Now, at last, he thought, they could call it a day.
They were stopped at a light when his cell phone rang.
“Hi — it’s Polly Logan. If you come by right now, I can show you the tape.”
“Now? It’s after—”
“I do know how to tell time, Frank. You said I could call anytime, and it’s now or never. I’m not sure how my station manager will feel about my showing this to you, so I’d rather not have a lot of folks around while you’re looking at it — all right? You know where the station is?”
“Yes.”
She gave him directions to a back entrance. “And don’t tell the doofus at the gate that you’re a cop. He’s a wannabe, and he’ll keep you there all night. Besides—”
“The station manager.”
“Right.”
He tried calling Irene’s cell phone number, but got her voice mail. He hung up without leaving a message. He sighed in frustration. She probably didn’t have it with her — she disliked it and had only recently agreed to carry one at all.
This was not the time to complain to her about it, he decided.
He pulled alongside the Jeep at the next intersection and motioned to Irene to roll down her window.
“I’ll make sure you get home safely, but then I’ll have to take off. I’ve got to meet with someone on the other side of town.”
“They’ve given you another case?”
“No, more of the same. This just worked out to be the only time I could get together with this person.”
“‘Person,’ huh? Must be a woman. If you’re going in the other direction, don’t worry about following me home. I’ll be okay.”
He found himself unable to resist saying, “I’d feel better if you had your cell phone with you.”
She shrugged. “I’ll be okay,” she repeated, a little impatiently. When she saw his reluctance to let it go, she added, “Besides, Big Brother, you can ask the comm center to track the Jeep’s LoJack signal if you’re worried that I’m heading out of state.”
“Before you decide that the LoJack in the Jeep is there just in case I want to abuse my mighty police powers, I’d remind you that Ben had it installed long before we bought the Jeep from him.”
“Don’t take everything I say so seriously, Frank. And you don’t need to watch over me every minute. I’ll be fine. I’ll call you when I get in, if it will make you feel better.”
Afraid she was feeling hemmed in, he said, “All right. I’ll be home as soon as I can. Listen — I’m sorry this meeting came up. I was hoping we could talk.”
She shook her head. “Not a good time to do that anyway. I’m beat.”
A car pulled up behind her and the driver tapped his horn — the light had changed. She moved off, waving to Frank as she drove through the intersection.
He watched until he could no longer see the Jeep’s taillights, then made a U-turn.
If someone had hauled away the satellite dishes and painted over the mural that adorned one side of the Channel 6 studios, the building would have looked no more exciting than a warehouse. The mural showed the “News Where You Live Team” in smiling, bright-eyed, larger-than-life scale. He noticed that Polly Logan’s portrait was also younger than life.
The gatekeeper was a cheerful, middle-aged man whose girth was wedged nearly miraculously into a tall armchair. Frank wondered how, if a pursuit were necessary, the fellow would ever get to his feet.
When he gave the man his name, the gatekeeper responded with a knowing smile and said, “That Polly is something, isn’t she?” He handed him a clipboard, then went back to reading a crumpled copy of Hustler. Frank wrote his name illegibly and handed it back. The guard didn’t look at it. He picked up a phone and dialed a number.
Frank’s cell phone rang while the guard was talking to someone inside the building.
“Hi,” Irene said. “I made it home, safe and sound.”
At that moment, the guard leaned out and handed him a visitor’s badge, saying in a loud voice, “Here you go, lover boy, a pass to see Polly Logan. But a word to the wise — with the stuff that’s going around these days, you’d better wear a rubber — that broad has laid more pipe than the local plumbers’ union.”
He heard Irene disconnect.
He drove through the gate, parked in the nearly empty lot, and tried calling home. He got the answering machine. “Irene, I know you’re there. Please pick up the phone.”
Nothing.
“You aren’t going to let one loudmouthed knucklehead cause us problems, are you?”
He heard her pick up the receiver — and set it right back down in the cradle.
He swore, turned the phone off, and headed for the building’s back entrance.
The cloying scent of Polly Logan’s perfume hit him before he saw her. She stood waiting for him, a blond beacon at the end of a dimly lit hallway — a narrow figure clad in a dark blue suit and high heels that would have made a stilt-maker proud. At six four, he was a tall man, but he thought he was only about half a foot above being eye-to-eye with her. In this semidarkness, she bore at least some resemblance to the woman on the mural. He knew better. In her efforts to stay in front of the camera, Polly Logan must have spent most of the money she had made there on cosmetic surgery. The results were now in the waxworks stage — her blue eyes had that wide-open, perpetually startled look that was a by-product of too many facelifts, her mouth and chin so stiff as to make a ventriloquist’s dummy’s seem more supple, and her satiny, wrinkle-free face was, alas, perched atop her original, aging neck, making her look as if her head had been transplanted to the wrong body.
“Frank,” she said, extending a hand, “good to see you.”
The hand was smooth but dry and bony, so that he felt as if he were grasping an albino bat’s wing. He let go before the bat did. “I appreciate your willingness to help me out.”
“I’m sure I’ll be able to think of a way for you to return the favor,” she said with a smile.
He thought he might have grimaced in response.
She didn’t seem to notice and sauntered toward a door at the end of the hallway. “Come along, I’ve set this up in one of the conference rooms.”
She aimed a remote at a television set attached to a VCR. When the set came on, she immediately pressed a volume button, so that the sound was nearly muted. “I don’t want to attract a lot of attention to what we’re doing in here,” she said. “Not just because you’re a cop, but because — well, I’ve taken a lot of crap around here about keeping these.”
“These?” he asked, wondering how long he’d be trapped here with her, watching videotapes.
“The original footage, I mean. The clips I copied to make this one for you.” She smiled. “A labor of love.”
“How long is the final product?” he asked.
“Two hours,” she said, and pressed the play button on the remote.
The first few minutes were made up of footage from about a dozen years ago, she explained. “I shot most of this myself.”
Fleeting images of Lefebvre went by. There was an almost voyeuristic quality in them that Frank found unsettling. Most of the time Lefebvre clearly wasn’t aware he was on camera. The woman was all but stalking him.
“He had the most interesting eyes,” she said softly, after a close-up.
The rest of the tape had been shot by other camera operators. Frank glanced at Polly as she narrated in a low voice. “This was after he solved the Berton case.” Then “This is at the courthouse, after he testified against Hunter.” She gazed at the screen, caught up in memories, giving a running commentary that prevented him from hearing the soundtrack of the tape.