“Let’s sit,” I said. “Felix likes things to go the way he said they should go.”
“There’s a limit,” Brian said, “to how much I care what Felix likes.”
“He’s doing us the favor,” I said.
“Whatever it is,” Brian said.
We sat until two, then got out and walked across the street and into the saloon. Felix was sitting in the first booth on the left, across from a strong-looking young man with a square face and receding black hair, which he wore long on the sides and combed back straight. I knew Richie wouldn’t be there. And he wasn’t. Rosie dashed around behind the bar, looking for him. The bartender reached under the bar and came up with a long chew stick. Rosie sniffed it, and grabbed it, and joined Brian and me as we sat in the booth opposite Felix. Felix scratched her absently behind the ear.
“Brian Kelly,” I said. “Felix Burke.”
“We’ve met,” Brian said.
“This is Tommy Noon,” Felix said.” He’s got some things to tell you.”
Noon looked at Felix. “Off the record?”
“Tommy,” Felix said. “You’re on my record already.”
“We can listen off the record for now,” Brian said.
“I give you something, helps you out, maybe we can deal?”
“We might work something out,” Brian said.
“Guy comes up from New York, offers me ten to whack a guy named Markham?”
“You do it?” Brian said.
Tommy glanced at Felix and got nothing back.
“Yeah,” Tommy said.
“Who’s the guy?”
“He didn’t gimme his name.”
“How do you know he’s from New York?” I said.
“He said so.”
“How’d he pay you?” Brian said.
“Cash, all hundreds.”
“Describe him,” I said.
“Kind of short, maybe five-eight, kinda fat, soft-looking. Big horn-rimmed glasses. Sort of fluty, you know, college guy, thinks he’s important.”
Harvey Delk.
“Could you identify him if you saw him?” I said.
“Sure.”
“You know who this guy is?” Brian said to me.
I nodded.
“Can we get a picture?”
“Yes.”
“This helps you out?” Tommy said.
“Yes,” I said.
Tommy looked at Felix again.
“I get to bring a lawyer when we go on the record?” he said.
Felix made no comment.
“Sure,” Brian said. “And we’ll Miranda you, and your lawyer and the ADA can work out something. But first you got to pick your guy out of a photo spread.”
“You show me a picture of him,” Tommy said. “I’ll recognize it.”
“We can probably do all this tomorrow,” Brian said. “You and your lawyer want to come in?”
Tommy continued to glance at Felix before he answered.
“Sure,” he said. “Gimme a time and place.”
Rosie was working intensely on her chew stick. Felix looked down at her.
“What’s she eating?” he said.
“That’s called a bull stick,” I said.
“What part of the bull does that come from?” Felix said.
I said, “Let’s not go there, Felix.”
He studied the bull stick some more, and his face changed slightly. I realized he was smiling.
“And if you don’t show?” Brian said.
“He’ll show,” Felix said.
Brian nodded and watched Rosie chew her bull stick for a moment.
“Since we’re off the record here, and just out of curiosity, how come you’re so willing, Tommy?”
Felix answered. “It’s a way to avoid the death penalty.”
“We don’t have a death penalty,” Brian said.
Felix shrugged. Brian studied him for a minute. Then he nodded and looked at me.
“Ah, yes,” he said.
64
Corsetti sent up some photos, and Tommy Noon picked Delk out every time. His lawyer was there; Brian read him his rights. An assistant DA named Missy O’Neil arrived, and she and Tommy’s lawyer sat down to talk. I went home and called Corsetti.
“We got her,” I said.
“Your man ID’d Delk.”
“Every time,” I said.
“There’s your wedge,” Corsetti said. “Delk’s got the cojones of a butterfly. He’ll rat out his children. Lollipop will get a perp walk like the Bataan death march.”
We didn’t have the cuffs on her yet. But I knew Corsetti was right. And I knew that Delk would babble like a spring brook.
“We’ve known for a while what happened. Now we’ll be able to prove it.”
“And maybe get the guy who aced your lawyer friend,” Corsetti said. “How’d you find this guy, anyway?”
“A favor from a friend,” I said. “Next time I’m in New York, we’ll have lunch and I’ll tell you about it.”
“Will your witness hold?”
“He wouldn’t dare not to,” I said.
“Because of your friend?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe you’ll be down to testify at the trial,” he said.
“You think there’ll be a trial?”
“No,” Corsetti said. “Bender will deal. But we may need you down here, anyway.”
“I’ll be happy to attend, Eugene,” I said. “And if you’re ever in Boston...”
“You can introduce me to your mystery friend,” Corsetti said.
“You’d make an interesting pair,” I said.
We hung up. Rosie was asleep on my bed, stretched out to the extent that her physique would allow. I walked over and lay down beside her and rested my hand on her hip. It was mid-afternoon. The sun was shining obliquely through my skylight, making a long, angular parallelogram of brightness against the end wall of my loft. Rosie was snoring pleasantly. When either part of a relationship changes, she had said, the other part changes, too. I heard myself laugh softly. My shrink had become “she.” I had changed, or I was changing. I wasn’t sure what I had been. And I wasn’t sure what I was becoming. But I could feel the deconstruction and reconstruction process as if it were visceral. Maybe I was a good cop. All these years, my father stayed with my mother because they love each other. Who knew?
Without opening her eyes, Rosie shifted onto her back, with her short legs sticking up, so that my hand was now on her belly. I rubbed it gently. Actually, it was hard to say exactly who solved the Sarah Markham/Lolly Drake entanglement. I had found Moline and gone there — twice. I had slept with Peter Franklin in New York, although that maybe didn’t strictly count as police work. Spike had helped. Brian Kelly. Corsetti. I smiled, thinking about Eugene Corsetti, accent on the first syllable of Eugene. He was a lot smarter than he let you know. My mind wandered. I stopped rubbing Rosie’s stomach. She flopped her head around and looked at me with one beady, black eye. I began to rub it again. She closed her eye. And, of course, Uncle Felix. That was the big irony. Felix Burke found Tommy Noon and convinced him to confess. He was able to do both and make it stick because he was an amoral killer who valued family and kept his word. Felix was everything the law in theory opposes. Yet it was the simple fact that people feared him, and Tommy Noon was terrified of him, that made it happen. I knew he hadn’t done it for me, though I knew, within his limited range, Felix liked me. He had done it because Richie asked him to. And Richie had done it for me.
The elongated sun square had moved up my wall. The loft had that kind of hissing silence that a home has, which is different from the silence in a forest. If Felix had killed somebody finding Tommy Noon, and I couldn’t know that he didn’t, would the gunshot make a sound? Was the saloon they had given Richie purchased with ill-gotten gain? Almost certainly. Did Richie run it honestly? Yes. Would we have nailed Lolly Drake without Felix’s help? Maybe. It was all too complicated for me. Perhaps “she” and I could talk about it. I shifted on the bed so I could hug Rosie.