About the Author (30 page)

“Who knows?” I said, moving across the lot to my car.

The minute I got home, I put in a phone call to the New York Police Department. The woman I spoke to couldn’t have been more polite and helpful, but no, she said, there was no detective by the name of Thomas Cantucci on the force—they had a Car
lucc
i, with an
l
, and a Cantonio, and, let’s see, a Carson, Calabrese, Causabon. . . .

So. What does this mean? What the
fuck
does this mean? It could mean, of course, that Bantam got the Italian name wrong—which is virtually what fools like Bantam were put on earth to do. Or it could mean that when detectives are working undercover, the force does not reveal their names to stray phone-callers. Except that this cop
isn’t
working undercover. He’s been flashing his badge all over town—to Ernie, to Bantam, to God knows who else.

Okay, for the sake of argument, let’s say he
isn’t
a cop. Then who is he? Think about this. Maybe someone associated with Les’s bungled drug deal. Some mobster dispatched from New York to find out what happened to the drug shipment that was supposed to be transported from Vermont into Canada but never arrived. Maybe they suspect that Les made off with the drugs. Or the money. Or something. And this guy’s a hit man! (In which case, he’s a little late.)

Or have I seen too many gangster movies? Or read too many cheap thrillers? Undoubtedly. There must be some perfectly reasonable explanation for why the name Detective Cantucci is not on record with the NYPD. He
must
be a cop. He sure looks like a cop, and moves like one, too. Oh, he’s a cop, all right, and by now he’s been by her place and discovered that she’s not there. In which case, he’s bound to have ordered up a search warrant for her cottage. Which means that as early as—when? this evening? tomorrow morning?—a squadron of policemen will be subjecting her house to a thorough search, looking for clues to her whereabouts. Maybe Det. Cantucci came armed with a warrant; maybe he is, even now, prying up her floorboards, pulling away the plaster from her walls.

Did I search the house thoroughly enough for the computer
?

The cops will be at leisure to take the place apart board by board, brick by brick. And if they
find
the laptop, they’re sure to subject it to a meticulous search. Why in God’s name didn’t I take the initiative and burn the fucking place down when I had the chance? How simple it would have been in the past week to slip over to her cottage at night and toss a few oil-soaked rags under the foundation, light them, and flee. If the computer
is
hidden somewhere in that house, a fire would have taken care of it—blessed flames would have melted its plastic shell, baked from its silicone brain all memory of Stewart. Is it too late for me to steal up there tonight and torch the place? With that cop snooping around? What time is it now? Eight o’clock. Already dark. How about if I wait until four A.M.? Surely Detective Cantucci won’t be hanging around the place at that hour. Unless he’s staking the place out, in which case it’s imposs

I must be calm. I must think. Everything is rushing out of control. Breathe deep. Slow down.
Think
.

Twenty minutes ago I was interrupted, mid-word, by a noise outside my open office window. A footfall. Someone was creeping around the perimeter of the house. In the dark.

I snapped off my writing lamp, got up from my desk, pasted myself against the wall beside the window, and peeped out. I saw a figure silhouetted against the hillside. Small, female. Moving along on tiptoe. She crossed into a slant of light from the adjacent kitchen window.

It was Chopper. Little Chopper Pollard. In plaid flannel shirt and ripped jeans. House- and baby-sitter extraordinaire, plant waterer, Les’s protégée. A good kid despite her infatuation with Les. A sweet child. But what was she doing here? Why was she creeping, as silently as her rather clumsy frame would allow, up to my open office window in the dark? I knew it could not bode well, but I could not have guessed just how bad, how nightmarish, her visit was going to be.

She brought her square-jawed face up to my window.

“Mr. Cunningham?” she whispered.

I clicked on my desk lamp. She jumped back, startled. I leaned down and told her to come around to the back door.

“But
Mrs
. Cunningham . . . ?”

I told her that Mrs. Cunningham wasn’t home.

So: Chopper, sitting in my brightly lit kitchen, nervously cracking her knuckles; frightened, out of breath, her ruddy face beaded with sweat along the soft, fluted upper lip, the baby-fat cheeks, the high, round forehead (I think she must have run all the way up from town). I stood over her, my arms folded across my chest.

I asked what she was doing here.

“I got a—” she said, pausing to gulp, “I got a message from Les. She’s in trouble, real bad.”

