And again, my sincere congratulations on your accomplishment as a crime fighter. Would that there were a few like you in the Albany police department.'
'Yeah, would.'
'Good day, then.'
'So long, Sim.'
I picked at my stale muffin. Timmy said, 'What was your mistake?'
'What?'
'You told him you thought you'd made a mistake. Which one was that?'
'None of your business. Crap. I'm going out.' I got up and flung my muffin in the trash. After I left Timmy would retrieve the muffin, wrap it in a bread bag, and place it in the refrigerator until garbage-pickup day so that it wouldn't draw ants or mice.
'When will you be back?' he said, making a mental note of the improperly discarded baked good.
'In a day or two. If anybody calls, just say-anything, any damn thing at all.'
'I'll just say that you've got a hair up your ass and you've gone to the Mayo Clinic to have it removed. In that saying, do you think it's h-a-i-r or h-a-r-e?
H-a-r-e sounds more uncomfortable, which is probably your situation right now. You're the expert, which is it?'
I realized, of course, that Timmy was not to blame for my shortsighted clumsiness and there was no reason for my taking out my anger and frustration on him. In fact, he had been through an ugly experience that I had caused to happen, and, if anything, he deserved sympathy, gratitude and sensitive forbearance on my part that day and for many days and weeks to come. I said, 'You'll have to call the library on that one, sweetheart,' and left.
From the Hilton I phoned Ned Bowman and asked him several questions that had been nagging at me, and he answered them. He said he had a lot of questions for me too, but I said later. I got out the money in the hotel-room closet, skimmed off another thousand, paid for two more nights of storage, and drove out to the airport. I was in LA by 12:15, California time, rented a car, and drove over to Joan Lenihan's apartment building, where I waited.
TWENTY-THREE
At ten till five in the afternoon the two of them drove into the parking lot beside the building. Joan was at the wheel, Gail seated beside her. I thought they might enter a side door and get away from me, so I trotted through the spray of the lawn sprinklers and met them as they stepped out of the car in their shiny whites. To Joan Lenihan I said, 'We need to talk.'
'Do we? I don't think so.'
'We thought you went back east,' Gail said, looking powerfully ambivalent about my presence. 'Why are you- didn't you go back to Albany?'
'The men who killed Jack are in jail on both murder and narcotics charges.
I thought you would want to know that, Joan. Or has Corrine called?'
Her face froze in fright and confusion, and she said, 'Who is it?'
'An ex-con, a car thief, by the name of Mack Fay. He had two accomplices, Terry and Kevin Clert. The Clerts are the sons of the nurse who looks after your father-in-law. They were after the two and a half million, but Jack got to it first and they killed him. One of the remaining unanswered questions is, where did that money come from? Apparently it was kept in Pug Lenihan's house and he considered it his, but where did it come from originally? You know, don't you, Joan?'
'Where is it? Where is the money now?' She was trembling with rage. Gail Tesney stood stricken, looking at Joan, then at me, then at Joan again.
'The money is safe. I have it.'
'With you?'
'In Albany.'
'It's not yours. You have no right.'
'Whose it is then?'
'Give it to me.'
'Is it yours?'
'Just give it to me. It doesn't belong to you. You have to give it to me.'
'You're going to turn it over to Pug Lenihan, aren't you? That's what you would do if you had it. Are you going to tell me why, or am I going to tell you?'
She paled and began to blink, panic rising. 'Gail, why don't you go on up.
I'll be up in a little while.'
'Joan, what is wrong? What is he talking about?'
'She'll be all right,' I said. 'Go ahead. We'll come up to the apartment in a few minutes.'
Joan waved her away. 'It's okay. I'll be okay. Go ahead. You go ahead.'
Gail stared at us both for a long moment, looking hurt and abandoned, then turned and walked quickly into the building. Joan and I found a dry patch of grass under some eucalyptus trees and sat on it. I said, 'I'm offering you a proposition. Either you tell Gail or I'll tell her.'
She fumbled in her big leather bag, found a pack of cigarettes, and lit one.
'Tell her what? What is it that I'm supposed to tell Gail? You go around telling people how to run their lives. Tell me what I'm supposed to tell her.'
'That you killed your husband, Dan Lenihan, eighteen years ago this month.'
She didn't flinch. Drawing on the cigarette, she leaned back against the tree trunk, then exhaled mightily. She looked at me and said, 'Yes, I killed Danny. Did Pug tell you?'
'No.'
'Who did?'
'You did-with your irrational fear of Pug Lenihan, who's nothing but a vicious, cracked old blowhard. He's been holding this over you for eighteen years, making your life miserable every time the subject of Albany came up, threatening you, extorting cash to pay for his nursing care, using you as a lever against Jack after Jack made off with the famous two and a half million last October. You're so scared of Pug you can't even let him find out you're gay, for fear of the bigoted browbeating you think you'll have to take from him. The truth is, for eighteen years Pug Lenihan has been blackmailing you with his knowledge of your husband's death. Except, I don't quite believe it. What happened?'
'What happened? Danny died, that's what happened. I killed him.' She dragged on the cigarette and gazed toward the setting sun, which was huge and lovely in the smog above the horizon.
'How did you go about that? I'm told Dan Lenihan was drunk and passed out in the street, where he froze to death in the middle of the January night.'
A slight shake of the head. 'No. Not on the street.'
'Where?'
'On the front porch.'
'That's not murder. That is horrible bad luck.'
'No.'
'He had gone out drinking, to Mike Shea's on Broadway. As he did-every night?'
'Every night. Yes, every single solitary night of the nineteen years of our marriage. Before Corrine was born, I went with him. Every night.'
'And he left Shea's-when?'
'At three. He always left at three because Mike knew when to shut him off and Danny would still have enough strength left to make it home on his own steam. Mike would call me at three-wake me up-every night at three in the morning for nineteen years. And I would go down and unlock the door so Danny could get in. Danny never carried his own key because he'd lose it. So I'd go down and let him in-open the door. Every night.'
'And Mike called that last night, as usual?'
