“What is it you want? Money? You want money?”
“Is Nora the mother of your son?”
“What the hell do you care!”
“Why did you tell the police you were here? Where were you that Saturday night?”
“I don’t have to talk to you,” he said.
A man, maybe a security cop, was sauntering toward us from the bar, alerted maybe by our shouting. Dixie saw him, strode down the planks, and talked to him. Both men regarded me for a moment, then walked off together.
I decided not to hang around. I caught a night’s sleep at a Hampton Inn and spent the following morning riding around in an Escalade SUV with a salesman, learning, among other things, that Dixie had a seven-year-old son enrolled in a local private school and that his father, who had bought him the dealership, was a wealthy supporter of an Evangelical Christian organization dedicated to the abolition of substance abuse.
Back in Maine, after a bumpy overnight flight above the rainstorms, I visited my friend Lieutenant Myron Kadish at the local police station and told him what I had learned. I didn’t mention Nora or Dixie’s son. For now, at least, Nora’s name didn’t have to go into the record.
“It’s not enough,” Mike said, leaning back in his swivel chair, fingers entwined at the back of his head, sweat patches in his armpits, children’s watercolors on the bulletin board behind him. “But let’s get Porky up here.”
Porky Johnson was the investigator assigned to my father’s case. We didn’t like each other. At least a dozen times over the last eight years he had threatened me with arrest for interfering in his investigation. Each time Mike had rescued me with a mild rebuke.
“It’s my father, Mike.”
“It’s his case. It’s police business. For the tenth time, stay out of it.”
“But he’s not doing anything!”
Annoyance flashed in Porky’s eyes when he saw me as he swaggered into the office. He didn’t greet me; I didn’t greet him. He dropped onto a hard chair against the wall and leaned back, legs stretched out, looking like a kid with a bad attitude who’d been called into the principal’s office.
“We got something,” Mike said, fingering the file his secretary had just dropped onto his desk.
Porky waited.
“This guy—” He flipped through some pages, ran his finger down a sheet. “—Benedict Hardaway you interviewed. You remember him?”
“Supposed to be a customer of the hag who ran that place. We had nothing on him. He alibied out.”
“But you remember him.”
Porky shrugged.
“His father, it says—”
“I remember him because his father’s lawyer called, accused me of threatening the kid.”
“And he said the kid was in Florida?”
With typical arrogance, Porky didn’t bother to answer. It was on the record.
“Did you even follow up on that? Why would the guy call in his lawyer?”
“We had no evidence his son was anywhere near that cottage the night of the homicide,” Porky said wearily, as though talking to an idiot. “We didn’t have anything—”
“We’ve found a witness who says Dixie Hardaway was with a woman that weekend in Cape Porpoise.”
“What witness?”
“A lawyer Duff ran into, said he rented a cottage next to Hardaway’s and saw him there with a woman every weekend, including the weekend Duff’s father was killed.”
“Give me the name,” Porky said, sitting up, pulling a notebook out of his inside jacket pocket. “I’ll check it out.” He looked at me. “Got a name for the woman?”
They were both watching me. I didn’t want to surrender Nora’s name. A child and a woman’s reputation were at risk. But it would catch up with me if I lied.
“Nora Murphy,” I said.
“I’ll check it out.” He stood. “Anything else?”
“Yeah,” Mike said, showing him the picture of Dixie Hardaway I had been given a copy of. “If this guy wasn’t important to your investigation, why’s his picture in here?”
That brought concern. “I don’t know. I didn’t put it there.”
He didn’t ask to see it. His eyes challenged Mike to call him a liar. Porky was too smart to show contempt, but it was there behind the eyes. We watched him leave the office.
“I don’t like that son of a bitch,” I said.
Mike laughed. “Nobody does.”
“But you know how that picture got into the file?”
The question amused him. “Just wanted to get his reaction,” he said, which might have been the truth, but left a bunch of untold truths dangling behind it.
“I’m not unmindful that my father was in Internal Affairs, Mike, and that it would have been out of place for him to be checking on a whorehouse. Is there a separate investigation going on?”
“You know how your father was, especially after your mother died.”
“A workaholic, you said.”
“Yes, and he was going out on little excursions that had nothing to do with the behavior of policemen, acting like a cop from the old days, comforting himself, killing time. I know you think he wouldn’t’ve been on that beach trying to close that cottage down. Okay, I can understand that. But we have no evidence — not in his notes, not in the record — that he was out there checking on a police officer.”
“But he might’ve been.”
“Sure, he might’ve been. He might’ve been suspicious as hell of someone, but there’s nothing about it in his reports.”
He knew I wanted more. I knew there was more and knew I wouldn’t get it.
“You admitted once that Porky didn’t follow up on a lot of leads—”
“Stay out of it, Duff.”
I could have sat there an hour arguing that I had a right to know, but it would only have antagonized Mike. He was already sharing a lot more information with me than I was entitled to. I let it go.
The following afternoon I was in my office putting together information about a house fire I had investigated for an insurance company when Nora Murphy called. She sounded scared. She wanted to talk.
Because I knew she’d be more comfortable at her own place than in a made-into-an-office bedroom in my loft, I said I’d be right over.
I saw Nora’s finger holding a lace curtain aside at a front window when I pulled up at the curb behind her Ford. She pointed toward the walk that led to the back door.
“My mother’s taking a nap,” she said as I entered a kitchen that smelled of old house and fresh coffee. Nora pointed to a chair at a cloth-covered kitchen table.
“Just milk,” I said, as she set a teacup and saucer in front of me. “No sugar.”
Everything in the room was old and old-fashioned, as though time had floated through the lives of these two women unnoticed. There were stains on the wallpaper, raw wood where varnish had peeled off the frame of a doorway that led past a staircase to a darkened front room.
“I’ve talked to someone about you,” she said, measuring my reaction.
“Okay.”
She rested the rim of the cup against her bottom lip, her thin upper lip retreating from the coffee as she sipped.
“Winona Dyer,” she said, across the surface of the coffee.
“A good friend.” She was a probation officer I sometimes worked for.
“I don’t know her very well,” Nora said. “She runs a kind of school for parolees. I teach there once in a while... Anyway, she said you were, as she put it, ‘good people.’”
Nice to hear.
She took several deep breaths as though fighting off the jitters.
To ease things, I asked, “Why do they call your friend ‘Dixie’? He’s not a Southerner, is he?”
“It’s just a sobriquet for Benedict.” She took another sip of coffee, stared at something across the room, tightened her lips. “He called,” she said, pain settling into her eyes. “He’s very upset.”