There's some bastard out there murdering babies. I think you can help us find who it is. Thank you.'
'Ever coach a football team, Al?' Kate murmured in his ear as the meeting broke up.
'What do you think I was doing just then?' he replied. 'Take a desk. I'll let you know when I'm going to talk with Tyler.'
The morning wore on, with the painstaking business of names and numbers, photographs with the instant camera, locations on the map, questions: Where do you work? Have you ever been arrested? Where were you on the Wednesday after Thanksgiving, on the twenty-fourth of January, yesterday afternoon? Did you see anyone yesterday afternoon? Did anyone see you yesterday afternoon? Did you see or hear a car on the Road yesterday evening? Do you smoke anything, use matches, go into bars, own a car, drive a car, have any other pieces of information that might possibly be related? On, and on, and on.
Answers were recorded, reactions to certain questions were noted, voices dropped, and tempers flared. Hawkin moved in and out of the rooms, chatting, encouraging, defusing hot spots, disappearing to walk through the mud to speak with the newsmen. Gallons of coffee and herbal tea were drunk, children were laid down for naps, a hugely pregnant woman began to look pale and was sent off to an upstairs room. At one point a plate of vegetarian spaghetti and hot bread appeared in front of Kate, and she and her interviewee slurped at each other and got sauce on the forms.
At one o'clock Kate found herself in one of the more difficult interviews of the day. Not that Flower Underwood wasn't cooperative—she was, and friendly and intelligent besides. It was her child who created the problems.
The child was a boy, or at least Kate assumed it was a boy, for the woman didn't correct her when she asked how old he was. He was an utterly irrepressible two-year-old who took her pens apart, ate one of the forms, emptied her purse three times (wallet and keys went into her pocket after she pried them from his inquisitive fingers), and climbed up onto his mother's lap to nurse five times, the last time squirting Kate with milk from the unoccupied breast. Deliberately. Into this stepped Hawkin, who put his hand on her shoulder as she was writing.
'Pardon me, Casey, but when you're finished you might like to join Tyler and me upstairs. All the way to the top of the stairs, third door on your left.'
Kate nodded her agreement and looked up to catch the tail end of an extremely odd expression on the woman's face.
'What is it?'
'Nothing, really.' She was stifling amusement.
'Something about upstairs? Was that it?'
Flower Underwood's lips twitched, and finally she burst out laughing, which caused her son to pull back and stare at her, milky mouth agape.
'Well, you know,' she said helpfully, 'the downstairs of this place is pretty public. Everyone on the Road uses it like a living room.'
'And upstairs—the top floor—is not public, you mean? Quite private, in fact?' The woman's eyes were sparkling, those of her son drooping as she caressed his back. 'By private invitation only, that sort of thing, yes?'
'That sort of thing,' she agreed.
'Have you been up there, to the top of the stairs?'
'Not in quite a while, though I don't imagine it's changed much. Or Tyler either, for that matter.' It seemed a good memory, thought Kate, judging from the face across from her.
'Would you say that many of the women on the Road have 'been upstairs'?'
'A fair number. Probably most of the single women at one time or another, maybe, oh, a third of the attached ones.'
'I would have thought that would cause a lot of trouble.'
'Not here. In suburbia, perhaps, but not here. And Tyler's very careful not to get too close if there's another man involved who would object. He's a good man, very caring, very generous.'
'With money?'
'With everything.' Again the amused, fond smile crossed her face.
'He only invites women upstairs?'
'Oh, no, men too. Not to bed, of course.' She giggled at the absurdity of the thought, and Kate was struck dumb by this outcrop of conventionality. 'He takes guys up there to play chess, I know, or just to have a drink or a smoke if something's happening down here and he wants some quiet.'
'But you're sure it's no more than that?' Kate persisted.
That gave her pause, and Kate had her turn to be amused, to see that Flower Underwood was troubled by this idea, whereas Tyler's wholesale hetero relationships had fazed her not at all.
'No, he invites a lot of people up to his rooms, not just to sleep with them. I've never heard of him sleeping with a man. I'm sure I would have. There's no hiding anything on the Road, not for long. No, I'm sure Tyler's a normal man,' she said, firmly rejecting the possibility.
' 'Normal.' '
'Well, straight, anyway. At any rate, he is very sweet. In bed, I mean.'
This interview is getting out of hand, thought Kate, and tried to pull it back to earth.
'Does he have any children?'
'A couple for sure. He has a wife, or an ex-wife, I guess, who lives in L.A. with their daughter, who's ten or eleven. There's also a little boy here on the Road who's probably his, though it's hard to be sure because he's only three. There's a couple other possibilities, but the mothers aren't sure.'
Kate's eyes involuntarily strayed to the sleeping blond terror, and the mother's eyes followed.
'No, not this one. You'd only have to see my old man to be sure about that. She looks just like him. Say, if you want to know what the men do—' Her voice faltered as a thought struck her and strengthened again as she pushed it away. 'If you want to hear about Tyler's rooms from a man, you could talk to Charlie. Charlie Waters is my old man. He's down here all the time, playing chess with Tyler.' Her voice trailed off and her eyes rose to search the room beyond, and Kate thought it a good time to call the session to a halt.
'Thank you very much for your time, Ms. Underwood. I really appreciate your coming down today,' but the woman had already risen with her groggy burden and headed for the hallway.
Kate scribbled her signature and dropped the papers on the next table—where Bob Fischer was talking to a man, with three peaceful children distributed over their two laps—and sprinted for the stairs.
5
Contents - Prev/Next
The stairway was lined with odd bits of old weaponry, a small tapestry, a cloak pinned out fully to show off its thick embroidery, several framed photographs of castles and people in colorful medieval costume, and similar elements of Tyler's passion. At the top landing a full set of armor, with both arms and its helm in place, stood guard over a locked glass case that held numerous small objects, bottles and combs and such, which Kate did not pause to examine. Voices came from the third door on the left, so she knocked lightly and opened it.
'… decided on a maximum of a hundred and fifty. Ah, come in, Inspector Martinelli. We were just getting started. What will you have to drink?' Tyler stood up and moved to a tall, glossy cabinet made of several kinds of wood, and Kate allowed herself to be talked into a glass of soda water. Tyler presented it with a flourish and went to stand by the open fire, his back to the stones and the heavy mantelpiece.
His air of jovial goodwill seemed somewhat strained, and Kate soon diagnosed that the source of his nervousness was Hawkin, who was sitting comfortably back into a leather chair with a somnolent expression on his face and a glass of amber liquid on his knee. Tyler's eyes kept glancing off the relaxed figure, as if by avoiding eye contact he might escape a blow. It was a reaction Kate had seen many times before, but she was a bit surprised to see it in Tyler.
Hawkin picked up the conversation again, continuing where it had been left, and with half an ear Kate listened to Tyler's plans for his land, proposals for a grant and tax-free status, the balance between convenience and freedom from gadgets. She listened, but she also studied the man's surroundings, the room at the top of the house.
