“Let me guess,” I said. “The Petersens are long gone, am I right? Brennan’s out there now, looking at nothing more than a deserted antique shop and barn. Because you had plenty of time to call the Petersens and tell them the heat was coming. So they’ve split, right?”
“I don’t follow any of this.”
“But when you called Tony’s to warn your buddies, nobody was there but Felicia Richards. You didn’t warn her, though, did you? Don’t bother explaining why; I got that figured out, too. Only certain people knew about you, right, Lou? Only certain people knew about the inside man at the sheriff’s office. Like the Petersens. And Chet. And Pat. But not P. J., huh? He’s just a stooge. And not the women. Or the people you fence the goods through. Just the inner circle, the masterminds. Mastermind small-time, low-life punks like you, Lou.”
“You better keep quiet, Mal. You don’t know what you’re getting into.”
“Sure I do. So what happened, anyway? When you called Tony’s and found nobody home but the woman, what did you do? Figure that they might try Mrs. Fox? Or were you listening to the police-band radio in your car? Or at the office? Oh, well. Doesn’t matter. Probably none of it can be proved, anyway.”
Under the pencil-line mustache, Lou’s mouth formed a smile, just a little one.
“Because you tied up the loose ends, didn’t you, Lou? You shot them. You blew ’em apart with your gun. You’re really something, Lou. You’re some goddamn friend in need. Indeed.”
The sirens were starting now. Brennan would be here soon. Cops. Ambulance. In the background, people were watching us, Lou and me, watching a conversation they couldn’t hear but wanted to. Morbid curiosity, it’s called.
“I’ll tell Brennan, of course. And he’ll believe me. But I can’t be sure it’ll do any good. With the damn civil service the way it is, I don’t even know if he can get away with firing you, let alone pressing charges. So you win, I guess. You ripped everybody off, and the spoils are yours. Have fun.”
“I will,” Lou said softly. “And I’m not worried. Because nobody’s left.”
He was right. The Petersens clearly had made it away before Brennan got there. Chet was dead. Pat was dead. P. J. knew nothing. The women knew nothing. Me? I had a patchwork quilt of guesses; try that out in court.
“I’m left,” Debbie said.
We hadn’t heard her come up behind us. I’m sure she hadn’t wanted to leave Pat behind, but she’d felt the need to come over and join us. To let Lou know.
That she knew.
Husbands don’t keep much from wives. Lou should have thought of that. And maybe Felicia Richards would turn out to know as much as Debbie. After all, Chet was her brother. Among other things.
Lou’s hand tightened around the butt of the holstered.357 Magnum once again. Began to draw it out.
“Are you kidding?” I said. “Listen to those sirens. They’re thirty seconds away. Look at all these people standing in their yards, on porches, watching. You going to shoot them, too? Get serious.”
He let the gun drop back down in the holster.
He said, “I really didn’t mean… want… to kill them. But it was all I could think of to do.”
The tears came now. Debbie’s, I mean. She buried her face in my chest, and I patted her head.
Lou touched his forehead with one hand and mumbled, “Damn sirens.” He went over to the curb and sat and covered his ears with his hands, while the cars started rolling in on the scene: first cops, then ambulance, then Brennan, in close succession. Across from Lou, Pat and Chet were staring, empty-eyed. Lou was staring, too. With eyes just as empty.
25
I spent the next several weeks trying to forget the whole damn affair. I didn’t have much luck. Every time I turned around, Brennan (who had become friendly due to the favorable publicity I’d helped him get) was stopping by to tell me the latest. I came to dread those visits, but also looked forward to them, since my desire to put the mess out of my mind was equaled by my natural curiosity to see how the details worked out. You might be curious, too, so I’ll give you the nutshell version of what Brennan had to say.
While the Petersens had made it away that afternoon before Brennan could get out to their antique shop, they’d left a truck behind in their barn, a furniture truck with ramps set in back for the loaded green van to be driven up inside. The truck’s place of purchase was traced to Cleveland, Ohio, where, not coincidentally, Lou Brown had been working in a factory until he decided to move back to Port City.
Brennan also said that a pattern involving the Petersens was forming, which should facilitate their eventual capture. Apparently, under various names, the couple had on at least four other occasions (in Georgia, Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois) made down-payments on down-at-the-mouth antique shops located out in the boonies, keeping up the payments for several months and then leaving town suddenly. The young couple skipping out after failing to make a go of their investment had never been remotely connected to the local outbreaks of breaking-and-entering. Now that it had, and the pattern was clear, it was just a matter of time, Brennan said, before the Petersens would join Lou Brown, whose trial was set to come up in three months.
My hunch about Felicia Richards was right; she, too, knew of Lou Brown’s link to the break-in ring and was bitter enough about her brother’s death to testify. The fact that doing so brought her immunity from prosecution may have had something to do with her cooperation. Because of such cooperation, neither Felicia nor Debbie was to be charged with anything.
Which was fine with me.
And now two weeks had gone by since the shooting out in front of Mrs. Fox’s. I was getting back to my mystery novel and hoped to get the final draft typed up and in the mail by the middle of next month. And I had a good idea what my next one would be. Right now, however, I was drinking a Pabst, enjoying the solitude of my trailer. Didn’t even have the stereo or TV on.
The phone rang, of course.
Solitude has a way of not lasting long-when I’m enjoying it, anyway.
“Mal? This is Debbie.”
“I know. How are you doing?”
“Better. I haven’t seen you since….”
“Right. You making the adjustment okay?”
“I suppose as well as can be expected. We’re moved in with Mom now. A lot of our stuff was… stolen property, you know, so all of that was confiscated. Cindy’s taking it kind of hard. She was crazy about her daddy.”
“Most little girls are. I’m sorry.”
“Mal, I can’t tell you what it means to me that you’re not… bitter about what… what I did to you. I think about that-what I did-and it makes me feel so, God… well, let’s just say this wasn’t an easy call to make.”
“It wasn’t a necessary one, either,” I said. “I can understand what you did, without approving of it. Pat was your husband. You loved him. What you did came out of that.”