Old Prof McGovern, Ralph thought. How strange that sounds.
“Okay-John it is. And both of you guys can call me Ralph. As far as I’m concerned, Mr. Roberts is always going to be a Broadway play starring Henry Fonda.”
“You got it,” Mike Hanlon said. “And take care of yourself.”
“I’ll try,” he said, then stopped in his tracks. “Listen, I have something to thank you for, quite apart from your help today.”
Mike raised his eyebrows. “Oh?”
“Yes. You hired Helen Deepneau. She’s one of my favorite people, and she desperately needed the job. So thanks.”
Mike smiled and nodded. “I’ll be happy to accept the bouquets, but she’s the one who did me the favor, really. She’s actually overqualified for the job, but I think she wants to stay in town.”
“So do I, and you’ve helped make it possible. So thanks again.”
Mike grinned, “My pleasure.”
As Ralph and Leydecker stepped out behind the circulation desk, Leydecker said: “I guess that honeycomb must have really turned the trick, huh?”
Ralph at first had absolutely no idea what the big detective was talking about-he might as well have asked a question in Esperanto.
“Your insomnia,” Leydecker said patiently. “You got past it, right? Must have-you look a gajillion times better than on the day I first met you.”
“I was a little stressed that day,” Ralph said. He found himself remembering the old Billy Crystal routine about Fernando-the one that went Listen, dahling, don’t be a schnook,-it’s not how you feel, it’s how you look! And you… look… MAHVELLOUS!
“And you’re not today? C’mon, Ralph, this is me. So give-was it the honeycomb?”
Ralph appeared to think this over, then nodded. “Yes, I guess that must have been what did it.”
“Fantastic! Didn’t I tell you?” Leydecker said cheerfully as they pushed their way out into the rainy afternoon.
They were waiting for the light at the top of Up-Mile Hill when Ralph turned to Leydecker and asked what the chances were of nailing Ed as Charlie Pickering’s accomplice. “Because Ed put him up to it,” he said. “I know that as well as I know that’s Strawford Park over there.”
“You’re probably right,” Leydecker replied, “but don’t kid yourself-the chances of nailing him as an accomplice are shitty.
They wouldn’t be very good even if the County Prosecutor wasn’t as conservative as Dale Cox.”
“Why not?”
“First of all, I doubt if we’ll be able to show any deep connection between the two men. Second, guys like Pickering tend to be fiercely loyal to the people they identify as ’friends,” because they have so few of them-their worlds are mostly made up of enemies. Under interrogation I don’t think Pickering will repeat much or any of what he told you while he was tickling your ribs with his hunting knife.
Third, Ed Deepneau is no fool. Crazy, yes-maybe crazier than Pickering, when you get right down to it-but not a fool. He won’t admit anything.”
Ralph nodded. It was exactly his opinion of Ed.
“If Pickering did say that Deepneau ordered him to find you and waste you-on the grounds that you were one of these baby-killing, fetus-snatching Centurions-Ed would just smile at us and nod and say he was sure that poor Charlie had told us that, that poor Charlie might even believe that, but that didn’t make it true.”
The light turned green. Leydecker drove through the intersection, then bent left onto Harris Avenue. The windshield wipers thumped and flapped. Strawford Park, on Ralph’s right, looked like a wavery mirage through the rain streaming down the passenger window, “And what could we say to that?” Leydecker asked. “The fact is, Charlie Pickering has got a long history of mental instability-when it comes to nuthatches, he’s made the grand tour: juniper Hill, Acadia Hospital, Bangor Mental Health Institute… if it’s a place where they have free electrical treatments and jackets that button up the back, Charlie’s most likely been there.
These days his hobby-horse is abortion. Back in the late sixties he had a bug up his ass about Margaret Chase Smith. He wrote letters to everyone-Derry P.D the State Police, the FBI-claiming she was a Russian spy. He had the evidence, he said.”
“Good God, that’s incredible.”
“Nope; that’s Charlie Pickering, and I bet there’s a dozen like him in every city this size in the United States. Hell, all over the world.”
Ralph’s hand crept to his left side and touched the square of bandage there. His fingers traced the butterfly shape beneath the gauze.
What he kept remembering was Pickering’s magnified brown eyeshow they had looked terrified and ecstatic at the same time. He was already having trouble believing the man to whom those eyes belonged had almost killed him, and he was afraid that by tomorrow the whole thing would seem like one of the so-called breakthrough dreams James A.
Hall’s book talked about.
“The bitch of it is, Ralph, a nut like Charlie Pickering makes the perfect tool for a guy like Deepneau. Right now our little wifebeating buddy has got about a t(on of deniability.”
Leydecker turned into the driveway next to Ralph’s building and parked behind a large Oldsmobile with blotches of rust on the trunklid and a very old sticker-DUKAKIS ’88-on the bumper.
“Who’s that brontosaurus belong to? The Prof?”
“No,” Ralph said. “That’s my brontosaurus.”
Leydecker gave him an unbelieving look as he shoved the gearshift lever of his stripped-to-the-bone Police Department Chevy into Park.
“If you own a car, how come you’re out standing around the bus stop in the pouring rain? Doesn’t it run?”
“It runs,” Ralph said a little stiffly, not wanting to add that he could be wrong about that; he hadn’t had the Olds on the road in over two months. “And I wasn’t standing around in the pouring rain; it’s a bus shelter, not a bus stop. It has a roof. Even a bench inside. No cable TV, true, but wait till next year.”
“Still…” Leydecker said, gazing doubtfully at the Olds.
“I spent the last fifteen years of my working life driving a desk, but before that I was a salesman. For twenty-five years or so I averaged eight hundred miles a week. By the time I settled in at the printshop, I didn’t care if I ever sat behind the wheel of a car again.
And since my wife died, there hardly ever seems to be any reason to drive. The bus does me just fine for most things.”
All true enough; Ralph saw no need to add that he had increasingly come to mistrust both his reflexes and his short vision. A year ago, a kid of about seven had chased his football out into Harris Avenue as Ralph was coming back from the movies, and although he had been going only twenty miles an hour, Ralph had thought for two endless, horrifying seconds that he was going to run the little boy down. He hadn’t, of course-it hadn’t even been close, not really-but since then he thought he could count the number of times he’d driven the Olds on both hands.
He saw no need to tell John that, either.
“Well, whatever does it for you,” Leydecker said, giving the Olds a vague wave. “How does one o’clock tomorrow afternoon sound for that statement, Ralph? I come on at noon, so I could kind of look over your shoulder. Bring you a coffee, if you wanted one.”
“That sounds fine. And thanks for the ride home.”
“No problem. One other thing…”
Ralph had started to open the car door. Now he closed it again and turned back to Leydecker, eyebrows raised.
Leydecker looked down at his hands, shifted uncomfortably behind the wheel, cleared his throat, then looked up again. “I just wanted to say that I think you’re a class act,” Leydecker said. “Lots of guys forty years younger than you would have finished today’s little adventure in the hospital. Or the morgue.”
“My guardian angel was looking out for me, I guess,” Ralph said, thinking of how surprised he had been when he realized what the round shape in his jacket pocket was.