Randy had been leaning on Duckworth to pass along anything that might help him in his upcoming campaign — in particular, problems within the police department. He’d even suggested to Barry that if he helped him out, once elected, he’d see about firing Rhonda Finderman and making him the new chief.
Duckworth wanted none of it.
So when he found out his son was working for the ex-mayor’s water company, Duckworth couldn’t help but suspect Finley of wanting payback. I gave your boy a job. Now give me something I can use.
But when he told Trevor his suspicions, it all came out wrong. Trevor, proud to have found work after months of unemployment, felt demeaned, as though his father were suggesting he couldn’t find a job on his own terms. Trevor got in his water company van and took off.
The two hadn’t spoken since.
Duckworth got out of his car and walked to the front door, stood there a moment, steeling himself to whatever was coming.
He opened the door and stepped inside.
“Barry?” His wife’s voice, coming from upstairs. Seconds later, he saw her legs first, then the rest of her, as she descended the stairs.
“Hey,” he said.
“Trevor’s here.”
“I saw the truck.”
“He’s upstairs. He was doing a run somewhere — I can’t remember where — and decided to stop by before dropping off the van at the end of his shift.”
“Great,” Duckworth said.
Maureen said, “He was helping himself to a beer in the fridge, but I said because he was still technically working, and responsible for one of Finley’s water delivery trucks, he should just have a Coke, and he got annoyed, said he was hardly going to get drunk on one beer, and I said, ‘Let’s say you have an accident, and it isn’t even your fault, but they do a breath test and find out you’d been drinking. That could make you and your employer liable. It could lose you your job.’ Do you think I told him the right thing? Or am I just picking on him? Do you want dinner now? It’s all ready. I asked him if he wanted anything, but he said no. He’s upstairs going through some of his old CDs that he wants to put onto his computer so he can put them on his iThingie or whatever. How’d it go today?”
The two of them went into the kitchen. Duckworth reached into the fridge and grabbed one of the beers his son had lusted after.
“Lousy day,” he said, dropping his butt onto a chair at the table.
“Well, since you asked, mine wasn’t much better,” Maureen said.
“Sorry,” Duckworth said. “You go first.”
“Well, we lost Mrs. Grover’s bifocals.” Maureen managed a store that sold eyeglasses. “Things went downhill from there.”
“Oh, shit. Did you find them?”
“When the new pair we ordered come in, that’s when we’ll find them. But I’m guessing that’s small change to what you’ve had to deal with. The drive-in and all.”
“Yeah. And all.”
Maureen soon had a plate in front of him. Baked chicken without the skin, asparagus, a few carrots. Duckworth studied it, wondering what had happened to the butter-smothered baked potato.
“The drive-in,” Maureen reminded him.
He twisted the cap off the beer and took a drink. “They had a bomb expert out there today. It was no accident. And they’ve got this guy working with me, who I sent out to Thackeray today. I don’t know what to make of him. And the Fisher-Gaynor stuff is still driving me crazy.”
“That’s a full plate,” she said.
Duckworth looked down. “Speaking of which, why is there no potato?”
“You’ve got two vegetables.”
“But neither one of them’s a potato.”
“If I cooked you a potato, you’d bury it in butter and sour cream. What’s the latest with Rosemary Gaynor? I thought the doctor killed her.”
“I don’t think so. It had to be somebody else. I think it’s Olivia Fisher’s killer.”
“That was horrible. All those people in the park who heard her screaming and didn’t do a thing. And such a black mark against the town. All that media attention, the stories about the town that didn’t care, the twenty-two people who heard what happened and did nothing. Remember they compared it to the Kitty Genovese story? You know? The woman in Queens, in 1964? Stabbed to death in Kew Gardens with a whole bunch of witnesses and nobody did anything.”
“How many people did you say heard her?”
“Kitty Genovese?”
“No. Olivia Fisher.”
“Oh. The stories back then said twenty-two.”
Duckworth frowned. “Off by one.”
“Sorry?”
He filled her in on the incidents that were linked by that one number. He’d thought, briefly, maybe it had something to do with the Fisher case, but the number twenty-two hadn’t popped up anywhere.
“What about some buttered noodles?” he asked his wife. “How long would it take to cook some noodles?”
“What about the Twenty-third Psalm?” she asked.
“That’s the first thing everyone thinks of. I wish I’d been here when the Olivia thing happened. I’d have a better handle on it. I was away around that time three years ago. You remember? I was in Canada. Opening of pickerel season.”
“Oh yeah. You didn’t catch a thing.”
“Rhonda Finderman was the primary on that. Before she was promoted to chief,” Barry said, picking at the asparagus. “What happened to the chicken skin?”
“Please stop.”
“Anyway, the thing that’s really been bugging me, and there’s not really anything I can do about it, is that I kind of feel like Rhonda dropped the ball here. She couldn’t have been paying very much attention to the Gaynor murder, or she’d have made a connection right away at how similar it was to the Fisher case. If we’d known that from the beginning, we might have gone at this another way. We’ve lost time on this thing.”
“What should she have done?”
“She can’t be reading the reports. She’s too caught up in the bureaucratic stuff, I guess. Maybe I’m being too hard on her. Maybe it’s not a big deal.”
“It seems to be to you.”
“You already eaten?” he asked his wife.
“I’m sorry. This is my book club night. I’m supposed to be at Shirley’s in twenty minutes. I ate a while ago.”
“I forgot it was tonight. What’s the book?”
“You’d hate it. It’s about feelings.”
“Say no more.”
Trevor walked into the kitchen.
“I didn’t even hear you come down the stairs,” Maureen said. “Say hello to your father.”
“Hey,” he said.
Duckworth got up. “Trev. How’s it going?”
“Okay.” He waved a handful of CDs at his mother. “I found what I was looking for.”
“You have to go?” Barry asked.
“I gotta get the truck back.”
“Job going good?”
“It’s a job,” Trevor said.
“You want to come by after? Your mother’s got her book club thing. I’m just hanging out here. Probably watching a game or something.”
The young man hesitated. “I don’t know. Probably not. Kind of beat.”
“It’d be fun,” Barry said.
Trevor shrugged. “I gotta go.” He gave his mother a hug, half a wave to his father, and then he was gone.
“Shit,” Barry said.
“You tried,” his wife said. “I think he was right on the edge there. Maybe if you’d asked once more.”
“I’m not going to beg my son to hang out with me,” he said, moving the vegetables around with his fork.
“You hate your dinner.”
He looked at his wife. “I don’t have the energy anymore.”
“What?”
“I don’t have the energy I once did. This drive-in thing, I figure by tomorrow the feds will be all over it — maybe Homeland Security will want it to justify their existence. Part of me wants to tell the feds to go jump in the lake if they try to take this away, and part of me would be relieved if they did take it. I may be in over my head.”