Текст книги "Jericho Iteration"

Автор книги: Allen Steele

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 7 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

I didn’t want to encroach on my friend’s rightful territory, but this bit with Tiptree and Beryl Hinckley and Ruby Fulcrum was a hot potato I couldn’t afford not to catch.

“C’mon, man,” I said, “you can’t-”

“I know.” John kept his eyes locked on the highway ahead. “Look, you’ve got to trust me on this one. This is serious business, and not a little bit dangerous. Just … y’know, let me handle this by myself. All right?”

“All right.” I raised my hands. “Okay … whatever you say.”

John didn’t have my problems. He still had everything I had lost. A nice car, a house in the ’burbs, a wife who didn’t despise him, a job that was secure. A kid who was still alive. I envied him, sure …

For a moment, despite our long friendship, I caught myself hating him. He must have read my mind, because he nervously cleared his throat. “Look, if you want my advice,” he began, “you’re going to have to put some things behind you.”

He hesitated. “I mean, your situation’s tough and all that, but … well, Jamie’s gone and you’re just going to have to-”

“Right. Jamie’s gone and I’m going to have to live with that. I know. Time to get a life.” Out of impulse, I switched on the CTV again. “I think it’s time for Batman.You know what channel it’s on?”

John shut up. I found the station showing the favorite cartoon show of my misspent youth. The theme song swelled to fill the car as we sailed the rest of the way downtown: one man with a firm grip on reality, the other trying to avoid it at all costs.

Get a life. Sure, John. I had a life.

And boy, did it suck.

8

(Thursday, 12:45 P.M.)

I dropped off the camera with Jah after we got back to the office; he promised to process the disk and give me a contact sheet before the end of the day. He also informed me that his father had found out about my surreptitious exit and was-in Jah’s words-“livid pissed.”

That meant sneaking up the stairs to the second floor. I had rather hoped Pearl had gone out for lunch for once, but the odor of fried brains assaulted me as I tiptoed past Bailey’s door. Fried brains, that most obnoxious of St. Louis delicacies, was Pearl’s favorite food; he brought a take-out deli plate of them to the office every day and consumed them in full view of the staff. Bailey didn’t look up from his brains as I scurried to my desk, but I knew that he would eventually catch up with me.

I figured that the best thing for me to do was to look busy so that, at very least, he couldn’t accuse me of goldbricking. I sat down at my desk and began work on my column for next week’s paper. The subject was the ERA raid on the Muny last night; the morning Post-Dispatchgave me such clinical facts as the number of people who had been busted, but what came out in my column was a more subjective eyewitness account.

I was halfway through composing the article, in the middle of describing the arrival of the ERA troopers, when I caught a glimpse of Bailey as a reflection on my screen. I ignored him and went on writing; for a few moments he hovered just outside my cubicle as if trying to decide whether to say something, then he walked away. I glanced over at John; he was on the phone at his desk, but he grinned back at me. My job was still safe-for today, at any rate.

Yet I couldn’t get the events at Tiptree out of my mind. Sure, it wasn’t my story, but nonetheless my journalistic curiosity was itching, and I needed a good scratch. After I finished the rough draft of my story and saved it, I switched the computer to modem and made a call to the city election commissioner’s office.

Steve Estes’ campaign contributions were a matter of public record; all I had to do was ask the right questions and the skeletons danced out of the closet and onto my screen. Estes had been a busy little political hack: his war chest listed contributions from hundreds of private individuals, among them many of the city’s wealthiest and most powerful citizens. The list also included local corporate and PAC donations to Citizens to Re-Elect Steve Estes, and right smack in the middle of the list was $10,000 from the Tiptree Corporation.

Of course, that in itself didn’t mean shit to a tree: everyone from the Republican National Committee to the National Rifle Association had written checks to Estes. It still meant that there was a subtle connection between Estes and Tiptree.

I made a hard copy of the file, circled the Tiptree item in red ink, and was about to pass it to John when I got a better idea. Almost on impulse, I picked up the phone and called Estes’ office.

Estes was a senior partner in a downtown law firm; the switchboard operator passed the buck to Estes’ private secretary, a hard-eyed young woman who looked as if she could have been a model for a 1947 Sears Roebuck catalog. Her bee-stung lips made a slight downturn when I identified myself as a Big Muddyreporter. “Just a moment, please,”she said. “I’ll see if he’s in.”

