I’ll be on this phone. Right.” He listened for another few seconds, then said, “You could tell him that maybe he ought to be checking those himself, but I wouldn’t waste too much time on it if I were him.” He rolled his eyes over at Russo. “Because we’ve already got a person of interest with no alibi for that night, as he knows… no… no… no, we like thorough, that’s fine. All right. Just a sec, I need something to write with.” Resting the phone against his ear, he pulled out his little notebook and the pen from his pocket. “Okay, shoot. You want to spell that? All right, you’re not sure, it’s phonetic. Got it. We’ll try. Okay. Fine. Later.”
Hitting the disconnect button, he said to Russo, “That was Hunt’s girl, and-”
“You mean his secretary?”
“Yes, of course. What could have gotten into me that I said ‘girl’? You’d think that after all those weeks of sensitivity training
… what I meant to say was that was Hunt’s executive assistant, is what I was saying. He wanted us to know that Turner’s Communities of Opportunity, including Neshek, had a meeting at City Hall on Monday night before she was killed.”
“Okay.”
“And he wanted us to check everybody’s alibi. I told her to tell him we already had Alicia’s lack of one and liked it a lot, but if he got a better one, he should let us know.”
“I heard you. So what’d she have you write down?”
“A guy’s name.” Juhle looked down at his pad. “Keydrion Mugisa or something like that. He’ll have a sheet somewhere. We’ll find him. One of Len Turner’s people. I’m thinking probably not Irish.”
“What about him?”
“I don’t know. That’s what Hunt’s asked me to find out.”
“We gonna do it?”
“Might as well. I don’t see how it could hurt.”
Al Carter was sitting in the lobby at a fold-up lunch-style table among a large group of what Mickey had come to recognize as Battalion members-mostly young men, but some young women as well, all reasonably well-dressed and well-groomed. A hum of comfortable, loose banter floated out across the lobby all the way to the door where Mickey entered.
He was here mostly to see Lorraine Hess about her whereabouts and activities on Monday night, but when he saw Carter, Mickey thought of a question he wanted to ask him and headed over that way first. They were working from boxes filled with perforated forms-pledge cards-that they were tearing into thirds, organizing in some way, and then sending the oblong mailing through a Pitney Bowes automatic postage machine. When they’d gone through that, another few of the Battalion kids packed them into a growing pile of open-topped white cardboard boxes that Mickey guessed would soon be on their way to the nearest post office, or possibly even all the way down to the main station at Rincon Annex, if the mass mailing was big enough.
Mickey got about two-thirds of the way there when Carter saw him. After an infinitesimally brief look of confusion or maybe impatience, the older man rearranged his face into its natural and neutral expression and pushed himself back from his folding chair. Closing the now-small distance between them, he extended his hand. “Al Carter,” he said, reintroducing himself.
“Yes, sir. I remember. Mickey Dade.”
“Well, Mickey Dade, what happened to you?”
“I got hit by a car. Or rather, my car got hit by a car. It looks worse than it is.”
“I’m glad to hear that. ’Cause if it was as bad as it looks, you’d be dead at least twice. You want to sit down a minute?”
“That’d be good.”
They got over to the wall by the administrative offices and sat down where a few extra fold-up chairs had been set up. “I met your boss yesterday at Mr. Como’s memorial,” Carter began. “Hunt. So what brings you down here to these environs again?”
“I’ve got a few more questions for Ms. Hess, but then I saw you and I thought I’d ask-”
Carter stopped him by replying, “I already told your Mr. Hunt about Mr. Como firing Alicia that last morning. I don’t know what I can add to that.”
“That’s not an issue,” Mickey said. “Or not the issue I was talking about.”
“All right.” He cocked his head to one side, a question.
“Last time I was here, you told me you’d known my grandfather, Jim Parr.”
“I did. Reasonably well.”
“Well, I know there were a lot of people at that memorial, but you didn’t by any chance run into Jim there, did you?”
“As a matter of fact, I did. Why?”
Mickey took a deep breath and released it. “He hasn’t come home. He didn’t come home last night.”
Carter straightened up, his face now thoughtful, his frown pronounced.
“What?” Mickey asked.
“Well, I didn’t just see your grandfather yesterday. I don’t know if you heard about Mrs. Como when she saw Alicia…”
“She kicked her out.”
“Yes, she did. Or rather, she asked that she be removed. I don’t know if you’d heard that I stepped in and became the remover.”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“I went over to her, put an arm around her, got her outside, and the two of us ran into your grandfather. I was surprised that they knew each other.”
“Yeah. We’d had her and her brother over the night before.”
“So I gathered.” He paused and looked sideways over at Mickey, obviously conflicted about going on. “You know,” he said, “when we first talked about the reward last time you were up here, I didn’t want any part of it. I didn’t want to make any profit out of Dominic’s death. But since then… well, it’s a hell of a lot of money. It’s life- changing money.”
“It might be. But I don’t see what you’re getting at.”
“I’m getting at what I told your boss yesterday, about Alicia. Getting fired. If that turns out to be what the police need, for her arrest, I mean. I’d just want you and Mr. Hunt to remember where you heard it.”
“There’s no chance we’d forget, sir. But I don’t see what Alicia being fired has to do with her and my grandfather.”
“I don’t see that either. Not specifically. But I just have the same feeling I had yesterday when I felt like I was pointing the finger at her. I don’t mean to do that. I like the young woman very much.”
“But…?”
“But I know what I know.” His vision lasered into Mickey’s face. “She told Jim she’d drive him home.”
“Alicia did?”
He nodded. “That’s who we’re talking about, isn’t it? Jim had come down on the bus, and was going to take it home, but she said she was going by his way, and she’d take him. Wouldn’t hear otherwise.” He shook his head, uncomprehending. “And now you’re telling me he never made it home. You hear what I’m saying?”
The sudden pounding of his heart into his broken ribs threatened to double Mickey over with pain just as an explosive throbbing expanded behind his eyes. He brought his good right hand up to his forehead and squeezed at both temples. “Give me a minute.” Dry-throated, he barely got the words out. “I just need another minute.”
It took him more like fifteen minutes, and when he got his breathing and the pain back under control, he was still at a complete loss as to how he was supposed to proceed. Al Carter, having made sure he was basically all right, and with nothing else to tell him, left Mickey and went back to his supervision of the pledge-card mailing.
When his head had sufficiently cleared, Mickey’s first inclination was to call Alicia and simply ask her.
But he found that he couldn’t do it. Some psychic barrier had arisen. He didn’t know what it meant yet, but for the first time now the weight of all the evidence against this woman he had believed and cared for had tipped the scales out of her favor. He didn’t immediately leap to the conclusion that something bad or, God forbid, tragic, had happened to Jim, or even that, if something had, Alicia had played a role in it. But the possibility loomed large
