I wasn’t sure why I went in there. Maybe there’s some real masochistic compulsion in me. More likely it was because, on my way up to see if the police would let me see Jane, I wanted to know if the Branigans had learned anything new.
I didn’t offer my hand. I knew better. I wasn’t that much of a masochist. Instead, I said, “I don’t think she did it.”
“How reassuring,” Mrs. Branigan said tartly.
Branigan had the grace to look embarrassed. “I’d forgotten. You were a cop once, weren’t you?”
I nodded.
“Have they told you anything?”
“Nothing since yesterday,” I said.
“She didn’t do it.” He said it absolutely.
“No. I don’t believe she did.”
Mrs. Branigan said, “You hadn’t been seeing her again, had you?”
“Don’t trouble yourself,” I said. “We really had broken off, Mrs. Branigan. I hadn’t put my filthy hands on her in over a year.”
Mrs. Branigan looked as if my language made her physically ill.
Mr. Branigan slammed a big fist into an open palm. “My God, I can’t believe this. This just isn’t possible.” He started pacing.
Mrs. Branigan watched him. I watched Mrs. Branigan. She said to me, “The police have said that she called you.”
I tried to take some of the anger out of my voice. “Yes, Mrs. Branigan, she did.”
“I want to know why.”
“I suppose because I used to be a policeman. I suppose she thought I could help her.”
Now Mrs. Branigan softened her tone. Even some of the contempt went out of her eyes. “Well, as a former policeman, what do you think?”
“Do I think she’s guilty?”
“Yes.”
“No.”
Mr. Branigan said, “He was a real bastard. She was calling us nearly every night all the time he was breaking things off with her. He went out of his way to make the end as unpleasant as possible.”
“He even — he even brought another woman to their apartment one night when he thought Jane had to work late,” Mrs. Branigan said. There were tears in her eyes. “I suppose I have to say that much for you — you treated her well.”
“There’s something you never quite seemed to understand, Mrs. Branigan,” I said. “Jane broke up with me — not the other way around. She convinced herself I was this really terrible guy so that she could justify going off to live with Stephen Elliot. I know that’s not a particularly noble thing to say at a time like this, but I think we should set the record straight.”
Mr. Branigan pushed out his hand. He looked as if he might consider shaking hands with me, then put his hand away quickly.
“Did you get a chance to talk to her?”
“Not much,” I told him. I sketched in our meeting in the park.
“Then she didn’t mention the older woman in the museum?”
“No.”
“She followed him one night. He went to this museum. He spent several hours there with a much older woman.”
“Do you think that has some bearing on what happened?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did she say anything else about the woman? What museum it was, for instance?”
Mrs. Branigan spoke up. “Only that there was a traveling Van Gogh show.”
“Over the next week,” Mr. Branigan said, “he met with this woman several times. In a restaurant there was a scene between them. The woman slapped him.”
Elliot seemed to have had a predilection for scenes. Spitting in Carla Travers’s face. Getting slapped in a restaurant by an older woman.
“When Jane asked Elliot who the woman was he got very upset and told her to never mention the woman again — if she wanted to live.”
“He actually threatened her, physically threatened her life,” Mrs. Branigan said. Her voice had started to keen again. For the first time in my life I found myself feeling something resembling warmth for her. At least a bit.
I put my hand out and touched her shoulder. She surprised me by not jerking away. “I’m going to do all I can to help her.”
She looked at me. It would be nice to say that she offered me a warm embrace and told me how wrong she’d been about me and that I was a wonderful guy. But all she said was, “We would appreciate that, Jack. Very much.”
But that was something. She had never called me “Jack” before. Somehow she’d managed to talk to me without ever using my name.
“Yes,” Mr. Branigan said, “yes, we certainly would appreciate it. Very much. We’ll be staying at the Hilton if you need to get in touch.”
I nodded and went upstairs on the elevator.
The uniformed cop listened to my story patiently, walked down the hall with squeaky shoes, and called his superior. He came back shaking his head.
They weren’t going to let me see her.
7
He had arthritic hands and wasted eyes, and if he had much more to live on than his social security, I would be surprised. He came in once a month and tried, as he was trying tonight, to steal a five-pound tin of ham. He was a lousy shoplifter. I was literally afraid that he was going to work himself into such a terrified state — the way he looked around, the half hour he took to get the ham up to his overcoat pocket — that one of these nights he was going to fall over from sheer fright.
I watched him for five minutes, then walked to the back of the discount store where I was pulling a security gig this week. I had gone there after leaving the hospital, hoping the evening would provide me with some professionals and a few games of cat and mouse. I needed the adrenaline of clean, cold pursuit. Busting old folks didn’t qualify.
I placed my sixth call of the evening to the number listed as belonging to “C. Travers” in the phone book. If Bryce Hammond was right, the lady could give me all sorts of useful information about Stephen Elliot, including why he’d spit in her face one day.
There was no answer. Again. Either she was a busy woman or she had disconnected her phone. I’d been trying to reach her since the day before.
On the floor, I watched the old man again. He had started into his head-swerving phase, looking around for store dicks like myself.
Satisfied that he was not being observed, he wrapped a gnarled hand around the ham and began to push it into his pocket. I moved quickly, afraid he might be observed from the manager’s office.
“Hey,” I said.
A look of mortification and pure horror filled his face. I touched his hand, guided the ham back to its place in the display.
“You sure that’s the ham you want?”
His eyes were ancient, watery. His bones were hard, but his clasp was soft.
“Huh?” he said, yelling loud as a deaf man.
“I think you picked up that ham by mistake, didn’t you?”
He stared at me a long moment, then started getting tears in his eyes. “Yes, I guess I did. By mistake.”
I could imagine him savoring the ham — sliced and served warm in sandwiches. If the poor bastard had enough to afford bread.
“Fuck,” I said.
“Huh?”
“I said fuck.”
“Fuck what?”
“Fuck everything, old man.”
I picked up the ham and a loaf of white bread — I wasn’t doing him any favors — and laid them in his arms. Then I took a ten-dollar bill from my pocket and put it into his.