“Found a card for a lawyer in there in her purse where we found yours.”
I waited.
“Ran that down before I came here. Woman lawyer. Says that Amy Peters was planning to sue Pequod for sexual discrimination for firing her.”
“Which seems strange,” I said, “if she was also planning to kill herself.”
“Suicide’s hard to figure,” Belson said. “Women don’t usually do it with a gun.”
“What’s the lawyer’s name?”
“Margaret Mills. Firm is Mills and D’Ambrosio. You planning to help us on this?”
“Bothers me a little.”
“She came to you scared and you sent her away and she ends up dead,” Belson said.
“Something like that.”
“Would bother me, too,” Belson said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
I was in a booth in a donut shop talking to a gray-haired guy with a good-sized belly and a big mustache who had been for the last thirty years the youth service officer for the town of Franklin. His name was Pryor.
“His real name was Peter Isaacs,” Pryor said. “Kids called him Peter Ike and it eventually became Pike.”
“You remember him well?”
“Oh yeah,” Pryor said. “Kid was a pain in the ass.”
He took a paper napkin from the dispenser and wiped powdered sugar from his mustache.
“Wild-spirited?”
“Mean-spirited. Nasty little bastard. Did a lot of dope.”
“He still around?”
“Yeah.”
“How about Tammy Wagner?”
“She was his girlfriend,” Pryor said. “Pike’s. I don’t know what happened to her.”
“Joey Bucci?”
“Bucci… Yeah, sort of a faggy little kid, used to get bullied a lot. Hung with the burnouts because no one else would hang with him.”
“You know where he is now?”
Pryor shook his head.
“No idea,” he said. “He ain’t around town.”
“Where do I find Pike?”
“He’s still here,” Pryor said. “Works down the bowling alley. Sweeps up, cleans the rest rooms.”
“Nice career choice,” I said.
“Better than jail,” Pryor said.
“Anything else you can tell me about Mary Toricelli?”
“No. Kind of a loser kid. The only reason I remember her is that she hung out with assholes like Isaacs and Levesque.”
“You never got her for anything?”
“No. She was never into much. Just sort of dragged around after the hot shots. What’d she do, got a fast operator like you down here asking about her.”
“Cops think she killed her husband,” I said.
“Honest to God,” Pryor said. “I didn’t think she had the juice for it.”
“I hope you’re right,” I said.
“So why do you want to talk to Isaacs?”
“See what he can tell me.”
Pryor grinned. “Good thinking,” he said. “You know what you’re hoping to hear?”
“No.”
“So how about if you hear it,” Pryor said, “will you know it?”
“I hope so.”
“Man, wait’ll I tell the boys down at the station how I had coffee with a real private eye.”
“You know how it goes,” I said. “You get a case. You just keep poking around, see what scurries out.”
