Officer Becker stood aside so Marty could pass. ‘Detective Rolseth told me you’d be armed, sir. Are you carrying now?’
Marty nodded and lifted the hem of the white linen shirt, exposing the.357 uncomfortably tucked in the waistband.
‘Not the best place to holster that, sir.’
‘Tell me about it. You missed the shift change.’
The young cop talked without looking at him, his eyes constantly on the move through the deepening shadows outside. ‘I thought I’d get you all settled in the hotel, then call my relief.’
Marty nodded, pleased. He liked the way Becker handled himself, the way he was taking his assignment seriously. ‘I’ll be glad to have you with us.’
‘Thank you, sir. Is everyone ready?’
Marty glanced over at Jack, who was more intent on his drink than their conversation. ‘I’d like to take a private minute here with Jack, if that’s okay with you.’
Becker didn’t seem too happy about that, and lowered his voice. ‘To tell you the truth, Mr Pullman, after spending the afternoon with Mr Gilbert, I was looking forward to having him safely locked in a hotel room with a man at the door. He pretty much hops all over the place, and he doesn’t seem half as concerned as he should be, for a man who dodged a bullet this morning.’
‘Relax, Supercop,’ Jack slurred from the sofa, who had apparently been listening more closely than Marty thought. ‘This guy doesn’t like an audience. Shoots old women alone in their houses, or hides behind a tree and takes potshots, cowardly bastard.’
Becker, who probably knew very little beyond that someone had taken a shot at Jack, raised a questioning eyebrow at Marty, who nodded.
‘That’s the history so far.’
‘All right then. I’ll step away from the building, give you gentlemen some privacy, but I’ll keep the door in sight at all times.’
‘Thanks, Becker.’ Marty watched him move out among the rows of potted arborvitae until he looked like just another shadow, thinking that at least he wouldn’t get wet. Those first few raindrops had made it look like the sky was going to open, but it had stopped almost as soon as it began.
He closed the door, crossed to the desk, and sat down in the chair, shaking his head at the glass Jack was holding out for him at a precarious angle, sloshing good scotch all over the floor. ‘No thanks.’
Jack shrugged and started drinking it himself, even though he held his own glass in his other hand.
‘Did you call Becky to tell her where you’d be?’
‘Becky, my wife?’
‘That’s the one.’
‘Well, gee, Marty, that would be like calling Mr Filcher at the butcher shop and telling him where’d I’d be, and he’d say what the fuck do I care? So if you want me to call somebody just to listen to that, I think I’ll go for the butcher.’
‘You’re not making a lot of sense.’
‘Probably not. Half a bottle of scotch’ll do that to you. The way I figure it, I’ll be dead of alcohol poisoning in about ten minutes, and shooting me will be redundant.’
‘Not funny.’
‘Sure it was. Lighten up. The thing is, Becky gave me the one-finger salute last night – and that was before the gunfight at O.K. Corral. Sayonara, fuck off, see you in court. Wouldn’t even let me in the house, so I slept in the pool house, took a shower with the garden hose.’
Marty blew out a breath and reached for one of the partially full glasses Jack was juggling. ‘Sorry.’
‘No prob. I hated that house anyway. Faggot designer Becky hired did the whole master bath in a frog motif. Can you believe that? S’like trying to take a shit in the middle of a Budweiser commercial.’ He drained his glass, filled it again. ‘You want me to top that off for you?’
‘No. I want you to tell me why Morey went to London.’
Jack looked at him. ‘Excuse me?’
‘Or Prague. Or Milan. Or Paris.’ He tossed over Morey’s passport, and Jack jumped when it hit his lap.
‘What the hell is this?’
‘That’s Morey’s passport. I found it in a tackle box in a closet.’
‘Dad had a passport?’ Jack opened it up and squinted hard. ‘God, this is small print… Is this Paris or Prague? Goddamn Frogs can’t even use a stamp without blurring it…’
‘It’s Paris. He was there for a day. Not much longer in any of the other places. Since when was Morey a world traveler?’
Jack kept drinking as he flipped through the pages. ‘Jesus. He went to Johannesburg?’
‘Are you telling me you didn’t know about those trips?’
‘These?’ Jack tossed the passport on the cushion next to him. ‘Nope. Didn’t know about them. Is that it? Can we get out of here now? It’s hotter than hell with the door closed.’
‘Why would Morey hide his passport in a tackle box? Why would he make a bunch of overseas trips and then turn around and come back the next day? What the hell was he doing in all those places, Jack?’
‘I knew it. I knew this would happen. Was I right? You can take the man out of the cop, but you can’t take the cop out of the man, and now you’re doing all that detective shit. So what now, Marty? Are we going to play interrogation again? You want to move to the equipment shed? We got a bulb hanging from a wire in there. You could swing it back and forth, do the movie thing…’
Marty closed his eyes and took a sip out of the glass without thinking. ‘I was thinking maybe we could skip all the crap and you could just tell me the truth, Jack. I know it’s not normally done in this family – hell, maybe not in any family – but I tried it on Lily the other night and it turned out okay.’
Jack giggled. ‘Oh yeah? What truth did you tell her?’
Marty looked straight at him. ‘That I thought about killing myself.’
Jack’s glass stopped halfway to his mouth. ‘Jesus, Marty. Because of Hannah?’
‘Not exactly.’
That seemed to surprise Jack more than anything. ‘Well then why, for chrissake?’
Marty took another drink, then set the glass on the desk and pushed it out of reach with one finger. The alcohol was still seductive. Prison would cure that, he thought with a grim smile. ‘That’s a really big secret, Jack. Quid pro quo. A truth for a truth.’
Jack set his own glass on the floor and hunched forward, bracing his elbows on his knees. ‘I should have been there for you. I let you down, buddy. On the list of a hundred regrets I’ve been piling up over the past couple years, that one goes on the top.’
‘The truth, Jack. What do you know about who killed your father?’
Jack smiled at him without moving. ‘Truth isn’t what it’s cracked up to be, you know, Marty?’
‘Whoever did it is killing other people, Jack. You’ve got to help.’
‘Nah. He’s finished. ’Cept for me.’
‘And how the hell do you know that?’
Jack looked down into his glass, took a breath, then blew it out hard. ‘I think I have to start this at the beginning.’
Sometimes you spitfired questions, hammered them home fast, non-stop; but there was a time in every interrogation when you stopped asking and just went quiet. Marty kept his hands still on the arms of his chair, kept his eyes on Jack, and waited.
‘I kind of hate to do this to you, Marty. I know what that old bastard meant to you.’
‘He was a good man, Jack.’
‘This is going to be like Elvis.’
‘You lost me.’
‘Well, do you remember what it was like when you found out the King was a drug addict? I mean, here was this guy, the one true King, and what does he turn out to be? Some potbellied, pill-popping junkie. Man, the idol crumbles, and that just rocked my world. You ready for that?’
‘Jack…’
‘Pop put a gun in my hand for the first time on my ninth birthday. Did you know that? You have to be ready, he said, and every Saturday morning from then on he took me out to the Anoka Gun Club and we did some target shooting. Ma thought we were going to McDonald’s for some father-son bonding, and I wasn’t allowed to tell her different. Boring as hell. I hate guns. But I was a dumb kid. As long as I was with him, it was great.’ He picked up his glass again and leaned back against the cushions. He took a long drink, then smiled. ‘I’m a hell of a shot, Marty. But I was nothing compared to Pop.’