Slaughter - Lutz John (читать книги без txt) 📗

Renz looked surprised. “Are we doing all that?”

“As soon as you supply the cameras and cassettes.”

“Nobody uses cassettes anymore,” Renz said.

Quinn ignored him and stood up. He knew Renz had the political clout to get whatever he needed to get something done in a rush. The man had his connections. That was how it worked. The favor would also subtract from Renz’s stock of favors owed. Some might sniff weakness, but who knew if there really were such images that hadn’t been destroyed?

Renz stood up and said, “You are really a prick, Quinn.”

As Quinn was leaving, he paused at the door and said, “Nice cigar, Harley. But it’s only that.”

When Quinn arrived at Q&A, he found Jerry Lido there, along with Pearl and Fedderman.

Sal and Harold were still occupied interviewing witnesses to the bombing and burning. Sal had called earlier and talked to Pearl. She’d told him two witnesses had surfaced and reported glimpsing a child of about twelve running and dancing through the flames. Neither witness had gotten a good look at the quick, lithe figure.

Pearl gave Sal and Harold names and addresses and sicced them on the witnesses.

“Could have been a small adult,” said one of the witnesses, a hard-looking but glamorous woman named Philipa.

“Or a large child,” Harold said.

They were in her living room, in a modest but cozy ground-floor apartment that looked out at ankle level at passersby on the sidewalk. It was on the upwind side of the field of wreckage left by the explosions and fire. Half the buildings on the block looked untouched, in contrast to the others.

Harold wondered about Philipa’s ethnicity. She had a certain earthy magnetism that intrigued him. When she caught Harold staring at her breasts, she gave him a look that startled him with its clarity of meaning. She knew what he was thinking she was thinking, but he was wrong.

Exactly.

“I was just curious about your ethnicity,” he said, laying it all out there. “Where you’re from.”

“Philipistan,” she said. “And before you ask, yes, I am named after my country.”

“Like Odessa,” Harold said.

Sal glared at him. “Or Miss Australia.”

Philipa’s husband entered the room then, and that was that.

“I wasn’t here during the event,” he said. Meaning he had nothing to add, and neither did his wife. Interview over.

Harold thought “event” was an odd thing to call a bombing and conflagration. And to Harold, the man didn’t look at all Philipistanese. More Irish.

“Thanks for your cooperation,” Sal told the husband, feigning dead seriousness. He gave the wife one of his cards. “If you remember anything else, please call.”

As Philipa accepted the card, she glanced at him, then up and to the side. Something in her eyes sent the ancient wordless message: I know you know I know . . .

“Where exactly is—” Harold began, as Sal pushed him out the door to the hall.

Back in the unmarked, with its engine and air conditioner running, Sal riffled through the many interviews. What he and his fellow detectives were doing didn’t seem productive, but he knew how some small item or phrase, or even silence, could unexpectedly yield up a fact or physical piece of evidence. He squeezed the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. Some people thought doing that could help to make a headache go away. Sal wasn’t one of those people. His headache had a name: Harold.

They drove for a while, Sal behind the wheel. He knew that sooner or later something would click. The trick was to recognize it when it happened. The legwork of the investigation was only beginning. When a little time had passed, the same witnesses could be interviewed again. Differences or contradictions in the results could be useful.

Sal continued to drive what he thought was the perimeter of the recent catastrophe. Harold sat and fiddled with his iPhone.

Fifteen minutes passed before Harold spoke: “It’s nowhere on Google.”

“What’s that, Harold?”

“Philipistan. As far as Google’s concerned, it doesn’t exist.”

After a while, Harold muttered, “Those countries come and go. Sometimes they even overlap.”

Back at Q&A, Quinn sat slouched in his desk chair and listened while Sal and Harold read their reports in noticeably weary voices. Quinn didn’t mind, not only because he wasn’t doing the drone work on the Gremlin chase, but because he believed that sometimes what’s not noticed in one sense is noticed in another. Listening to reports differed a shade from reading them to oneself. Quinn had once persuaded Pearl to touch her tongue to a sheet of paper to see if it tasted the same as the rest of the paper in a tablet. The papers had tasted the same, but Quinn pretended that one was more acidic than the other, which convinced a suspect to roll over and implicate his codefendant in a series of burglaries.

I know that you know I know . . .

49

St. Louis, Missouri, 1999

The Happy Brat sandwich shop was close enough to the ballpark that, when the ball club was in town, there was no shortage of customers. Fran and Willie had opened the place after the previous owner had put it up for sale and retired to Kissimmee, Florida. They had themselves retired two years ago, almost died of boredom, and saw it as their fate to at least make an offer when the diner went on the market. Their offer was rock bottom, but the owner knew them and liked them. And sold them the Happy Brat.

Willie was a big man, and strong, but he was in his seventies now. His hair was thinning and gray, his back bent, but his arms were still powerful. There was a hitch in his gait. He knew he’d soon have to have a hip replacement. Fran was wiry and stronger than she looked, but she, like Willie, was surprised to discover that retirement had been wearing. They needed help, full-time and part. A fellow retiree, Henry Lodge, who was a longtime friend of Willie’s, bought a percentage of the diner and sometimes spent weekdays there with them. There were days when business dragged.

When the Cardinals ball club was in town, it was another story. The Happy Brat couldn’t afford much, but hired a series of short-order cooks and countermen to handle the additional business. Henry helped, especially on those busy days when the Chicago Cubs were in town for day games. Baseball fans loved bratwurst on a bun with sauerkraut and mustard. And what could go better with that than beer, which Fran and Willie sold on draught and ice cold?

All went well beneath the neon bratwurst on a bun sign until, during a long home stand, a need for a dishwasher and sometimes short-order cook became too obvious to ignore.

This home stand, the Cardinals stayed in town almost three weeks. Fran was beginning to look haggard and tired all the time. Willie and Henry took to sniping at each other.

“Enjoy the backbreaking work while you can,” Willie was fond of saying. “There’ll be plenty of slow days in our future.”

But this was the present, profitable even if it was a test for nerves. The economy was such that it would be easy to hire temporary help, maybe for the rest of the baseball season.

Hiring seemed the solution to their problem.

Fran put a help-wanted sign in the lower right corner of the window, and within an hour the kid turned up. He was small, said he actually wanted to become a jockey. But things other than horses were slow at the track across the river in Illinois, so he was looking for a job he could do for a while.

Fran, who was at the register, listened carefully to the boy, and motioned for him and Willie to come to her end of the counter where she could take part in the job interview.