She put me on hold, and I was treated to a computer-generated lily field and the theme for The Sound of Musicfor a couple of minutes. My gag reflex was kicking in when the flowers and Julie Andrews abruptly vanished, to be replaced by Steve Estes’ face.

“Good afternoon, Gerry,”he said, beaming at the camera. “How can I help you?”

We had never met or talked before, so I ignored the first-name familiarity. It was par for the political course. “Good afternoon, Mr. Estes,” I said, touching the Record button on my phone. “I’m working on a story for my paper, regarding last night’s raid by ERA troops on the Muny, and I was hoping I could get a response from you.”

Estes didn’t even blink. “I’d be happy to give you a response,”he said, “but I’m afraid I don’t know much more than what I’ve read in this morning’s paper.”

He was already disavowing any connection. “Well, sir,” I went on, “it’s interesting to hear you say that, considering that you’ve gone on record to urge ERA to force the homeless population out of the park. Are you saying that you had nothing to do with the raid?”

He settled back in his chair, still smiling at me. “For one thing, I’m not sure if ‘raid’ is the appropriate word,”he replied, switching hands on the receiver. “‘Peaceful police action’ is probably the right term. And although I’ve asked Colonel Barris to step up his enforcement of the indigent population in Forest Park, I can’t say that I’ve directly requested him to … um, conduct any ‘raids,’ so to speak, on the park or the Muny in particular.”

Clever son of a bitch. Until Estes saw how public reaction toward the raid swung, he was carefully avoiding any credit for it, while simultaneously making sure that his name was still associated with the “peaceful police action” if it turned out that the majority of voters were in favor of what had happened last night.

“Do you believe ERA should conduct any further … ah, police actions in the park?” I asked.

“ I believe ERA should enforce the law and be responsible for the safety of all St. Louis citizens,”he replied.

Another neutral answer. Estes might rave in the city council chamber about “taking the streets back,” knowing that the TV news reporters would extract only a few seconds’ worth of sound bite from his diatribe, but when confronted by a columnist for the local muckraker who might print his remarks in their complete context, he would play it much more safely. I had to hand it to Estes; he was a professional politician in every sense of the term. He couldn’t be fooled by the loaded do-you-beat-your-wife queries that might foul up another politico.

“One more question,” I said. “I was at the private reception held at the Tiptree Corporation this morning-”

“You were?”All innocence and light. “ Why, so was I. That was a beautiful shuttle launch, wasn’t it?”

“I wish I could have seen it,” I said, “but my colleague and I were forcibly removed from the room …”

He raised a wary eyebrow. “Really …”

“Really. In fact, the Tiptree official who forced us out claimed that you minded the fact that I took a picture of you, and that’s the reason why we were asked to leave.”

Despite his polished self-possession, Estes looked flustered for a couple of moments. He glanced away from the camera for an instant, as if listening to someone just outside the phone’s range of vision, then he looked directly back at me again. “I’m sorry to hear that was you, Gerry,”he said. “My apologies … I thought you were someone else.”

“Uh-huh. Anyone in particular?”

His smile became rigid. “No comment,”he said evenly.

No wonder. “One more thing,” I said, “and then I’ll let you go. I happened to check your campaign disclosure and noticed that you’ve received a sizable contribution this last year from Tiptree. Can you tell me why?”

He blinked at my knowledge of this tidbit of information, but remained in control. “Tiptree has been a good friend of the St. Louis community,”he said, as if reciting from a campaign fact-sheet. “It’s employed thousands of people over the last several years and has been a growing part of the local aerospace community. As such, we have mutual interests at heart.”

“I see. And Project Sentinel … is that …?”

“A great technological achievement, as Mr. McLaughlin said during his opening remarks.”He made a show of looking at his watch. “Now, if you’ll please excuse me, I have to go. I have someone waiting in my office to see me.”

“Yes, well, thank-”

The screen blanked before I finished my sentence.

I went back to my column, this time incorporating the remarks Estes had made about the raid during our interview. They didn’t make much of a difference, except that it was interesting to note how Estes’ “peaceful police action” contrasted with the mob panic, tear gas, and gunfire I had seen and heard.

I finished the piece at about six o’clock, as green-tinted twilight seeped through the windows. By then most of the staff had already gone home; John and I were the last two people left in the editorial department. Jah stopped by to give me the contact sheet of the photos I had taken. I found the shot I had taken of Beryl Hinckley, and John glanced at it under a magnifying glass as he put on his overcoat, memorizing her face for the meeting he was supposed to have with her later that evening.

