29
The short guy who entered the squadroom brought stench after him like a wake. He smelted like rotten bananas and Wildroot Cream Oil and cockroach shit and the inside of a city garbage truck at the end of a busy morning. He was dressed in a pair of ageing herringbone pants, a ripped grey institutional shirt, and a faded blue warmup jacket from which most of the zipper hung loose like a string of pygmy teeth. The uppers of his shoes were bound to the lowers with Krazy Glue. A pestiferous hat sat on his head. He looked like death with a hangover.
‘Oh Christ, get out of here!’ The duty sergeant cried. ‘You’re not under arrest, Hap! I swear to God! I swear it on my mother’s name! Get out of here! I want to breathe again.’
‘I want to talk to Lieutenant Bozeman.’
‘He died, Hap. It happened yesterday. We’re all really fucked up over it. So get out and let us mourn in peace.’
‘I want to talk to Lieutenant Bozeman!’ Hap said more loudly. His breath drifted fragrantly from his mouth: a juicy, fermenting mixture of pizza, Hall’s Mentholyptus lozenges, and sweet red wine.
‘He had to go to Siam on a case, Hap. So why don’t you just get out of here? Go someplace and eat a lightbulb.’
‘I want to talk to Lieutenant Bozeman and I ain’t leaving until I do!’
The duty sergeant fled the room. He returned about five minutes later with Bozeman, a thin, slightly stooped man of fifty.
‘Take him into your office, okay, Dan?’ The duty sergeant begged. ‘Won’t that be all right?’
‘Come on, Hap,’ Bozeman said, and a minute later they were in the three-sided stall that was Bozeman’s office. Bozeman prudently opened his only window and turned on his fan before sitting down. ‘Do something for you, Hap?’
‘You still on those murders, Lieutenant Bozeman?’
‘The derelicts? Yeah, I guess that’s still mine.’
‘Well, I know who greased ‘em.’
‘Is that so, Hap?’ Bozeman asked. He was busy lighting his pipe. He rarely smoked the pipe, but neither the fan nor the open window was quite enough to overwhelm Hap’s smell. Soon, Bozeman thought, the paint would begin to blister and peel. He sighed.
‘You member I tole you Sonny was talking to a guy just a day before they found him all cut up in that pipe? You member me tellin’ you that, Lieutenant Bozeman?’
‘I remember.’ Several of the winos who hung around the Salvation Army and the soup kitchen a few blocks away had told a similar story about two of the murdered derelicts, Charles ‘Sonny’ Brackett and Peter ‘Poley’ Smith. They had seen a guy hanging around, a young guy, talking to Sonny and Poley. Nobody knew for sure if Sonny had gone off with the guy, but Hap and two others claimed to have seen Poley Smith walk off with him. They had the idea that the ‘guy’ was underage and willing to spring for a bottle of musky in exchange for some juice. Several other winos claimed to have seen a ‘guy’ like that around. The description of this ‘guy’ was superb, bound to stand up in court, coming as it did from such unimpeachable sources. Young, blond, and white. What else did you need to make a bust?
‘Well, last night I was in the park,’ Hap said, ‘and I just happened to have this old bunch of newspapers—’
‘There’s a law against vagrancy in this city, Hap.’
‘I was just collectin’ ‘em up,’ Hap said righteously. ‘It’s so awful the way people litter. I was doin’ a public surface, Lieutenant A friggin’ public surface. Some of those papers was a week old.’
‘Yes. Hap.’ Bozeman said. He remembered — vaguely being quite hungry and looking forward keenly to his lunch. That time seemed long ago now.
‘Well, when I woke up, one of those papers had blew onto my face and I was looking right at the guy. Gave me a hell of a jump, I can tell you. Look. This is the guy. This guy right here.’
Hap pulled a crumpled, yellowed, water-spotted sheet of newspaper from his warmup jacket and unfolded it Bozeman leaned forward, now moderately interested. Hap put the paper on his desk so he could read the headline: 4 BOYS NAMED TO SOUTHERN CAL ALL-STARS. Below the head were four photos.
‘Which one, Hap?
Hap put a grimy finger on the picture to the far right ‘Him. It says his name is Todd Bowden.’
Bozeman looked from the picture to Hap, wondering how many of Hap’s brain-cells were still unfried and in some kind of working order after twenty years of being sauteed in a bubbling sauce of cheap wine seasoned with an occasional shot of sterno.
‘How can you be sure, Hap? He’s wearing a baseball cap in the picture. I can’t tell if he’s got blond hair or not’
‘The grin,’ Hap said. ‘It’s the way he’s grinnin’. He was grinnin’ at Poley in just that same ain’t-life-grand way when they walked off together. I couldn’t mistake that grin in a million years. That’s him, that’s the guy.’
Bozeman barely heard this last; he was thinking, and thinking hard. Todd Bowden. There was something familiar about that name. Something that bothered him even worse than the thought that a local high school hero might be going around and offing winos. He thought he had heard that name just this morning in conversation. He frowned, trying to remember where.
Hap was gone and Dan Bozeman was still trying to figure it out when Richler and Weiskopf came in… and it was the sound of their voices as they got coffee in the squadroom that finally brought it home to him.
‘Holy God,’ said Lieutenant Bozeman, and got up in a hurry.
30
Both of his parents had offered to cancel their afternoon plans — Monica at the market and Dick golfing with some business people — and stay home with him, but Todd told them he would rather be alone. He thought he would clean his rifle and just sort of think the whole thing over. Try to get it straight in his mind.
‘Todd,’ Dick said, and suddenly found he had nothing much to say. He supposed if he had been his own father, he would have at this point advised prayer. But the generations had turned, and the Bowdens weren’t much into that these days. ‘Sometimes these things happen,’ he finished lamely, because Todd was still looking at him. ‘Try not to brood about it.’
‘I’ll be all right.’ Todd said.
After they were gone, he took some rags and a bottle of Alpaca gun oil out onto the bench beside the roses. He went back into the garage and got the .30-30. He took it to the bench and broke it down, the dusty-sweet smell of the flowers lingering pleasantly in his nose. He cleaned the gun thoroughly, humming a tune as he did it, sometimes whistling a snatch between his teeth. Then he put the gun together again. He could have done it just as easily in the dark. His mind wandered free. When it came back some five minutes later, he observed that he had loaded the gun. The idea of target shooting didn’t much appeal, not today, but he had still loaded it. He told himself he didn’t know why.
Sure you do, Todd-baby. The time, so to speak, has come.
And that was when the shiny yellow Saab turned into the driveway. The man who got out was vaguely familiar to Todd, but it wasn’t until he slammed the car door and started to walk towards him that Todd saw the sneakers — low-topped Keds, light blue. Talk about Blasts from the Past; here, walking up the Bowden driveway, was Rubber Ed French, the Ked Man.