Part 31 (1/2)

Ike resembled an elderly beatnik. His hair was gone on the top, but the snowy sides overflowed his collar, and he wore a goatee. He had a long ap.r.o.n, which might not have been washed in a month, and the eye that he'd lost when he was shot was a pure milky white and moved now and then for reasons of its own.

”Were you around the night he plugged that guy?” Larry asked him.

”Around? Yeah. But I was doing the same as I'm doing now. I didn't see nothing until I smelled the gunpowder. Isn't that a p.i.s.ser?” asked Ike. ”That .38 probably shook plaster off the walls, but the first thing I remember is the smell.” Ike looked into the barroom. ”Gage over there was standing not three feet from the both of them. He seen it all.”

Once he got a beer, Larry drifted over that way. Mike Gage worked Property Crimes Area Six. His picture was in the dictionary next to the term 'good cop.' He was one of those blacks with a permanent part in his hair that looked like it had been applied with a chisel. He was a quiet type, church on Sunday, six kids. Larry had a theory that the quiet guys did the best on the job. Larry himself, especially when he was younger, was just too d.a.m.ned excitable. Mike was even. A lot of policemen tended to run bitter. In general, the job seldom turned out to be the adventure you hoped for. Even your kids got old enough to realize you weren't the legend you wanted to be in your own mind. It was paperwork and boredom, getting pa.s.sed over in favor of the connected, and making far less money than half the creeps you snagged. And by the time you got hip, you had too little going to move on to anything else. But Mike was like Larry, excited to see the s.h.i.+eld when he picked it up every morning. Gage still thought it was a great deal, helping people be good rather than bad.

Mike was with a bunch of other guys from Six, but made room on the bench beside him. One guy with Gage, Mai Rodrigues, extended his fist across the picnic table, and Larry gave it a knock, ballplayer style, celebrating last week's victory again. It was noisy in here”Creed was pounding out of the speakers”and in order to be heard Larry had to get close enough to Mike to cuddle. They talked about the case for a minute, what a strange guy Erno had proven to be.

”Ike says you were right there when Erno popped that character”Faro Cole?”

”Larry, I'm on the job long as you, and truth be told, that's as close as I've come to a bullet.” Mike smiled at his beer. ”The fool Erno shot”Faro?”he'd been waiting like some Iraqi woman, and Erno got the pistol out of his hand and pushed him outside, then all the sudden they were back in here and bang. Not three feet from me.” Mike pointed toward the side door where he'd been sitting.

Larry asked one of the questions that had been bugging him for a while: Why was a complaint never lodged against Faro for threatening Erno?

”We all figured Faro for past tense. And Erno didn't want charges anyway. Once we took the gun, Erno started in bawling over the body.”

”I thought Erno was saying self-defense.”

”He was. But he kept telling us leave the guy alone.”

”Not too logical.”

”You're Homicide, you tell me, but I didn't think shooters were where you went for logic.”

Larry took a second. Better sense told him to stop now, but at the age of fifty-four he still hadn't figured out how to heed the voice of caution.

”Here's the thing, Mike. Today, I'm starting to have bad dreams. I need comfort on one thing. You think you could make this guy? Faro?”

”Four years, Larry. Maybe Mai could. He had Faro's head in his lap for fifteen minutes while we were waiting for the mercy wagon.”

”Lemme buy both of you a beer at the bar.”

Ike had put today's Trib away and it took him a second to find it.

”This bird,” said Larry, displaying the front page to Gage and Rodrigues, ”this one. Just check me out that he doesn't look like the guy Erno shot.”

Rodrigues peered up before Mike Gage but there was the same thing in both faces. Larry had been pointing to Collins in the photograph of Erno's funeral.

