"Mr. Applebee?"
"Yes?"
Ramsey held up his badge. The old man looked at it and then looked back at him, looked in his eyes and then looked him up and down in slow, silent appraisal. He said nothing, only stepped aside to let him enter. A cop gets used to that sort of thing-being hated on sight and all-still, Ramsey had the sickening sense that it was more than that, that he had been judged on his Inner Man and found wanting. That's what made the superstitious sensation worse.
Worse, and then worse as he stepped inside. The musty Negro respectability here was smothering and accusatory, the sense of nemesis clearer and more present, almost an oppressive stringency in the atmosphere. The old man led the way past moldering upholstered furniture and piles of books about jazz and African culture. There was even an antimacassar on the back of one of the chairs, for Christ's sake. Ramsey's mother had used those. What the hell was this place? 1950?
The old man himself seemed as anachronistic as his surroundings. Ramsey had had schoolteachers like him as a child. Putting on intellectual airs and white professorial dignity. Looking down at him with disapproval, no matter how he tried to please.
Applebee led him into the dining room and positioned himself at the mantelpiece. He was wearing a sweater with patches on the elbows, and he leaned one of the patches on the mantel. Ramsey's eyes flicked up and saw the wooden carving above him, three angels, two in profile with trumpets, the third gazing down at him, his hand upraised, his face unpleasantly alive with a look that seemed to echo and amplify the old man's condemnation. The angel of his nemesis, Ramsey thought, before he could sweep the thought under.
"How can I help you, Lieutenant?" Applebee said quietly, and the way he said it made Ramsey feel as if he'd been called into the principal's office.
"I understand a carpenter named Henry Conor was doing some work for you."
"That's right, he was."
"He's not here now, though."
"No. He finished the job. He's done."
"So you don't know where he is?"
"He was only moonlighting here on weekends. I assume he's at his usual work or at home." Despite the neutral tone of his words, there was a sort of irony and intelligence in the old man's eyes that made Ramsey wonder what he had done to offend him. He tried to chalk it up to the usual neighborhood suspicion of the police, rife even among the law-abiding citizens sometimes. But it seemed more than that. Had Conor said something to him?
Ramsey murdered Peter Patterson.
Ramsey glanced up at the angel on the mantelpiece. There was a sort of irony and intelligence in his eyes, too. Annoyed, Ramsey spoke more bluntly.
"He's not in his apartment," he said. "There's a dead police detective there, but not Conor. That's why we're looking for him."
Applebee took a deep breath and shifted his position. A dead detective-that was more than he had bargained for. Still, as the breath came out of him, that undertone of disapproval was there again.
"I don't know anything about that," he said. "I'm sure Henry wasn't involved in killing your detective."
"Oh, really? What makes you sure of that?"
The old man hesitated and then answered, "You get a sense of people." He said it pointedly, Ramsey thought, accusatorily-the old fart-the angel of his nemesis-or was all this just in his own imagination? "In any case," the old man went on, "he did some work for me and now he's gone. You're welcome to search the place, if you think he's hiding somewhere."
Ramsey paused, irritated, giving the old man the eye. "That shouldn't be necessary," he said. "You're here alone, I take it."
"Yes."
"You live alone?"
"I live with my daughter and grandson. She's at work and he's at school."
There was something then-something on the word daughter- a shifting of the eyes away and back, a slight hesitation. Ramsey caught it, understood it in a flash. Handsome Harry's site boss, Joe Whaley, had been right. There was a girl. Applebee's daughter. Was that the source of the hostility here? Was she the one the old man was trying to protect? That made some sense of this, at least.
"Is there anything else, Lieutenant?" Applebee said-trying to fill the silence, Ramsey thought, fearing he might have given himself away.
Ramsey considered getting tough with him but thought better of it. He wasn't ready to go so far as to put his hands on the geezer and, without that, he didn't think the old man would crack. More likely, he'd just get on the phone when Ramsey was gone and warn his daughter that the big bad policeman was on his way.
So Ramsey gave him a brief smile instead. "No," he said. "Nothing else. I'm sorry to bother you, but I did have to check." He went into his wallet, offered the old man his card. "If Conor contacts you or you hear anything, please get in touch."
Applebee took the card without a word. Without a glance at it, he stuck it in his sweater pocket.
The irony and disapproval in the old man's eyes and the irony in the eyes of the angel of judgment and his own self-aggravating superstition continued to annoy Ramsey, but he exercised his famous self-control-merely smiled again and nodded. None of it mattered, none of it was to the point. It was best in this situation just to be polite and move on.
The daughter was the one he was really after.
He knew her. The moment he set eyes on her, he understood exactly who Teresa was. The good girl, he thought, the church girl. It figured, her being Applebee's daughter and all. And it gave him fresh insight into Conor's trajectory.
He was sitting in his Charger now, parked in a no-stopping zone in back of the school where she taught. It was a Westside private school, a big old cathedral-like building of red brick with rounded mission gables. There was a fenced-off asphalt courtyard out in back with some playground equipment and some painted white lines for field games. Ramsey was parked in front of that.
The lunch hour was just passing. At the sound of a bell, the boys poured out into the yard in their neckties and the girls in their plaid skirts, all of them shouting and laughing together, a surflike roar. Ramsey was just about to get out of his car and go inside to find Teresa when he saw her step into one of the rear doorways. She stood there, watching the children at their play.
He knew her face from her license photo in the computer, but he hadn't had a real sense of her until he saw her now. Now he felt a sort of helpless admiration for her and a dark resentment toward her and a dark attraction. The good girl, the church girl. His wife had been one of the same. She was the girl who didn't drink or do drugs or smoke or party. The girl who sang in the choir and decorated her notebooks with marker drawings of hearts and flowers. The girl who said "Aw" when she saw pictures of small animals and "Oh no! What're you going to do?" when her friends got themselves knocked up. She was the girl who walked swishing past when the brothers talked jazz at her passing ass, because she wasn't going to come over here, baby, not even if she was so fine, aw really, he'd be so careful, swear. She had her life all laid out in her mind, her plans confided to her diary, and they didn't include no baby-baby-baby, because she wasn't going to have no baby before the clock struck married. She was that girl.
And here was the thing about it. Girls like that-for some reason, they were love magnets for weak and damaged men. It was some kind of save-me-mommy deal. His wife had told him all about it. They wanted her sympathy, her kindness, her "Oh, you poor thing." They wanted her to make them better than they were, but, fucked-uppedly enough, they wanted to drag her down to their level, too. "I used to tell them if they wanted salvation, they could get themselves a Bible," Ramsey's wife had said. "If you want me, you gotta walk like a man."