I had my own dormant Facebook page that I’d started, under protest, three years earlier. Most of my “friends” were old television contacts, and once I stopped being interested in who had his hand in what cookie jar and who had signed what deal, I stopped checking my Facebook page for invitations and new friend requests, but I was still out there in cyberspace with a three-year-old picture and outdated contact info. Just as well-I looked younger and wasn’t as easy to find, a winning combination.
Maybe I’d get lucky and locate that one perky gal who considers it her mission to reconnect people whether they want it or not. Every school, business, or organization has one, the person who organizes things no one else wanted to bother with-the uncool activities, the obscure charity events. (Hi, want to volunteer for the National Frankfurter Finger Weenie Roast?)
At my school her name was Rena. She wore an ear-to-ear grin from the first day of high school to graduation. A relative of mine, from the cynical side of the family, claims only babies and idiots are that happy. In Rena’s case, she might have been right. Rena always seemed to be cradling a clipboard in her arms as if the sign-up sheet was her baby. She was probably working for a cruise line now, with a steady stream of new people to annoy every week.
I started with the school and the word cheerleader. Two female names popped up but no pictures-presumably they wanted to be remembered as they were, ponytailed, flying through the air, no cellulite, eternally young. Perversely, I was glad. Who wanted to think cheerleaders from twenty-five years ago were still as beautiful and limber as they were back then? No male names appeared.
Next I tried the football and baseball teams. The hat was a Detroit Tigers hat. Maybe our man was an athlete and not just a fan. That coughed up pages of names to scroll through; either Newtonville’s male students were all on Facebook, or every water boy and equipment manager claimed he played a valuable role on some team. And this was interesting: the men were more likely to post pictures of themselves and the women posted avatars or nothing. No matter how saggy, bald, or tubby they got, the males thought they still looked hot. Self-esteem or self- delusion?
I was up to the Fs and getting a little punchy. There was nothing in the fridge, so I ordered a pizza and a two- liter bottle of diet soda for dinner. Good food was going to take time and mine would be there in less than twenty- five minutes or it would be free. My finances being what they were, I found myself hoping for a tiny fender bender somewhere between here and Armando’s Pizza Coliseum, nothing serious, just enough to hold up traffic and make the pizza arrive in twenty-seven minutes.
I stared at my computer screen, wondering how else I might find the man who’d bumped into Caroline if I got to the Zs and didn’t see a guy with a cleft lip. The customer who knew his sports teams also knew Retro Joe, and said that these days Joe was driving for Hutchinson Shipping. If my other research came up empty, I’d try Hutchinson, but I wasn’t relishing that conversation. “Hi, do any of your truckers have scarred or cleft lips?” I’d have hung up on me.
For her part, Babe posted a note on the Paradise bulletin board claiming the man had left something at the diner. Not entirely true but not entirely false either, he’d left a lot of questions.
The bell rang, I snapped out of my blue screen stupor, grabbed my wallet, and headed for the door. I glanced at my watch-shoot, twenty-three minutes. When I opened the door I saw Mike O’Malley standing there holding a pizza box and a paper bag.
“What are you doing here?”
“Delivering your pizza,” he said, inspecting the receipt that was taped to the top of the box. “I thought you ate healthy food. Cake for lunch the other day and now this. Has life in Springfield totally corrupted you?”
“What have you done with the pizza man?” I asked, looking down the driveway.
“Ran him off the road and stole his pie.” He waited for me to at least smile, but I was too tired. “You used to have a sense of humor. I stopped him for speeding, around the corner.”
“And he bribed you with my dinner?”
“Of course not. Technically, I’m off the clock, so he got away with a strongly worded warning. I paid for your pizza and this swill that you’re planning to drink. Can I come in or are we going to let this pie get cold? Truce?”
I should have just tipped him and sent him on his way after his less-than-polite exit at lunch, but there was something about him that always made me open the door and invite him in.
Of course, he was one of the few single men I knew in Springfield between the ages of eighteen and seventy- five. It could have been that. Or maybe it was something else. He was a good man: he looked after his elderly father, he had a dog, he brought me food. He had all the outward signs of normalcy that usually appealed to women, but maybe that was it. I didn’t ordinarily gravitate toward normal. I wanted the tortured artist. The driven genius. The explorer with just one more mountain to climb. And here I was, once again trying to picture this pale, thinning-on-top suburban policeman naked on a fur rug in front of a crackling fire. There was no denying it-we had the worst timing since that couple on the Titanic.
“What are you smiling at?” he said.
“Nothing. When did you get so health conscious?” I said, shaking off the image. I shooed him in and led him past the door to my office. He peeked in.
“You’re working late.”
“Actually I’m being interrupted late. Is this supposed to make up for stiffing me at lunch?”
“Yes.”
We went upstairs to the kitchen and I dropped the greasy cardboard box on a round oak table I’d scored at a flea market the previous summer. The last time Mike O’Malley was here, my kitchen had been ransacked, with all the drawers and cabinets open and their contents strewn about. Despite that, he knew where everything was located. He set the table as if he lived there and we sat down to dinner every night.
“I think the garlic powder is downstairs.”
“No worries, I can do without it.”
We were being very careful with other, not wanting to get into another of our volatile and incomprehensible dustups. The tiptoeing generally lasted about three minutes. According to my kitchen clock, we were at two minutes and forty-five seconds.
“What were you doing around the corner?” I asked. “Am I under surveillance?” I meant it as a joke, but it came out sounding too snippy. He let it slide.
“No. The pizza delivery boy was speeding on Longview Road. I just happened to catch up with him here. Fortuitous, since I’m now off duty and strangely in the mood for one of our pizza dates.” He separated a slice and deftly wiggled it away from the others without adding too much extra cheese. Was this a date?
We agreed that drivers on my street were reckless fools and it was only a matter of time before some poor soul, driver or pedestrian, was sent flying into the wetlands, never to be seen again, body parts scattered by foraging critters. We discussed the renovation of the one and only Chinese restaurant in a twenty-mile radius and the latest exhibit on Polish immigrants at the historical society. What was next? The weather? The merits of the Mets’ newest acquisition? Caroline was the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room with us, whether we said her name out loud or not. As usual with O’Malley, I blinked first.
“I’m sorry if you think I asked you to lunch only to pump you for information.”
“Well, didn’t you?”
“Grant Sturgis asked me to find the tipster. That’s the digging I said I’d do, and it kind of backfired.”
O’Malley picked the pepperoni disks off his slice and stacked them like poker chips in one corner of the cardboard box. “I take it that was before he thought it was you who informed on her?”
“Yes, wise guy. Before everyone thought it was me.” Stay calm, I told myself. If you’re going to ask someone for his help, try not to call him names first. “I know it’s not your case, but isn’t there anything you can tell me?”
O’Malley added to what I’d already learned. Caroline was arrested for attempting to sell drugs to an undercover cop. That much anyone with a newspaper or an Internet connection knew. Her attorney claimed it was entrapment-the cop was a young woman and they were at a party. Apparently, Caroline offered the woman a joint and the woman insisted on paying. The next day the police came to the football field and arrested her in the middle of practice.
“I don’t know anything about the law, but that sounds like a trap to me.”
“Harder drugs were found in Caroline’s gym bag, as was forty-seven thousand dollars in cash. She’d been under
