“Whoa. Is that the fucking dog from the crime scene?”
“Maybe…” I say, and McGully says, “Maybe what?” and now I’m pacing vigorously, the dog is pacing, too, in my footsteps. “Maybe what happens is, Peter brings Toussaint pills in June. They hang out, they get high, and then after Peter gets caught and quits, J. T. keeps it going. Maybe at some point he started selling the overflow, and now he’s gotten used to the cash, he’s put a customer base together. So he finds himself a new source.”
“Yes!” says McGully exuberantly, and pounds his fist on the table. “Probably the same person who tried to murder you with your snow chains.”
I look at him and he’s clearly making fun of me. I sit back down in my chair.
No use telling McGully about the slamming front door back at the house on Bow Bog Road, because he will say I’m imagining things, or that it was a ghost, and I know that I am not, and it was not. Someone tried to stop me from finding those drugs, and it wasn’t J. T. Toussaint, because Toussaint is lying dead in the morgue in the basement of Concord Hospital.
Houdini sniffs around under Andreas’s desk, settles in for a nap. My cell phone rings.
“Hello? Detective Palace?”
It’s Naomi Eddes, and she sounds nervous, and at the sound of her voice I feel nervous, too, like a kid.
“Yep. This is me. Hi.”
I can feel McGully looking at me, so I stand up from my desk, step over to the window.
“What’s up?”
“I just—” The phone crackles for a second, and my heart leaps in terror against the possibility that I’ve lost the connection.
“Ms. Eddes?”
“I’m here. I just—I thought of something that might be helpful to you, in your case.”
2.
“Good evening,” she says, and I say, “Good evening,” and then we spend a second or two looking at each other. Naomi Eddes is in a bright red dress with black buttons running down the center of it. I look terrible, I’m sure. I’m wishing now I had stopped to change from my day-at-the-office, my gray jacket and blue tie, to something more appropriate for dinner with a lady. Truth is, all my jackets are gray, all my ties are blue.
Eddes lives in a neighborhood in Concord Heights, south of Airport Road, a new development where all the streets are named for fruits, and where the asteroid recession took hold halfway through construction. She’s on Pineapple, and everything from Kiwi moving westward is half finished: bare wooden frames like dug-up dinosaur bones, half-tiled roofs, vandalized interiors, never-used kitchens stripped for copper and brass.
“You can’t come in,” she says, and steps out onto the front stoop, her peacoat draped over her arm, tugging a hat down over her bald head. It’s a kind of hat I’ve never seen before, a kind of girl-style trilby hat. “Place is a mess. Where are we going?”
“You said—” she’s walking to my car, I follow her, slipping a little on a patch of black ice on the driveway, “—you said you might have information relevant to my case. To Peter’s death.”
“I do,” she says. “I mean, I think I do. Not information. Just, like, an idea. What happened to your face?”
“Long story.”
“Does it hurt?”
“No.”
“That’s good.”
It’s true, my wounded eye has been fine all day, but as I’m saying the word no an intense pulse of pain seizes the right side of my face, radiating outward from the eyehole, as if the injury is punishing me for lying. I blink the good eye, endure a wave of nausea, and find Naomi standing at the shotgun door in an old-fashioned way, waiting for me to open it for her, and I do, and by the time I come around to my side and slide in, she’s reaching for the dashboard computer with fascination, almost but not quite touching the screen.
“So, what is your idea?”
“How does this work?”
“It’s just a computer. You can keep track of where every other member of the force is, at any given time.”
“What does WC stand for?”
“Watch Commander. What’s the idea you had, about the case?”
“It’s probably nothing.”
“Okay.”
She’s looking out the window, or at her own ghostly reflection in the window glass. “Why don’t we talk about it at dinner?”
Eddes vetoes the Somerset Diner out of hand, and basically what’s left are the bars and the pirated fast-food joints and the Panera. I’ve heard of a fine-dining place still open in Boston where the owners have bribed their way out of price controls, where you can get the whole white-tablecloth experience, but from what people say, it would cost all the money I’ve got left.
Naomi and I end up at Mr. Chow’s, looking at each other over a pot of steaming jasmine tea across a grease-stained linoleum table.
“So how’s it going?”
“What?”
“Sorry, how would you say it, in cop language?” A small teasing smile. “What is the status of the case?”
“Well, we did, actually, apprehend a suspect.”
“You did? And how did that go?”
“Fine.”
I could tell her more, but I don’t. The suspect attacked me with a scale model of the New Hampshire state house. The suspect was a drug dealer, and either was supplying or was supplied by the victim. The suspect is dead. Ms. Eddes seems satisfied not to know, and anyway our food comes quickly, a massive lazy Susan laden with dumplings, soups, and cashew chicken. The words Chow! Chow! flash in pink neon on the window just past our table.
“What was your idea about the case?”
“You know what?
“What?”
I knew she was going to do this. Put it off, delay, elide. I feel oddly as if I know her so well.
“Let’s have an hour.”
“An hour?”
“Henry, please, I really…”
She looks at me with clear-eyed sincerity, her face washed of all her teasing swagger. I like it intensely, that clear-eyed face, her pale cheeks, the symmetry of her shaved head. “I know I called because I said I had something to tell you. But to tell you the truth, I was also thinking how much I would love to just, you know, just eat dinner with a human being.”
“Sure.”
“You know? Have a normal conversation. Eat dinner without talking about death.”
“Sure,” I say again.
“To the extent that this activity is still possible, I would like to try it.”
“Sure.”
She lifts her wrist, slim and pale, undoes the little silver buckle of her watch, and places it on the table between us. “One hour of normalcy. Deal?”
I reach out and let my hand rest for one moment, over hers.
“Deal.”
And so we do, we sit there and we eat what is really pretty mediocre Chinese food and we speak about normal things.
We talk about the world we grew up in, the strange old world from before, about music and movies and television shows from ten and fifteen years ago, ’N Sync and Beverly Hills, 90210 and The Real World and Titanic.
Naomi Eddes, at it turns out, was born and raised in a suburb called Gaithersburg, in Maryland, what she calls America’s Least Remarkable State. Then she went to community college for a couple of semesters, dropped out to be the lead singer in a “terrible but well-meaning” punk-rock band, and then, when she figured out what she really wanted to do, she moved to New York City to finish her bachelor’s and get a master’s degree. I like hearing her talk when she gets going, there’s music in it.
“What was it? What you really wanted to do?
“Poetry.” She sips her tea. “I wanted to write poems, and not just in my little journal in my room. I wanted to write good poems, and publish them. Still do, in fact.”