“You got something to say, say it.”
Brindle took a step closer. “You know what my take is on this?”
“I’m sure whatever it is, it’ll be brilliant.”
“Looks to me like you picked up one girl, thinking you could have a little fun, and then when a different girl got into the car, you thought ‘Hey, what the hell’s this? These girls trying to mess with me? Play some kind of trick on me?’ Did that piss you off? You were thinking of getting it on with the first girl, that she was just your type, and then the Rodomski girl gets in the car and you’re all, ‘Shit, that’s not what I wanted. I wanted some of that other stuff.’”
Brindle stopped, waiting for a response. Maybe he wanted me to hit him. The satisfaction would have been too short-lived. When I had no reply, he said, “You want to hear the rest of this?”
“Knock yourself out.”
“You got angry with this Hanna girl, and she wanted to get out of the car, like you said, but when she ran, you went after her. Ripped the wig off her head. I can see it right there in your car.”
“Yeah,” I said. “All my training and years working as a cop, and then a detective, have taught me the best place to hide incriminating evidence is on the backseat of your own car.”
I sighed. This very long night was catching up with me, and I still had, as the wise poet once said, miles to go before I slept.
“You’re going to have to find another way home, Mr. Weaver,” Brindle said. “Officer Haines has informed me that we’re to seize your car and search it and I think that’s a pretty good idea.”
“For Christ’s sake,” I said under my breath. I said to Haines, “You telling me Augie actually asked that my car be taken in?”
So, no more Mr. Nice Guy. My brother-in-law was through cutting me some slack.
Haines turned his hands palms up in a what-can-I-tell-you gesture. “I didn’t actually hear it from him directly.”
“Who then?”
“I got the message through Marv. Uh, Officer Quinn.”
So Augie told Quinn, and Quinn told Haines, and Haines told Brindle, who was clearly enjoying himself.
He said, “The way it looks to me, you’re the last one who saw that girl alive. You’re the one who had the opportunity. The other thing I figure, given the personal tragedy you’ve had lately, things are probably pretty bad on the home front, and chances are you’re not getting any. So—”
“Come on, man,” Haines said to Brindle.
Brindle shot him a look and kept going. “So, a nice ripe thing like that, it’d be hard to pass up.”
It took everything I had.
“But then,” Brindle continued, “you had to shut her up, right? She couldn’t go around telling people what you’d done to her.”
I got out my phone.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Calling a cab,” I said. “You said I needed to find another way home, so I take it you’re not arresting me.”
Not yet, anyway.
Neither of them said anything. I could see the disappointment in Brindle’s eyes, that I hadn’t taken the bait, that he’d missed out on a chance to slap some cuffs on me for assaulting an officer. He would never know how close he’d come.
I put the phone to my ear. “Yeah, hi, I’m at Iggy’s out on Danbury and need a lift home. Five minutes? No problem. Name’s Weaver.” I ended the call and slipped the phone back into my jacket. “On their way,” I said, digging out my keys. “Don’t want you having to smash the windshield or anything.” I got my house key off the ring, then tossed the car keys at Brindle. He didn’t react in time, fumbled them comically, and they landed at his feet.
His face turned red with fury and embarrassment. He glared at me, then at the keys on the pavement, then at me again.
He’d have to shoot me before I picked them up.
“I got it,” Haines said, leaning over, snatching them up, and dropping them in Brindle’s open palm.
It would have been, I had to admit, a stupid thing to die over.
Twenty-seven
As promised, a cab was there in five minutes. Haines and Brindle were still standing by their cruiser, babysitting my car until a truck came to tow it away. I gave them a friendly wave as we pulled out of the parking lot.
“Wonder what the cops are up to,” the woman behind the wheel said as I got buckled into the backseat.
“Hard to say.”
“You know what I bet?”
“What?”
“Bet that car’s full of drugs.”
“You never know,” I said, and suddenly had a dark thought. I knew the car had no drugs in it now. I hoped that was still the case when the tow truck arrived.
“So where we off to?”
I gave her Bert Sanders’ address.
“The mayor’s place?” my driver said.
“Yeah.”
“Driven him home a couple of times when he wasn’t exactly fit to get behind the wheel. Not that I’m passing judgment. That happens to all of us once in a while. I’m just glad the mayor’s got the sense not to drive home pissed, you know? I like that in my elected officials.”
We pulled up in front of the house five minutes later. “I might be a while,” I said. There was already seven bucks on the meter, so I handed her a twenty to ensure that she’d hang in.
“Take your time,” she said. “I might catch a couple winks. Just don’t scare the bejesus out of me when you get back if I’m asleep.”
There was a five-year-old black Buick in the driveway this time and what looked like one light on, upstairs. Aside from Sanders’ expensive suits, that car and this modest house spoke to an unassuming, middle-class lifestyle. There’s a perception among some that all mayors live in mansions, that they’re chauffeured about in Lincoln Town Cars. Some actually do. An old friend of mine from Promise Falls used to drive that town’s former mayor around in one. But the reality is, in America small towns are more often than not run by regular people. They sit on school boards, town councils, water commissions. These are our neighbors, the folks we run into at Walmart and the DMV and the Exxon station.
As small-town mayors went, Sanders was undoubtedly more intellectual than most. A former college professor, an author. But he’d persuaded voters he was one of them, still enough of a regular guy to be viewed as one of their own, although tonight’s town hall meeting suggested fewer of them thought of him that way than used to. I hadn’t voted for him, but I hadn’t voted for anyone, in any election, in years. After a while, you stop wanting to reward liars.
They’re all liars.
Sanders hadn’t won me over in our face-to-face meeting, either. I wasn’t expecting our second encounter to go any better.
I jammed my thumb onto the doorbell and kept it there. The chimes just inside the door rang incessantly. Ding-dong. Ding-dong. Ding-dong. Ding-dong.
Peering through the window, I saw a man come down the stairs, silhouetted by the light filtering down from the second floor. He was tying the sash of a bathrobe and shouting, “Okay! Okay!”
The front porch light came on over my head, and a second later I heard a bolt being turned and the door swung open.
“Jesus Christ,” he said, a lock of his hair sticking out sideways. He’d clearly been in bed. “You again. You have any idea what the hell time it is?”
I placed my palm on the door as he attempted to shut it. “We need to talk again.”
“Get off my porch.”
I pushed harder until I had the door open wide enough to step in.
“I told you, get out,” he said.
“I guess you haven’t heard,” I said. “There’s been what you might call a development in this little switcheroo Claire and Hanna pulled last night.”