“You want me to come along for the ride?” I asked after Jah left. “I could help identify her when she-”

“Oh, no you don’t,” Pearl snapped.

I shut my eyes, cussing under my breath. I wasn’t aware that Bailey was just outside the editorial cube. He had been shutting down the production department’s photocopy machines when he overheard our conversation. Overheard, hell: the bastard had been eavesdropping.

“You let John take care of his own stories, Rosen,” he said, glaring at me over the top of the partition. “All I want from you is your column and whatever else I specifically assign you. You hear me?”

Here it comes. The second chew-out of the day. Before I could muster a reply, John cleared his throat. “Pardon me,” he said, “but I asked Gerry if he would help me out on this. He saw something at the Muny last night that … ah, might have something to do with what I’m working on.”

It was a good lie, and Pearl almost fell for it. His eyes shifted back and forth between us, trying to decide who was putting on whom, before his basilisk stare settled on me. “Did you get your column written?” he demanded.

“Sure, Pearl … uh, Earl. Got it finished just a few minutes ago.”

He grunted. “Good. Then tomorrow I want you working on the Arch story we talked about at the last staff meeting. Deadline by next Friday.”

The assignment in question was a no-story story about why the Gateway Arch hadn’t collapsed during the New Madrid quake. Why hadn’t the Arch fallen? Because it was built well, that’s why. When some dopey Wash You intern had suggested the piece, I had argued that point and added that the quake was old news; besides, who needed another feel-good piece about things that hadn’t fallen down and gone boom? The TV stations, the Post-Dispatch,and the local shoppers had already published so many of these yarns that a new category in local journalism had been tacitly created to encompass them: Courageous Firemen, Heroic Pets, and Gee Whiz It’s Still Standing Upright.

But Pearl had assigned it to me anyway-largely, I suspect, because he wanted to see how well I jumped through hoops. I was about to protest that this was a useless assignment when I caught John’s stern expression out of the corner of my eye and shut up. Since I was already walking the tightrope, I might as well show off my other circus tricks.

“And the next time you decide to take off with John,” Bailey went on, “you might have the common courtesy to tell me first. We got a tip this morning from some lady out in Webster Groves. Squirrels are back in Blackburn Park for the first time since the quake-”

“And there was no one here to cover it,” I finished, snapping my fingers and shaking my head. “Aw, gee, I’m sorry I missed it. Sounds important.”

John coughed loudly and covered his mouth with his hand, this time to disguise the grin on his face. Bailey shot a harsh look at him, then focused on me again. “I’m the editor here, Rosen, and you’re the reporter. Understand? Just to teach you a lesson, I want you to call this lady back ASAP-”

“C’mon, Pearl-”

“And don’t gimme me that ‘Pearl’ shit or I’ll have you over in copyediting faster than you can say Oxford English Dictionary.”

Translation: shape up or ship out. Unless I wanted to end my career at the Big Muddyproofreading pasteups and checking the grammar of the stuff sent in by the freelancers, I had better content myself with writing about squirrels and pretend to like it.

I didn’t say anything, because anything I was likely to have said would probably have had me at the copyediting desk by Monday morning. Bailey gave me one last sour look, then picked up his jacket. “See you tomorrow, gentlemen,” he said. “Don’t forget to lock up behind you.”

Then he strode down the center aisle between the cubicles, heading for the front door, where his son was waiting to drive him home.

“He’ll get over it,” John whispered. “Just lie low for the next couple of weeks and let him chill out.” He opened his desk drawer, pulled out Dingbat, checked the battery LED, and slipped it into the wallet pocket of his trenchcoat. “If it’s any consolation, I’m sorry I got you into this.”

“Forget it,” I said, waving him off. “It’s my fault, not yours.” I paused. “The offer’s still open. If you want me to go with you to Clancy’s …”

He shook his head. “Better not. I think I ought to do it alone this time.” He tapped the proof shoot with his fingernail. “Your friend might get leery if she sees both of us.”

I nodded. He was right; the story was the most important thing, not who covered it. I began to turn off the rest of the lights. Since I lived just upstairs, it was my job to close down the office on the way out the back door. John picked up his gray fedora and walked past me as he headed toward the front door, then abruptly stopped as if a thought had just occurred to him.

“Do me a favor, though,” he added. “Let me know how this bit with the squirrels turns out.”

I tried not to be irritated by his seeming condescension. My friend was attempting to take an interest in my work, making me feel as if it was something that really mattered. He was on the trail of a murderer, and I was stuck with some silly-ass story that would only wind up as a small piece in the front section, if it saw print at all.

