“What’d you see?”
“I don’t know, some bogus action flick at the Laurel Ten. You know, the new one, with the guy’s got a ponytail.”
“What about after that?”
“We went out for a few.”
“Where?”
Billy thought it over and waved a hand in my direction. “I can’t remember the name, a chain joint. One of those phony Irish names, they have drinks comin’ out of machines. Right in front of Laurel Mall. O’Tooligan’s, MacManley’s, some shit like that.”
“April get drunk?”
“She always gets drunk.”
“She get drunk enough to give you any idea she was going to split?”
“She was drunk enough. But no, she didn’t say a word.”
“And she left the next deft"3"ay.”
“That’s right. I went to work, and when I came home she was gone.”
“No note, right? I mean, that computerized Dear John you told me about, that was all bullshit, right, Billy?”
Billy narrowed his eyes. “I apologized already, last night. You’ve busted my balls enough, don’t you think? I’ve got nothing else to tell you.”
“All right,” I said, pointing down the road. “Let’s go see Crane.”
FIFTEEN
Tommy Crane’s cottage was in a half-acre clearing about a quarter-mile through the woods. Fifty yards from the house was a cinder-block structure larger than the cottage. We parked the Maxima beside a red F-150 truck on a plot of hard sand under a single oak that stood next to the cottage.
I pointed to the cinder-block structure. “What’s that?”
“Pig compound. He houses and feeds them in there. Slaughters ’em in there as well, from what I can remember.”
I thought things over. “Crane probably won’t let me in his house, if he’s got something to hide. At the very least, maybe I can get in to use his bathroom. If he does let me in, I’m going to need as much time as I can in there alone, to look around. Do your best and keep him occupied, even if it’s only for a few minutes. You’ll know when to do it. But for now, just stay in the car, okay? I don’t need any distractions up front.”
“It’s all you now, man. Go on.”
I climbed out of the car and pushed Maybelle’s head back in-she was trying to slide out with me-before closing the door. A fat sound, the movement of animals, came from the direction of the compound. The air felt colder as I passed beneath the naked branches of the oak. The branches cast shadows like black arthritic arms on the hard earth.
I stepped up onto a wooden porch whose planks were painted gray. There was a screen door and after that a solid one. I pulled open the screen door and knocked on the other.
The door unlocked quickly, and Tommy Crane stood before me. He was wearing a blue chamois shirt over a thermal undershirt, and loose-fitting jeans. Over the shirt was a black down vest that bulged on the left side of his chest. On the side of his hip a knife was secured in a thin brown-leather sheath. The knife’s handle was wrapped tightly with black electricians’s tape. The long blade of the knife took up the balance of the sheath. The sheath ran halfway down Crane’s thigh.
“Yes?” Crane said. The voice was controlled and uncomfortably gentle-for a man his height and weight, it didn’t fit. His tan hands were long and densely veined, and his rawboned wrists filled and stretched the cuffs of the chamois shirt. The wrists had the thickness and mass of redwood.
“My name’s Nlong and dick Stefanos.”
“That supposed to mean something to me?” Crane squinted and scratched his black beard. A wire-thin scar veed deeply into the right side of the beard.
“I work for Billy Goodrich,” I said, turning my head briefly in the direction of the Maxima. Crane looked toward the car and saw Billy in the driver’s seat, then looked back at me. There was lack of interest and mild annoyance in his thin black eyes. I shifted my feet to simulate discomfort as I handed him my card. “Mind if I come in?”
He gave the card a contemptuous glance. “For what?”
“I’m looking for April Goodrich. I understand she was down here and she was with you.”
“She was down here,” he said, and as he said it he stepped out onto the porch and closed the door behind him. Crane ran one hand through his thick black hair and pulled the bulk of it back behind his ears. Then he hitched up his jeans and puffed out his broad chest. “You want to talk to me, come on, but make it quick. I got work to do, and plenty of it.”
Crane skipped the steps, jumped down off the porch, and landed walking, taking long strides toward the pig compound. I looked quickly at Billy. Billy shrugged, and I followed Crane.
I trailed him to a wood gate, where we butted through and stepped into a small grassy area enclosed by a barbed-wire fence. The wire was wrapped and tied at six-foot intervals to knotted wood posts driven deeply into the earth. We continued toward the cinder-block structure to an opening cut to accommodate an average-sized man. The structure was topped unevenly by a corrugated tin roof laid over asbestos sheeting. A thin periscopic chimney rose out of the roof, and gray smoke drifted out through the chimney. The wheezy animal sounds grew heavier as we approached the gate that was hinged to the opening.
Crane pushed on the gate and strode in, lowering his head to clear the top-frame of the entrance. I followed him into a dark, concrete-floored area of roughly eight hundred square feet. The entire structure was elevated to provide for a concrete feeding trough that ran around the sty and was accessible from the outside. On the left wall two farrowing pens were lit and warmed by infrared lamps, and in those pens two sows lay on their sides. Several piglets suckled the sows’ teats from behind a set of steel rails. On the right wall were sleeping compartments where slats of timber had been cross-nailed inches above the cold concrete. In the rear of the sty a copper circular trough was mounted on a brick base. A fire burned in the center of the base and the putrid steam that rose from the liquid boiling in the trough entered a hole that led through the chimney. Next to the cooker was an iron drinking trough. Next to that a black hose lay dripping and coiled on the concrete. On the wall behind the troughs several butchering knives rested in the hooks of a punchboard. Beside the punchboard was an exit, exactly the size of the opening through which we had entered. The ropes of a pulley dangled from the rafters, above it all.
Crane kept walking. He lowered his head once more and stepped outside through the rear opening. I followed. Now we were in another fenced enclosure with twice the area of the yard in front. Bales of hay were lined end-to-end around the bottom of this fence, and a few dozen pigs and weaners of varying litters were llite aying on their sides on the worn grass, butted up against the hay. It was colder in the yard than it had been in the sty, but the sun was bright and the air was bracing and clean.
Some of the pigs had risen at the arrival of Crane, and they began to move about the yard. They alternately snorted and squealed. A white pig larger than the others moved slowly in our direction. The rest remained against the bales. I nodded toward them. “They like the feel of that hay?”
“Not really,” Crane said. “Pigs like the sunshine, but they hate the wind. Hate it damn near worse than they hate anything. So they come outside for the sun and get behind the bales. Now one of those sows-that one over there”-Crane pointed to a large Middle White in the corner of the yard-“she’s lyin’ back because she senses it’s her time to die. I haven’t fed her for twenty-four hours, for the reason of the mess the killin’ makes if there’s food in her belly, and that just adds to her confusion. But she knows, boy. She knows.”