The bell rang, I snapped out of my blue screen stupor, grabbed my wallet, and headed for the door. I glanced at my watch-shoot, twenty-three minutes. When I opened the door I saw Mike O’Malley standing there holding a pizza box and a paper bag.
“What are you doing here?”
“Delivering your pizza,” he said, inspecting the receipt that was taped to the top of the box. “I thought you ate healthy food. Cake for lunch the other day and now this. Has life in Springfield totally corrupted you?”
“What have you done with the pizza man?” I asked, looking down the driveway.
“Ran him off the road and stole his pie.” He waited for me to at least smile, but I was too tired. “You used to have a sense of humor. I stopped him for speeding, around the corner.”
“And he bribed you with my dinner?”
“Of course not. Technically, I’m off the clock, so he got away with a strongly worded warning. I paid for your pizza and this swill that you’re planning to drink. Can I come in or are we going to let this pie get cold? Truce?”
I should have just tipped him and sent him on his way after his less-than-polite exit at lunch, but there was something about him that always made me open the door and invite him in.
Of course, he was one of the few single men I knew in Springfield between the ages of eighteen and seventy-five. It could have been that. Or maybe it was something else. He was a good man: he looked after his elderly father, he had a dog, he brought me food. He had all the outward signs of normalcy that usually appealed to women, but maybe that was it. I didn’t ordinarily gravitate toward normal. I wanted the tortured artist. The driven genius. The explorer with just one more mountain to climb. And here I was, once again trying to picture this pale, thinning-on-top suburban policeman naked on a fur rug in front of a crackling fire. There was no denying it-we had the worst timing since that couple on the Titanic.
“What are you smiling at?” he said.
“Nothing. When did you get so health conscious?” I said, shaking off the image. I shooed him in and led him past the door to my office. He peeked in.
“You’re working late.”
“Actually I’m being interrupted late. Is this supposed to make up for stiffing me at lunch?”
“Yes.”
We went upstairs to the kitchen and I dropped the greasy cardboard box on a round oak table I’d scored at a flea market the previous summer. The last time Mike O’Malley was here, my kitchen had been ransacked, with all the drawers and cabinets open and their contents strewn about. Despite that, he knew where everything was located. He set the table as if he lived there and we sat down to dinner every night.
“I think the garlic powder is downstairs.”
“No worries, I can do without it.”
We were being very careful with other, not wanting to get into another of our volatile and incomprehensible dustups. The tiptoeing generally lasted about three minutes. According to my kitchen clock, we were at two minutes and forty-five seconds.
“What were you doing around the corner?” I asked. “Am I under surveillance?” I meant it as a joke, but it came out sounding too snippy. He let it slide.
“No. The pizza delivery boy was speeding on Longview Road. I just happened to catch up with him here. Fortuitous, since I’m now off duty and strangely in the mood for one of our pizza dates.” He separated a slice and deftly wiggled it away from the others without adding too much extra cheese. Was this a date?
We agreed that drivers on my street were reckless fools and it was only a matter of time before some poor soul, driver or pedestrian, was sent flying into the wetlands, never to be seen again, body parts scattered by foraging critters. We discussed the renovation of the one and only Chinese restaurant in a twenty-mile radius and the latest exhibit on Polish immigrants at the historical society. What was next? The weather? The merits of the Mets’ newest acquisition? Caroline was the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room with us, whether we said her name out loud or not. As usual with O’Malley, I blinked first.
“I’m sorry if you think I asked you to lunch only to pump you for information.”
“Well, didn’t you?”
“Grant Sturgis asked me to find the tipster. That’s the digging I said I’d do, and it kind of backfired.”
O’Malley picked the pepperoni disks off his slice and stacked them like poker chips in one corner of the cardboard box. “I take it that was before he thought it was you who informed on her?”
“Yes, wise guy. Before everyone thought it was me.” Stay calm, I told myself. If you’re going to ask someone for his help, try not to call him names first. “I know it’s not your case, but isn’t there anything you can tell me?”
O’Malley added to what I’d already learned. Caroline was arrested for attempting to sell drugs to an undercover cop. That much anyone with a newspaper or an Internet connection knew. Her attorney claimed it was entrapment-the cop was a young woman and they were at a party. Apparently, Caroline offered the woman a joint and the woman insisted on paying. The next day the police came to the football field and arrested her in the middle of practice.
“I don’t know anything about the law, but that sounds like a trap to me.”
“Harder drugs were found in Caroline’s gym bag, as was forty-seven thousand dollars in cash. She’d been under surveillance for some time. Seems like half the student body was on speed at one time or another, and what better way to distribute than through one of the most popular girls in school?”
I couldn’t believe it. Our Caroline?
“But why would she do it?”
“There could have been any number of reasons-money, wanting to look cooler than the other kids, boredom. I’m a bachelor. I don’t know why kids do the things they do. I’m just telling you what I heard and read.”
“Where?” I asked.
In the police report. O’Malley had seen it and I needed to. I didn’t know about the past, but police records were public these days. In Springfield, all I’d have to do was walk into the station house and ask for it, like the mother of that unruly thirteen-year-old. A decades-old report in another state where I’d never been and didn’t know anyone was going to be harder. Certainly for a gardener, but maybe not for a journalist. I thought of asking Lucy for help, but I’d have to tread carefully. In this instance, she was one of them. I didn’t want her contributing to the feeding frenzy surrounding the Sturgises, although it was naive to imagine I could stop it.
At least now I had something tangible to look for, and who knew, maybe my online research would turn something up. I couldn’t wait to hustle O’Malley out of the house and get back to the computer.
I inhaled three slices of pizza and washed them down with copious amounts of diet soda guaranteed to ruin my teeth and the lining of my stomach.
“You were hungry,” O’Malley said, working on slice number two, pacing himself and peeling off excess strands of cheese.
Not really, but I hoped that if the food was gone, O’Malley would leave soon after. He finally took the hint.
“I can’t stop you from looking for this person, but I don’t see what good it will do anyone.”
He didn’t, but I did. It was my reputation and my new life, almost as much as it was Caroline’s.
Soon after Mike left I resumed my Facebook research. The Ms were promising because there were just so many, but no one looked remotely like the trucker I’d seen at the diner. Nothing at all until the Ws, someone named Jeff Warren. I’d assumed the name JW referred to his first and middle names. The picture he posted was of a Tigers shirt and hat. I reedited my Facebook profile and became a Detroit Tigers fan. Then I friended Jeff. Within four hours he’d confirmed me as a friend and I learned that he worked for Hutchinson Shipping and was currently on some mind “making a dead-head run on some mind-numbing stretch of highway between Maine and North Carolina.” Which would mean he’d recently driven through Connecticut.