“Of course not. It’s my house, left to me by my dear father. It’s my responsibility, not theirs.” She trailed away again and nothing came over the line but the ragged sound of her breath, which probably smelled of dentures. Poor, sad, silly old thing, who probably wouldn’t remember her children’s names or her own this time next year (if she lived that long), had burned some papers and with them his chance of finding her.
He hung up without saying good-bye and called the store in Raven Lake.
“You again,” the woman said when he told her who it was. He must not have made a very good impression.
She said, “Yes, I asked Lorraine. And she remembers him because she said he was good-looking. Him, not her. Definitely a him. And she doesn’t know anything else about him. Now, if you’ll excuse me,” and she hung up.
“And the leases?” Latovsky asked.
“Now snapping merrily away on the hearth,” Mrs. Rodney said happily. “I only wish it had been harder to sound so fuddled.”
Nothing fuddled about her, Latovsky thought.
Maybe he’d ask if he could come to tea when this was over, bring his mother, who’d make some of those little crustless sandwiches he could eat about eighty of. Suddenly, he felt good and found himself smiling into the phone.
“Have I now circumvented the danger to myself?” she asked.
“I think so, but I still want you to lock up carefully at night, Mrs. Rodney. I’m very serious about that. And I’m going to have a Glenvale police cruiser drive by every hour after dark for the next few weeks; it’ll attract less attention than a state car.”
“Do tell the officers to stop in for something hot to drink. Any time before ten... or even after. The old don’t need much sleep, you know. That’s one of those old wives’ tales that turn out to be gospel.”
They hung up. He took out the list of tenants she’d made on her thick cream-colored stationery and the Xerox copy he’d made of it and tore them to confetti, then dropped them in his wastecan, watched them drift into it, and felt even better. He’d foreseen something even Eve hadn’t and had broken the last link between her and the killer in the woods, a link only he could break, and he felt good for the first time in days.
In the middle of his moment of self-congratulation, Meers called and told him to come to his office.
“Jig’s up,” Meers said.
“What jig’s that?”
“The Adam Fuller jig, Dave. Just had a call from an attorney, name of John Farber, of Macready, Ruskin, Farber, and so on, to tell us that Dr. Adam P. Fuller is getting ready to sue the squad for harassment unless such harassment ceases at once.”
“He’s bluffing!” Latovsky choked.
“About which, Dave? Making the tail on him or suing us because of it.”
“Oh, he made the tail. We couldn’t follow a blind deaf mute without getting made. But he ain’t gonna sue, Lem. Killers don’t sue cops.”
“You willing to bet a coupl’a hundred thousand bucks on that?”
Latovsky didn’t answer.
“I’m not,” Meers said, rolling an unlit cigarette over and over in his fingers. He’d been trying to quit for years, did so on and off, and his face would lose some of that cadaverous look for a tew months. Then he’d go back and his cheeks sank in again.
Latovsky wanted to reach out and snatch the cigarette away from him, but the truth was, he wanted one too, even though he’d quit years ago.
He watched helplessly as his boss stuck the Marlboro in his mouth, pulled out his ancient Zippo, and lit up.
He inhaled like a man drinking water after five days in the desert, then he looked at Latovsky.
“You’re off Fuller and he’s back to what he was day before yesterday, one of twenty-six patients between twenty-five and fifty years old. And do me a favor, Dave—don’t argue with me.”
He asked this last very gently.
“Okay, Lem, but smoke this with that toxic crap. While I’m observing the legal niceties and going after twenty-six instead of one, another woman could find herself slit open and drying out in the moonlight. Then what, Lem?”
“Then we lose a lot of sleep,” Meers said, looking fondly at the glowing end of the cigarette. “That’s part of what we get paid to do. I think it stinks, I think the legal system sucks, I think all the things you know I’ve thought for twenty years. But I’ve got forty cents in the squad budget and that’s not as much of an exaggeration as you think. If Fuller sues us—we’re finished. And I can’t, cant risk the whole squad, which we’ve both worked our asses off for, because you got a ‘feeling’ at your best friend’s funeral.
“Go after Fuller, Dave, go after the other twenty-five. Do the miserable old cop work. Something will shake out that Linney can take to a judge and if it doesn’t, it probably wasn’t Fuller anyway.
“In the meantime...” Meers drew in smoke, his eyes got a little dreamy, and Latovsky thought he was actually getting high on it. “In the meantime,” Meers said, “I want you to take the weekend off. Take the kid fishing and come back rested and with a clear mind. That’s an order, Lieutenant.”
“Congratulations, Eve,” Joe Rubin said.
He came around his desk, flopped into the big leather chair, and beamed at her.
“You’re sure?” she said faintly.
“Positive, and you’re farther along than you think: into the fourth month, I figure, so you’ll be as big as a house through summer, something most women try to avoid. But I gather this wasn’t planned.”
Eve didn’t say anything.
He looked at her with the intent kindness she was used to from him. He must be pushing seventy; his cheeks and temples had gotten a little sunken and his jowls were loose, but his eyes were bright, his hair still thick and iron gray.
“Eve? Fran told me Sam was gone.”
“It’s Sam’s baby, if that’s what—”
He held up his hand. “It’s not. I just wanted to know if he or someone’s waiting for the news.”
“He’s back,” she said evasively.
“Well, now. Well... that’s good news, Evie. Maybe this time...”
No, not this time, Eve thought. Not ever. They were trying, you could feel the trying in everything they said to each other, in every tentative touch between them. No, dear Doctor Joe, not ever.
She slumped in the chair.
“Hey, I’ve got a little something for occasions like this,” he said heartily. He stood up and went to a cabinet against the wall. She stood too and wandered to the window around the corner from his desk. It looked out on Elm, which had been lined with the trees until the Dutch disease killed them. Now they had Chinese elms that were supposed to be resistant and would probably look pretty good in a hundred years or so.
The houses across the street were eighteenth century. Some had been converted to offices, one housed the town library, a tew were still private homes, with gracious lawns that looked in need of the season’s first mowing. The grass was tender green, the leaves were fresh, not dusty looking the way they’d get in July, when it was hot... and she’d be “big as a house.”
A baby...
She’d ask him when a sonogram could tell if it was a girl or boy; she knew about sonograms from Meg. She also wanted to know if she should have amniocentesis to rule out birth defects, because she was thirty-one, past the optimum child-bearing age.
Sun glanced off a window of one of the houses across Elm and back into her eyes. She blinked and saw a street covered with tanbark and heard the clop of horses’ hooves. A woman stood across the way under a huge old spreading elm, the likes of which had not been seen in Bridgeton since the 1960s. She wore a hoop skirt, tightly laced bodice, and had a tiny waist. Her dark hair, the exact color of Eve’s, was pinned in a crown of smooth braids, and Eve knew her eyes (although she was too far away to see the color) were brown with a greenish undercast that made them look olive drab in sunlight.