“What do you make of it?” Pohl asked, his voice almost a whisper. “I saw what I wasn’t supposed to see, okay. I want to know the truth. I want to know his name. Then I’d like to forget the whole thing.”
“There are things you’ve got to forget at any cost,” Shimura said.
“If that’s true, fine,” Pohl said. “Any cost.”
Shimura heaved a long sigh.
“What about making an investigation?” Pohl asked. “Will you do it? No matter what’s going on between them I won’t interfere. I won’t interfere or meddle with them or cause you any trouble. I want to know who he is and if she loves him. Then I’ll know if I’ve got a chance.”
“You’re my friend. I’ll do it,” Shimura said without hesitating.
Pohl plunged his fingers into the bowl and came up with three fish eyes, shook them like dice in a loose fist, then popped them in his mouth.
“If you go on eating those things you must be hungry.”
“That’s right,” Pohl said, smiling. “Let’s get out of here.”
The bartender handed Pohl a special towel, moist and hot, scented with lemon, to wash the smell of the spicy fish eyes off his hands. Shimura went ahead to the exit of the Casino Club. Pohl paid the bill.
Jackson Street was crowded with people sniffing the fresh night air under the glow of neon lights. Pohl and Shimura went in the direction of their favorite Italian restaurant. On the way, a dog walked toward them with one eye shut and a sticky secretion in the other. The fur covering his ribcage was dyed blue. Pohl turned his head and his eyes filled with blue neon from an arcade with coin-operated games. Shimura patted the dog on the head as it went by. The dog snapped at him, growling.
At the traffic signal, Pohl saw a roving beam of light behind him and followed it up to a woman standing on a small balcony with a standard flashlight in her hand. She directed a trembling circle of light over the sidewalk that must have been impossible to see from where she stood like a watchtower guard looking for an escaped prisoner.
Trying hard to focus on the woman, who remained a silhouette in the faint light behind her, Pohl narrowed his eyes, and for all he could see she was alone, the silhouette of a solitary woman, standing straight as a soldier looking for something she’d never find. She tapped her foot impatiently on the balcony, switched off the flashlight. Shimura tugged Pohl’s sleeve, pulling him across the intersection, and he looked back from the middle of the crosswalk at the empty balcony. Pohl followed Shimura to the other side of the street. The restaurant was in the middle of the block.
[ 16 ]
The County Sheriff’s Office, founded in 1835, is the largest and oldest sheriff’s office in the state. The constitutional mandates include keeping and maintaining the peace throughout the county, maintaining the county jail, providing bailiff services for circuit courts and serving legal process. It is comprised of four Bureaus: Administration, Police Services, Special Operations, and Detention Services.
When Captain Rand Hadley retired from the County Sheriff’s Office under the “Rule of 75” (when an officer’s age, added to years of service, equaled the number 75), he’d been working in the CID (Criminal Investigation Division) for several years. He served a total of twentyseven years in a variety of assignments throughout the department including Process, Patrol, Parks, Transit, Courts, Detention Bureau, Airport, Police Services Bureau — HIDTA (High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas), and the Drug Enforcement Unit. He had a Bachelor of Science-Criminal Justice degree from the local branch of the state university, and was a graduate of the Department of Justice’s Death Investigation School and the Midwestern University School of Police Staff and Command.
Randall Hadley was sitting in the small kitchen wearing a plaid bathrobe and scraping the burnt patches off his breakfast toast when the doorbell rang. It was eight-thirty. Morning sunlight came in through the window and warmed the Formica tabletop. Steam drifted up from his mug of freshly brewed coffee. He took a sip of it before he got up to answer the door.
When he opened it, Shimura stood in front of him in a beige jacket, navy shirt and beige trousers, and a cigar between his lips.
“You can’t smoke that in here,” Hadley said, pulling the door all the way open.
“You don’t have to tell me, Rand. Give me an ashtray.”
Hadley turned around, headed for the kitchen, and Shimura followed him. He looked at the familiar, sparsely furnished one-bedroom apartment where he’d visited Hadley so many times in the last ten years.
Rand Hadley gave him personal or professional advice when he couldn’t find a solution to a problem on his own. He’d spent the better part of the night out with Pohl after dinner in the Italian restaurant, and he had a hangover and didn’t know how to handle the thing Pohl wanted him to do. The personal favor to Pohl would have to be something independent of the Kawamura Agency and it required tact.
Shimura sat down at the kitchen table opposite Hadley. There was a large empty ashtray in front of him and he put his cigar in it. Hadley picked up a slice of toast he’d spread with cholesterol-reducing butter substitute. He’d quit smoking a year ago, had high cholesterol, and he wasn’t in great shape because he liked to eat although he didn’t cook for himself, so he’d begun to pay attention to what he put in his stomach. The burnt toast made a lot of noise as he chewed it.
He was fifty-four years old, divorced, and he taught investigative basics in the community and technical colleges system, which gave him a meager salary that filled the gap left by his county pension equal to 2.5 percent earned, per year of service, of the average of his high three consecutive years of earnings. The maximum pension a detective drew was eighty percent.
“How are you feeling?”
“Do you know what happens to someone hit by a slow freight?”
“Cut the kidding, Rand. You haven’t looked better in months.”
“Everything I like to eat I can’t have and everything I can have isn’t what I’d pick if I had the choice, so how do you expect me to look at it? It’s boring, but you’re right. I’m feeling better, looking better.”
Rand Hadley cracked a smile, took a swallow of coffee.
“I’m sorry, I forgot to offer you a cup.”
He got up, took a mug out of the cabinet and poured Shimura a cup of steaming coffee. He gave him the mug and sat down again.
“You’re looking tired,” Hadley said. “You work too hard.”
“That’s funny, coming from you.”
“Did I tell you I got a letter from my ex-wife?”
“No, what did she want?”
“More money. But she’s right. I owe her.”
“Did she say that?”
“No, she wouldn’t say a thing like that. We get along just fine.”
“And you take care of her and your kid just fine, Rand.”
“We’ve been divorced two years, and in the years we had together before that, after I retired, I still wasn’t able to make it up to her.”
“It’s the same old song, isn’t it? Whether you’re private or public.”
“A detective? Well, facts are facts. Policemen’s wives have it tough.”
“What’s she going to do with more money that she can’t do with the money she’s got now? She has a job.”
“The kid’s going to college, and it costs plenty because it isn’t a community college, and he’s not bright enough to have a scholarship — I’ve got to call a spade a spade — and I don’t want him taking a loan. You never get out from under a loan.”
“True.”
“Anyway, I wasn’t spending much before, and now that I won’t be eating in restaurants — or smoking cigarettes, even — I’ll have to learn to cook for myself, and then I’ll have money to spare.”