“Sam, that’s the wrong attitude, you know it is.” Frank’s tone had sharpened. “Now, I give you a break ’cause you’re on the force and all, but you better be there, no foolin’. I’d hate to make a formal report. Especially with you being on probation and all. Hate to have something like that affect your promotion.”
Sam folded his arms, flashlight in his right hand, forcing himself not to move, forcing his voice to come out slow and deliberate. “I’ll be at the damn meeting. Okay?”
Leo was grinning, a rookie cop glad to see his mentor give the new detective a hard time. “Your brother be there, Sam?”
Sam aimed his RayoVac at the young cop’s face. “You know my brother?”
“No, but I know where he is,” Leo said. “In a labor camp up in New York.”
Sam kept quiet as the wind rose up, water striking his face, keeping the flashlight beam steady on the younger man. “Then I guess he won’t be there tomorrow night, will he, Leo.”
“Hey, Sam, just a joke. That’s all. Don’t you know how to take a joke?”
“Sure, Leo. I’m an inspector. I know a lot of things. Know how to question people. How to look at a crime scene. And how to recognize jerks when I meet them.”
Frank started to say something, but Sam turned away. “Party or no Party, brother or no brother, you’re both still beat cops, and I’m an inspector. In a couple of minutes, I’m going to be nice and dry, and you’re still going to be out here in this shitty rain, doing what I told you to do. That’s what I know. Anything else?”
“Yeah,” Frank said. “Now I wish this fucking guy had been a political. At least we could get out of the rain sooner.”
“We all have wishes, don’t we, Frank,” Sam said.
CHAPTER THREE
Ten minutes later, Sam sat in the warmth of the Fish Shanty, writing up his notes while trying to ignore the smell of fried seafood, mixed in with the smoke from cheap cigarettes and cigars. Sarah was waiting at home with his supper, and woe be to him if he went home without an appetite.
He sat on a stool at the lunch counter, and off to both sides, booths filled up with shipyard workers, a scattering of locals, and sailors getting a fast meal into them before heading out for a night of whoring and drinking.
Unbidden, an empty white coffee cup was placed on the counter, and Sam looked up from his notes to see a smiling red-haired waitress wearing a black and white uniform that was just a tad too tight. Donna Fitzgerald, a few years younger than Sam, a local girl who had hung out with him and other kids years ago, having fun, raising hell, until high school and the Depression had scattered them. He smiled back.
“Having a busy night, Sam?”
“Just working a case. How are you doing, Donna?”
“Doing okay. Last night here at the Shanty, thank God.” Her smile broadened, displaying the dimple on her left cheek.
“Really?”
“Uh-huh,” she said, filling up his cup from a dented metal coffeepot. “I start tomorrow at the Rusty Hammer, in town. Oh, it’s still waitressing, but you get a good lunch crowd with the businessmen, with better tips. Here, well, most of the customers are tight with their money, saving it for… other things.” She winked and put a freckled hand on top of his. “Now, Sam, how come you never asked me out when we were in school together?”
“Oh, I don’t know, Donna. The age difference, I guess. Being in different classes.”
“Age doesn’t make much of a difference now, does it?” Her hand was still on his.
He smiled. “Guess it doesn’t.”
There was a shout from the kitchen; she took her hand away. “Time to get back to work. Good to see you, Sam… And did you hear? My man Larry is getting released from the camps in Utah. He should be back here in Portsmouth by the end of the week.”
“That’s… that’s good news, Donna.” For the briefest of moments, when her hand had touched his, there had been a little spark, a jolt.
She winked at him, and he remembered how pretty she’d been at fifteen. “Certainly is. You take care, Sam, okay?”
“I will,” he promised, and he watched her walk away, admiring the way the uniform hugged her hips and her other curves. He saw at the far end of the counter, sitting by themselves, a man and woman and small boy. They sat with cups of tea before them and nearly empty plates, a paper check on the countertop near the man’s elbow. They were well dressed and quiet. He knew the look. Refugees. French, Dutch, Brits, or Jews from everywhere else in Europe. Like lots of port cities up and down the Atlantic Coast, his hometown was bursting with refugees. The family had probably come here for a hot meal, and they were stretching out the comfort of food and being warm and dry. Sam knew they were here illegally. He didn’t care. It was somebody else’s problem, not his.
He looked down at his notes again, trying to get Donna out of his mind. Not much in his notes. Dead man, no identification, nice clothes, and a tattoo: 9 1 1 2 8 3. What the hell did that mean? A series of numbers so important they couldn’t be forgotten? Like what? A bank account? A phone number? Or if they were added in some sort of combination—or did they stand for letters? He did some scribbling on his pad, substituting each number with the corresponding letter in the alphabet, and came up with IAABHC. He tried rearranging those letters and came up with nothing. So maybe it was just the numbers.
But why go to the trouble of having them tattooed?
Sam looked up from his notebook and watched the boy at the other end of the counter whisper something to his mother. She pointed to the rear of the diner. The boy slid off his stool, then walked away from the counter, toward the bathroom. The boy was about Toby’s age. Sam wondered what it must be like to be that young and torn from your home, to live in a strange land where sometimes the people treated you nice and other times they arrested you and put you in a camp.
He took his wallet out, looked inside. Sighed. Being a cop meant a paycheck, but not much of one. Still…
For the second time this night, Sam slid out a dollar bill. He waited until the boy came back out, then let the bill fall to the linoleum. As the boy went by—Sam noted the sharp whiff of mothballs from the boy’s coat, probably a castoff from the Salvation Army—he reached out and caught his elbow. “Hey, hold on.” The child froze, and Sam felt the sudden trembling of the thin arm.
“Sir?” the boy said.
Sam pointed to the floor. “You dropped this on the way over.”
The boy—brown-eyed with olive-colored skin—shook his head gravely. Sam reached to the dirty floor, picked up the dollar bill, and pressed it into the boy’s palm. “Yes, I saw you drop it. It belongs to you.”
The boy stared, looked at Sam. Then his fingers curled around the bill and he ran back to his parents. The father started whispering furiously to the mother, but she shook her head and took the dollar bill from her boy. She picked up the check and nodded at the Shanty’s owner, Jack Tinios, who had just ambled out of the kitchen. He pocketed both the check and dollar bill, then came over to Sam, wiping his hands on a threadbare towel.
Like most of the restaurant owners in this stretch of New Hampshire, Tinios was from Greece but had moved here before the Nazis overran his country back in ’41. His real first name began with the letter J and had about a dozen syllables; he and everyone else made it easier by calling him Jack. His face was florid, his mustache damp with perspiration, and his arms and hands were thick and beefy. He had on a T-shirt and stained gray slacks, an apron around his sagging middle.
“Found a body on the tracks a hundred yards or so away,” Sam said.