After much thought in the booth, Tim had still punched his ballot for Paul. In his concession speech, Paul said Sofia and he were going to take some time to consider the future, but until now Tim had not realized that meant their relationship. It was one of the truest adages he knew that you could never tell from the outside what was happening in a marriage. Sometimes inside, as well. All in all, it sounded like the Gianises had themselves one hell of a mess.
He told Evon he’d poke around a little more to see if recent developments had shaken loose something new. Evon asked him to check back before taking on any big expenses.
Tim didn’t expect any of the Gianises to be more inclined to talk to him, but there was no harm in asking. Sooner or later, he might wear one of them down. He phoned Sofia at work, but it went straight to voice mail, where the message said Dr. Michalis was out of the office. Naturally. There were slimers from all over America who wanted an interview. Tim took an old-fashioned approach and wrote a letter, addressed to Sofia at the house in Grayson, saying he was thinking about her and needed a few minutes.
Around eleven, he went out to the Gianises’ house, joining at least six different TV vans with their potato- masher antennas on the roof. A county cop was in the driveway to keep the reporters from acting like jerks and creeping up to the windows. Tim caught sight of a cameraman he used to know just a little, Mitch Rosin, sitting on the back of his van, enjoying a cigarette in the mild weather. The flowering shrubs were in bloom, and the trees had exploded into green overnight a few weeks ago. At Tim’s age, there was a special pleasure in spring.
Rosin squinted through his own smoke as Tim gimped up.
“Brodie, right?”
“Right.”
“How the hell have you been?” Rosin worked as an independent and had produced some documentaries for the cable networks. His shoulder was a mess, he said, from carrying the camera for forty years, but otherwise it had been a great life, as a professional voyeur. The rear doors of the van had been thrown open and Tim sat beside Rosin on the dusty bed of the truck. They gabbed a good twenty minutes, laughing about old cases. Like a lot of people, Rosin remembered Tim from Delbert Rooker. Delbert had killed six schoolteachers and tried to abduct at least four more. He actually rented space in a meat locker along with the deer hunters and had the six bodies wrapped and hanging right there. Except for being a homicidal maniac, Delbert could otherwise have been Mr. Peepers, right down to the pocket protector. Worked for the state Department of Transportation approving truck licenses.
“I take it,” said Rosin, “that he didn’t have a positive experience in grade school.”
“So it seems. Guy never explained, though. We went in the apartment with a SWAT team. Here he is in a three-flat and he’s grabbing these poor women, sticking them in his trunk, and then dragging them up the stairs to a third-floor apartment in the middle of the night, wrapped in a tarp. No one ever hears or sees anything. And of course, he’s just inside his own sick world-not only took pictures but made audiotapes so he could relive each kill. And never cleaned up. There’s blood and hair all over the living room rug. We had him sitting in the kitchen, handcuffed to the radiator while we searched. I says, ‘Delbert, didn’t you know you shouldn’t be doing this stuff?’ I was just trying to knock out the insanity defense. But he shrugs. ‘Had it coming,’ he says. ‘All of them?’ I ask. ‘Had it coming.’ OK, well then that’s how he saw it.”
Tim eventually asked what was up with the Gianises. Rosin told him that Paul’s and Sofia’s offices said each was on vacation. No one had a clue about Cass, whose latest whereabouts once again were unknown. There was no word on when any of them would be back, but the gossip shows all wanted the first footage of the new couple whenever they appeared, so Rosin was sitting here.
While Tim was talking to Rosin, the mail carrier arrived in her little truck and took a trip to the house next door. A tiny dark woman wearing a pith helmet and PO-issued shorts, she clearly didn’t like doing her job on- camera and virtually dashed up to the neighbors’ mail slot.
Tim tried not to react. He stood up and stretched and said something about moving his old bones. He drove around the block and ended up following the mail van for an hour, until the carrier stopped for lunch in a little Bibimbap hole-in-the-wall. She was jawing in Korean with the owners when Tim sat down beside her at the counter on one of the vinyl-covered round backless stools. She was a small woman, maybe fifty, with a beautiful coppery color and a wide sunny face. Her knotty little calves were displayed beneath the hem of her shorts with their maroon stripe down the seam. A large wooden cross hung from her neck, which Tim didn’t take as an especially good sign.
He picked up a stray copy of the
She stared at the money.
“No way,” she said.
“Just need a conversation,” he answered. “How long is the Gianises’ mail held?”
She ate for some time, using her sticks, her face close to the bowl.
She never looked down when she swept up the money and put it in her left pants pocket.
“Monday.”
“And have you delivered mail there for Cass? Cassian?”
“Couple things.”
“Any forwarding for Paul?”
“Start last week.”
“Where to?”
She laughed. “I not the phone book.” Still she closed her eyes. “Center City. Tee hun-rat on Mo’gan.”
“Three hundred on Morgan,” Tim repeated delicately.
She nodded. He couldn’t think of anything else.
Thursday morning, Tim decided to see if he could find Cass. There was a guy he used now and then, Dave Ng, who could get social security information. Tim never asked how, but over the years he took it that Dave had somebody-or somebody who had somebody-in Baltimore in Social Security HQ. This was too far over the line for Tim, except when he was desperate. Ng charged five hundred bucks that Tim would have to bury in his gas and mileage expenses for Evon. Ng called back in an hour.
“Zero,” he said. Tim had never met Ng face-to-face and for all Tim knew, he was really a black guy named Marcellus. In payment, Tim mailed two blank postal money orders to a PO box in Iowa. “Last job was at the Hillcrest Correctional Facility downstate. No employment this year in either quarter.”
He might have thought Cass was a phantom, but both Georgia and Eloise, the attendant at St. Michael’s, had seen him in the last few months.
On the way back to the Gianis house, he stopped at the FOP lodge hall. There’d been a jar of pickled eggs on the bar he’d been thinking about for two months at least. It had been an entire era since he’d eaten one. The same bunch he’d encountered last time was playing pinochle, Stash and Giles and the guy who’d told him he was never going to find Cass, and three more. There was a pile of quarters in the center of the table.
“God oh mighty,” said Stash at the sight of Tim. “Here comes the walking dead.”
“Greetings from zombie land,” said Tim. He pulled a chair up behind Stash and said, “Jesus, you wasting all that money on a hand like that?”
Stash turned full around and Tim laughed merrily.
“I don’t even know the rules of this game,” he confessed. “Far as I know, you win with petunias.”
“You still chasing around for Kronon?” Giles asked. “I’d have thought he’d have declared mission accomplished. He sure sank Paulie’s ship.”
“Just some loose ends I’m trying to tie up, more for my own sake than anyone else’s,” Tim answered.
He went to the bar and laid down two singles and ate two pickled eggs, then returned to the table to ask the guy who knew the Gianises’ neighbor if there was any news about Cass.
“I actually talked to Bruce, after you were here. Told him you were on Cass’s trail.”
Tim nodded. He hadn’t expected to fool anyone. Still, you could tell from the deliberate way the man didn’t look up from his cards that he thought he’d gotten the drop on Tim. He was a fair-size guy, basically bald but wearing the fringe of hair he had left long enough to overflow his collar. Man seemed decent enough, but Tim sensed he hadn’t actually been a cop, more a wannabe, probably welcome here because he lost a lot more than he won.
“He said no sign of Cass,” the man said. “The wife saw Sofia in the driveway a couple months back and
