I took the piece of paper and did a little rough addition on the numbers. The total didn’t come to much: $100, give or take some change. Then I realized that, while it wasn’t much to me, $100 could get a man beaten to a pulp if he fell in with the wrong company. It might even be enough to bring death upon him.

‘What did he want the money for?’ I said.

‘He was looking for his daughter. Told me she used to be a junkie, but she was straightening out. Last he heard she was up in Bangor looking for work, and seems like she found some. I think—’

He paused.

‘Go on.’

‘I think she’d come up here because she wanted to be near him, but not so near that it would be easy for him,’ said Shaky. ‘She wanted him to come find her. Jude had abandoned her momma and her way back, and he knew that the girl blamed him for everything that had gone wrong in her life since then. She was angry at him. She might even have hated him, but when there’s blood involved love and hate aren’t so different, or they get all mixed up so’s you can’t tell one from the other. I guess he was considering moving up to Bangor and having done with it. But Jude didn’t like Bangor. It’s not like here. They tore the heart out of that city when they built the mall, and it never recovered, not the way Portland did. It’s a bad place to be homeless, too – worse than here. But Jude wanted to make it up to the girl for what he’d done, and he couldn’t do it from Portland.’

‘How long did it take you and Jude to get the money together?’

‘A week. Would have taken him a month if he’d been working alone. I ought to get me a job as a debt collector.’

He used the forefinger of his right hand to pull the scrap of paper back to him.

‘So my question is—’ he began, but I finished it for him.

‘Why would a man who had just spent a hard week calling in his debts, and who is fixated on mending his relationship with his daughter, hang himself in a basement just when he’s managed to get some cash together?’

‘That’s right.’

‘So, what: he was going to give his daughter the money, or use it to move to Bangor?’

‘Neither,’ said Shaky. ‘If I understood him right, I think he was hoping to hire you to find her.’

He seemed to remember that he still had his coffee. He drank half of what remained in one gulp, and turned an eye to the muffin on my plate. I pushed it towards him.

‘Go ahead,’ I said. ‘I’m not as hungry as I thought.’

We spoke for an hour, sometimes about Jude, sometimes about Shaky himself. He’d served in the military, and that was how he had come by his bad arm: it was nerve damage of some kind caused by a jeep tire exploding.

‘Not even a proper wound,’ as Shaky told me. ‘I used to lie about it to make myself sound brave, but it just don’t seem worth the effort no more.’

At the end of our conversation, two things were clear to me: Shaky knew Jude better than almost anyone else in Portland, and he still didn’t really know him at all. Jude had only shared the barest of information about his daughter with Shaky. To Shaky, it seemed as though the more troubles his friend encountered, the more reluctant he was to seek help with them, and that was how men ended up dying alone.

I bought Shaky another maple latte before I left, and he gave me instructions for how best to reach him. As with Jude, he used the Amistad Community and the good folk at the Portland Help Center for such communications. I then drove to South Portland to meet my prospective client at her home, and she gave me details of where her husband was working, where he was living, just how much of an asshole he now was and just how much of an asshole he didn’t used to be. She didn’t want to involve the police for her children’s sake, and she hated her lawyer. I was the least bad of the remaining options, although she did ask if I knew someone who would break her husband’s legs once I had made it clear that this wasn’t something I was prepared to take on, or not without a better reason.

Since I had nothing else to do, I went to visit the errant husband at his office in Back Cove, where he was a partner in some hole-in-the-wall financial advice and investment business. His name was Lane Stacey, and he didn’t look pleased when he discovered that I wasn’t there to give him money to invest. He did some hollering and grandstanding before it became clear to him that I wasn’t about to be intimidated back on to the street. A calm demeanor always helped in these situations; calmness, and having a good forty pounds on the man on the other side of the argument.

Like the Bentley-owning Hyram P. Taylor, Stacey wasn’t a bad guy. He wasn’t even as priapic as Hyram. He was lonely, he missed his wife and kids and he didn’t think anybody else would be willing to have him. His wife had just fallen out of love with him, and he, to a lesser degree, with her, although he had been more willing to keep things going as they were in order to secure a roof over his head and have someone around to nurse him when he caught cold, and maybe sleep with him occasionally. Eventually I ended up having lunch with him at the Bayou Kitchen, where I explained to him the importance of not stalking his wife, and of paying to support his children. He, in turn, confessed he’d been hoping to force her to take him back by starving her – and his kids – into submission, which went some ways toward explaining why his fears that he might not find anyone else to put up with him had some basis in truth. By the time lunch was over I’d secured some guarantees about his future behavior, and he’d tried to sell me on a short-term bond so risky that it was little more than a personal recession waiting to happen. He took my rejection on the chin. He was, he said, ‘optimistic’ about the country’s financial future, and saw only great times ahead for his business.

‘Why is that?’ I asked.

‘Everybody loves the promise of a quick buck,’ he said, ‘and the sucker store never runs out of stock.’

He had a point.

After all, I’d just paid for lunch.

12

A couple of calls gave me the name of the detective whose name graced the file on Jude’s case. It came as both good and bad news. The good news was that I knew the detective personally. The bad news was that I had once kind of dated her. Her name was Sharon Macy, and ‘dated’ might have been too strong a word for the history between us. She’d come into the Bear a couple of times when I was bartending, and we’d had dinner once at Boda on Congress, which was not far from her apartment on Spruce Street. It had ended with a short kiss, and an agreement that it might be nice to do it again sometime soon. I wanted to, and I think she did too, but somehow life got in the way, and then Jackie Garner died.

Sharon Macy was an interesting character, assuming you were content to accept the Chinese definition of ‘interesting’ as resembling a kind of curse. Some years earlier, she was temporarily stationed on an island called Sanctuary out in Casco Bay when a group of hired guns with a grudge came calling, and a lot of shooting had resulted. Macy came through unscathed, but she blooded herself along the way, and had acquired no small degree of respect as a cop with clean kills. As a result she hadn’t been destined to stay in uniform for long, and no one was surprised by her move to detective. She worked in the Portland PD’s Criminal Invesigation Division, and was also heavily involved in the Southern Maine Violent Crimes Task Force, which investigated serious incidents in the region.

Macy’s cell phone was off when I called her number, and I didn’t bother to leave a message yet. She wasn’t at her apartment when I went by, but a neighbor said that she had gone to drop off her laundry at the eco place on Danforth. The guy at the laundromat confirmed that she’d been in, and said that he thought she might be waiting in Ruski’s while he did a fast wash-and-fold for her.