“Dwyer?”
“Yeah.”
“Dwyer, you dipshit, what’re you doing out here?”
“Trying to get inside.”
“You’d think a former cop would know that B and E is against the law.” With a quick practiced glance, she assessed the tall and casually beautiful Donna Harris. “How did you ever talk her into spending time with you?”
“I’m still wondering myself.”
She tilted her head toward the inside. “You up for some coffee?”
“Sounds great,” Donna said.
Apparently I now had an official spokesperson.
Bertha Lamb led us down a corridor to a tiny lunchroom with a Formica table and a microwave that didn’t look big enough to hold a donut. On top of the cabin-style refrigerator sat a Mr. Coffee with a full pot. Bertha poured coffee into “personalized” mugs and handed us each one. I drank from Mona’s cup, hoping Mona didn’t have gum disease or something. Bertha raised her cup with a heavy competent hand, almost in a toast, and said, “Were you the asshole who was rattling the back door?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Well, I’ve had a spell of stomach trouble, so I was incapacitated for a while.” She nodded to a door that showed the brush strokes of a bad green paint job. The sign read LADIES. “Puts you in a hell of a bind, let me tell you. You can’t move but some fool is rattling anyway.” She smiled at Donna. “What do you see in this hot dog, anyway?”
“Not much, now that you mention it,” Donna said sweetly.
“Now I want you to tell me about this place,” I said.
“Trueblood?”
I nodded.
“Started working here last week. The plumbing’s bad, their subscription to Time ran out a couple months back so they’ve just got old issues, they’ve got a Scanray security system that isn’t worth diddly-squat, and one of the secretaries keeps a jumbo package of Switzer’s licorice on her desk. Unfortunately, Thornton makes us take a polygraph test every month, so if I so much as took a bite of the stuff, I’d be out of a job.”
“You think the place is strictly legal?”
“Huh?”
“I mean, have you noticed anything funny going on? Late-night deliveries, anything like that?”
“You on a case?”
“Sort of.”
“I wish Thornton would let me moonlight like that. Hell, I get tired of being a baby-sitter for alarm systems. I wish I could work on an actual case.”
“So have you noticed anything?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Damn.”
“Sorry, Dwyer.”
Donna said, “Do you know anything about the owners?”
I looked over at her, impressed. I should have thought of that myself.
“You a detective, too?”
“No, I’m an editor.”
“An editor?”
“Yes, of an advertising magazine.”
“Oh, I see.” But obviously she didn’t. She put a fat finger to her sulky lower lip. “The owners. Hmmm. Nope. I don’t remember anything except for a plaque in one of the offices. Shows a bunch of guys a long time ago cutting the ribbon to open this place up. That mayor — Dandridge — was in the picture, the one who went to prison? He was the one cutting the ribbon.”
“Mind if we go see the photo?”
She shrugged. “Hell, no. Come on.”
We followed her. As we walked, I asked her about Lockhart: she didn’t know anything about him. She moved like a rowboat in rough water. Her thighs were so short her Magnum almost touched her knees. We went back to the front office. All of us looked at the desk with the big black slab of Switzer’s licorice on it. “You’d think the bitch would at least have decency enough to keep it in her desk,” Bertha said.
We went through a dark door. Bertha flipped on the lights. A mahogany desk the size of a ping-pong table lay before us. It was covered with photos of a blond middle-American family. All the kids would grow up to be George Bush. There were two miniature flags on the desk, one U.S.A., one state. The rest of the desk was so bare it looked like a prop. Bertha pointed to a faded photograph behind the desk, reverently framed in silver. “There.”
We went over and looked at the six men. Each wore a suit of the sort that Edmund O’Brien wore in D.O.A. (one of my favorite actors in one of my favorite movies). At the right edge of the photo you could see a black 1948 Buick, fat and formidable. I scanned the men, their faces. At the fourth one I stopped.
“God,” Donna said. “Look.” She was ahead of me.
“Somebody you know or something?” Bertha asked.
I grabbed Donna’s hand. “Maybe,” I said, and started to turn toward the door.
“Hey, Dwyer, you going to clam up on me, you bastard?”
“Bertha, look, if I told you what was going on, you’d be liable to tell Thornton all about it, right?”
She shrugged unhappily, knowing I was right. “I guess. Yeah.”
“So I’m going to do you a favor and not tell you anything at all.”
“Gee, thanks, Dwyer.” She looked and sounded as if she was going to cry. I felt bad. I liked her.
“But we’ll have you over to dinner once we get all this resolved,” Donna said.
Bertha brightened. “Say, you’re one hell of a nice lady, you know that?”
“Nice to see you, Bertha,” I said. And we were gone.
“It was him, I know it was him,” I said.
“In the photograph, you mean?”
“Yeah.”
“You mean Dr. Kern?”
“Yeah. He had a mustache and a lot more hair and he had on that strange double-breasted suit, but it was him.”
“You’re right, Dwyer,” Donna said. “It was definitely him.”
“But what’s he got to do with Trueblood Medical Supplies?”
“Right. And why did Lockhart have the medical supply’s card in his pocket?”
“I’m not sure.”
“You sure you’re not sure?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I mean, maybe you know or think you know but are keeping it to yourself.”
“No. One thing they teach you on the force is to form as few opinions in advance as possible.”
She didn’t say anything for a time. Just watched the windshield, the way headlights and then muddy water splashed across it.
“You really don’t have any ideas, Dwyer?”
“Not yet. Sorry.”
“Damn.” Then she curled up, fetus-like, next to the door.
The sanitarium was on a hill. It was brick, big and friendly even in the gloom. It might have been the campus of a small liberal arts college. Definitely not the sort of place that mad scientists hung out. Our headlights swept the right wing; on the third floor the windows were barred. For a moment that struck me as ominous, but I thought it through. Some mental illnesses inspired violence. Barred windows, in such cases, made sense. To the right of the front door in front of neatly trimmed hedges was a white sign with gold embossing that said HAVENHILL. We pulled up in front of it and got out. Next to us was another car that looked familiar. “Boy,” Donna said, “this really is starting to come together.”
“Yes,” I said, “maybe it is.”
The car was a silver XKE. It belonged to Evelyn Ash-ton’s father. It was the same one we’d seen her and Keech in.
We went up to the double doors and knocked, safe from the rain beneath a wide porch roof. There were enough lights on for the Cubs to play at night.
The girl who opened the door was nineteen at most, but she was one of those fair earnest blondes who at that age are already on their way to being matrons. She wore jeans and a turtleneck sweater underneath a blue smock. I hadn’t seen eyeglasses like hers since the fifties. An English teacher I hadn’t liked much owned a pair just like them. The woman’s favorite novel had been Giants in the Earth, the only novel I know that makes Silas Marner read like Judith Krantz.