I won’t try to describe my inner convulsions and confusions.

“Les?” I said. “What are you talking about? Les! Les
who
?”

Chopper opened her hands. Confused. Frightened by the vehemence of my reaction. “Les,” she repeated. “Lesley—Miss Honecker—the lady who lives at the Yellow House.”

“I can’t understand—I don’t know what you’re . . . Are you saying she’s
alive
?”

Poor little Chopper looked at me in utter confusion. She began again from the beginning, mechanically, like a child who had learned the words by rote: “I got a message from Les. She told me to tell you—”

“
When
, for God’s sake, Chopper!
When
did she tell you this?”

Chopper looked genuinely terrified now, cowering in her chair, one arm lifted to ward me off should I suddenly attack her. “To
night
,” Chopper said. “She told me tonight. She axed me to come up here and—”

“She’s here? In New Halcyon?”

Chopper nodded.

“How long?” I said, sagging into a chair in front of the girl. “How long has she been here?” She could not die. She was like a cockroach. All the rest of the human race could be extinct through flood, fire or famine, and Les would crawl on.

“Well,” Chopper began warily, “the last three, four days. She’s in big trouble, Mr. Cunningham. She said you’d understand.”

“Wait, Chopper,” I said. “You’re speaking too fast. I can’t understand you. You say Les has been here, in New Halcyon, for the last three or four
days
?”

“Yes, sir. She come to my place one night real late. When my folks were asleep. Oh, man, Mr. Cunningham, she was in bad shape. She was cut up. Bleeding. Dirty. I don’t know. She said that she almost got killed by some guys who—well, she dint tell me the whole story. But she said she spent some nights in the woods. She said they’re probably still after her.”

“I see,” I said. “So then what happened?”

“Well . . .” She stretched the word out. She was clearly under orders not to reveal too much to me. I could see the child hesitating.

“C’mon, Chopper,” I pressed. “Does Les want my help or not?”

She went on slowly. “Well, what I done, I found a place for Les to stay where nobody would find her. ’Cause, see, she said she needed some time to figure out what to do. She’s been planning on leaving town, but I guess she had some stuff back at the Yellow House that she needed to pick up before she goes.” (The computer, I thought. The fucking laptop. Hidden somewhere under the floorboards, in the walls. . . .) “But she couldn’t go over to the cottage,” Chopper continued, “because she figured it wasn’t safe. She said that Alain—” she stopped suddenly and flushed. She was not supposed to say this name. She glanced at me, but I poker-faced her, as if I had no interest in this name whatsoever.

“Go on, Chopper,” I said, soothingly. “You can tell me.”

“Well, anyways, she said it wasn’t safe. I said
I’d
go pick up what she needed, but she said that some of the stuff was hidden [
sic
!!], and I wouldn’t be able to find it without her. She said we had to wait a few days till things cooled down. So—so, we
did
wait. And then this morning we went over to the cottage and we picked her stuff up, and then when we was leaving, she saw the guy.” Chopper’s eyes grew round. “I mean, we barely got out of there. We had to sneak out the back way and go into the forest and then hide out there until tonight, when it got dark.”

“Who did she see, Chopper? Did she see Alain?”

Chopper took a deep breath. I could see the terror in her eyes. “No,” she said. “Not Alain.”

“Chopper,” I said softly, “was it that policeman? Was it that plainclothes detective?”

Chopper visibly shuddered. She seemed close to tears. The child was shivering. “Oh, Mr. Cunningham,” she said, weeping now, “that ain’t no cop. He ain’t no cop.”

“Who is he, Chopper?”

She looked at me, her face streaked with tears, her eyes wide with horror. “That’s Les’s boyfriend. That’s Tommy. He come all the way from New York to get her. He’s gonna kill her ’cause she run away. He’s been looking for her. Les figures he’s been looking for weeks. Les says he always uses this old cop badge he’s got. She figures he musta went to all the airlines and bus stations and
everywhere
and made like he was looking for a missing person, or a runaway. That’s how he tracked her down way up here.”

“But Tommy’s her boyfriend,” I said leadingly. “Why would she be afraid of him?”