“Sure, man,” I mumbled. “I’ll let you know.”

“Could be interesting,” he said hesitantly, realizing that he had said the wrong thing. “You never know …”

“Right …”

He turned around again. “See you in the morning.”

“Catch you later,” I said.

I set the office phone so that it would ring upstairs, shut off the lights, made sure all the doors and windows were locked, then climbed the back stairs to my apartment. It was a warm and humid night, so I cracked open the windows and warmed up a can of SpaghettiOs on the hot plate while I caught a rerun of some old cop show on TV. Robert Urich and his wisecracking buddy caught the bad guys after a car chase; such a surprise. I had no idea what the story was about, but it made me forget how awful my dinner was.

I was out of beer, but I was still suffering alcohol fatigue from last night’s bender, so I didn’t go out to buy another six-pack from the grocery on 12th. It had begun to drizzle outside, and all I really wanted to do was to stay home and stay dry.

After I dumped my plate in the sink and turned off the tube, I sat down at the computer and tried to get some real writing done. After spending an hour rewriting the same boring paragraph several times, though, I realized that my muse had gone on vacation in Puerto Rico and, besides, the Great American Novel still sucked lizard eggs. I switched off the computer without bothering to save the few lines I had written, shucked my clothes, and curled up in bed with a secondhand paperback spy novel.

I fell asleep while reading, not even bothering to turn off the lamp over the bed. Rain gently pattered on the fire escape, city traffic moaned, and helicopters clattered overhead. The night world moved on around me; I vaguely heard the sound of police sirens from somewhere nearby and rolled over in my sleep, dreaming of nothing I could remember.

A countless time later, I was awakened by the buzz of the phone. That did for me what the familiar urban noises outside the window could not; I opened my eyes and, squinting in the glare of the lamp, fumbled for the handset beside me.

“’Lo?” I said, expecting it to be Marianne, calling to nag me again about Uncle Arnie.

A male voice on the other end of the line: “Is this theBig Muddy Inquirer office?”

Shit. I should have turned on the answering machine. “Yeah, but we’re closed now. Can you call back tomorrow …?”

“Who’s this?”the voice demanded.

“Who wants to know?”

A pause. “ This is Lieutenant Mike Farrentino, St. Louis Police Homicide Division. Is this one of the staff?”

Homicide division? What the fuck was this? I woke up a little more. The clock on my dresser said it was 9:55 P.M. “Yeah, it is,” I said. “Why, what’s-”

“What’s your name?”When I didn’t answer promptly, the voice became stronger. “C’mon, what’s your-”

“Rosen.” A cold chill was beginning to creep down my spine. “Gerry Rosen. I’m a staff writer. Why are you-?”

“Mr. Rosen, I’m at Clancy’s Bar and Grill, just down the street from your office. We have a dead person here whose personal ID says that it is the property of one John L. Tiernan, a reporter for your paper. Would you mind coming down here to verify the identity of the deceased, please?”

9

(Thursday, 10:05 P.M.)

Blue lights flashing in a humid night in the city, veiled by dense evening fog. The distant hoot of a tugboat pushing barges down the Mississippi River. The sound of boot soles slapping against a brick sidewalk …

This is the aftermath of murder.

Clancy’s Bar amp; Grill was crawling with cops by the time I got down there: three blue-and-whites parked on Geyer with a couple of unmarked cruisers sandwiched between them, and out of them had emerged what seemed to be half of the St. Louis Police Department, most of them standing scratching their asses and trying to look as if they knew what they were doing. It figured that a poor black dude can get shot in the head in broad daylight down in Dogtown and nobody gives a shit, but a middle-class white guy gets killed in a Soulard barroom and most of the force shows up, looking for trouble.

The bar was almost empty. Given its usual clientele, though, it only made sense that the regulars would have cleared out as soon as the cops arrived on the scene. A big, burly policeman was standing beneath the front awning, listening to his headset as he watched the sidewalk; he blocked my way as I approached the door.

“Sorry, pal, but you can’t go in right now. Police business-”

“Outta my way,” I muttered as I tried to push past him, “I gotta get in there-”

And found myself being shoved backward so fast I lost my balance and fell against two more cops who were standing on the sidewalk. One of them, a thin Latino cop, snagged the back of my jacket. “Hey, sport,” he said as he began to usher me away, “find another place to get a drink, okay? This is-”

“Fuck off.” I shrugged out of his grip, headed for the door again. “My friend’s-”

The Latino cop grabbed my right arm and twisted it behind my back. I yelped as I was forced to my knees, and all of a sudden I saw nothing but shiny black cop shoes all around me as a riot baton was pressed against the back of my neck, forcing my head down while yet another officer grabbed my left arm and pulled it behind me.

