Edelman still had sleep marks tattooed on his left cheek, and his thinning brown hair had been plastered down with King Kong hair spray in an effort to make it lie flat. Beneath the bottom of his trench coat you could see baggy gray work pants. He kept the coat buttoned up to his neck, which meant that he was probably wearing his pajama tops. Maybe the ones with the boats on them, which his wife had gotten him for his last birthday as a joke. “But you know, Dwyer,” she’d told me that night at the party (a party for the Edelman’s is a birthday cake and Kool-Aid for their tribe of five kids), “he just looked at them and said ‘These are great, honey.’ He didn’t think the little boats were funny at all.”
Now Edelman said, “Hastings said you’ve already given your statement.”
I nodded.
“Doesn’t sound like it’s going to be too hard to put together,” Edelman said.
“Hi,” Donna said. She’d gone down to Pizza Hut again after the rain stopped. More coffee. She handed one to me and one to Edelman.
“You should’ve been a nurse.”
“Can’t stand the sight of blood,” she said. Then, realizing the circumstances, “I guess that isn’t very funny.” She watched Edelman sip his coffee. He looked like a grade school principal. He was a gentle man, and wise in his way, and maybe the best male friend I’d ever had. When he finished sipping, Donna said, “Did Dwyer tell you?”
He was still sleepy. He seemed confused, as if he’d missed something. “Tell me what?”
“About Wade.”
“What about him?”
“How he didn’t do it.”
“Didn’t kill Reeves, you mean?”
She nodded.
He raised his eyes to me. He looked sad. For Donna. “Well, let’s wait till we get all the reports in, all right?”
“Do you think he did it?” Donna asked.
He glanced at me again. “I don’t want to hurt your feelings, Donna.”
“So you do think he did it, huh?”
“I’d have to say it’s a pretty good bet. He certainly had a motive. And he came over here.”
“But somebody pushed him down.”
She sounded young and naive. I wanted to hug her, protect her. Edelman did it for me. He put his arm around her shoulder and gave her a little tug and said, “We’ll wait for the reports, okay?”
Half an hour later the whole neighborhood was alive with press. Three TV stations showed up with vans. In the cold, and by now clear May morning — cold enough to kill the early flowers — their lights were ominous.
I’d watched all the processes. Things looked worse and worse for Wade. They’d found the cabdriver who’d brought him over. The cabbie gave a positive ID. A neighbor upstairs said she’d heard Wade go into Reeves’s apartment and then heard a scuffle shortly afterward. The knife was removed from Reeves’s back and put into a plastic bag. The knife would have Wade’s fingerprints all over it.
I went out on the back porch. The smell of new-mown grass was on the air. The dawn was pink and yellow behind the thunderheads. Donna sat across from me on an empty Pepsi case. I’d asked Edelman to come out when he was finished talking with the detective in charge.
He came out with a cigar in his mouth. Unlit. “One of the guys had a baby. Or rather, his wife did. I hate the smell of these when they’re lit, but the tobacco tastes pretty good just to chew on.” He was obviously trying to avoid what he had to say to us. “He looks pretty good for it, Dwyer.”
“How good?”
“Real good.”
“What’s going to happen?”
“APB. Armed and dangerous. He drinks and you tell me he’s got a weapon.”
“Yeah.”
“We don’t have a hell of a lot of choice.”
Donna stood up. She was shaking again.
“Why don’t you take her home, Dwyer?”
I nodded.
Donna said, “You wouldn’t shoot him, would you?”
Edelman went over and put his arm around her again. “I just wish he hadn’t run, Donna. That really complicates things.”
“Yes,” she said, her voice almost gone. “Yes, I know.”
5
Seven hours later I was standing at a display of sunglasses, watching in a mirror a man thinking about taking a watch from the jewelry counter. After breakfast Donna had gone to Ad World to wrap up the current issue and I’d come here, to Sparkle City (yes, indeed), where I was presently a wage slave for the American Security company.
Lunch I got from a machine. At three, when I’d finished my four-hour shift, I headed straight for home and my jogging clothes. The only way I would get through the rest of the day without sleep was to run a few miles.
By seven o’clock, showered and dressed in a buttoned-down white shirt without a tie, a tweed sport coat with one button missing, and a pair of jeans that hadn’t exactly come wrinkle-free from the drier, I pulled my rusting Honda Civic up in front of the Bridges Theater.
The marquee was dark. Inside the locked front doors, the light from the stage was glowing dimly into the lobby. Somebody was in there. I went around to the alley and tried the side door. Locked. I knocked. Stan DeVoto, the janitor, opened up.
“Hey, Dwyer, what’re you doin’ here? Figured you woulda heard they closed down for the night.”
“Yeah. Ashton left word with my service.”
He smiled. He was in his sixties, bald and beer fat, and I would have given at least one of my testicles to be as happy as he usually seemed. Nuclear war? Piss on it; the Cubbies are on this afternoon (though come to think of it, the way the Cubbies play sometimes, nuclear war might be more enjoyable to contemplate). He always talked about the “mizzus” and where a guy could get Blatz on the cheap (but never cheap enough for my taste) and who among the actors was a “good guy.” He never said who wasn’t a good guy, but you could tell what he thought by the way his mouth tightened and he squinted his spaniel eyes.
“They’re all inside,” he said.
“You mean the cast?”
He nodded. “David, he told me nobody would be coming over, but they all seemed to drift in.” He smiled. “Just like you.”
I shook my head. “I suppose we’re all in a state of shock.”
“Yeah, like that guy Lockhart.”
I didn’t know who he meant. “Who’s that?”
“One of Reeves’s friends.” The way he said “Reeves” told me that death hadn’t changed his mind about Reeves. He’d never been one of the “good guys.” (Reeves treated most people pretty badly unless there was something he wanted from them.) “Came in here like he was in a daze. Seemed all broke up. Kinda felt sorry for him.”
“What’d he want?”
“Wanted to see Michael’s office. Hell, the cops were here earlier in the day, so I didn’t figure there’d be any problem lettin’ him in, you know.”
“So you let him in?”
He could sense that maybe he hadn’t done the right thing. “They were buddies, Dwyer.”
“All right,” I said.
But he wasn’t finished defending himself. “Seems Lockhart was one of Reeves’s convict friends. You know that acting class he teaches? Lockhart’s one of those guys.”
“All right, Stan.”
He rubbed his bald head. “I fucked up, huh?”
I shrugged. “That’s how I’ve spent my life, Stan, fucking up. It isn’t anything to worry about.”
“I won’t let the s.o.b. in there next time — if he ever comes back, I mean. You can bet your ass on that.”