“She doesn’t like baseball. I’d rather go with you.”
“I won’t be any fun.”
“That’s okay. We can be miserable together.”
With that, she pushed back from the table, grabbed her bag, and stood to leave. I reached over and swiped her car keys from the table.
“That’s sweet,” she said, “but I think I’ll walk.”
A half hour later, I was sitting on a bar stool nursing my beer when Annie slid over with another bottle. “This one’s on the blonde by the front window,” she said. “Are you that hung, or is this just your lucky day?”
“Hung,” I said. “Every day is lucky.”
I picked up the bottle and carried it to the table where Gloria sat with a can of Bud.
“All alone on a Friday night?” she asked.
“Veronica’s off playing with her sister.”
“You two starting to cool off?”
“Feels more like we’re heating up.”
“Oh. Too bad.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, and I guess she didn’t either. We sat quietly for a few minutes.
“Well,” she finally said, “I gotta be going.”
“Late date?”
She shook her head. “It’s not easy finding the right guy, one who wants to spend a romantic evening driving around Mount Hope with the windows cracked, sniffing the air for the smell of smoke.”
“Jesus, Gloria. Are you still doing that?”
“Most nights. Not every night. When all hell broke loose Monday, I was at the White Horse in Newport getting groped by a broker who tried to impress me with everything he knows about hedge funds. Missed the biggest story of the year, and I didn’t even have a good time.”
She drained her can, slid her chair back, and got to her feet.
“Stay, Gloria. Next round’s on me.”
“Sorry. Gotta go.”
“You shouldn’t be wandering around out there by yourself.”
“Come with me,” she said. “I got Buddy Guy on the CD player, you can smoke in my car, and this time I promise I won’t kiss you.”
I almost caved. But hell, I couldn’t look after everybody. The gnawing in my stomach told me I wasn’t doing much of a job of looking after myself. Besides, I wasn’t sure she’d keep that promise or if I’d remember to behave if she broke it.
When I shook my head no, she turned and walked out the door. I watched her walk past the window in the rain.
I slipped a Cuban out of my jacket pocket, clipped the end, and set fire to it with the Colibri. Annie brought me another Killian’s, then went back behind the bar and turned the volume up on the TV so the night shift filing in from the newspaper could catch Logan Bedford’s version of the news:
“Remember Sassy, the dog that either did or didn’t walk all the way across the country to find its owner? Well, the tests from the Tufts veterinary school are in, and 10 News has it exclusively. Wait till you hear what they found. You’ll be shocked!”
No, I won’t, I thought, but I carried my beer to the bar for a closer look. Bedford had a good time holding up Hardcastle’s story and rubbing it in. He closed his report with two short camera shots—one of Martin Lippitt roughhousing with his dog, the other of Ralph and Gladys Fleming on their front stoop in Silver Lake, clutching each other and sobbing in the rain.
Annie wiped a tear from her cheek and brought me another beer.
“That was one of the saddest things ever,” she said.
“Yeah. It’s right up there with ‘In lieu of flowers,’ ‘Let’s just be friends,’ and ‘Yankees win.’ ”
44
That night, I couldn’t sleep. I stretched out on my bed in my undershorts, watching CNN and reading A Pocket Guide to Accelerant Evidence Collection at the same time. I smelled the gasoline before I heard the rustling at my apartment door.
I tiptoed barefoot to the kitchen, stepped in something wet, and peered through the peephole. All I could see was the cracked plaster wall across the hall. I flipped the dead bolt, yanked the door open, and discovered a man squatting at my threshold, spilling a gallon jug onto a dustpan angled to shoot the gasoline under the door.
He set the jug down on the floor, straightened to his full height of five foot five, and looked me up and down.
“Really?” he said. “Red Sox boxers? Isn’t that taking things a bit far?”
“You outta see my condoms.”
The right corner of his mouth curled into something that could almost be mistaken for a smile. Then he reached into his jacket pocket and extracted a pack of Marlboros. He shook one out, stuck it in his face, and fired it with a disposable lighter.
I didn’t say anything. The little thug’s lip curled again. He probably thought I was scared speechless, but that wasn’t my problem. I just couldn’t find the right wisecrack. “Those things can kill you” was too obvious. “Don’t you know it’s Fire Prevention Week?” wasn’t much of an improvement. “Hi—no offense” seemed beneath me. Unlike my threshold, each lacked a little something.
Finally I settled for “Sorry, but Timmy can’t come out to play.”
The lip curl faded.
“Pretty funny for a dead guy.”
“It’s only an ulcer.”
“What?”
I shrugged.
“I got a message for you, Mulligan. You’ve been sticking your nose into places it don’t belong, and that ain’t healthy. Quit your snooping. This is the only warning you’re gonna get. Next time I drop the cigarette.”
“Mulligan?” I said. “You’re looking for Mulligan? I threw that asshole out months ago. He smoked in the apartment, he never helped clean up after dinner, I caught him cheating on me, and he always welshed on his share of the rent.”
The little thug wasn’t buying it. He was already tromping down the stairs.
I chased after him, catching up in the narrow entry hall. I grabbed him by the shoulder and spun him. My mistake. He balled his fists, faked with his left, and shot a right uppercut to my groin. He smiled as he watched me fall, then turned and strolled out the door as if he didn’t have a care in the world.
45
“Okay, asshole,” Polecki said, “let’s go over it again.”
I repeated the description of the little thug, from his shaved head to his Air Jordans, and recited, as close as I remembered it, every word he said.
“He said he had a message for you? Did he mean it was from him, or was he delivering it for somebody else?”
“He didn’t say.”
“Tell me again how he managed to kick your ass, big guy like you.”
“We’ve been over it three times already.”
“Yeah, but I really like hearing that part.”
It had been well past three in the morning when I got to the police station on Washington Street. The night sergeant had listened to my story, recognized its importance, and rousted Polecki out of bed. We sat across from each other now on battered metal chairs, two empty paper coffee cups on the cigarette-scarred interrogation-room table.
“This could be our break,” he said. “You may have seen our guy’s face.”
Four hours later, I shut the last mug book, unable to find a match. I spent another hour with a sketch artist who’d found her art school on the back of a matchbook. Based on her portrait, we were looking for Homer Simpson.
When I got home, the apartment still reeked of gasoline. Black fingerprint dust coated the stair railing, my door frame, the door knob, anything the little thug might have touched.
I tried to grab some sleep, but it wasn’t working, so I called McCracken to tip him off about the little thug. He promised to run the description by insurance investigators around New England.