“You’re scared, aren’t you?”
“Sure. And you’re scared, too, even with the gun.”
He kept the gun in his hand, but he bent his head and went back to looking at the floor. His bitterness broke his gloom. “My old man screwed up at the end too. Had a good life but got hooked up with some Florida people pulling a land scam. Colonel DePaul. Perfect record until then. Died by hitting an embankment at ninety miles an hour. Everybody knew he’d done it on purpose, but nobody would say it out loud.”
“What made you get involved with the fire?”
His anguished blue eyes were focused on me again. “For years I’ve been driving over to the Quad Cities to do a little gambling. Usually took my wife and made a weekend of it. We had some good times. And then I just got hooked. I’d drive over there two or three times a week. And it wasn’t fun any more. It was serious. If I’d lose, I’d go over to win some of my money back. If I’d win, I’d go because I figured I was on a roll.”
“How much have you lost?” But given what the judge had learned from the bank, I thought I already knew.
“Most of our retirement. A pretty good share of our savings.”
“So your wife knows?”
“She knows about the money. She doesn’t know that I let Lou pay me off.” His heel came off the stool. In a single swift movement, he dropped his gun arm and jammed the. 45 into his holster. “I never did have my old man’s guts.”
“If you cooperate, they’ll go easier on you.”
“Nina’ll be happy. She never liked me.”
“She won’t be happy. She may not like you much, but she doesn’t hate you. Mostly, she’ll be worried about her mother.”
A snort. “Her mother. I’ve been a piss-poor husband this time, too. Swore I’d really be different on the second go-round, and for a few years I was. But I slipped back into my old ways. My mother always called my old man a tyrant, and that’s what I am too. And Nina’s got every right not to like me. I wasn’t much of a stepfather, either.”
“You could be out in a few years.”
“I’d never make it. I’d die in there.”
“Not if you were careful.”
His head sank again. He’d shut me out.
“Listen to me, DePaul. I need to get some things clear. Then I’ll help you with Sykes. I promise.”
“What a way to end up. I take a bribe and then I fink on everybody.”
“They killed a woman. You’re doing what you should.” I paused. “You want a smoke?”
“Yeah. That’d be good. I guess I left mine inside.”
I walked my pack over to him. Handed it over. He drew one out. I put my Zippo to work. In the dusty sunlight through the window in back, the smoke had a hallucinatory tumbling richness to it. I took one for myself. I needed him to give me the two names out loud.
“Who set the fire?”
“I think you’ve figured it out already.”
“I’m asking you again, who set the fire?”
He shrugged. He’d put on some weight. His uniform shirt revealed a small belly and a collar that was too tight. “Davenport and Raines.”
“And Lou personally called you about doctoring the fire report?”
“Yeah. Lou and I were friends. It really got to me when somebody killed him. And now Davenport’s dead.” He dragged on his smoke. “Somebody’s paying us back for Karen being killed.”
“We need to stop them.”
“Maybe it’s better. Maybe that’s what we’ve got coming.”
“Maybe so. But that’s not for you to decide. That’s what we’ve got courts for. And by the way, Lynn Shanlon seems to be missing.”
He eased off the stool. I took two steps back. He still had a gun, and he still had a reason to try and escape. “I was thinking she was the one who killed the two of them. She has the biggest stake in all this. If Karen had been my own sister, I’d go after everybody involved.”
“I need to take you in now.”
“I figured.”
“The first thing is, you have to hand your. 45 over to me.”
He touched the holster. “I’ve had this since Korea. Killed two Chinks with it on the same day. My old man always told me how good it felt to kill somebody. But he was a bullshitter. At least I didn’t feel good about it. I didn’t feel anything. I was just doing my job. I didn’t even talk about it with my soldiers. When they killed somebody, you never heard the end of it. But I was quite a bit older than they were. Maybe it would’ve felt good to me if I’d been their age.”
All the time he talked I watched his gun hand. Maybe he was using his words to snake charm me into carelessness. I start watching him instead of watching his gun hand…
He did it in the same kind of swift motion as when he’d pointed it at me. He handed it over without any kind of ceremony. He just laid it across my open palm.
“I’d like to talk to my wife.”
“Fine.”
We didn’t talk now. He went first out the garage door and into the staggering heat. The back of my shirt was swimming-hole wet and my armpits were heavy with water. He walked to the back door. He didn’t look back. He went inside.
I walked up to where Nina was still working on the car. She was hunched down, scrubbing the front left tire. She dipped a wiry brush into a soapy bucket of water.
“You find him, Mr. McCain?”
“Yeah.”
“He talk to you?”
“Uh-huh.”
“He in trouble?”
“The Grand Inquisitor.”
She grinned. “Dostoyevsky. I read that last year. The Brothers Karamazov is one of my favorite novels.”
She stood up. Bones making a cracking sound. “I must be getting old.” The grin again.
Then we heard the scream.
“My mom,” she said and flung her brush into the soapy water of the bucket. “I need to see what’s wrong.”
Her mother had been told the truth; that was the problem. Her husband would most likely be going to prison. The family would be disgraced. And what about finances? Mrs. DePaul had to be thinking about that, too, with Nina soon to be starting college.
Nina ran alongside the house, half-crashed through the backyard gate, and disappeared. There was no other scream, but there was plenty of sobbing. Mrs. DePaul sounded as if she was on the verge of insanity. The wailing was stark and inappropriate in this expensive housing development. This was the kind of wailing you heard in Negro ghettos and in poor white neighborhoods, where mothers worn down by years of terrible news about mates and children reached some kind of end game and broke down entirely, unable to handle even one more call from the police or crawl their way one more time to identify one more body in the morgue.
In the midst of the wailing, DePaul appeared in the backyard gate. He closed it behind him just before he started walking toward me. He’d changed clothes. In his white shirt and blue trousers and tasseled black loafers he walked with the military stride I’d seen so often. Some of his self-confidence was back.
“My attorney says I should drive myself to the police station and not talk to you at all any more.”
“I’m an officer of the court, DePaul. If you don’t want to talk to me, that’s fine. Your lawyer’s right. But I want to deliver you personally to the police station.”
“You must want your picture in the paper.” It might have been a joke, but I knew better. His wife whooped again. He cringed. His eyes roved to the house. “I wish she was tougher.”
