Insomnia (35 page)

‘I don’t just
dislike
her, Ralph; I fucking
hate
her. Listen – I’m a Catholic, my lovin mother was a Catholic, my kids – if I ever have any – are all gonna be altarboys at St Joe’s. Great. Being a Catholic’s great. They even let you eat meat on Fridays now. But if you think being Catholic means I’m in favor of making abortions illegal again, you got the wrong puppy. See, I’m the Catholic who gets to question the guys who beat their kids with rubber hoses or push them downstairs after a night of drinking good Irish whiskey and getting all sentimental about their mothers.’

Leydecker fished inside his shirt and brought out a small gold medallion. He placed it on his fingers and tilted it toward Ralph.

‘Mary, mother of Jesus. I’ve worn this since I was thirteen. Five years ago I arrested a man wearing one just like it. He had just boiled his two-year-old stepson. This is a true thing I’m telling you. Guy put on a great big pot of water, and when it was boiling, he picked the kid up by the ankles and dropped him into the pot like he was a lobster. Why? Because the kid wouldn’t stop wetting the bed, he told us. I saw the body, and I’ll tell you what, after you’ve seen something like that, the photos the right-to-life assholes like to show of vacuum abortions don’t look so bad.’

Leydecker’s voice had picked up a slight tremor.

‘What I remember most of all is how the guy was crying, and how he kept holding onto that Mary medallion around his neck and saying he wanted to go to confession. Made me proud to be a Catholic, Ralph, let me tell you . . . and as far as the Pope goes, I don’t think he should be allowed to have an opinion until he’s had a kid himself, or at least spent a year or so taking care of crack-babies.’

‘Okay,’ Ralph said. ‘What’s your problem with Susan Day?’

‘She’s stirring the motherfucking
pot
!’ Leydecker cried. ‘She comes into my town and I have to protect her. Fine. I’ve got good men, and with just a pinch of luck, I think we can probably see her out of town with her head still on and her tits pointing the right way, but what about what happens before? And what happens after? Do you think she cares about any of that? Do you think the people who run WomanCare give much of a shit about the side-effects, as far as that goes?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘The WomanCare advocates are a little less prone to violence than The Friends of Life, but in terms of the all-important ass-ache quotient, they’re not much different. Do you know what this was all about when it started?’

Ralph cast his memory back to his first conversation about Susan Day, the one he’d had with Ham Davenport. For a moment he almost had it, but then it squiggled away. The insomnia had won again. He shook his head.

‘Zoning,’ Leydecker said, and laughed with disgusted amazement. ‘Plain old garden-variety zoning regulations. Great, huh? Early this summer, two of our more conservative City Councillors, George Tandy and Emma Wheaton, petitioned the Zoning Committee to reconsider the zone with WomanCare in it, the idea being to kind of gerrymander the place out of existence. I doubt if that’s exactly the right word, but you get the gist, don’t you?’

‘Sure.’

‘Uh-huh. So the pro-choicers ask Susan Day to come to town and make a speech, help them to raise a war-chest to combat the pro-life grinches. The only problem is, the grinches never had a chance of rezoning District 7,
and the WomanCare people knew it!
Hell, one of their directors, June Halliday, is
on
the City Council. She and the Wheaton bitch just about spit at each other when they pass in the hall.

‘Rezoning District 7 was a pipe-dream from the start, because WomanCare is technically a hospital, just like Derry Home, which is only a stone’s throw away. If you change the zoning laws to make WomanCare illegal, you do the same to one of only three hospitals in Derry County – the third-largest county in the state of Maine. So it was never going to happen, but that’s okay, because it was never about that in the first place. It was about being pissy and in-your-face. About being an ass-ache. And for most of the pro-choicers – one of the guys I work with calls em the Whale People – it’s about being
right
.’

‘Right? I don’t get you.’

‘It isn’t enough that a woman can walk in there and get rid of the troublesome little fishie growing inside her any time she wants; the pro-choicers want the argument to
end
. What they want, down deep, is for people like Dan Dalton to admit they’re right, and that’ll never happen. It’s more likely that the Arabs and the Jews will decide it was all a mistake and throw down their weapons. I support the right of a woman to have an abortion if she really needs to have one, but the pro-choicers’ holier-than-thou attitude makes me want to puke. They’re the new Puritans, as far as I’m concerned, people who believe that if you don’t think the way they do, you’re going to hell . . . only their version is a place where all you get on the radio is hillbilly music and all you can find to eat is chicken-fried steak.’

