“Yeah. There’s this fat lawyer whose wife fucks half the people in the bars downtown. He’s used to it by now. But with this one businessman she got serious. So the lawyer got mad and hired the twins. They took a butcher knife and cut the guy’s buttocks in long strips. He wasn’t able to sit down for months. He never bothered the lawyer’s wife again. Of course, by now she’s back to fucking everybody who walks through the door.”
“They sound like fun guys.”
“The twins?”
“Yeah.”
“They’re very pretty and you might think they’re queers, but if you ever saw them in action you’d think otherwise, believe me.” The note of admiration in her voice was as chilling as the lawyer anecdote she’d just related.
I sat there in the sunlight and wished to hell I did something else for a living. You hang around too many people like this old babe here and you begin to think everybody’s like her.
I picked up the files and walked around the desk. She started to reach for the .45 in her pocket again, but I just frowned and said, “I’m going is all.”
“You taking those with you?” She meant the files.
“Yeah.”
“I should charge you more.”
I gave her my best glare. “You’ve pushed your luck about as far as it’s going to go.”
She looked me over and decided I was serious and then just gave me a great cynical shrug and let me walk past her and out into the gloom of the hallway.
19
Downstairs in the lobby I tried Becker, but Bobby Lee said he was tied up. “Am I going to get some work for tonight?”
Our brief friendship from yesterday was gone. She was back to her old self. “You really embarrassed the agency, that kid getting into Channel Three while you were on duty.”
“So I’m not going to be working tonight?”
“Not till further notice.”
I hung up.
At home I spread the files out and went through them one by one. Two hours later I still had no real idea what I was looking at.
In Robert Fitzgerald’s file, for example, there was a neatly typed note that said, Obviously he was the main force behind the whole thing.
What whole thing?
In both Hanratty and Robards’ file the same language appeared. Paid them each $1000. Both provided me with information.
What kind of information?
Something was going on here, something that seemed to link the Channel 3 people in some way more binding than merely working together — but what?
I made some instant coffee and sat in the sunlight and thought again about getting a cat (my boy still had the family cat) and tried to guess what Ross’s notes were about, but I couldn’t.
I decided to drive over to Falworthy House before going out to see Kelly Ford.
Karl Eler looked sweatier and more desperate than ever when I arrived. He had a stolid and hostile-looking boy in his office and was trying to make a point to him. “The man from the juvenile bureau is very mad, Ronnie. Very mad. You stayed out past your curfew last night and they picked you up. They could send you to reform school.”
“Fuck ’em.”
You could sense poor Eler writhing inside. Trying to help people who didn’t care if they were helped or not. Being Jesus is never easy. It wasn’t even easy for Jesus himself.
“Ronnie,” he said, and wrung his hands, literally. Ronnie frowned, obviously seeing Eler as less than a man. “Go back to your room,” Eler said. He spoke in a whisper.
Ronnie got up, kind of scratched his balls, kind of shook his head at the pathetic sight of Eler and went out of the room.
When Eler saw me, he said, “I’ve started looking around.”
“Looking around?”
“For other jobs.”
“It getting to you?”
He ran a miserable hand over his miserable face. “Everything’s getting to me, I’m afraid. I’m forty years old. I’ve lost my wife, I don’t have much hair left and for the first time I’m starting to worry about things like cancer and heart disease. I don’t need this kind of torture on top of it.”
“Some of the kids here are pretty nice, for whatever that’s worth.”
He looked melancholy a moment. “Yes, some of them are nice, and some of them appreciate what I try to do for them. But a lot of them...” He shook his head again. “Well, what can I do for you today?”
I had become one of his students. He treated me with professional interest and a certain haste.
“I’d like to see Diane again if I could.”
“Of course. This is one of her work-internship days at Hardee’s, and she’s still upstairs getting ready. I’ll get her.”
I looked at my nickel notepad, on which I’d written down several points. After he called upstairs for Diane, I said, “Did you ever see any older men hanging around here waiting for Stephen Chandler?”
“No. I would have objected if I had. What with all the perversion in the world, I’m not about to stand for things like that.”
“Did Stephen ever mention anything to you about any of the people he might have been hanging out with away from Falworthy House?”
He thought a moment. “Not that I recall.”
“He never mentioned twins?”
“No.”
I closed my notebook and turned to see Diane. She looked tired. Her prettiness was washed out. I wanted to give her a little hug and buy her some breakfast. At the moment she needed a parent. And I needed a child.
“You can go into the sunroom,” Eler suggested. Obviously he had other work he wanted to get back to.
We went into the sunroom.
She sat on the edge of a couch that was ratty with age. The light was dusty and melancholy.
“I kept having dreams about him,” she said. I assumed she was talking about Mitch Tomlin in jail. “God, I really loved him. I wish he hadn’t killed himself.”
All I could do was watch, wait.
She allowed herself a few terrible tears, as if there were an allotted number she couldn’t exceed, and then she started biting on the edge of one already badly bitten nail, and then she started snuffling.
“I need to ask you a few more questions.”
“I think I helped kill him,” she said.
“No, you didn’t, Diane.”
“Toward the last, when he was flying so high, I should have seen that he was just covering up how depressed he was.”
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”
“What?”
“When Stephen was flying high.”
“Okay.” She looked curious, even a bit afraid of my business-like tone.
“You remember the twins you mentioned?”
“Yes.”
“I’m trying to find them.”
“Why?”
“Because they can help me prove that Mitch didn’t kill Curtis.”
“Really?”
I nodded.
“Well,” she said, “I did see something kind of weird one night.” She bit at a fingernail, then went on. “I went up to his room upstairs to talk to him, see if we couldn’t get back together and all, but he was getting dressed up. You know how I told you about all the new clothes he’d gotten and everything and nobody could figure out where he was getting the money?”
I nodded.
“Well, anyway, he’s getting dressed up in this really fancy silk shirt and some new leather pants and when I got inside his room he looked real uncomfortable, like it was really a drag to see me. Anyway, I started to talk, but he said he was in a hurry and couldn’t talk, that some people were waiting down on the corner for him. I thought that was real weird, you know, that they’d wait down on the corner instead of out front. So he just brushed past me. I tried to grab him and get him to hold me, but he just looked at me like I was this pain-in-the-ass-little kid, you know, and then he half ran out of the house. I followed him. It was dark out — it was probably eight o’clock or something — and I followed him down the block and then I saw this really incredible car, this red car, it was older but it was really shiny, I think it was a Cadillac, and in the streetlight I could make out these two guys sitting in the front seat, and it was very strange but I got the impression they were both the same guy. I mean the way they sat and the way they wore their hair and the clothes they wore, everything. It was like looking at a — what’s that word — it’s like clown or something?”