“Please don’t,” Jonathan said icily. “You’ve said quite enough. Look at me, William. Tell me what you see.”
“You,” said Willie. He wasn’t in the mood for asshole games, but Jonathan Harmon did things at his own pace.
“An old man,” Jonathan corrected. “Perhaps not so old in years alone, but old nonetheless. The arthritis grows worse every year, and there are days when the pain is so bad I can scarcely move. My family is all gone but for Steven, and Steven, let us be frank, is not all that I might have hoped for in a son.” He spoke in firm, crisp tones, but Steven did not even look up from the flames. “I’m tired, William. It’s true, I did not approve of your crippled girl, or even particularly of you. We live in a time of corruption and degeneracy, when the old truths of blood and iron have been forgotten. Nonetheless, however much I may have loathed your Joan Sorenson and what she represented, I had no taste of her blood. All I want is to live out my last years in peace.”
Willie stood up. “Do me a favor and spare me the old sick man act. Yeah, I know all about your arthritis and your war wounds. I also know who you are and what you’re capable of. Okay, you didn’t kill Joanie. So who did? Him?” He jerked a thumb toward Steven.
“Steven was here with me.”
“Maybe he was and maybe he wasn’t,” Willie said.
“Don’t flatter yourself, Flambeaux, you’re not important enough for me to lie to you. Even if your suspicion was correct, my son is not capable of such an act. Must I remind you that Steven is crippled as well, in his own way?”
Willie gave Steven a quick glance. “I remember once when I was just a kid, my father had to come see you, and he brought me along. I used to love to ride your little cable car. Him and you went inside to talk, but it was a nice day, so you let me play outside. I found Steven in the woods, playing with some poor sick mutt that had gotten past your fence. He was holding it down with his foot, and pulling off its legs, one by one, just ripping them out with his bare hands like a normal kid might pull petals off a flower. When I walked up behind him, he had two off and was working on the third. There was blood all over his face. He couldn’t have been more than eight.”
Jonathan Harmon sighed. “My son is…disturbed. We both know that, so there is no sense in my denying it. He is also dysfunctional, as you know full well. And whatever residual strength remains is controlled by his medication. He has not had a truly violent episode in years. Have you, Steven?”
Steven Harmon looked back at them. The silence went on too long as he stared, unblinking, at Willie. “No,” he finally said.
Jonathan nodded with satisfaction, as if something had been settled. “So you see, William, you do us a great injustice. What you took for a threat was only an offer of protection. I was going to suggest that you move to one of our guest rooms for a time. I’ve made the same suggestion to Zoe and Amy.”
Willie laughed. “I’ll bet. Do I have to fuck Steven too or is that just for the girls?”
Jonathan flushed, but kept his temper. His futile efforts to marry off Steven to one of the Anders sisters was a sore spot. “I regret to say they declined my offer. I hope you will not be so unwise. Blackstone has certain…protections…but I cannot vouch for your safety beyond these walls.”
“Safety?” Willie said. “From what?”
“I do not know, but I can tell you this—in the dark of night, there are things that hunt the hunters.”
“Things that hunt the hunters,” Willie repeated. “That’s good, has a nice beat, but can you dance to it?” He’d had enough. He started for the door. “Thanks but no thanks. I’ll take my chances behind my own walls.” Steven made no move to stop him.
Jonathan Harmon leaned more heavily on his cane. “I can tell you how she was really killed,” he said quietly.
Willie stopped and stared into the old man’s eyes. Then he sat back down.
IT WAS ON THE SOUTH SIDE IN A NEIGHBORHOOD THAT MADE THE flats look classy, on an elbow of land between the river and that old canal that ran past the pack. Algae and raw sewage choked the canal and gave off a smell that drifted for blocks. The houses were single-story clapboard affairs, hardly more than shacks. Randi hadn’t been down here since the pack had closed its doors. Every third house had a sign on the lawn, flapping forlornly in the wind, advertising a property for sale or for rent, and at least half of those were dark. Weeds grew waist-high around the weathered rural mailboxes, and they saw at least two burned-out lots.