‘You sound pretty bitter.’

‘Try sitting on a powderkeg for three months and see how it makes
you
feel. Tell me this – do you think Pickering would have stuck a knife in your armpit yesterday if it hadn’t been for WomanCare, The Friends of Life, and Susan Leave-My-Sacred-Twat-Alone Day?’

Ralph appeared to give the question serious thought, but what he was really doing was watching John Leydecker’s aura. It was a healthy dark blue, but the edges were tinged with rapidly shifting greenish light. It was this edging which interested Ralph; he had an idea he knew what it meant.

Finally he said, ‘No. I guess not.’

‘Me either. You got wounded in a war that’s already been decided, Ralph, and you won’t be the last. But if you went to the Whale People – or to Susan Day – and opened your shirt and pointed at the bandage and said “This is partly your fault, so own the part that’s yours,” they’d raise their hands and say, “Oh no, goodness no, we’re sorry you got hurt, Ralph, we whale watchers
abhor
violence, but it wasn’t
our
fault, we have to keep WomanCare open, we have to man and woman the barricades, and if a little spilled blood is what it takes to do that, then so be it.” But it’s not
about
WomanCare, and that’s what drives me absolutely bugfuck. It’s about—’

‘– abortion.’

‘Shit, no! Abortion rights are safe in Maine and in Derry, no matter what Susan Day says at the Civic Center Friday night. This is about whose team is the best team. About whose side God’s on. It’s about who’s
right
. I wish they’d all just sing “We Are the Champions” and go get drunk.’

Ralph threw back his head and laughed. Leydecker laughed with him.

‘So they’re assholes,’ he finished with a shrug. ‘But they’re
our
assholes. Does that sounds like I’m joking? I’m not. WomanCare, Friends of Life, Body Watch, Daily Bread . . . they’re
our
assholes,
Derry
assholes, and I really don’t mind watching out for our own. That’s why I took this job, and why I stay with it. But you’ll have to forgive me if I’m less than crazy about being tapped to watch out for some long-stemmed American Beauty from New York who’s going to fly in here and give an incendiary speech and then fly out with a few more press-clippings and enough material for chapter five of her new book.

‘To our faces she’ll talk about what a wonderful little grassroots community we are, and when she gets back to her duplex on Park Avenue, she’ll tell her friends about how she hasn’t managed to shampoo the stink of our paper mills out of her hair yet. She is woman; hear her roar . . . and if we’re lucky, the whole thing will quiet down with no one dead or disabled.’

Ralph had become sure of what those greenish flickers meant. ‘But you’re scared, aren’t you?’ he asked.

Leydecker looked at him, surprised. ‘Shows, does it?’

‘Only a little,’ Ralph said, and thought:
Just in your aura, John, that’s all. Just in your aura
.

‘Yeah, I’m scared. On a personal level I’m scared of fucking up the assignment, which has absolutely no upside to compensate for all the things that can go wrong. On a professional level I’m scared of something happening to her on my watch. On a community level I’m fucking
terrified
of what happens if there’s some sort of confrontation and the genie comes out of the bottle . . . more coffee, Ralph?’

‘I’ll pass. I ought to be going soon, anyway. What’s going to happen to Pickering?’

He didn’t actually care much about Charlie Pickering’s fate, but the big cop would probably think it strange if he asked about May Locher before he asked about Pickering. Suspicious, maybe.

‘Steve Anderson – the ADA who questioned you – and Pickering’s court-appointed attorney are probably horse-trading even as we speak. Pickering’s guy will be saying he might be able to get his client – the thought of Charlie Pickering being
anyone’s
client – for
anything,
sort of blows my mind, by the way – to plead out to second-degree assault. Anderson will say the time has come to put Pickering away for good and he’s going for attempted murder. Pickering’s lawyer will pretend to be shocked, and tomorrow your buddy is going to be charged with first-degree assault with a deadly weapon and bound over for trial. Then, possibly in December but more likely early next year, you’ll be called as the star witness.’