“He used to beat her up real bad!” Chopper cried. “He used to hit her. He nearly killed her a while back when he found out she had some money. She wouldn’t tell him where she got it, and he said he was gonna get it out of her. He busted a bottle right across her face—oh, Jeez, Mr. Cunningham, I seen her right after that, ’cause she run away up to here, and it was . . . it was . . .” Chopper paused and wiped at her eyes, at her running nose. “And—and now he come to get her. He come to kill her, she says. She got to have some money real bad, Mr. Cunningham. She wants to get on a plane as fast as she can. I’m going to drive her to the airport. She says she don’t want to be greedy. She just needs enough to get on a plane for somewhere far away. One-way fare, she says. And she told me to tell you that if you give it to her, you don’t owe her the rest. She’ll call everything even. She said you’d know what that means.”

“Listen, Chopper,” I said. “First, there’s something I want to know. What did she take from the Yellow House? What did she need to pick up?”

Chopper’s brow wrinkled. Obviously the poor child could have no idea why I was asking this perfectly irrelevant question. “You mean this morning?” she asked.

“That’s right.”

Pursed her lips, looked up at the ceiling. “Just some clothes, and her bag, and her computer, and about fifteen bucks she had in a drawer—I think that’s all.”

“Her
laptop
computer, Chopper?”

She sniffled, nodded. Then I saw her eyes dart toward the wall clock mounted above the kitchen sink. “Jeez, Mr. Cunningham, I’m supposed to be home now, and if my mom sees that I’m not there—”

“Okay, Chopper,” I said. “I’ll give her the money. But I don’t have any cash on me now. I’ll have to wait until the bank opens tomorrow.”

Chopper jumped up from her seat. “Oh,
thanks
, Mr. Cunningham! Les’s gonna be—she’s just gonna be—I’m s’posed to phone her when I get home, and she’s gonna be—”

“There’s just one more thing, Chopper,” I said. “I need you to tell me where Les is hiding.”

The child immediately grew grave. “Oh, no, Mr. Cunningham, I can’t tell you, on account of she told me not to tell nobody. Les told me not to tell no one.” Chopper sounded very firm on this point. I, however, felt equally firm. There was no way I was going to allow Les to flee with the computer in her possession. She was going to have to surrender it to me first. Whether she liked it or not.

I forced a smile onto my face. “Chopper, she didn’t mean that you shouldn’t tell
me
.”

Chopper’s mouth had grown very small, and her eyes very large. She shook her head. “I can’t, Mr. Cunningham. She said not to tell nobody.”

“Look, Chopper, it’s not like Les will ever know you told me. I’m not going to go and
see
her,” I brazenly lied. “I just need to know. For my own . . . my own peace of mind.”

“I don’t know, Mr. Cunningham,” she said, with a pleading whine in her voice.

“Don’t you understand, Chopper?” I said. “Les and I were—well, we were friends, a long time ago. Way back in New York. Didn’t she tell you that?”

She shook her head. “Les didn’t say.”

“Well, we were. No one knows that except me and her. And now you. Why do you think she’s turning to
me
for help? We care about each other. Now, think back: did she
really
tell you not to tell me?”

“She did,” Chopper said with a staunch little nod. “She said to me, ‘Don’t tell Mr. Cunningham where I’m at.’ ”

“Because she’s
scared
,” I said. “She doesn’t know who her friends are at the moment, and can you blame her? With this Alain and this Tommy after her? She must feel like the whole world is against her. You’re the only person in the whole world she can trust. You and
me
.”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Listen, Chopper,” I said, my voice hardening now. “Do you want me to give you the money or not?”

I saw her struggle with this. Her eyes darted around. She screwed her hands up, kneading the short, thick fingers. Finally she said, “You know Mr. Halbert’s place? On River Road? That’s where she’s at. I got the keys because I water their plants and all.”

The Halberts! On vacation in Rome until Sunday. Of course!

I asked, “She’s been hiding there for the past three nights?”

“She don’t got no lights on, and she don’t go out. I smuggle her food under my sweatshirt when I go to water the plants. And I don’t go near the place at night, in case someone’s following me. That was Les’s idea.”

“Les is a very bright girl,” I said. “Okay, listen. Why don’t I meet you tomorrow morning at the Snak Shak, at twenty past ten? I’ll have a folded newspaper with me. The money—two thousand bucks, cash—will be inside it. You sit down beside me at the picnic table. Don’t speak to me. When I get up, I’ll leave the newspaper. You take it. Got that?”