“Ease down, pal! Ease down!”

Ease down, hell. The cops were all over me, securing my wrists with plastic cuffs while I struggled against them. I was halfway through most of the words your mother told you she’d wash your mouth out with soap if she ever heard you say them again when I heard a new voice.

“Stimpson! Who is this man!”

Stimpson was the first cop I had confronted. “Just some jerk who wouldn’t take no for an answer, Lieutenant,” he said. “We asked him to leave, but he’s decided he wanted to-”

“Did you bother to ask him his name first?” I tried to look up, but the riot baton continued to force my head down toward the brick sidewalk. “Sir, can you tell me your name?”

“Rosen,” I managed to gasp. “Gerry Rosen. I’m with the Big Muddy-”

“Shit. Let him up, D’Angelo.” The grip on my arms relaxed a little. “I said, let him up,” the lieutenant demanded. “That’s the man I called down here, for chrissake.”

“Yes sir.” D’Angelo hesitated, then let go of my arm and grabbed me beneath my arms to gently lift me off my knees. As he produced a pair of scissors and cut off the handcuffs, the rest of the cops who had encircled me took a powder, their batons and tasers sliding back into belt loops and holsters.

My savior was a tall, gaunt plainclothes cop in his late thirties. He wore a calf-length raincoat and a wide-brimmed fedora, and a cigarette dangled from thin lips in a pockmarked face that looked as if it had once suffered from chronic acne. He brushed past Stimpson and thrust out his hand.

“Michael Farrentino, homicide division,” he said by way of formal introduction. “Glad to meet you, Mr. Rosen. Sorry about the rough treatment.”

I ignored both the hand and the apology. “You said you found my friend in here,” I said, my voice rough as I massaged my chafed wrists. “Where is he?”

I started to push past him, heading for the door again. “Hey, whoa … hold on. Just wait a moment.” Farrentino stepped in front of me as he reached up with both hands to grab my shoulders. “Just let me ask you a couple of questions first-”

“Fuck that,” I snapped. “Where’s John?”

We stared each other eye to eye for another moment, then Farrentino’s hands fell from my shoulders. He took the cigarette out of his mouth and flicked it into the street. “Okay, have it your way,” he murmured. “Follow me.”

To my surprise, he didn’t escort me directly into the bar. Instead he led me past the front door and about twenty feet farther down the sidewalk, past a high brick wall, until we reached the narrow iron gate that led into Clancy’s open-air beer garden. Two more cops were guarding the red tape-marked CRIME SCENE DO NOT PASS-that had been stretched across the open gate. They moved aside as Farrentino ducked under it, then held it up for me so I could pass through.

Many of St. Louis’s saloons have biergartens,a fine old tradition that the city’s first settlers brought with them from Germany during the 1800s. Even though this particular beer garden now sported an Irish name, it resided behind a three-story building and was just old enough to have a real garden. Picnic tables and iron chairs were arranged between small Dutch elms and brick planters; from the number of half-empty beer bottles and plastic cups left abandoned on the table, it seemed as if there had been a fair number of people in Clancy’s beer garden before the law had arrived in large numbers.

But the scene of the crime wasn’t down here; instead, it was an enclosed balcony on the second floor in the rear of the building. I could see a number of people clustered around the corner of the balcony overlooking the street; portable camera lights had been rigged on tripods around the wooden balustrade, and they were all aimed down at something on the porch floor, but I couldn’t see what it was.

Farrentino silently led me up the weathered pinewood stairs to the balcony. More cops, a couple of bored-looking paramedics with a stretcher, two more plainclothes homicide dicks-Farrentino led me through the crowd as they parted for us, until we reached the end of the balcony and I got a chance to see what all the fuss was about.

The body sprawled across the porch floor was definitely that of John Tiernan. His trench coat, his tie, even his patent-leather shoes: I had seen him wearing those clothes only a few hours earlier. But it took me a few moments to recognize his face.

That was because it looked as if someone had taken a white-hot fireplace poker and had shoved it into his skull, straight through the center of his forehead.

The black moment had come for John so quickly that his eyes were wide open, seeing only those things dead men can see.