”Christ,” Larry said. But the columns kept adding up, just as they had all day. Faro was a travel agent and so was Collins. Size, age, race all matched. Like Collins, Faro had been represented by Jackson Aires. 'Faro Cole' sort of looked like 'Collins Farwell,' turned inside out, S.O.P. with aliases, so the doofus using it would have a clue, when he was on the spot, about what he had been calling himself. And it wouldn't be unusual for a bad boy just out of the joint, as Collins was in 1997, to be toting phony I.D., to make sure he didn't give the coppers”and his parole officers”a head start if he got jammed up on something. But what bothered Larry the most was what had struck him while he was sanding: Collins's story about how Jesus had entered his life with a bullet through the back.

Rodrigues tried to console him. ”You don't need to trust a four-year-old eyeball, even if it's cops.”

Larry went outside to use his cell phone. The high clouds were darkening and resembled an angry stallion rearing up. Storm tonight, probably. Then he rejoined the present and fell under its weight.

This f.u.c.king case.

Chapter 33.

August 8, 2001 At Sea ”YOU GOT TIME TO leave the office?”

Muriel had grabbed her own phone after-hours. Not even bothering with a name or h.e.l.lo, Larry sounded cozy and familiar. She'd been waiting days for his call, and she was immediately dashed when he added, ”Some guys down here you ought to talk to.” She could not quite dampen a faint echo of embarra.s.sment in her voice when she finally asked where the h.e.l.l he was. It sounded like a tavern.

”Do we have a problem?” she said.

”Can of worms. No,” said Larry. ”Snakes. Rattlesnakes. Cottonmouth.”

They had a problem.

”And, if you don't mind,” Larry added, ”bring the old file on Collins we put together when we went to see him in the jail.” He told her where it was in the current materials stored in her office.

Pus.h.i.+ng through the old oak door at Ike's a half hour later, Muriel could detect a current in the room. Generally speaking, there were two schools of thought about her in the Kindle County Unified Police Force: some liked her, some hated her guts. The ones in the second camp kept it to themselves when they were on the job, but off duty they owed her no such courtesy. They remembered the cases she'd nixed, the hard fines she'd drawn and sometimes enforced on police practices. Their world was far too macho to comfortably endure discipline”or ambition”from a woman. She could grant them that she was often hardheaded, even abrasive, but in her heart of hearts, she knew that the main issue for the guys staring at her came down to plumbing.

Larry was back at the bar. He was in overalls and looked like he'd been rolled in flour. His clothing and hair were pale with dust.

”Let me guess. You're going to be a sugar doughnut for Halloween.”

He didn't seem to get the joke until he glanced at the beveled mirror over the bar and even then wasn't very amused. He explained that he'd been sanding all day, but he clearly had other things on his mind besides his appearance.

”Wa.s.sup?” she asked.

He told her, slowly, piece by piece. She got right next to him when he'd finished, so she didn't shout.

”You're telling me Erno Erdai shot his own nephew?”

”I'm saying it's possible. Did you bring that file?”

Larry waved Mike Gage over first to look at Collins's mug shot from 1991. Mike just gave him a look. Rodrigues said, ”I take it 'Definitely' is not the answer you're looking for.”

”Tell it like it is.”

”The eyes, man.” Rodrigues tapped the color photograph. ”Almost orange. Village of the d.a.m.ned or something.”

”Right,” Larry said.

”Let's get out of here,” Muriel told him. This wasn't the place for a discussion. Even the cops who liked her were uncertain allies, many of them more loyal to the reporters who kept them on their call list than they'd be to her. Outside, she offered Larry a ride up the hill. He hesitated at the door, reluctant to bring his dust into her sedan. She'd owned the Civic since 1990, and it hadn't been tidy even when it was new.

”Larry,” she said, ”there is nothing this upholstery hasn't seen,” and barely caught herself from laughing when she lit on a distant memory. He gave her directions as they drove.

”So, okay,” she said. ”Explain.”

”I don't think it makes any difference.”

”That's step two,” said Muriel. ”We have to know what the h.e.l.l was happening first. Am I reading this right? If my mother wants to reconcile with her sister, she ought to try shooting her in the back?”

Larry laughed for the first time tonight. ”Three thousand comedians unemployed, and you're making jokes.”