After a moment, Welch sighed. "I'm sorry. I love Lyle, but I'm not about to settle in with one guy. I'm too restless. And I want to focus on my career and on reforming the department. Lyle's role models in love are his mother and father, and if any two guys or any two women want that, that's fine. But it's not for me."
"Apparently not," Thad said. "I'll go in and see how Lyle's doing. Maybe you need to just cut him loose. Or maybe he should cut you loose, if he can."
Welch did not reply, and Thad went into the house, where a light had come on in a distant inside room.
"Lyle is so upset with me," Welch said to me, "that you almost had him believing I was a major felon."
"And he's so smitten with yon that lie almost had me believing he was going to tip you off that I was onto you-or even that he was your accomplice."
Welch swigged more beer. "So," he said after a moment, "what made you decide I was a kidnapper?"
I explained how comments Lylc had made about Welch's rage over the J-Bird and his radio show had predisposed me to becoming suspicious of him, and how Lyle's apparently exaggerated remarks about Welch's drug use had fueled that predisposition. Then after Leo Moyle told of the powerful scent of fingernail polish in the room where he had been held, I connected that with Welch's use of poppers, which smelled like nail polish, and Welch and his mysterious cohorts suddenly became the obvious culprits.
"We do use poppers," Welch said. "They're probably not healthy, but they're legal.
None of us use fingernail polish, though. Delmar, Marty and I are all police officers, and colored nails would not go over big in the department."
"There was also," I said, "the fact that with Jay F'lank-ton's situation becoming increasingly desperate, some of us hired to find him probably started getting desperate, too. You heard about the tongue at the Post, I take it."
"I doubt if that's real," Welch said. "Who would do that? It's too wild, too much." "I hope so."
"Before you pulled up across the street, Lyle was on the phone with the other detectives working the case, including the feds, and he said everybody was sounding desperate.
The forensics weren't in on the tongue yet, and nobody could find a tattoo artist who looked like a good suspect for the Moyle inkwork. There are hundreds of licensed tattoo parlors in the metro area, and nobody knows how many unlicensed amateurs, it turns out. They'd been hoping that the tattoo search would churn something up. And I guess the FFF end of the investigation hasn't been productive either."
"Not so far," I said. "The harassment of Plankton, supposedly by FFFers, was just some angry kids in Massachusetts. And apparently the kidnappers then picked up on the FFF name, hoping the kids would be the prime suspects. But they weren't for long."
With faint light now discernible through the low clouds in the east, Welch and I reviewed the case for several minutes, until Thad and Lyle reappeared. Lyle seemed to have calmed down. To distract him, Thad had asked for a tour of the Welch house, ostensibly to reassure Thad that Jay Plankton was not bound and gagged somewhere. Thad reported to me that it was true-Plankton was nowhere in the house, and there was no evidence that he had ever been there.
"Upstairs there are two hunky naked guys on a big bed," Thad said, "snoring to beat the band. Earlier somebody had spilled a vial of poppers on a pillow, and the place still reeked. It's a powerful aroma, and I can understand, Strachey, why when you smelled the popper in the subway it triggered this really strong reaction on your part, like Marcel Proust's madeleine.
"But this stuff didn't really smell like nail polish. It's sweeter, and not so pungent. I was thinking, there's nothing that smells exactly like nail polish. So maybe what Leo Moyle smelled really was nail polish. Wouldn't Moyle and the J-Bird and those guys recognize nail polish when they smelled it? They've got all those girlfriends and ex-wives and ex-girlfriends who probably did their nails a lot. So the J-Bird gang would surely know that smell when they were near it," Thad said.
That's when something I had been dimly aware of since one of my annoying conversations with Jerry Jerris and Jay Plankton in Jeris's office started to come back to me.
Chapter 22
I was seated at Dave Welch's kitchen table, and I had Leo Moyle on the phone. On the table in front of me were the few remaining crumbs from the crullers. And instead of joining Welch in a beer, I was back at the takeout coffee, which Welch had zapped in his microwave. This brought out the brew's acidic qualities, which I needed.
A groggy-sounding woman had answered Moyle's telephone. Apparently he had taken Jerry Jeris's advice on how to help regain his mental health. The woman was reluctant to awaken Moyle at daybreak, but when I explained that the information might save Jay Plankton from additional harm, she relented, and Moyle was soon on the line.
I asked him, "What do you know about Steve Glodt's personal life?"
"You woke me up at 5:30 A.M. to ask me whati"
"Jerry Jeris and Jay Plankton once mentioned to me in passing that Steve Glodt had a girlfriend in Oyster Bay who runs a nail parlor. It was my impression from this conversation, as I recall it, that Glodt also has a wife wherever he lives on Long Island. Is all of that true? I'll explain in a minute why I'm waking you up at this early hour, and how all this might be relevant to your kidnapping and to Jay's."
There was a pause, and then Moyle said, "What are you trying to say, Strachey? Just spit it the fuck out. What are you implying about Steve?"
"It sounds, Leo, as if you are ready to be indignant over any imputation of wrongdoing on the part of your big boss, Steve Glodt. I guess you are much fonder of Glodt than it's my impression Jerry Jeris and Jay Plankton are. Your confidence in his integrity is far greater than theirs. They both talked about Glodt as if he is greedy, mendacious, treacherous. Maybe your experience with Glodt has been different."
Moyle said, "Steve's a total asshole, don't get me wrong."
"Uh-huh."
"But what are you saying? That Steve had me snatched and dragged out to the Island and tortured? And now he's doing the same thing to Jay? Even if he was that skanky, why would he do that? Sure, Steve is a depraved son of a bitch. Anybody who's ever been in contract negotiations with him knows that. The man is capable of just about anything he thinks he can get away with. But why would he do this to Jay and I?
There'd be nothing in it for him."
"What about publicity? A spike in the ratings?"
"The show's ratings have never been higher," Moyle said. "Unless. .." There was a silence.
"Unless what?"
"Unless Steve thought that by putting Jay and me through the wringer it would make us angrier."
"Why would he want that?"
Moyle was breathing audibly now, as if the idea that someone was calculatedly trying to make h i m angrier was making him angrier.
"Steve's been working on a deal to get the show simulcast on cable TV-on GSN, the Gonzo Sports Network. But according to Irene Wojkowski, my agent, the GSN people have been offering less money than Steve thinks the deal is worth. They told him they thought the show was losing its edge, that we all weren't angry enough. The angry-white-male audience wants raw red meat, and the GSN people aren't sure we're mean enough. They want us foaming at the mouth for three hours a day, Irene said, and they claim we aren't doing it. Which is idiotic, because Jay and I are as vicious as we've ever been, and if any pussy-whipped dickhead tries to say otherwise to my face, I'll break his pansy-wristed fag neck."
Could necks have wrists? Now was not the time to inquire. "I guess, Leo, that when you use the term 'mean,' you are using it in the Jack Welch-style American corporate sense. By 'mean,' you mean relentlessly, even amorally, profit-oriented."
"Not really," Moyle said. "By 'mean,' I mean shitting on wussy, oversensitive, PC types of people for the sheer, sadistic pleasure of it."