The Ten-Mile Trials (17 page)

‘Could we do that?' He licked his lips.

‘Don't see why not. She's not in jail, she's in treatment. Right here in town.'

‘But can they—? Are they allowed out?'

‘Ask the judge,' I said. ‘Explain that we just need her help for an hour.'

‘OK. We'll do that and find out about the pawnshop, right away.'

‘And speaking of the house, I was thinking maybe you could maximize one other thing for me.'

He didn't even flinch. ‘What?'

‘Andy Pitman.'

‘What about him? He's out on a call right now, talking to a burglary victim who got cut in the window they broke getting into his house. Guy wants to make a case for reckless endangerment.'

‘OK . . . but remember when Andy was a COPS officer? A POP cop, I think we used to call it, when the program first started.'

‘For sure. Andy was the COPS
über
-cop for a while. Wasn't he the one who cleaned up the Horton Tuck neighborhood?'

‘Yes, he was.' Andy Pitman was a massive, ugly boy with crooked teeth when he joined the force. I've seen pictures in which he looks like a socially challenged hillbilly – you wonder how he made the cut. In the twenty years since, he's put on a lot of weight and neatened up a little. But his looks are irrelevant now, because he is legendary for his time as a COPS officer. COPS stands for Community Oriented Policing Services, and the year after we started it in Rutherford Andy took over the Horton Tuck neighborhood, a section centered on two blocks of rancid public housing that most cops entered only in pairs, with their holsters unsnapped. Walking a beat and knocking on doors, listening to retirees and housewives, and coming down hard on prostitutes and the local mopes, almost single-handedly, Andy saved a neighborhood that was sliding into slum status. He went on to train some of the officers who carry the program forward to this day.

Ham-handed, big-bellied, with a nose like a frozen beet, Andy's default expression has become a ferocious glare. He is on record for having uttered the longest string of profanity without repeats ever heard in the station locker room. But he's also famous for enlisting an entire neighborhood, including five hard little gang-bangers and a houseful of awesomely silent Somalis, in the effort that turned a trashed block into a sweet little city park with a soccer field.

I said, ‘And didn't Andy help get that ordinance passed about absentee landlords?'

‘I guess. So?'

‘The homicide house – the grow garage.'

‘Ah. You're right, he got a rule passed that says the landlord's responsible for what a renter does to a neighborhood. Got some nifty fines to make it stick, too.'

‘Why don't you turn Andy loose on the house on Marvin Street? Have him find out who-where-when – all that good stuff – about the landlord. That could get us the name of the renter, right?'

‘Plus a social security number or the lack of same. Yeah, Andy's an expert at putting the arm on absentee landlords – that was half the job in the area around Horton Tuck.'

‘OK. And while Andy's there he could look for some wardrobe items the bad-suit guys left behind, couldn't he?' Beginning to look downright cheerful, Ray left a message on Andy's pager.

I turned to leave and collided with Kevin, who said, ‘Ricky Anderson's resting comfortably in front of his Mommy's TV set, waiting for your call.'

‘Cool,' I said. ‘That his telephone number?' Then I remembered another idea from Ben's two o'clock feeding, and turned back. ‘Ray, is Rosie around?'

‘I'm right here,' she said, sticking her head out from behind Kevin.

‘What are you doing?' I said. ‘Stalking Ray's office?'

‘I heard you over here and I came to ask questions.'

‘In a minute. First I want to ask you some. You heard about the mugging that interrupted the burglary at the Anderson house?'

‘Yeah, Winnie told me.'

‘About how he got dope when he was supposedly on a tightly controlled vision quest for the good of his character?'

‘She mentioned it. Do you need to know about that more than about the meth supplies?'

‘Maybe not, but right now his story keeps gnawing away at me. His father insists he sent him out clean – went through his luggage to be sure he had no controlled substances. But by some lucky chance Ricky supposedly leaned down from his horse, out there in the corn fields around Saint Charles, and found a dealer standing by the trail waiting to sell him some hemp. I have trouble imagining that. I'd like to know more specifics. How much did he pay? Was the weed in a baggie or a paper sack? How come he was carrying cash along? I thought one of the things they did on those quests was go out with nothing but the supplies in the wagon, so they'd have to fish and find roots and berries.'

