“Says no.”
Pearl squirmed around between us until she got herself head down under the covers, and curled into an irregular ball, taking up much more than a third of the bed.
“What are you going to do now?” Susan said.
She had her hand stretched out above the bulge Pearl made in the sheet, and she was holding my hand, similarly stretched. The rain spattered sporadically on the windowpane, but didn’t settle into a nice, steady rhythm.
“Talk to Farrell, report to Tripp, see what Quirk finds out.”
“He’s still in South Carolina?”
“Yeah, and Belson’s going to go down. They’ll talk with Jumper Jack, and with Jefferson, and they’ll try to get a handle on Cheryl Anne Rankin.”
“I’m glad you came back.”
“Quirk and Belson will get further, they’re official,” I said.
“There was a time,” Susan said, “when you’d have felt obliged to stay there and have a staredown with the Sheriff’s Department.”
“I’m too mature for that,” I said.
“It’s nice to see,” Susan said.
“But I will go back if I need to.”
“Of course,” Susan said. “Too much growth too soon would not be healthy.”
“It’s not just to prove I’m tough. The case may require it. I can’t do what I do if I can be chased out of a place by someone.”
Susan said, “A man who knows about such things once told me, in effect, `Anyone can be chased out of anyplace.”‘
“Was this guy also a miracle worker in the sack?” I said.
“No,” she said.
chapter twenty-six
FARRELL AND I were in my office having some scotch from the office bottle. It was late afternoon, on Monday. Tripp was out of town. Senator Stratton’s office had not returned my call.
“What do you know about Stratton?” I said. “Anything I don’t?”
Farrell looked tired. He shook his head. “Just what I read in the papers, and if you’ve ever been involved in something the papers wrote up, you know better than to trust them.”
I nodded and dragged my phone closer and called Wayne Cosgrove at the Globe. He was in the office more now since they’d made him some sort of editor and he had a political column, with his picture at the top, that ran three days a week. When he answered, I punched up the speakerphone.
“You’re on speakerphone, Wayne, and there’s a cop with me named Lee Farrell but all of this is unofficial and won’t go any further.”
“You speaking for Farrell too?” Cosgrove said.
He had a Southern accent you could cut with a cotton hoe, although he’d left Mississippi at least thirty years ago, to come to Harvard on scholarship. I always assumed he kept the accent on purpose.
I looked at Farrell. He nodded. His eyes were red and seemed heavy, and his movements were slow.
“Yeah,” I said. “Farrell too.”
“Okay, pal, what do you need?”
“Talk to me about Senator Bob Stratton,” I said.
“Ahh, yes,” Cosgrove said. “Bobby Stratton. First off he’s a pretty good Senator. Good staff, good preparation, comes down pretty much on the right side of most issues-which is to say I agree with his politics. Got a lot of clout, especially inside the Beltway.”
“How about second off?” I said.
“Aside from being a pretty good Senator, he’s a fucking creep.”
“I hate it when the press is evasive,” I said.
“Yeah. He drinks too much. He’d fuck a snake if you’d hold it for him. I don’t think he steals, and I’m not even sure he’s mean. But he’s got too much. power, and he has no sense of, ah, of limitation. He can do whatever he wants because he wants to and it’s okay to do because he does it. He’s the kind of guy who gooses waitresses. You understand?”
“Money?” I said.
“Yeah, sure. They all got money. How they get elected.”
“Married?”
“To the girl on the wedding cake, two perfect children, a cocker spaniel, you know?”
“And a womanizer.”
