Now I come up dry and it's enough to push old C.D. out the goddamned door.”
“I'm sorry. Lieutenant.”
“Sorry ain't got but piss to do with it,” said the old man, pouring himself another shot and draining it with a gasp.
“It was my idea. Took a mess of convincing. All that overtime. Cost the state about five hundred thousand dollars but I told my boss and yours—and they told the governor-that it'd get ’em Lamar Pye.”
“But it didn't.”
The old detective stared into the grim space.
“What the hell did I do wrong? What did I miss?”
“Lieutenant, I'm not a detective. I'm a road cop, that's all.”
“Dammit, Bud, there aren't any more detectives. I'm the last one. Your metro boys, your young Feebs, your Treasury agents or atf.
boys—they're not detectives, not any of them. They're clerks. They do crime scene or they tap wire or they interview witnesses and take notes. But they don't do no goddamned detective work, not a one of them.”
The old man's head lolled forward and his lower lip hung loose. He seemed to breathe heavily through his mouth, and once again fought for consciousness. His eyes closed, but then like a lizard's peeped open again.
“You listen to my thought on this problem and tell me what I done wrong. Here's how I broke this sucker down.
They always run to their own kind. They do. That's the first principle, sure as summer heat. No place he could go but into the criminal community. He's got to be somewhere, among folks who’d give him aid. We got the biker groups nailed, he ain't there. And we got the goddamned car-tire type. So, if we cross-reference, we come up with close to two hundred possibilities. He has to be there. Has to be.
What did I miss?”
“Lieutenant, I don't know.”
“Did I miss a category? Felons, known informants, fences, criminal lawyers, anybody in the culture. What category could I have missed?
What other category is there?
That's what I believe I'm missing. I'm missing a category.
Bud, you got any categories?”
“Lieutenant, as I said: This ain't my line of work.”
“See with Freddy Dupont, the missing category was secondary experience.
That is, reading. That's what done it. So I'm missing a category, goddammit.”
“Lieutenant, I wish I had an idea.”
“See, it's points. You need two points to draw a line.
One point: criminal community. Another point: the car-tire track. But… goddammit, nothing. I need a third point.
Goddamn, a third point! A third category. Another drink, Bud?”
“Lieutenant, I got to get on home. I got a boy hearing about college today.”
“The baseball player?”
“No sir. The student.”
“A ball player and a student. It sounds like a fine family, Bud.”
“It is,” said Bud.
The lieutenant took another hit from his paper cup, and the whiskey seemed to bring a tear to his old eyes, or maybe it was just that something blew into them. Anyway, he said, 'Nope, never had kids myself. Just never had the damned time.” Then suddenly he lit up and for a second his melancholy seemed to evaporate.
“Say, Bud,” he said, 'one of these days why don't you bring them boys over? Love to meet ’em. Bring ’em over to the house and we'll sit ’em down and give ’em their first drink. Best a boy learns to drink with his daddy and not out behind the woodshed. I won't have much to do hanging around the house. I'd like that. Bud.”
Bud knew it was the drink talking, just as when he said, 'That sounds like a damn fine idea. Lieutenant,” he knew he'd never do it. It would be horrible: His two sons, who were already from different planets than their old fart of a father, locked in some strange little house with this bitter old coot who was from still another planet. It would never happen. Besides, he didn't think the old man really wanted it to happen either.
He checked his watch. It was nearly four. Damn, he was late.
“I ought to be going now, Lieutenant.”
“You go, Bud. You done good work, all my boys done good work. I'd rise to shake your hand, but I pissed up my pants a few minutes ago and I'm too embarrassed to move.”
“Oh, Lieutenant, I—”
“Don't pay it no never mind said the lieutenant.
He poured himself another drink, emptying the bottle, and threw the bottle into the wastebasket, where it shattered.
Then he looked up and seemed surprised to see Bud still there.
“Go on, get out, get about your life!” he commanded darkly, and Bud hurried out.
“Bud,” said Dispatch, 'your wife called when you were in with the lieutenant. She wants you to call.”
Thank God he was here when she called!
He found a phone.
“Sweetie, it's me.”
“Bud, Russ got in. They're going to give him a full scholarship. He's going off to Princeton University!”
“All right! Hey, isn't that great!” Bud said. A surge of joy leaped in him. Something was turning out in his life!
“He'll have so many chances. He'll meet so many people.
A whole new world will open for him!”
“That's great. I'll be home in a little bit and we'll go out, if that's what he wants.”
“He said he would. He wants to see some friends later, but he'll go out.”
“On my way!”
Russ deserved it. He'd worked hard at his studies and he was a very bright boy, the school counselors had told them.
It was in this mood that, as Bud drove home, he passed a large gray structure on Gore Boulevard, which he had passed perhaps five hundred times before; but for the first time, he noticed the lions.
CHAPTER 21
It was the fucking neck.
The key to the lion lay in its neck. Somehow, in the density of muscle and bone, in the knots of hair, in the fucking shortness of the structure, there lay the secret to that amazing regality, that kingly magnificence.
Yet Richard could not free it, not, that is, with a pencil or a crayon or any conventional drawing implement.
Lord how he had tried. Like popcorn puffs, his crumpled-up failures lay scattered about him in the upstairs room of Ruta Beth's farmhouse.
He felt a killing headache.
He could not get it: his beasts all had a strange tightness to them. He drew them in his sleep, he drew them in the air with an empty hand, he drew them in his mind, he drew them on paper, and he had never quite brought it off.
In fact, if he thought about it, his best lion had been done in the liquid medium of peanut butter. It was the image he'd crafted on the mock cake: something in the wet fluency of the material and the ease of its manipulation and the lack of pressure or expectation had freed him to really achieve the pure essence of lion hood And his first dumb drawing in the Mac and maybe a doodle here and there, on a place mat in the margins of a book or magazine, those, too, had had the freedom he needed.
