She still did not look up. ‘She must have told you about the time she was lost in the mountains up beyond Lake George. When she was six.”
“Sure.”
“She didn’t get lost, Harry. Someone… a man… attacked her. Criminally.”
“Oh, damn, Estelle.”
“He… they sent him to jail for it. But that isn’t the point. The point is that Catherine somehow forgot about it, Harry. Or she deliberately put it out of her mind. Sublimated it, that’s the word. I heard her talk about it afterward a dozen times, and all she ever remembered was wandering in the woods and being cold. She talked about it like some marvelous childhood adventure she’d had, and the… the other part of it was out of her mind completely. I wanted to tell her about it but I never could.
I never could say anything. But that must have been part of it, I’m sure. She buried the memory of what happened because it was such a shock, but there was some kind of inverse reaction, as if she were unconsciously trying to prove to herself that it hadn’t hurt her, or… I don’t know. But she should have been under analysis. I did tell her that once, two or three years ago, but she merely laughed at me. Maybe I’m making too much of the whole thing, maybe it wouldn’t have made any difference anyhow. But now she’s…”
Estelle had been staring at the rug all the time she was telling it. It was not simply that she was upset. I had to wonder how a woman could grow to thirty-six or thirty-seven and still be embarrassed by something like that.
I didn’t have much idea what the story was worth. Psychology was another one of those things I’d missed because of wind-sprints and signal practice at Ann Arbor. Not that it mattered much now anyhow. I went across to her.
Her head was still down. I put my fist under her chin. “Look, will you be all right? I have to check in with the law. I haven’t seen them yet, Estelle.”
She started to get up and I helped her. For a moment she stood there with my hand on her wrist. She started to say something and then her face twisted up again. After that I was holding her with her face on my shoulder.
“It’ll be all right, Estelle.”
We stood that way. She was breathing unevenly and I could feel her breasts rising beneath the robe. They were full and firm. It was probably a shoddy thing to consider at the moment, but I thought she very likely needed a man a lot more than she needed consolation. I squeezed her shoulders, waiting another minute, then I eased away.
“I better call them.”
“Will you… I won’t go to school today. I’ll see mother this morning, but I won’t tell her. Harry, will you stop back later?”
“Sure.”
I watched her shuffle into one of the bedrooms. She closed the door.
There was a phone on a stand and I dialed my number. Dan wouldn’t be answering. It rang once and then the voice was Nate Brannigan out of Central Homicide.
“Fannin, Nate.”
“Well,” he said. “Well, now. Fannin, huh? Isn’t that grand? Wait until I check my watch and see just how grand that is. Six forty-one. Putting the time of death at roughly three-thirty, that makes a lapse of three hours and eleven minutes. What the hell, let’s call it three hours even. Nice of you to ring, Mr. Fannin. Would you like a little more time, maybe? Would you like to make it four hours? Five? I’d hate to inconvenience you.”
I let him get all that out of his system.
“Well, Fannin?”
“I wasn’t sure you were finished.”
“I’m not. Not by a damned sight. But first I want to hear your end of it. Tell me a story, Fannin. Make it a good one. Where the damned hell you been? Where are you now?”
“I’m across on 72nd. You get that pick-up on Perry Street?”
“Yeah, yeah. Bogardus. I sent a car. They hauled him in twenty minutes ago, but I’m still waiting for a charge. You better have one, Fannin. You get me stuck with a false arrest to cover a fist fight you had with some wet-nosed kid and I’ll—”
“You read a bulletin on a payroll job in Troy yesterday? Some shirt factory? Roughly forty thousand?”
“Not my department. He in on that?”
“Him and another couple, cousins named Sabatini. I had a session with one of them also, but I lost. He’ll be poking around in some of the same places your boys will be working on the killing, looking for the girl. It slipped my mind to tell him she’s dead.”
“Dan gave me the background on you and the girl, Harry. Sorry about that.”
“Thanks.”
“She rigged in on the Troy thing?”
“That’s pretty much it. She was with Sabatini until roughly two o’clock, then she scrammed. That would have been fine, except she took the money with her. She went someplace before she came to me, more likely two places. One of the guys she went to see had a second thought and followed her. I’ve been using the MG she came in. She—”
“Damn it, Fannin.”
“I was in a hurry, Nate. But let me—”
“No, let me. Okay, so the guy stabs her out front and then grabs the money and guns off. And after that the girl gets back on her feet bleeding like a stuck pig and rings your bell and dances up the stairs, huh?”
“I know how it sounds. But either he thought she was dead or he lost his nerve. You can—”
“the girl didn’t say anything?”
“Not about who killed her, no.”
“But you talked?”
“A couple words, yeah.”
“Fannin, you amaze me. How long have I known you — five, six years?”
“Come off it, will you, Nate? What gripe have you got except that I should have called sooner? What the hell would you have done in my position, got up a bridge game maybe? Let’s play it without the weary cop sarcasm, huh? I’m not much in the mood.”
“Fannin, I’ll finish what I started to tell you. And like I say, if I didn’t know you and you hadn’t played it straight for five years I’d have had every badge in nine precincts out of bed and hunting for you two minutes after I got here—”
“Now listen—”
“You listen. All right, the girl comes up and dies on your doorstep. You used to be married to her, maybe that’s good enough reason why she’s there. But don’t tell me you had a cozy little chat before she died and she didn’t say word number one about who—”
“Damn it—”
“And don’t hand me any fairy tale about somebody she went to see who followed her and took the money, don’t give me that either. Don’t give me anything. Just get yourself over here and make it fast. You get me? I don’t know what you’re trying to cover, or who — the girl’s reputation probably — but I don’t like to be suckered. I’ll trust you on it for the fifteen minutes it’ll take you to get across town and not four seconds longer. What the hell do you take me for anyhow?”
“Why, you old rummy. You old dim-witted country Irish jerk. Five years, huh? And just how many things have I handed you in that time? Every damned one of them crated up and slapped on your desk without a loose string anywhere. Which is a damned good thing because if there was a loose string you’d trip over it and fall on your fat face. And here I get one that I’m not even doing for money, see, no fee at all because sometimes I can get to be sentimental as hell, you know? And in three hours I’ve done half your legwork and found your motive and—”
“What motive, Fannin? What motive is that? You mean the forty-two thousand, three hundred and sixty-seven dollars and thirty-four cents?”
“You bet your tin badge I mean the—”
“Yeah? What’s the matter, Fannin, you get hoarse all of a sudden? You lose the voice from trying so hard to make yourself sound good?”
“All right, all right, let’s have it. I thought the Troy heist wasn’t your department?”
“Never said it was.”