I folded the paper and put it back on Karl’s desk. “I can’t exactly say I’m surprised. Are you?”
“Not about that shit, no,” he said. “But I got an email from a guy I know who works at the Times-Tribune, and what it said did surprise me a little.”
“And that was…?”
“The text of that ad, all laid out and ready for uploading, was emailed to the T-T at 7.29 pm yesterday. They just made the deadline for the next morning’s edition – the cutoff time for ad copy is 7. 30, he tells me.”
“OK – has this joke got a punch line?”
“Fuckin’ A,” Karl said, “and it’s a doozy. You know what time the bomb went off?”
“No, I didn’t hear the blast. Don’t forget, Mercy Hospital’s on the other side of town from Ricardo’s.”
“I wasn’t sure of the time myself,” Karl said. “So I checked the 911 log. The first call reporting the explosion came in at 7:17.”
After a couple of seconds, I reached over and retrieved the paper from Karl’s desk. I wanted another look at that ad.
There was a lot of text, and most of it was very specific to the bombing at Ricardo’s. This wasn’t a bunch of boilerplate that could be pulled out of a document file and turned into ad copy in no time at all.
I put the paper down and looked at Karl. “Somebody at PP headquarters works pretty fast, don’t they?”
“Maybe too fast.”
“Uh-huh. And there’s something about this mess that I haven’t told you yet. Before I racked out this morning, I called that number that Loquasto gave me.”
“The consigliere.”
“That’s the guy.”
I gave Karl the details of my conversation with the Calabrese Family’s consigliere. When I’d finished, he looked at me as if I’d just told him that the Girl Scouts were going to be selling hash brownies along with their cookies this year.
“That’s just… fucking ridiculous,” he said.
“It sure would be nice to think so.”
“The fucking Patriot Party is going around blowing shit up so that they can blame it all on supes and sweep the election? Stan, I knew those guys were assholes, but … come on.”
“I know, I know,” I said. “It’s crazy. Except that it’s been done before.”
“Where?
“Germany,” I said. “The Thirties, soon after Hitler was elected Chancellor. One night the Nazis burned down the Reichstag, which was their Parliament building. Burned it to the ground. Then they found some Communist doofus and hung the whole thing on him.”
“Why that guy?”
“Because, like I said, he was a Commie, and the Commies were the Nazis’ biggest political rivals. As a result of the public panic over the fire, the Communist party was outlawed and the Nazis gained absolute power – which they hung onto until the end of the war.”
“OK, I see the parallel, assuming what we’re thinking about the Patriot party is true,” Karl said. “But, dude, this is Scranton. Not Nazi Germany. Scranton.”
“I know,” I said. “But when I was talking to Loquasto about this earlier, he said something that had a weird association for me, but I don’t know why.”
“What’d he say?”
“Just like us, he was trying to get his mind around the idea that somebody would do all this bad shit just to get political control of Scranton. And then he said something like ‘Maybe it’s a pilot project.’”
“Pilot project,” Karl said. He chewed his lower lip, which is a tricky thing for a vampire to do. Then he said to me, “Maybe we better go see McGuire.”
After Karl and I had finished talking, McGuire sat back in his chair, the worn springs creaking under his weight. He studied Karl, then spent a few seconds looking at me.
“I suppose I could order both of you to see the department shrink,” he said. “He’s probably seen a lot of cops with paranoia and has some ideas on how to treat it.”
“Doc Watson, you mean?” I said. “Yeah, he’s pretty good. He’ll probably have Karl drinking Type O laced with clozapine. He’d still be paranoid, but it wouldn’t bother him so much.”
The look McGuire gave me said he thought I was about as funny as diarrhea. It’s a look I’ve seen from him more than a few times.
“Alright,” he said. “Assume, for the sake of discussion, that the two of you aren’t bat-shit crazy. What do you plan on doing about this… conspiracy you think you’ve stumbled onto?”
“We were hoping you might have some advice for us, boss,” Karl said.
“I hope you weren’t thinking about arresting somebody,” McGuire said. “Right now, you haven’t got enough probable cause to justify a fucking traffic ticket.”
“We don’t need probable cause to bring somebody in for questioning, though,” I said.
McGuire raised an eyebrow at me. “Who’ve you got in mind?”
“How about the head of the Patriot Party…?” I looked at Karl.
“Slattery,” he said. “Phil Slattery.”
“You’re assuming he’s the head of the party,” McGuire said, “because he’s their candidate for Mayor?”
Karl frowned at him. “You’re saying he isn’t? If not, then who is it?”
“I didn’t say that Slattery wasn’t the head honcho,” McGuire said. “But there’s a rumor floating around City Hall, something about a power behind the throne.”
“Slattery hasn’t got the throne yet,” I said.
“Just an expression,” McGuire said. “But there’s some guys in the Mayor’s office who think there’s somebody behind the Patriot Party, pulling the strings.”
Karl shook his head. “And you called us paranoid,” he said quietly.
“Has this somebody got a name?” I asked McGuire.
“Fuck, no,” he said. “Like I told you, it’s just a rumor.”
“We can’t bring a rumor in for questioning,” I said. “Which brings us back to Slattery.”
McGuire put his feet up on the open top drawer of his desk, a sign that he was expecting this discussion to take a while. “We call Slattery in here for questioning,” he said, “and his campaign’s gonna scream bloody murder. They’ll claim the mayor’s using the police to harass him.”
“Let him,” Karl said. “Doesn’t look to me like the Mayor’s office has got a whole lot left to lose at this point. According to the last poll I saw, the Patriot Party’s expected to kick serious ass in the election.”
“Anyhow, that sword cuts both ways,” I said. “If Slattery balks, he could be handing the mayor a nice campaign issue: ‘Why won’t the PP cooperate with a legitimate police investigation?’ he could say. ‘What’s Slattery afraid of?’”
McGuire pursed his lips for a second. “OK, that could work,” he said. “But say we get him in here – so what? He’ll have his lawyer with him, for whatever that’s worth – I hear Slattery’s pretty sharp all by himself. What do you expect the guy to say that’s gonna do this investigation any good? He won’t even be under oath.”
“That’s right,” I said. “He won’t be under oath. He won’t even be under arrest.”
“Not without probable cause, he won’t be, and we sure as shit haven’t got any,” McGuire said.
“Which means we won’t be reading him his rights beforehand.”
McGuire didn’t say, “Well, duh!” but the look he gave me got the point across pretty well, anyway.
“The Barlow decision says you can’t have a vampire anywhere around a suspect who’s being questioned by the authorities,” I said. “Once he’s been read his rights.”
My boss isn’t stupid, and neither is my partner. They were both looking at me now, and their expressions said they thought I might actually possess an IQ higher than two digits. I tried to enjoy the experience, since it happens so rarely.
“Nothing Slattery says’ll be admissible in court,” Karl said, but not as if he was disagreeing with my idea.
“It wouldn’t be admissible, anyway, since we’re not gonna read him his rights,” I said.