‘Bail?’

‘It’ll probably be set in the forty-thousand-dollar range. You can get out on ten per cent if the rest can be secured in event of flight, but Charlie Pickering doesn’t have a house, a car, or even a Timex watch. In the end, he’s liable to go back to Juniper Hill, but that’s really not the object of the game. We’re going to be able to keep him off the street for quite a while this time, and with people like Charlie,
that’s
the object of the game.’

‘Any chance The Friends of Life might go his bail?’

‘Nah. Ed Deepneau spent a lot of last week with him, the two of them drinking coffee in the Bagel Shop. I imagine Ed was giving Charlie the lowdown on the Centurions and the King of Diamonds—’

‘Crimson King is what Ed—’

‘Whatever,’ Leydecker agreed, waving a hand. ‘But most of all I imagine he spent the time explaining how you were the devil’s righthand man and how only a smart, brave, and dedicated fellow like Charlie Pickering could take you out of the picture.’

‘You make him sound like such a calculating shit,’ Ralph said. He was remembering the Ed Deepneau he’d played chess with before Carolyn had fallen ill. That Ed had been an intelligent, well-spoken, civilized man with a deep capacity for kindness. Ralph still found it all but impossible to reconcile that Ed with the one he’d first glimpsed in July of 1992. He had come to think of the more recent arrival as ‘rooster Ed’.

‘Not just a calculating shit, a
dangerous
calculating shit,’ Leydecker said. ‘For him Charlie was just a tool, like a paring knife you’d use to peel an apple with. If the blade snaps off a paring knife, you don’t run to the knife-grinder’s to get a new one put on; that’s too much trouble. You toss it in the wastebasket and get a new paring knife instead. That’s the way guys like Ed treat guys like Charlie, and since Ed
is
The Friends of Life – for the time being, at least – I don’t think you have to worry about Charlie making bail. In the next few days, he’s going to be lonelier than a Maytag repairman. Okay?’

‘Okay,’ Ralph said. He was a little appalled to realize he felt sorry for Pickering. ‘I want to thank you for keeping my name out of the paper, too . . . if you were the one who did it, that is.’

There had been a brief mention of the incident in the Derry
News
’s Police Beat column, but it said only that Charles H. Pickering had been arrested on ‘a weapons charge’ at the Derry Public Library.

‘Sometimes we ask them for a favor, sometimes they ask us for one,’ Leydecker said, standing up. ‘It’s how things work in the real world. If the nuts in The Friends of Life and the prigs in The Friends of WomanCare ever discover that, my job is going to get a lot easier.’

Ralph plucked the rolled-up Dumbo poster from the wastebasket, then stood up on his side of Leydecker’s desk. ‘Could I have this? I know a little girl who might really like it, in a year or so.’

Leydecker held out his hands expansively. ‘Be my guest – think of it as a little premium for being a good citizen. Just don’t ask for my crotchless panties.’

Ralph laughed. ‘Wouldn’t think of it.’

‘Seriously, I appreciate you coming in. Thanks, Ralph.’

‘No problem.’ He reached across the desk, shook Leydecker’s hand, then headed for the door. He felt absurdly like Lieutenant Columbo on TV – all he needed was the cigar and the ratty trenchcoat. He put his hand on the knob, then paused and turned back. ‘Can I ask you about something totally unrelated to Charlie Pickering?’

‘Fire away.’

‘This morning in the Red Apple Store I heard that Mrs Locher, my neighbor up the street, died in the night. Nothing so surprising about that; she had emphysema. But there are police-line tapes up between the sidewalk and her front yard, plus a sign on the door saying the site has been sealed by the Derry PD. Do you know what it’s about?’

Leydecker looked at him so long and hard that Ralph would have felt acutely uncomfortable . . . if not for the man’s aura. There was nothing in it which communicated suspicion.

Well, maybe yes and maybe no. Either way he was glad that the green flickers at the edges of Leydecker’s aura had not reappeared.

‘Why are you looking at me that way?’ Ralph asked. ‘If I presumed or spoke out of turn, I’m sorry.’

‘Not at all,’ Leydecker said. ‘It’s a little weird, that’s all. If I tell you about it, can you keep it quiet?’