Years had passed, and Randi didn’t remember the number, but it was the last house on the left, she knew, next to a Sinclair station on the corner. The cabbie cruised until they found it. The gas station was boarded up; even the pumps were gone, but the house stood there much as she recalled. It had a For Rent sign on the lawn, but she saw a light moving around inside. A flashlight, maybe? It was gone before she could be sure.
The cabbie offered to wait. “No,” she said. “I don’t know how long I’ll be.” After he was gone, she stood on the barren lawn for a long time, staring at the front door, before she finally went up the walk.
She’d decided not to knock, but the door opened as she was reaching for the knob. “Can I help you, miss?”
He loomed over her, a big man, thick-bodied but muscular. His face was unfamiliar, but he was no Helander. They’d been a short, wiry family, all with the same limp, dirty blond hair. This one had hair black as wrought iron, and shaggier than the department usually liked. Five o’clock shadow gave his jaw a distinct blue-black cast. His hands were large, with short blunt fingers. Everything about him said cop.
“I was looking for the people who used to live here.”
“The family moved away when the pack closed,” he told her. “Why don’t you come inside?” He opened the door wider. Randi saw bare floors, dust, and his partner, a beer-bellied black man standing by the door to the kitchen.
“I don’t think so,” she said.
“I insist,” he replied. He showed her a gold badge pinned to the inside of his cheap gray suit.
“Does that mean I’m under arrest?”
He looked taken aback. “No. Of course not. We’d just like to ask you a few questions.” He tried to sound friendlier. “I’m Rogoff.”
“Homicide,” she said.
His eyes narrowed. “How—?”
“You’re in charge of the Sorenson investigation,” she said. She’d been given his name at the cophouse that morning. “You must not have much of a case if you’ve got nothing better to do than hang around here waiting for Roy Helander to show.”
“We were just leaving. Thought maybe he’d get nostalgic, hole up at the old house, but there’s no sign of it.” He looked at her hard and frowned. “Mind telling me your name?”
“Why?” she asked. “Is this a bust or a come-on?”
He smiled. “I haven’t decided yet.”
“I’m Randi Wade.” She showed him her license.
“Private detective,” he said, his tone carefully neutral. He handed the license back to her. “You working?”
She nodded.
“Interesting. I don’t suppose you’d care to tell me the name of your client.”
“No.”
“I could haul you into court, make you tell the judge. You can get that license lifted, you know. Obstructing an ongoing police investigation, withholding evidence.”
“Professional privilege,” she said.
Rogoff shook his head. “PIs don’t have privilege. Not in this state.”
“This one does,” Randi said. “Attorney-client relationship. I’ve got a law degree too.” She smiled at him sweetly. “Leave my client out of it. I know a few interesting things about Roy Helander I might be willing to share.”
Rogoff digested that. “I’m listening.”
Randi shook her head. “Not here. You know the automat on Courier Square?” He nodded. “Eight o’clock,” she told him. “Come alone. Bring a copy of the coroner’s report on Sorenson.”
“Most girl
s want candy or flowers,” he said.
“The coroner’s report,” she repeated firmly. “They still keep the old case records downtown?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Basement of the courthouse.”
“Good. You can stop by and do a little remedial reading on the way. It was eighteen years ago. Some kids had been turning up missing. One of them was Roy’s little sister. There were others—Stanski, Jones, I forget all the names. A cop named Frank Wade was in charge of the investigation. A gold badge, like you. He died.”
“You saying there’s a connection?”
“You’re the cop. You decide.” She left him standing in the doorway and walked briskly down the block.
STEVEN DIDN’T BOTHER TO SEE HIM DOWN TO THE FOOT OF THE bluffs. Willie rode the little funicular railway alone, morose and lost in thought. His joints ached like nobody’s business and his nose was running. Every time he got upset his body fell to pieces, and Jonathan Harmon had certainly upset him. That was probably better than killing him, which he’d half expected when he found Steven in his car, but still….
