“Especially when the cop is being told by everyone involved that the victim was Little Mary Sunshine.”
“So they weren’t looking for infidelity,” Susan said.
“Cops are simple people, and overworked. Most times the obvious answer is the right answer. Even, occasionally, when it’s not the right answer, it’s the easy one. Especially in a case like this where a lot of prominent people seem to be pushing you toward the easy answer.”
“Even Martin?” Susan said.
“You can’t push Quirk, but he’s a career cop. It’s his nationality-cop. If the chain of command limits him, he’ll stay inside those limits.”
“And not say so?”
“And not even think there are limits,” I said.
“But he sent Loudon Tripp to you.”
“There’s that,” I said.
“But could Tripp really have been so oblivious?” Susan said.
“And if he wasn’t, why did he hire me?”
Susan sampled a bit of olive, and washed it down with a sip of peppered vodka. She seemed to like it.
“It is, as you know, one of the truisms of the shrink business that people are often several things at the same time. Yes, Tripp probably is as oblivious as it seems, and no, he wasn’t. Part of him perhaps feared what the rest of him denied and he wanted to hire you to prove that she was what he needed to think she was.”
“So, in effect, he didn’t really hire me to find out who killed her. He hired me to prove she was perfect.”
“Perhaps,” Susan said.
“Perhaps?” I said. “Don’t you shrinks ever say anything absolutely?”
“Certainly not,” Susan said.
“So maybe the murder was the excuse, so to speak, for him to finally put his fears to rest, even if retrospectively.”
Susan nodded.
“He would have a more pressing need, in fact, once she was dead,” she said. “Because there was no chance to fix it, now. What it was, was all that he had left.”
The bar was almost empty on a mid-week night. The waitress came by and took my empty glass and looked at me. I shook my head and she went away. The other couple in the bar got up. The man helped the woman on with her coat, and they went out. In the courtyard outside the hotel, a college-age couple went by holding hands, with their heads ducked into the wind.
“He doesn’t want the truth,” I said.
“Probably not,” Susan said. “He has probably hired you to support his denial.”
“Maybe he should get the truth anyway.”
“Maybe,” Susan said.
“Or maybe not?” I said. “Hard to say in the abstract.”
Susan smiled at me. There was compassion and intelligence in the smile, and sadness.
“On the other hand; you have to do what you do, which may not be what he wants you to do.”
I stared out at the courtyard some more. It was empty now, with a few dead leaves being tumbled along by the wind.
“Swell,” I said.
chapter thirty-three
FARRELL CAME INTO my office in the late afternoon, after his shift.
“You got a drink?” he said.
I rinsed the glasses in the sink and got out the bottle and poured each of us a shot. I didn’t really want one, but he looked like he needed someone to drink with. It was a small sacrifice.
“First we went back over Cheryl Anne Rankin again,” Farrell said.
He held his whiskey in both hands, without drinking any.
“And we found nothing. No birth record, no public school record, no nothing. The woman who worked in the track kitchen is gone, all we got is that her name was Bertha. Nobody knows anything about her daughter. There’s no picture there like you describe, just one picture of Olivia Nelson with a horse, and nobody remembers another one.”
“Anyone talk to the black woman that worked there?”
“Yeah. Quirk talked with her while he was there. She doesn’t know anything at all. She probably knows less than that talking to a white Northern cop.”
“Who’s doing the rest of the investigating?”
“Alton County Sheriff’s Department,” Farrell said.
