“Sit down, Pete.”
Pete stared at him a minute before doing so.
“It doesn’t look as though you’ve done much packing, Cap.”
“Oh, I’m ready to go — what I’m taking will fit in three suitcases. No sense burdening yourself when you strike out for a whole new life, Pete.”
“That makes sense. Are you planning to come back for a visit?”
“There’s nothing to bring me back here now — I’m letting the real estate people handle everything, including the cleaning up. I won’t even have to come back to sign the papers.”
He glanced towards the living room, closed his eyes suddenly as he saw it the way it had been before Ellie died last summer. She was with him in that instant, her old rose fragrance strong in the air, her firm hand touching his shoulder to reassure him. He almost lifted his hand to hers, before he opened his eyes again.
“Nothing personal, Pete — but I don’t expect to miss you people a bit.”
The teakettle whistled, and he got up to spoon crystals into the mugs and pour in the water. He found milk in the refrigerator, brought it out, and found a spoon for the cracked sugar bowl on the table. Then he sat down again and stirred his coffee.
Pete sipped from his mug and stared at the captain over the lip. At last he set it down again and sighed, scratching his nose.
“I still don’t know how you did the Dolan job, Cap — the neighbors heard nothing, although the walls are paper thin. I’m almost ready to concede that you had nothing to do with that one, that it was just as it seemed.”
The captain’s face was carefully blank.
“The others all check out — you made it easy, although you must be tired now. Everybody knows what a hard-nose you are, Cap. For forty years this has been one of the crookedest cities in the country, but you won’t even pick a nickel off the sidewalk if there’s anybody to see you. Every other top cop to retire from the department walked away with enough to make him comfortable for life, but look at you — planning to drive to California to stay with your old-maid schoolteacher sister. How much money do you have, Cap?”
“More than most people think, thanks to Ellie. But every penny of it came honest, Pete — most of it because my wife was smart enough to scrimp out a few dollars and put them in mutual funds right from the beginning of our marriage. A few years ago she believed some psychic’s prediction that the market was headed for trouble and switched everything into government securities.”
“It must have been tough, Cap, watching the world fall into a sewer and not be able to do anything about it. A lot of old sins were expunged from the record tonight. I’m glad you’re leaving tomorrow.”
He got up then, leaving his cup half full. The captain followed him back through the house, stood on the porch as he opened the door to his car.
“If I could connect you to Dolan, Cap, I wouldn’t be walking away now. But I don’t really think you’d kill innocent bystanders. Send us a postcard from California — something to put up on the bulletin board.”
The captain stood on the porch watching the taillights of Lorgos’ car winking until they turned the corner, not wanting to go back into the house, to be reminded again of Ellie’s absence. Ellie had always been proud of him, even during the bad years when some of the mobsters had leaned hard — he still bore the scars of the beating that put him in the hospital for three months. It was rough for her then, with only him to worry about, but he was glad they never had kids. He hated to think what might have happened if there had been kids...
He went back in the house, stopped in the kitchen to pick up the mugs and place them in the sink with the other dishes. For a moment he was tempted to clean up, then decided no. He went upstairs to the bedroom, found the laundry bag stuffed with the clothes he had been wearing earlier in the evening. They were all the old things from the bottom drawer, threadbare pants and worn shirts that Ellie had stuck away to give to a charity that never came calling.
He stripped off the things he had on now, adding them to the bag, and went in the closet to find something more decent. Then he came back to the dresser and noticed the pile of mail that had been sitting there for days now. He flipped through the stack, saw that one of the letters was from the real estate company that had wanted to list the house. He dropped them all back unopened.
Then he picked up the silver-framed photo of Ellie as she had been when they first met, just after the war. She was smiling — it seemed to him now that she had always been smiling, no matter what her real feelings, trying to make it easier for him. He put the picture back down, went downstairs to check over the house.
The feeling of clutter, of mess, was pervasive. In the kitchen the captain leaned against the counter again, staring at the pile of dishes in the sink. Again he was tempted to start cleaning up, but instead he went into the living room, went to the little smoking stand that he had before he married Ellie. For the last three months the copper-lined compartment had been full, what with the heroin that he planted on Chelton to make sure the newsmen played up his drug connections, and the various guns he had used. They were gone now, of course, except for the one he left with Chelton, even the tranquilizing gun he had used on Dolan’s girl friend, on Chelton, and on all of them after that. The only things left in the cabinet were a few of his old pipes and a half a can of tobacco, stale now; he hadn’t touched them since Ellie’s death. In the back corner was the collection of lighters he had accumulated over the years.
Now he brought out a pipe and the tobacco, stuffed the bowl carefully, and picked up one of the lighters. It was dry, as were the next two, and then he spotted a butane job that had been given to him as a Christmas present by someone two or three years ago. As he flicked the wheel orange flame leaped up; the fuel had not leaked.
He sat down in his chair now, lighting his pipe and then reaching to turn off the lights, wanting to sit in the darkness for a time. He closed his eyes, thinking back over the evening, remembering now the excitement that had stabbed at his heart as he rode up on Huegens, forced him from the road. The captain had been so intent on checking out his plates that he had not realized his wife was in the car until the moment of impact. Afterwards he was relieved to learn she had survived. It had been a close thing for the captain, but he managed to bring the car back under control and leave the parkway at the next exit, as he had planned.
He flicked the wheel of the lighter again, watching the flame shoot up nearly four inches as he adjusted the little wheel. It was a pretty thing.
In a way he felt sorry for Dolan’s women, although he was not so unaware of their involvement in Dolan’s operation as Pete Lorgos was — neither of them could be called an innocent bystander, and there were those who thought his wife was the actual brains of the organization. The thought of killing them had been distasteful, had been what had taken the captain so many weeks to work up to this night. That’s why he made them the first to die, to have it done with.
The girl friend came first. She was the first human being he had ever killed — in all his thirty-eight years on the force he never once fired his gun at anything other than a target on the range. He must have lost control when he started driving the knife into her, for he could not remember hitting her so many more times after the first stroke.
By the time Dolan’s wife arrived the captain was composed, waiting for her behind the door; he got his hand over her mouth before she had a chance to spot the body. It had been a long time since he learned about pressure points, but they worked just like the book said they would. Once she was unconscious it was easier to use the knife and slash her wrists. And it was no trouble at all to take Dolan when he walked through the door a few minutes later. The knife was in his gut and ripping up before he even realized that something had happened to the women, before he could ask the captain why he had summoned him to this meeting.