopped over the edge of the bed, and the sight of it filled me with heartbreak. Son of a
I thought. Some miserable son of a bitch did this, probably a cheap neighborhood spider looking for pocket change. How many times does it happen? Someone returns home, walks in on a thief, and bingo. Suddenly in my mind I was a cop again.
Paxton came out of the bedroom and Martinson was right behind him.
“Hey, Cliff, how ya doin‘?” they said almost in the same voice.
“Ah, you win some, lose some.” I had lost this one big-time, but I left that unsaid. I kept up the bullshit until Whiteside went into the bedroom. Then, in a low voice, I said, “So what’s the story, guys?”
“Smothered with the pillow,” Paxton said. “We’ll know more later, but that’s how it looks.”
“How long?”
“I dunno. My guess is somewhere between five and seven o’clock.”
“No later than seven, though, huh?”