‘You're really curious about this transaction, hmm? And you want me to go ask him those questions?'

‘Yes. I figure you've talked to enough dopers so you can probably tell when Ricky's telling the truth and when he's lying in his teeth, right?'

‘Oh, yeah. I can do that.' She had begun to light up slowly, like a well-banked fire.

‘Good, then do it. Go to the Anderson house, get Ricky to tell you the name of the group he rode out with and the exact location on the trail where that convenient cannabis salesman stood waiting. OK?'

‘Totally OK,' Rosie said, in full blaze now. ‘About time I had some fun.'

‘Now, Kevin,' I took hold of his elbow, ‘let's walk back to my office while you tell me how Chris and Julie are coming along with those employee lists.'

‘Jake, it's eight fifteen and I've been doing your bidding ever since I got to work.'

‘So you don't know?'

‘No, but I bet if you'd get off my back for a couple of minutes I could find out.'

‘Excellent. Call me as soon as you have that information. Today, if you think you can manage that.' I was being a pushy prick for a reason – I wanted him as far from his euphoric Monday morning mood as I could get him. Fighting mad if possible, seething to show everybody that he was smart and I was a mean unreasonable bastard. Because although Kevin Evjan relaxed is often a self-indulgent showboat, when he is in top fighting trim he can be keen as a blade. And that was the Kevin I needed now, a canny half-Norskie Mick with his teeth filed down to points.

My phone was blinking when I walked into my office. It rang while I was reaching to pick it up – and before I could say hello, Ray said ‘Jake?'

‘I just gave you a work list as long as my arm. What more could you possibly want?'

‘Clint just told me the most amazing thing – I don't know how he could have not noticed what we've all been working on all week, but somehow he didn't.'

‘Ray, what the hell are you talking about?'

‘Clint Maddox. Happened to be walking by my office and heard me asking Andy if he remembered the old guy who runs the pawnshop on the east side, and he stuck his head in and said Ike Kostas is his uncle.'

‘Ike Kostas – the Reddi-Kash man? Is Clint Maddox's uncle? Now do you see what I mean about everybody reading the log? Bring him up here, right now.'

Clint Maddox came in a few seconds later with Ray, looking the way he always looks, sandy-haired, freckled and cheerful, like the Mayberry kid grown up. It would never in one million years have occurred to me to connect him with that sad, old Greek man with a handlebar mustache who used to perch on his dusty stool under a dim bulb on cold nights, trading gossip with me about neighborhood jerk-offs while dust motes drifted down from his crowded shelves. The American melting pot sometimes sweeps some very interesting genes under the rug.

I said, ‘Sort this out for me. Ike Kostas is your mother's brother?'

‘Her uncle. My great-uncle. His father came over steerage from Greece, went to Greektown in New York (don't ask me about it, I never been there!) hopped on the Greek grapevine – that's what he called it – and kept moving west from job to job till he got to Minnesota. Ike says Grandpa Kostas meant to keep going till he got to California but it was winter and he was cold so he got an indoor job, and by spring he'd met a girl. He used to have a little shoeshine stand in the Normandy Hotel, Ike says. Before my time, I don't remember.'

‘OK. But Clint, you were right here on this floor all week and you never noticed that all the rest of us were talking about the Reddi-Kash pawnshop?'

‘Funny, huh?' He enjoyed the joke. ‘I was in my workspace working on the file for that latest gang fight at the Blue Moon Bar, and for once nobody bothered me.'

‘We never bothered you because we were spinning our wheels at top speed trying to find out what's going on in that store. And now you say your uncle owns it?'

‘Till about three months ago, when a guy came in the place and asked him what he'd take for it. Ike named a price and the stranger paid it, no questions asked. Just like that, in a couple of weeks, he was out of work for the first time in forty-four years. My Mom was so relieved. She's his only relative left in town, and she was afraid he was going to die in that shop. Are you OK, Jake?'