When I was through vomiting over the rail, Farrentino led me back downstairs to the beer garden. He sat me down at a picnic table out of sight from the balcony, gave me a handkerchief so I could dry my mouth, and left me alone for a couple of minutes; when he came back, he had a shot glass of bourbon in one hand and a beer chaser in the other. The dubious benefits of having a murder committed at a bar.

I belted back the shot of bourbon, ignoring the chaser. The liquor burned down my gullet and into my stomach; I gasped and for a moment my guts rebelled, but the booze stayed down, and after a moment there was quietude of a sort. I slumped back in the chair and tried not to think of the horror I had just seen.

“Ready to talk?” Farrentino asked, not unkindly. I nodded my head; he pulled out a palmtop and flipped it open. “Is that John Tiernan? Can you give me a positive identification?”

I slowly nodded my head. Farrentino waited patiently for a verbal reply. “Yeah … yeah, that’s John,” I said. “I’m sure that’s him.”

“Okay.” The homicide detective made an entry in his computer. “I know that was rough on you, Mr. Rosen, but we had to be sure. We’ve got to call his family next, and even though we got his driver’s license from his wallet, I wanted to have someone else identify him before I put out a call to his wife. You were convenient and … well, I hope you understand.”

I nodded. Poor Sandy. I was glad that she hadn’t seen him like this. “Thanks, Officer. Do you want me to call her?”

“No, I’d just as soon do it myself.” Farrentino pulled out a pack of cigarettes, shook one out, and offered it to me. I shook my head, he took the cigarette for himself, lighting it from the bottom of the pack. “I hate to say it, but I’ve gotten used to this part of the job,” he went on. “I think it’d be better if she got the news from me instead of you. Me, she can hate for the rest of her life and it won’t matter much, but if she hears it from you …”

“Yeah, okay. I understand.”

He shrugged as he exhaled blue smoke. “So … when was the last time you saw the deceased?”

I actually had to think about it; all of a sudden, it seemed as if days instead of hours had passed since I had last seen John alive. “Around six, six-thirty, I think. We were closing down the office for the day.”

“Uh-huh.” Farrentino typed another note in his PT. “Do you have any idea where he was going?”

I became wary. Sure, I knew where John was going, and why … but I wasn’t sure if I was ready to tell these things to Farrentino. “He said he was coming down here, but I’m not really sure what he was doing.”

Farrentino continued to make notes. “You knew he was coming here,” he said, “but you don’t know why? Maybe he was just going out for a few drinks. That’s what most people do when they go to a bar after work.”

“Uh … yeah. That’s what he was doing-”

“Except when I talked to the bartender, he told me that Mr. Tiernan hardly ordered anything the whole time he was here. He remembers him buying one beer when he arrived at …”

Farrentino checked his notes. “A quarter to eight, and he nursed it the entire time he was here. I suppose he must have gone somewhere for dinner before then.”

I picked up my beer and took a sip from it. The bottle was slippery in my hand. “Yeah, I guess so,” I said. “That would make sense.”

“Hmm. Maybe so.” The detective coughed, his eyes still on the miniature screen. “Do you know if he was … well, y’know, fooling around with anyone? Had a girlfriend on the side his wife didn’t know about?”

I felt a rush of anger but tried to keep it in check. “I’m not sure that’s any of your business, Officer.”

“Well? Did he?” He shrugged indifferently. “Maybe it’s none of my business, but still it’s something his wife might want to know when I call her-”

“Hell, no!” I snapped. “If he was meeting anyone here, it sure as hell wasn’t a …”

My voice trailed off as the realization hit me. Farrentino had skillfully led me into a trap, forcing me to contradict myself. His eyes slowly rose from the PT. “I didn’t ask if he was meeting anyone here, Mr. Rosen,” he said. “Maybe you do know something about what he was doing here, after all.”

From behind the garden wall, there was the wail of a siren approaching from down the street. I could hear the metallic clank from the balcony as the paramedics unfolded their stretcher. A couple of barmaids stood watching us from the back door, murmuring to each other.

Farrentino was about to say something else when a uniformed cop approached our table, carrying several plastic-bagged objects in his hands. “This is all we found in his pockets,” he said, holding them out for the detective to examine. “Do you want us to have ’em dusted?”

I recognized some of the items: his house keys, his car remote, his wallet, an old-fashioned fountain pen Sandy had given to him as a birthday present, some loose change, the ever-present pack of chewing gum …