He was driving home along 13th Street when he saw the bar’s neon sign on his right. Without thinking, he pulled over and parked. Maybe Harmon was right and maybe Harmon had his ass screwed on backwards, but in any case Willie still had to make a living. He locked up the Caddy and went inside.
It was a slow Tuesday night, and Squeaky’s was empty. It was a workingman’s tavern. Two pool tables, a shuffleboard machine in back, booths along one wall. Willie took a bar stool. The bartender was an old guy, hard and dry as a stick of wood. He looked mean. Willie considered ordering a banana daiquiri, just to see what the guy would say, but one look at that sour, twisted old face cured the impulse, and he asked for a boilermaker instead. “Ed working tonight?” he asked when the bartender brought the drinks.
“Only works weekends,” the man said, “but he comes in most nights, plays a little pool.”
“I’ll wait,” Willie said. The shot made his eyes water. He chased it down with a gulp of beer. He saw a pay phone back by the men’s room. When the bartender gave him his change, he walked back, put in a quarter, and dialed Randi. She wasn’t home; he got her damned machine. Willie hated phone machines. They’d made life a hell of a lot more difficult for collection agents, that was for sure. He waited for the tone, left Randi an obscene message, and hung up.
The men’s room had a condom dispenser mounted over the urinals. Willie read the instructions as he took a leak. The condoms were intended for prevention of disease only, of course, even though the one dispensed by the left-hand slot was a French tickler. Maybe he ought to install one of these at home, he thought. He zipped up, flushed, washed his hands.
When he walked back out into the taproom, two new customers stood over the pool table, chalking up cues. Willie looked at the bartender, who nodded. “One of you Ed Juddiker?” Willie asked.
Ed wasn’t the biggest—his buddy was as large and pale as Moby Dick—but he was big enough, with a real stupid-mean look on his face. “Yeah?”
“We need to talk about some money you owe.” Willie offered him one of his cards.
Ed looked at the hand, but made no effort to take the card. He laughed. “Get lost,” he said. He turned back to the pool table. Moby Dick racked up the balls and Ed broke.
That was all right, if that was the way he wanted to play it. Willie sat back on the bar stool and ordered another beer. He’d get his money one way or the other. Sooner or later Ed would have to leave, and then it would be his turn.
WILLIE STILL WASN’T ANSWERING HIS PHONE. RANDI HUNG UP THE pay phone and frowned. He didn’t have an answering machine either, not Willie Flambeaux, that would be too sensible. She knew she shouldn’t worry. The hounds of hell don’t punch time clocks, as he’d told her more than once. He was probably out running down some deadbeat. She’d try again when she got home. If he still didn’t answer, then she’d start to worry.
The automat was almost empty. Her heels made hollow clicks on the old linoleum as she walked back to her booth and sat down. Her coffee had gone cold. She looked idly out the window. The digital clock on the State National Bank said 8:13. Randi decided to give him ten more minutes.
The red vinyl of the booth was old and cracking, but she felt strangely comfortable here, sipping her cold coffee and staring off at the Iron Spire across the Square. The automat had been her favorite restaurant when she was a little girl. Every year on her birthday she would demand a movie at the Castle and dinner at the automat, and every year her father would laugh and oblige. She loved to put the nickels in the coin slots and make the windows pop open, and fill her father’s cup out of the old brass coffee machine with all its knobs and levers.
Sometimes you could see disembodied hands through the glass, sticking a sandwich or a piece of pie into one of the slots, like something from an old horror movie. You never saw any people working at the automat, just hands; the hands of people who hadn’t paid their bills, her father once told her, teasing. That gave her the shivers, but somehow made her annual visits even more delicious, in a creepy kind of way. The truth, when she learned it, was much less interesting. Of course, that was true of most everything in life.
