“What time is it there, Harry?”
“A little after midnight. Why?”
“Why? Mine was a loser’s question, Harry. Ever know a loser with a watch that wasn’t either slow or fast or in hock? Nobody gives a damn about time in gambling joints. They have dinner at six or seven in the morning at the crap tables, steaks, banana cheesecakes, that’s why they’re losers.”
“That’s fascinating stuff, Jerry. If you want to know the time on the east coast look at your watch and add three whole hours. That’s why you never made all-conference, Jerry.”
“A point, you got a point. Now listen.” Goldbirn’s tone changed to serious. “The girl’s name is Jennifer, like she told you. Her last name is Easton. Lives on Sutton Place South, New York City. An unlisted phone. That’s usually no problem, Harry, a cop or newspaperman can get it for us. But this time, no way. Jennifer Easton’s number had a sealed code on it. That puts it out of reach.”
“How about her address?”
“That won’t help. Nobody’s used that Sutton Place apartment for months. We checked that. I’d have to call in a big marker for that unlisted number.”
“She’s important, Jerry. Believe me.”
“Okay, pal. A big deal vice-president of New York Bell kited checks in my place last year... would you believe it? Probably got his start robbing pay phones... and I covered for him. I’ll call him tomorrow, Harry. I’ll call him collect. The rest of it’s like first down and goal to go on a sunny afternoon... they’re in a motel in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, place called the Glades... Coralee Kane, the mother, and her kid, Barby. Some friendly cops checked ’em out for us. Two sets of wheels arrived the week the Kanes checked in. First a delivery van from the local liquor store. Coralee, it seems, likes a belt of gin with her ginger ale. Then a 450-SEL from Miami. Man name of Hank Swanson spent most of the day with the Kane woman. Swanson’s with an outfit called H. and H. Rates and Escrow, Limited. H. and H. is an offshore bag company, Harry, operates out of the Bahamas, but it’s owned by a firm in London. They launder real estate mortgages, cash, any commercial paper that needs a phony birth certificate. One of our cops spent his day off at the pool at the Glades. Had some drinks with your cracker tart. After a few off-duty slugs of gin, he got this. Mrs. Kane and her intended husband have just come into some oceanfront property around Avalon, New Jersey. That’s why this Swanson came. The paperwork’s been funneled from the Jersey shore out to Nassau and back to Miami. Which means the parentage of that property is about as kosher as an Easter ham.”
“Did I miss something, Jerry? Who owns H. and H.?”
“I told you, it’s a limey outfit in London. But here’s what’s interesting. The happy bridegroom is that Jesus freak you told me to check out, Oliver Jessup. He’s leaving Pennsylvania. He’s building himself a church over in Jersey. Lucky Jersey. Now they’ll all be saved in the Garden State...”
Selby hung up and looked through the notes he’d made. With one or two assumptions, he had a fairly coherent picture... someone was paying off Goldie Boy and Coralee Kane.
The night he’d picked up Shana at Little Tenn, Barby Kane had shouted at her mother about the blanket Shana was wrapped in. “It’s already been worse places tonight...”
Casper Gideen had been convinced the preacher and Coralee had been together that night...
Where? In the Tabernacle of the Golden Flame, it must have been there. And they could have seen Earl Thomson, could identify him...
Gideen had been shot and killed because he had suspected that and was trying to prove it...
“Someone” had sent Coralee Kane down to Florida, and was arranging through a British company to bribe Goldie Boy with land and a new church in New Jersey.
Selby called Brett a last time and got another busy signal. He settled down then with his father’s diaries and sheaf of snapshots.
For the first time since they had come into his possession he felt the beginning of a sympathy for the tall, scowling young man in the cracked snapshots, some recognition and understanding of the voice that seemed to sound from the frayed old notebooks. “The hills are all climbed, the creeks are all passed...”
They were both up against something hidden and threatening, he thought. The same thing, perhaps, except a generation later...
It made Shana feel sad, even disloyal to wonder if it meant all that much to love people. Her father said, “I love you,” and she knew he meant it. Loving was sort of easy... it always was for her. It was something you didn’t really have to think about. She loved her father and she loved Davey and Mrs. Cranston and Blazer and lots of her friends and the kittens and flowers and biscuits in the morning and she’d loved her mother’s wide smile. Even the tiny gap between her mother’s front teeth, she’d loved that.
In school she’d read a poem that said, “Love loves to love love.” She’d copied it out and passed it around to her friends, and they’d smiled at it because they knew what it meant too.
But hating was hard. She didn’t really know how. She didn’t even hate Earl Thomson, even though she realized he hated her. And tomorrow she’d have to say in court the shameful, hideous things he’d done to her that would make him hate her all over again and worse than ever. And she couldn’t understand why he’d done them in the first place.
It had almost made her sick to tell Miss Brett what he’d done. She’d hardly known the words to describe it. She’d been surprised that there were actually words for it. Miss Brett had finally shown them to her in a dictionary.
Shana’s tears were cold on her face. The shadows from the trees moved across the picture of the dead Olympic athletes. She wished she could talk to her mother even for a minute, or just touch her. Or pray to someone who could answer.
Tishie had prayed all the time. She told Shana she didn’t expect the clouds to open and an old man to say nice things to her, but the answers to prayers were in the world around you, in rainbows, and in what was inside you. Shana didn’t understand or believe in Tishie’s rainbows that meant new life, as her grandmother claimed, or the songs she said she could sing again after Treblinka. But now Shana tried to pray. She spoke aloud in a clear voice, but softly so as not to wake Davey... “I wouldn’t say those things about anyone unless I knew they were true. Unless I knew... It would be better to live with the hurt and pain inside me than take the chance of being wrong. It would be too terrible to hurt anybody else by making a mistake, or accusing someone who was innocent...”
That was Shana’s prayer.
Well, she’d told the truth. Nobody could take that away from her...
She had heard the cars on Fairlee Road and Blazer’s barking, had seen the flashlight going through the woods that night...
She knew who it was and what he was looking for on the road where his speeding red car had hit her. Earl Thomson would never find it there.
“Love loves to love love...”
That’s what she’d thought. But she had heard a different truth in her own voice, a voice she hardly recognized, hoarse and bitter, on the tapes... “Mommy, I’ll kill it, it’s evil.”
Shana lifted the picture of the dead Israeli athletes away from the wall. A tissue-wrapped object was Scotch-taped to the back of the frame. She unwrapped a layer of paper from the silver swastika she’d torn from his neck when he struggled with her that awful night in the farmhouse. She held up the square cross by links of chain still attached to it and let it swing back and forth in the moonlit shadows.
His initials, e.t., were on one side and Munich — 11/9/38, on the other. Thin traces of dried blood streaked the edges that had pierced and cut the palm of her hand.