Comeback

'Sir? You know a Mary Quindero?'

'She's my sister,' Ralph said. 'What's going on?'

The plainclothes cop turned away to the other cops. 'Bring them in,' he said, and walked away into the darkness, and Woody began to keen, like a dog when somebody's died.

9

Dwayne was in Archibald's suite, waiting. He didn't want to be there, but if he went to his own room down the hall Archibald would just keep telephoning every five minutes, so it was better to be here in the comfort of the man's suite, with Calavecci given this number to call if anything happened, even if that did mean he had to put up with Tina marching back and forth in a tight robe all the time, like a hooker on a runway, flashing those heavy legs.

Archibald marched, too, back and forth, back and forth, stopping every once in a while to glare at the phone, as though it had betrayed him in some fashion. 'Why don't they call?'

'Cause they don't have anything to say,' Dwayne suggested.

Tina, voice dripping sympathy, said, 'Will? You want a massage? Come on in the bedroom, I'll give you a nice massage.'

Well, Dwayne knew what that meant, but Archibald was too distracted by the loss of the money even to respond to his harlot. 'No, I can't think,' he said. 'You go to bed, Tina, I'll be along later.'

'I want to wait with you,' she said, and so she did.

What was this like? In some ways, it was like a wake, sitting around being polite in the presence of a death in the family. More than that, it was almost as though the money hadn't been stolen, it had been kidnapped, and they were waiting to hear from the kidnappers, hear what the terms were for getting the money back.

When the phone finally did ring, at almost three in the morning, it seemed at first as though nobody was going to answer it. Archibald and Tina, both pacing, stopped to stare at the instrument, on a round table at one end of the sofa. Dwayne, seated at the other end of the same sofa, also looked at the phone, but didn't reach for it because this, after all, wasn't his suite. Then he realized that while he was deferring to Archibald, Archibald was deferring to him, as the professional in this situation. Once that became clear,

Dwayne lunged across the sofa, scooped up the receiver, and said, 'Thorsen.'

'Calavecci. You want to come down to Broad Street?' That was what they called police headquarters, a big old pile of limestone built during the Wobbly scares, back in the twenties.

'You got them?'

'No, I don't,' Calavecci said, 'I'm sorry to say. I got something else, though. Very interesting.'

'Be right there,' Dwayne said, but of course he had to give Archibald about ten minutes of explanation about that one-minute phone call before he could leave.

Calavecci met him in a small barren office that had the look of a place whose regular occupant had just been fired, but which was in fact nobody's regular space. It was a meeting/conference/interrogation room, with an extra chair in one corner for the stenographer, for when the confession was to be taken, and a phone on the desk for calling the stenographer.

Calavecci and Dwayne sat across the desk from one another, both comfortable in this room, and Calavecci said, 'We couldn't believe we were so lucky, so of course we weren't. What we had was three white males in a car with Tennessee plates, where you people are from, and it's parked for

hours in a professional building parking lot, where the building's closed for the night.'

'Three's the right number,' Dwayne agreed.

'But the wrong guys.' Calavecci grinned and shrugged. 'But interesting nonetheless. Your boy Tom Carmody —'

'The inside man.'

'The clown,' Calavecci agreed. 'His girlfriend Mary Quindero turns up drowned in a closet. Not a usual way to go.'

Dwayne, trying to be patient, said, 'That's right.'

'One of the three guys in the Tennessee car is her brother Ralph.'

'Ah,' Dwayne said, getting it. 'Tom to George Liss to a couple of his pals, so that's our doers. Then Tom to Mary Quindero to her brother Ralph to his pals, they decide to do the doers.'

'The sheer quantity of assholes in this world,' Calavecci said, 'never ceases to amaze me. You want some know-nothing clown come in, louse things up? No problem.'

'But the sister's dead,' Dwayne said. 'How does that come into it?'

'The other two,' Calavecci said, 'Isaac Flynn and Robert Kellman—'

'Isaac Flynn?'

Calavecci shrugged. 'That's what it says on his driver's license. Twenty, twenty-five years ago,

people named their kids all kinds of stuff, like they were brands of cereal. Anyway, these two, Flynn and Kellman, they leaned on the sister because she clammed up when she realized what her brother had in mind. Of course, these are not guys who get the details right.'

Dwayne shook his head, having trouble here. 'They killed his sister, and the brother kept on with them?'