These days, the automat was always empty, which made Randi wonder how the floor could possibly stay so filthy, and you had to put quarters into the coin slots beside the little windows instead of nickels. But the banana cream pie was still the best she’d ever had, and the coffee that came out of those worn brass spigots was better than anything she’d ever brewed at home.
She was thinking of getting a fresh cup when the door opened and Rogoff finally came in out of the rain. He wore a heavy wool coat. His hair was wet. Randi looked out at the clock as he approached the booth. It said 8:17. “You’re late,” she said.
“I’m a slow reader,” he said. He excused himself and went to get some food. Randi watched him as he fed dollar bills into the change machine. He wasn’t bad-looking if you liked the type, she decided, but the type was definitely cop.
Rogoff returned with a cup of coffee, the hot beef sandwich with mashed potatoes, gravy, and overcooked carrots, and a big slice of apple pie.
“The banana cream is better,” Randi told him as he slid in opposite her. “I like apple,” he said, shaking out a paper napkin.
“Did you bring the coroner’s report?”
“In my pocket.” He started cutting up the sandwich. He was very methodical, slicing the whole thing into small bite-sized portions before he took his first taste. “I’m sorry about your father.”
“So was I. It was a long time ago. Can I see the report?”
“Maybe. Tell me something I don’t already know about Roy Helander.”
Randi sat back. “We were kids together. He was older, but he’d been left back a couple of times, till he wound up in my class. He was a bad kid from the wrong side of the tracks and I was a cop’s daughter, so we didn’t have much in common…until his little sister disappeared.”
“He was with her,” Rogoff said.
“Yes he was. No one disputed that, least of all Roy. He was fifteen, she was eight. They were walking the tracks. They went off together, and Roy came back alone. He had blood on his dungarees and all over his hands. His sister’s blood.”
Rogoff nodded. “All that’s in the file. They found blood on the tracks too.”
“Three kids had already vanished. Jessie Helander made four. The way most people looked at it, Roy had always been a little strange. He was solitary, inarticulate, used to hook school and run off to some secret hideout he had in the woods. He liked to play with the younger kids instead of boys his own age. A degenerate from a bad family, a child molester who had actually raped and killed his own sister, that was what they said. They gave him all kinds of tests, decided he was deeply disturbed, and sent him away to some kiddy snakepit. He was still a juvenile, after all. Case closed, and the city breathed easier.”
“If you don’t have any more than th
at, the coroner’s report stays in my pocket,” Rogoff said.
“Roy said he didn’t do it. He cried and screamed a lot, and his story wasn’t coherent, but he stuck to it. He said he was walking along ten feet or so behind his sister, balancing on the rails and listening for a train, when a monster came out of a drainage culvert and attacked her.”
“A monster,” Rogoff said.
“Some kind of big shaggy dog, that was what Roy said. He was describing a wolf. Everybody knew it.”
“There hasn’t been a wolf in this part of the country for over a century.”
“He described how Jessie screamed as the thing began to rip her apart. He said he grabbed her leg, tried to pull her out of its jaws, which would explain why he had her blood all over him. The wolf turned and looked at him and growled. It had red eyes, burning red eyes, Roy said, and he was real scared, so he let go. By then Jessie was almost certainly dead. It gave him one last snarl and ran off, carrying the body in its jaws.” Randi paused, took a sip of coffee. “That was his story. He told it over and over, to his mother, the police, the psychologists, the judge, everyone. No one ever believed him.”
“Not even you?”
“Not even me. We all whispered about Roy in school, about what he’d done to his sister and those other kids. We couldn’t quite imagine it, but we knew it had to be horrible. The only thing was, my father never quite bought it.”
“Why not?”
She shrugged. “Instincts, maybe. He was always talking about how a cop had to go with his instincts. It was his case, he’d spent more time with Roy than anyone else, and something about the way the boy told the story had affected him. But it was nothing that could be proved. The evidence was overwhelming. So Roy was locked up.” She watched his eyes as she told him. “A month later, Eileen Stanski vanished. She was six.”