Sally turned away, ostensibly to face the view, but I thought in fact to avoid making eye contact. “So what?” she asked rhetorically.
Her studied vagueness was encouraging.
“C’mon, you’re one of four or five people at most who make things happen in this town.”
She snapped back around to glare at me. “What the fuck’re you gettin’ at? I don’t have anything to do with the slopes, and I didn’t whack Vince. He was a loser.”
I smiled guilelessly at her. “You and I know that. Somebody didn’t.”
“The fuckin’ Chinese,” she tried again. “If they set Benny up, why not Vince, too?”
I shook my head. “Using Vu as bait? Doesn’t make sense.”
There was a prolonged pause as she stared out at her view. Finally, she let out a sigh and chucked the rest of her meal down the embankment, paper wrapper and all. We both watched it tumble and roll, disgorging its crimson contents as it went.
What she said then exposed her confusion. “You’re sayin’ somebody put Vince up against the chinks, knowing you guys might take ’em both out?”
“I’m saying Benny’s death created a vacuum that more than one person wanted to fill. Vince spent the entire night winding himself up and could barely see straight when he pulled that gun on Vu. We talked to the people who got high with him. They don’t think the party was Vince’s idea-they felt the glue and dope were supplied by someone else, and that Vince was as happy as they were to get it. You got any ideas about that?”
She made a face and spat into the dirt between her tattered sneakers. “You could ask Alfie Brewster. He and Vince didn’t get along, and he sure doesn’t like what’s goin’ on.”
“You think he could’ve manipulated Vince into confronting Vu?”
“He’s a smart guy, and he’s running scared as shit now. After the shoot-out, first thing I heard was Alfie had called in some buddies from Springfield, Mass., to back him up.”
“They here now?” I asked, not bothering to hide my surprise. If she was right, Brewster’s reaction would fit a man whose plans had backfired. Also, if Vu and Brewster both knew that the latter had tumbled to the home invasion ahead of time, then Vu would now have good cause to go after Brewster.
“Oh, yeah. Alfie’s takin’ good care of ’em-for as long as he can. His stock is a little low.”
His “stock,” we both knew, primarily meant girls, most of them very young.
“So what happens when the entertainment runs out?” I asked.
“Who the shit knows? They either leave town or they start throwing their weight around. Alfie’s just adding to the problem, if you ask me.”
I tried for some specifics. “And what is the problem, from where you stand?”
She shook her head and then looked at me steadily. “You’re not going to like it. The other reason Alfie got some troops is that Michael Vu is really ripped over what happened. Losin’ his boys like that makes him look bad-there’ve already been a few jokes about it. You might want to check out Lenny Roberts if you don’t believe me. He gave Vu some lip, and Vu damn near took his head off.”
“Hit him?”
My enthusiasm gave me away. She smiled bitterly. “Forget it. If you want to get Lenny to press for assault ’n’ battery, you’ll have to find him first, and then you’ll have to convince him that talking to you isn’t the same as a death wish. He was scared shitless, and so are most of the rest of us. Michael Vu isn’t fuckin’ around anymore.”
Her eyes widened suddenly as she thought of something else. “You know, all your bitchin’ and moanin’ about who’s setting up who… You were the one who yanked Vince’s chain. Got him so pissed off he couldn’t see straight. But now that he tried to whack Vu, you’re running around planting ideas that somebody else set him up. Scared they’re going to figure out you fucked up big time?”
But she missed her target. Instead of hitting what was in fact a guilty soft spot, she brought back what I’d mentioned earlier to Sammie. I hadn’t set Vince against Michael Vu. I’d set him against Sonny. So what had made Vince go after Vu?
“Sally,” I asked her, “have you ever actually met Sonny?”
She looked away again. “Sure.”
Her brevity told me otherwise. The trick was going to be forcing her to admit she was lying without making her look bad. I faked a surprised reaction. “That makes you the only one in town who has-the only one who can pick him out of a mug book, or prove he was in Bratt when this whole thing comes to trial.”
“I didn’t say I met him face to face,” she snarled, her face flushing. “It was on the phone… Once,” she added for safety’s sake.
“It’s been Vu from then on?”
“Yeah.” She hesitated and then said belligerently, “And from what I hear, you better hope you don’t meet Sonny, either.”
“What’s that mean?”
She stood up, suddenly restless to get away from this conversation. “That means, Joe Gunther, that the best way for a guy like Sonny to take back the juice is to whack a cop.”
One of the selling points of the house that Gail and I had bought together was a rear deck with a huge maple tree growing through the middle of it. During the winter, we, or lately I alone, had sat by the sliding glass door of the living room and watched the snow settle around the tree in a perfectly flat plane, setting it off so that it looked like a bonsai arrangement with hormone problems, towering overhead, white and crystalline, isolated in its own natural beauty.
I was sitting beneath it now, in the pink afterlife of the setting sun, listening to a soft breeze rustling its new leaves, and keeping out of sight of the two cars parked on the street out front. Both of them contained reporters from out of town. They’d shouted questions at me after I’d parked in the driveway, but Gail’s earlier warnings to them had obviously been dire enough to keep them from actually stepping onto the property.
Gail came out with a soda water, and a Coke for me. “You look like you had a rough day.” She nodded toward the road. “Were there a lot of them at the Municipal Building?” She stretched out onto the lawn chair next to mine and tilted her head back to enjoy the branches above us.
“They’ve made the central hallway look like a panhandlers’ convention. Every time any of us cuts from one side of the building to the other, we run the gauntlet. Tony’s scheduled two update sessions a day, upstairs in the selectmen’s room, but it doesn’t seem to make any difference.”
She reached out and took my hand in hers. “They came by here so often, I finally went to the library to work. What’s the mood like at the police department?”
“Not good. You see the paper?”
She nodded. “It’s in the kitchen.”
“Willy said the only section not covering the shooting is the funnies page. He’s not far off. They feel like they’re under a microscope, and they don’t like the second-guessing that’s already started-excessive force, endangering the public, all the rest. There’s a rumor that one of the Leungs’ neighbors is considering a lawsuit because of the stress we put them through. I had a meeting with the squad this afternoon-just to make sure everyone’s on track-and you could’ve cut the air with a knife. Only Dennis was normal… Oh, and Ron’s on administrative leave. Seems like the shooting totally pulled the rug out from under him.”
“Have you talked to him?”
“I tried to-spoke with Wendy instead. Anyway, it means we’re a man down.” I took a long swig from my Coke. I didn’t bother mentioning Sally Javits’s last words of warning.
“I take it the case isn’t going too well, either?” Gail commented gently.
“I’ll give you an example. There may be a crooked credit-card angle tied into the Thomas Lee home invasion, so I called the investigation branches of some of the major card companies and told them I was worried about a possible fraud taking place at the Blue Willow Restaurant in Brattleboro, Vermont. I could almost hear them yawning. They told me-though not in so many words-that certain losses are built into the budget, and that any fraud emanating from a Podunk backwater like ours wouldn’t amount to much. They took down the information and thanked me very much, but you know what that means.