On the paved and plowed highway I shifted out of four-wheel drive and cruised down to police headquarters. The patrol car was parked outside. It looked like a cop car designed by Mr. Blackwell. I left the dogs in the Cherokee and went on in to see Phillips.
He was behind his desk, his cowboy boots up on the desk top, reading a copy of Soldier of Fortune. He looked up when I came in, and it took him a minute to place me.
“You went out and hassled him, didn’t you?” I said.
Phillips was frowning, trying to remember who I was.
“Huh?” he said.
“Pomeroy. When I left you went back out there and made him tell you everything he told me, and then you couldn’t keep it to yourself, you went to the Argus and blatted out everything you knew; and got your picture taken and your name spelled right, and ruined what was left of the poor bastard’s life.”
Phillips had figured out who I was, but he kept frowning.
“Hey, I got a right to conduct my own investigation,” he said. “I’m the fucking law out here, remember?”
“Law, shit,” I said. “You’re a fat loudmouth in a jerkwater town playacting Wyatt Earp. And you cost an innocent man his life.”
“You can’t talk to me that way. Whose life?”
“Pomeroy killed himself this morning, in Boston. He had a copy of the Berkshire Argus story with him.”
“Guy was always a loser,” Phillips said.
“Guy loved too hard,” I said. “Too much. Not wisely. You understand anything like that?”
“I told you, you can’t come in here, talk to me like that, that tone of voice. I’ll throw your ass in jail.”
Phillips let his feet drop off the desk top and stood up. His hand was in the area of his holstered gun.
“You do that,” I said. “You throw my ass in jail, or go for the gun, or take a swing at me, anything you want.”
I had moved closer to him, almost without volition, as if he were gravitational.
“Do something,” I said. I could feel the tension across my back. “Go for the gun, take a swing, go for it.”
Phillips’ eyes rolled a little, side to side. There was a fine line of sweat on his upper lip. He looked at the phone. He looked at me. He looked past me at the door.
“Whyn’t you just get out of here and leave me alone,” he said. His voice was hoarse and shaky. “I didn’t do nothing wrong.”
We faced each other for another long, silent moment. I knew he wasn’t going to do anything.
“I didn’t do nothing wrong,” he said again.
I nodded and turned and walked out. And left the door open behind me. That’d fix him.
Chapter 34
“I KNOW people who might take one dog,” Susan I said. “But three? Mongrels?”
“I’m not breaking them up,” I said.
We were in my living room and the dogs were around looking at us. The alpha dog was curled in the green leather chair; the other two were on the couch.
“Where did they sleep last night?” Susan said. I shrugged.
Susan’s eyes brightened.
“They slept with you,” she said. I shrugged again.
“You and the three doggies all together in bed. Tell me at least they slept on top of the quilt.”
I shrugged.
“Hard as nails,” Susan said.
“Well,” I said. “I started them out in the kitchen, but then they started whimpering in the night…”
“Of course,” Susan said, “and they got in there and you sleep with the window open, and it was cold…”
“You’re the same way,” I said.
Susan laughed. “Yes,” she said. “I too think the bedroom’s too cold.”
“Dogs do not respect one’s sleeping space much,” I said.
“Did we sleep curled up on one small corner of the bed while the three pooches spread out luxuriously?” Susan said.
“I wanted them to feel at home,” I said.
“We must be very clear on one thing. When I visit, we are not sleeping with three dogs.”
“No,” I said.
“And when we make love we are not going to be watched by three dogs.”
“Of course not,” I said. “Hawk says he knows some woman owns a farm in Bridgewater and is an animal rights activist.”
“Don’t tell her about my fur coat,” Susan said.
“He thinks she’ll take them.”
Susan put the palm of her right hand flat on her chest and did a Jack E. Leonard impression. “I hope so,” she said, “for your sake.”
“You wouldn’t like to take them over to your place today,” I said. “I need to go to my office.”
“I have meetings all day,” she said. “It’s why I’m here for breakfast.”
“Oh yeah.”
“I’m sure they’ll love your office,” Susan said.
And they did, for brief stretches. Every hour or so they felt the need to be walked down to the Public Garden. In between walks they sat, usually in a semicircle, and looked at me expectantly, with their mouths open and their tongues hanging out. All day. Outside, Christmas was making its implacable approach. The dryness in the mouth of merchandising managers was intensifying, the exhaustion had become bone deep in the parents of small children, the television stations kept wishing me the best of the joyous season every station break, and the street gangs in Roxbury and Dorchester were shooting each other over insults to their manhood at the rate of about three a week. In the stores downtown people jostled each other; bundled uncomfortably in clothing against the cold, they were hot and angry in the crowded aisles where people sold silk show handkerchiefs and imported fragrances for the special person in your life. Liquor stores were doing a land-office business, and the courts were in double session trying to clear the calendar for the holiday break.
I got up and went to the old wood file cabinet behind the door and got out a bottle of Glenfiddich that Rachel Wallace had delivered to me last Christmas. It was still half full. I poured about two ounces in the water glass and went back to my desk. I sipped a little and let it vaporize in my mouth. Outside my window the dark winter afternoon had merged into the early darkness of a winter evening. I sipped another taste of the scotch. I raised my glass toward the dogs.
“Fa la la la la,” I said.
I could feel the single-malt scotch inch into my veins. I sipped another sip. In my desk was a letter from Paul Giacomin in Aix-en-Provence in France. I took it out and read it again. Then I put it back into the envelope and put the envelope back in my desk drawer. I swiveled my chair so I could put my feet on the window sill and gaze out at the unoccupied air space where Linda Thomas had once worked. Beyond it was a building that looked like an old Philco radio. A Philip Johnson building, they said. I raised my glass to it.
“Way to go, Phil,” I said. Lucky I hadn’t been assigned to guard it. Probably lose it. Was right here when I left it. My glass was empty. I got up and got the bottle and poured another drink and went back and sat and stared out the dark window. The dogs stood when I stood, sat back down when I did.
The light fused up from the street the way it does in a city and softened into a pinkish glow at the top of the darkened buildings. Maybe she was dead. Maybe she wasn’t. Maybe the pills and powders and booze and self-delusion and bullshit had busted her, and she had simply run and was running now.
I looked at the pinkish glow some more. I had nowhere I needed to be, nothing I needed to do. Susan was shopping. What if Jill had gone home? To her mother. To the hovel in the middle of the putrid hot field in the back alley of Esmeralda. I called Lipsky. “Maybe she went to her mother’s,” I said.