I realized I had started to count backward from a thousand and three by elevens. As I may have mentioned, math games help me control my impatience when people ramble on. I guess I look sort of brain-dead while I play them. I said, ‘Is he still in town?'

‘Uncle Ike? Far's I know.'

‘Would you call him, please, and ask him to come in here? We need to ask him some questions about the new owner.'

‘Sure. If I can figure out how to reach him.'

‘I thought you said he was still—'

‘He's living in somebody's RV till he decides . . . He's always lived above the shop, see. Even when Aunt Gracie was alive, they lived upstairs and went downstairs to use that old wall phone by the desk. He's very frugal and old-fashioned, so I don't suppose he knows anything about cell phones or—' He saw me starting to zone out again and said quickly, ‘I'll call my Mom. She'll know.'

‘That would be just splendid, Clint. And will you repeat ten times “From now on I will read the log every day without fail!” while you wait for her to answer?'

He nodded sheepishly, got up, and went out. I looked at Ray and said, ‘Now you see why I want everybody to read the log?'

‘Now you see what a pain in the ass it is to keep it up to date?'

‘I always knew that. God, are we really going to catch a break?'

‘I suppose that could happen, even to us. Not on the phone, though. Every number I've called today has asked me to leave a message.'

When he was gone, I finally answered my own message light. It was Lulu, the chief's secretary. She said, ‘He wants to talk to you,' in a tone that suggested I should plan how quickly I could clean out my desk. But that's Lulu for you – she thinks cordiality is for wusses.

‘Good!' I said. ‘I want to talk to him, too.' After an empty silence I said, ‘So put me through to him, will you?'

‘Not on the phone,' she said. ‘In here.' I hung up at once before she could assign me a time, like seventeen minutes from now, that would guarantee I waste seventeen minutes checking the clock. I walked briskly into his front office, strode past Lulu's space before she could block me, and stood in his doorway.

‘Ah, Jake,' he said. ‘Come in.' McCafferty looked his usual self, a big ex-jock fighting the fat of a hearty appetite, his desk covered with the piles of paper that computers never seem to make smaller. He wasn't scowling, but somebody must have stirred the pot a little, because he was kicking his desk and had a tell-tale pinkish look around the ears.

‘About Mrs Anderson,' he said.

‘She called you?'

‘Boy, did she!'

I told him about the kid who got expelled from adventure camp and found his own escapade waiting for him at home. ‘His mother thinks we shouldn't be letting these bad guys run around loose.' I repeated Ray's remark about the leash.

His grin lasted about two seconds. Then he bored in – where were we on this? I told him about our theory that the home invasions were melding with the homicide on Marvin Street. ‘Naturally we haven't shared that theory with Mrs Anderson. But if she's indignant now, she may be even angrier soon, because Rosie Doyle is on her way out there to talk to Ricky.' I recited the Mama's Boy's hinky doping story.

‘You think he's involved in this in some way?'

‘I don't see how he could be, but this case is kind of viral . . . it seems to keep spreading. So I thought – well, Ray and I decided – we'd better have Rosie go sniff around Ricky for a while, see what she thinks.' I slid that ‘Ray and I' business in to reassure the chief that the chain of command was holding up, even in difficult times. Actually, I now realized I had assigned Rosie to that job without a thought for whether Ray liked the idea or not.

‘OK,' the chief said. ‘Keep me up to date, will you? I'd like to be prepared when Mrs Anderson attacks again.' Grateful that Ricky's Mama had decided to go right to the top and bedevil the chief, I agreed to replenish his ammo regularly, and was almost out of the office when he cleared his throat behind me and said, ‘Oh, say?'

‘Yes?' I half turned back.

‘The Blue Moon Bar.'

‘Clint's got the file. He's interviewing all the people involved. It's just the usual, I think, kids and alcohol and grudge fights.'

‘I know, but keep an eye on it for me, will you? The City Council's fed up with that place, they've warned them twice and all they get is promises and more fights. They want us to let them know if we see signs of escalating violence there.' Not quite meeting my eyes, he added, ‘They're counting on to us to let them know if we think they ought to pull the liquor license.'