Ada sobbed, “I’ll make chicken salad and I’ve made chopped herring and some kreplach... oh God... it all sounds so alien. So... Jewish.”
“Chicken salad’s not Jewish,” Cohen said, “and Swedes eat chopped herring, don’t they, Dave?”
“I don’t know. I’m Polish. I need to talk to you, Al.”
“So pull up a bottle and talk.”
“Alone.”
Al sighed, took a deep swig from the glass, and stood up. He took a couple of steps, then went back for the glass and carried it carefully to the kitchen door.
“Did you call about the cold cuts?” Ada asked.
“For the ninety-fifth time, Ada, I called about the cold cuts.”
They went down the wide carpeted hall lined with the hunting prints Bunner had liked to the den where Latovsky and Bunner had watched about a thousand games together. Bunner would lie on the couch, head on the needlepoint pillow, feet pushing against the far arm. The wing-chair was Latovsky’s.
The box of files sat on the coffee table.
Cohen was saying, “Mary’s folks are flying in from Phoenix tonight. Terry Junior’ll be home in a couple of hours.”
He was at Yale and Bunner had been very proud of him.
Then Cohen saw the box. “What’s that?”
Latovsky told him and explained what he wanted.
“That’s nuts, Dave. I don’t really know those men, not to mention it’s a breach of confidentiality without their consent that could get my ass sued off.”
“Do you care?” Latovsky asked.
Cohen hesitated, then shook his head and started to cry. He was a big, swarthy, coarse-featured man with acne scars and startlingly light blue eyes, and seeing him cry was terrible. Latovsky turned away and went to the window overlooking the back lawn where shadows of the trees crept across the grass. It was getting late. Bunner had been dead about five hours.
Latovsky waited until Cohen was quiet, then he turned back. “I wouldn’t do this to you, Al, but time’s the problem, because our chances of getting him go down every hour. I could send it to the feds, ask them to rush and maybe they would, but you know what I’ll get back.”
“Yeah,” Cohen said hoarsely. “Jargon that makes two plus two sound like theoretical physics.” He pulled one of the folders out of the box, opened it, and said, “Yeah, okay, Dave.”
“Thank you.”
Cohen looked up at him; the tears had stuck his dark lashes together, giving his eyes a starry look.
“I’ll do it, Dave, but don’t get your hopes up. You’re asking me to read another physician’s files and intuit a potential sociopath who could shoot his doctor in the face and stay cool enough to cover his tracks. You need a psychic, not a shrink.”
And Latovsky finally thought of Eve, then of the tape recorder the killer had touched when he took a tape and wiped his prints off.
It looked like an easy run on the map: Northway to Thruway, Thruway to the Mass Pike, then south on 7.
With Bunner’s little recorder on the seat next to him, Latovsky pulled into an Exxon station at the foot of the on-ramp to the Northway. Last night’s rain had brought the flies out and clouds of them massed around the station’s vapor lights. The gas jockey burst out of the office and dashed through them to the Olds.
Latovsky wound down the window. “Fill it, super,” he said, then wound the window back up before too many flies got in.
The jockey jammed the nozzle into the tank and raced back to the office. Latovsky looked at the map again.
It would take four hours, give or take, and that would put him in Bridgeton at midnight or later.
He was going to try to use her again; he didn’t want to have to wake her up to do it. Bridgeton was a tiny empty circle on the map, too small to have any place to stay except maybe one of those loathsome yuppified country inns with dirty hooked rugs. He wanted a plastic motel with clean, thick towels, cable TV, and vending machines. Torrington looked big enough to have one.
The gas nozzle popped and the jockey raced back. “Twenty even,” he said and spit out a fly. Latovsky shoved the money at him, rewound the window, and started the car. Then he shut it off and sat still with the flies bombarding the windshield.
He couldn’t just disappear for a night without a word. He tried the cellular phone, but the static was so thick from the tlies or mountains or the general cussedness of things, it sounded like a forest fire. He hung up, shoved the door open and ran for it, waving his hands madly around his head: He leaped through the office door, slammed it after him and the gas jockey looked up at him. “What the fuck do they want?” he asked, meaning the flies.
“Blood,” Latovsky said. “You got a phone I can use?”
Riley had been waiting for Latovsky since 10:00 a.m. He had left the squad room at 1:15 to wolf down a ham sandwich at Rose’s, then rushed back, sure Latovsky would be there by then.
But his office was still dark; the bullpen had all but emptied out. Barber sat morose and alone, fielding what looked like a sudden burst of calls.
“What gives?”
Barber put his hand over the mouthpiece. “Press, press, and more press, Riley. Hate the fuckers... present company mostly excepted. A guy got himself shot on Old School, in the professional building.”
The “new” professional building was a sprawling mass of stained cement that already looked shabbier than buildings a hundred years older. The lot was mobbed; cruisers blocked the drive, sawhorses were set up to keep back bystanders, and yellow crime-scene tape was looped across the front of the building.
Riley left his car out on the road and walked back, joining the crowd by entering the lot through the patch of trees at one end of it.
“What happened?” he asked a pudgy-faced woman about fifty wearing a kerchief over hair rollers.
“Guy got shot in the head, I heard.” She shivered and jiggled all over, but didn’t seem ghoulish or disrespectful, just honestly upset and monumentally curious.
“What guy?”
“One of the doctors, I heard. They say one of those dopers looking for drugs did it.”
The Channel 6 van was there. Two Minicams waited at the edge of the crowd with their anchorman, who combed his hair like Dan Rather.
Jergens had sent Trennant to cover for the Register. He was at the far end of the lot, close to the tape across the front of the building, and Latovsky’s Olds was parked next to some cruisers. Riley settled down to wait.
Nothing happened for a long time, then coroner’s men in slick black jackets came out wheeling the stiff. From here, in the late sun, the body bag looked horribly featureless, with a smooth hump for feet, another for the head.
A hush fell on the crowd as they carried the stretcher to the gray van. Even the troopers were distracted, and one of the Minicam men slipped around a sawhorse and came at the stretcher with the camera covering his face like a mask.
He sidled along with the men, camera trained on the gray plastic. “Don’t guess you’d unzip,” Riley heard him say. “Heard he got it in the face.”
“Fuck yourself, ghoul,” said one of the bearers.
Unfazed, he kept the Minicam going until one of the troopers forced him back behind the cordon.
The coroner’s men shut the back of the van and it eased its way silently down the drive, looking ghostly in the late afternoon light.