“Do you know anybody on the paper who does schmooze with them?”
“Nobody I’d trust, and I’d be wary of any cop such a guy might bring me. I don’t like reporters who party with people they write about.”
We thought it through another stretch of quiet.
She said, “I feel like I’m playing pin the tail on the donkey, or a card game with half a deck.”
“You want to hear the story, I’ll tell you the story.”
“Sure I want to hear it, isn’t that why we’re here? I’ll take it any way you want to tell it, on the record or off.”
I told it to her with no more clarification than that. I took her from Slater’s arrival in my bookstore through my hasty retreat from Pruitt’s house three hours ago. She asked nothing and made no judgments until it was finished. Her eyes darted back and forth as if she’d been replaying parts of it in her head.
“God, I’ve got more questions now than I had at the beginning. I know who Slater is, but who is Pruitt? Is this really about a Grayson book or is something else at the bottom of it? What happened to the kid who was tagging along with the fat man? And you…oh, Janeway, what on earth possessed you and what’re you thinking now? Do you think Pruitt lost his mind, killed his friends, and took off with Rigby? Does that make sense to you?”
“All I know for sure is there were five people, counting Eleanor. Only two are accounted for and they’re dead.”
“And what about that record playing? What do you make of that?”
“She was being stalked and harassed on the phone. It had to’ve been Pruitt, that’s obvious now. He was her darkman, her worst nightmare.”
“But why leave the record playing, at home, with a dead man there?”
The check came. I made a stab at it but she was quicker. She looked through her purse and fished out a twenty.
“I’m going on up to the scene,” she said. “At least then we’ll know what cops are working it. Maybe I can take them off the record and get them to tell me something.”
We walked out in the rain. I stood beside her car, getting wet again, and talked to her through the narrow crack at the top of her window.
“I’ll be holed up in my room at the Hilton. You call me.”
“As soon as I can.”
“Sooner than that. Remember, I am not calm, I’m not taking this in my stride. I am very nervous.”
“I hear you.”
“You call me, Trish. The minute you can get the smell of it and break away, you get on that phone.”
“I’ll call, but don’t get your hopes up. I think you’re gonna have to go in to get what you want. And the cops won’t be naming you citizen of the year.”
22
I stood under a hot shower, put on dry clothes, lay on the bed with the TV low, and waited uneasily.
She called just before eight.
“The cops on the case, Quintana and Mallory…I know them both, not well, but maybe enough to give you a reading. It’s not good news.”
“Of course not,” I said, sitting up on the bed.
“You might be able to talk to Mallory if you could get him alone. But it wouldn’t do much good, he’d take it all to Quintana anyway.”
“It’s pretty hard to hold out on your partner.”
“And then Quintana would be running it, and your troubles would just begin. Mallory’s the weak sister in this Mutt-and-Jeff show: you can’t ask him about the weather with Quintana in the same room—you ask him a question and Quintana answers it. Quintana’s an overriding presence, extremely inhibiting. He is tough, intelligent to the point of being cunning, and damned condescending to women and other small animals. I don’t think he’d look at a former cop with much sympathy. People call him supercop, and not all of them mean it the way he’d like to think.”
There’s one in every department, I thought. I’d had one for a partner myself, before Hennessey. It didn’t last long. Steed had had to split us up to keep us from killing each other.
The prognosis was obvious. Grimly I moved on to the next round of questions. Had the cops been able to make the Rigby connection from the “Rigby” record?
“I haven’t been able to get into that with them. They’re just not open with stuff like that, and everybody’s wondering what I’m doing here anyway. I told you I don’t do breaking stories. We’ve got other people covering this, and I’m bumping into them every time I turn around.”
“What’s your best guess?”
“About the record?…I can’t see them linking it.”
I lost my temper, probably because I couldn’t see them linking it either. “Goddammit, who does Seattle put on these homicide jobs, Peter Sellers? What’s the matter with these fucking cops, what does it take to get their attention?”
“You asked me what I think and I told you. I could be wrong. But I think they’ll figure the record as noise, to cover up what was happening in that house. The music will go right past them. A million people in this town like Beatles music—it might as well have been the Judds on that deck, or the Boston Pops. Why would the police think twice about ‘Eleanor Rigby’?”
“Because a woman by that name just went through their stupid nitwit court system!”
“You’re assuming the right hand knows what the left hand’s doing. In a system this big, you should know better. Anything’s possible: I just think it would take one brilliant cop or a stroke of luck for that to happen.”
I heard an emergency vehicle pass in her background, the siren fading as it went by on the way somewhere else.
“They’ll be putting a wrap on it soon,” she said. “Are you coming in?”
I thought of supercop. It was almost more than I could bear.
“Janeway…”
“I hear you. I’m just having a lot of trouble with it.”
“It’s the right thing to do.”
“What if I didn’t come in?”
“I think that would be a mistake.”
“What have I got to lose at this point, supercop’s gonna have my ass for breakfast anyway. They don’t need me, they’ve got you.”
“I think I’m still off the record. Did we ever get that straight?”
“If we did, consider it inoperative.”
“What do you want me to tell them?”
“Everything. Anything that helps them find Rigby. Tell them if they waste manpower looking for me, they’re a bunch of losers.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Start from ground zero, go till I drop.”
“Listen,” she said as if she had just made up her mind about something. “We need to talk some more. Don’t just disappear on me. Call me tonight.”
“I’ll see where I am then.”
“I know some stuff I didn’t tell you yet…things you need to hear. Will you call me?”
“I’ll try.”
“It’s important.”
We seemed to have reached the end. But she was reluctant to let me go.
“Cliff, is this really what you want?”
“No. But it’s what I’m going to do.”
23
How do you disappear in the other man’s town? I went about it step by step, covering my tracks, playing the odds, counting on what I knew of the supercop mentality to help me along. Aandahl would be getting back to the scene right about now, just as I was packing my stuff out of the Hilton and loading up in Eleanor’s trunk. She’d be starting to tell them now, as I turned into University and hit the freeway. She’d probably start out talking to the quiet one, Mallory: that was her nature, avoid the supercops of the world as long as possible. It wouldn’t be possible for long: Mallory would call in supercop as soon as he realized what he had…just about now, I thought. She’d be segregated in one of the rooms away from the investigation and they’d start on her slowly and work their way up to heat. She’d have to repeat it all, everything she’d told Mallory: supercop never settled for hearsay, even from a partner. Again Mallory would ask the questions and she would answer, and when it was time for the heat to come down, supercop would take over and see if she scared. Maybe she’d tell him where to shove it. I thought about her and decided she just might. It would take an hour off the clock for them to get to that point.