What did Keenan know, and what didn’t he know, and what did his knowledge mean? He knew there had been a meeting of seven men who weren’t well known to one another. He knew Harbin was one of them, and he knew Harbin disappeared after that meeting. He knew there were rewards out for Harbin, sufficient to bring somebody like himself sniffing around.
But what didn’t he know? The purpose of the meeting. The backgrounds of the people who were there. He had some low-level tipster somewhere in law enforcement, but he wasn’t hooked in with the law in any major way. He could not have heard the tape, and so he probably didn’t even know that Harbin had gone to the meeting wired.
All of which meant that Keenan wasn’t getting much by way of help or input from the law. He was a freebooter, on his own, developing his sources and his information the hard, one-step-at-a-time way. If it became necessary to get rid of him, no lawman would care, or no more than usual.
As Parker had told Keenan, Dalesia was hard to get hold of. He had a phone but never answered it, had no machine on it, used it only for outgoing calls if he happened to be home. Parker could reach him eventually by sending a message to whoever was at that fax number Dalesia had given Elaine Langen. It would be good to let Dalesia know that this guy was lurking in the underbrush, but would it be necessary?
He hadn’t decided that question when he’d finished the drive back from the conversation with Keenan, but then it turned out the decision had been made for him. He came into the house, found Claire in her swimsuit just coming in from the lake, and she said, “Nick called. He left a number where you could call him, at six, or seven, or eight.”
It was now quarter past five. The number Dalesia had left would be a pay phone. “I’ll call him at six,” Parker said.
Outside the Mobil station where he’d waited in vain to see the Chevy Suburban was the phone-on-a-stick Parker used when he wanted to make a call that wouldn’t be monitored for training purposes. He got there just at six with a pocketful of change and dialed the number in upstate New York, and Dalesia answered on the first ring: “We got an event.”
“So have I,” Parker said. “Would yours be the same one? A guy named Keenan?”
“No, mine is Jake Beckham. He was shot.”
“Shot?” That made no sense. “The husband?”
“He’s not that kind.”
“How bad is he?”
“Hit in the leg, above the knee.”
“In the hospital?”
“Yeah, for a couple weeks. Actually, it’s not that far from where we wanted him, only now he’s gonna have a limp.”
“This isn’t what we wanted,” Parker said. “We didn’t want the law looking at him, wondering what he’s been up to lately, what did he have on the fire, who’s he been hanging around with.”
“That’s true,” Dalesia said. “We also didn’t want Jake’s reading on the thing.”
“Reading? What do you mean, reading?”
“Well,” Dalesia said, “he thinks you did it.”
TWO
1
Gwen Reversa had decided to change her first name from Wendy even before she knew she was going to be a cop. The name Wendy just didn’t lend itself to the kind of respect she felt she deserved. Wendys were thought of as blondes, i.e., airheads. Well, Gwen Reversa, now Detective Second Grade Gwen Reversa, Massachusetts CID, couldn’t help it if she was a blonde, but she could help being a Wendy.
It was in a name-your-baby book that she learned that Wendy wasn’t even a proper name all by itself, though that’s what her mother had picked for her and that’s what it said on the birth certificate. But Wendy was actually a nickname, for Gwendolyn.
Well. Once she’d discovered that, it was nothing at all to switch herself from a nickname without gravitas—Wendy—to a nickname with: Gwen. She was now twenty-eight, and at this stage in her life only her immediate family and a few early pals from grade school even remembered she’d once been a Wendy, and she was pretty sure they usually forgot.
“Detective Second Grade Gwen Reversa, CID,” she told the wounded man in the hospital bed, and he wheezed a little, nodded his head on the pillow, and said, “Glad to see ya.” Would he be glad to see a Wendy? Nah.
“You feel strong enough to talk, Mr. Beckham?”
“Sure, if I had anything to say,” he told her. “They missed my lung by about three feet.”
She laughed, mostly to put him at his ease, and pulled over one of the room’s two chrome-and-green-vinyl chairs. Since he was a crime victim, and the perp might be interested in a follow-up question, Mr. Jake Beckham was in a private room.
Gwen took two notebooks and a pen from her shoulder bag, then put the bag on the floor and moved the chair so the shoulder bag strap looped around one leg, which is how you learned to keep control of your bag when you had a gun in it. Then she sat on the chair, opened one of the notebooks, and said, “Want to tell me about it?”
“I don’t know a hell of a lot about it,” he said. He was fiftyish, heavyset, weak and a little dour from having been shot, but there was nevertheless something boyish about him, as though, instead of lying around here in a hospital bed, he’d much rather be out playing with the guys. He said, “I was just coming out of work—”
“Trails End Motor Inne.”
“Yeah, that’s where I work, assistant manager. I was coming off my shift, I went out to my car—they want us to keep our cars out at the end of the parking lot—”
“Sure.”
“I was on my way, I felt this sting first, my right leg”—he rubbed it beneath the hospital sheet and blanket—“I thought it was a bee sting, something like that, I thought, Jesus Christ, now I’m getting stung, and then, at the same time— See, I didn’t hear the shot at first. I mean, I heard it, but I didn’t pay any attention to it because I was distracted by this bee sting, whatever it was. Then I realized, my leg’s going out from under me, that’s something more powerful than a bee, and then I realized, holy shit, that was a shot! And there I am on my ass in the parking lot.”
“Did you hear a car drive away?”
“I didn’t hear or see a goddam thing,” he assured her. “I’m on my back on the blacktop, I’m suddenly weak, now I’m getting sudden-like light flashes around my eyes, I’m thinking, I was shot with a poisoned bullet! I gotta get outa here! That’s what I’m thinking, and I try to roll over, and that’s when I passed out, and woke up in the ambulance.”
“The bullet came from behind you.”
“Yeah, behind and to my right, cause that’s where the bullet went in, halfway up between the knee and the top of the leg. They tell me the bullet’s still in there, but it didn’t hit any bone, they’ll take it out in a couple days.”
There’d been very little to write so far in this first notebook. Gwen now opened the second, which contained the details she’d already collected, and said, “So whadaya think? This the past catching up with you?”
He looked almost angry at that. “Past? What past?”
“Well, Mr. Beckham,” she said, tapping the notebook with her pen to let him know she had the goods, right in here, “you have been known to hang out with the wrong kind of people.”
“Not any more!”
“You’ve done time—”
“All over!” He was agitated, determined to convince her. “I did the minimum, got all my good behavior, that’s behind me.”
“You’re on parole right now.”