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  “Maybe.”

  “I can see why Wilson’s getting sweaty palms.”

  “Well, he’s a politician. Sweaty palms are his business.”

  “Still, they might cost you your job.”

  Brandt nodded. “Mine and a lot of other people’s. But that’s the luck of the draw. If, in fact, we didn’t do our homework the first time on this, maybe a few heads ought to roll. The point is, we’ve come to a very dicey crossroads in this investigation, and I thought it might be a good idea for the four of us to get together and maybe come to some sort of understanding.”

  “In other words, butt out of your business,” Katz said. Bellstrom laughed and reached out to pat him gently on the arm.

  “Down, boy, down.”

  Brandt resumed. “There was a lot missing from this morning’s story, a lot that would give it more coherence and that might also reduce some of the hysteria. People are starting to see this Ski Mask as a marauding cutthroat, randomly knocking people off. In fact, he’s being very methodical and has but one goal in mind. Now, I would love to share as much as we’ve got on him with you in the hope of setting the public’s mind more at ease.”

  “In exchange for what?”

  “In exchange for some advance warning on your future articles.”

  Katz jammed his hands into his pockets, but kept quiet.

  “You want to read the articles first?”

  “Well, if not read them, at least hear about what’s going into them. This isn’t too ominous, by the way. It amounts to merely hearing both sides of a debate before publication-pretty standard practice.”

  “When we choose it to be. There are a couple of problems I can see, the most practical of which is finding one of you guys in the middle of the night before we go to press. This morning’s story didn’t have much lead time, and I wouldn’t have been able to waste more of it chasing after you.”

  “I understand. That’s an unusual circumstance.”

  “There is one more important point. If we tell you what we’ve got before we publish, that opens the door to a lot of similar interference. People could legitimately lay claim to the same right we give you. Every board meeting, every feature article, every sports report would be open to the same scrutiny. We’d nevny. icleer be able to get to the printers.”

  Brandt pulled his prop out of his pocket and started fiddling. “I understand. It’s hardly a new argument, nor is mine for that matter. In fact, under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t even have this conversation. In our cases, it’s an I-do-my-job-you-do-yours kind of world-it has to be that way. But, and please pardon the cliche, this is somewhat of a special case. We may have put the wrong man in jail. We have to either find enough to get him off the hook, or nail someone else in his stead. If we don’t do one or the other, he stays where he is. The legal process put him in; it’ll have to get him out. But it can only do so with our help. If you folks find something and publicize it before we can nail it down, it might blow his chances at getting out. I don’t want to censor anything you might get; at the most, I might ask for a little time before you publish it.”

  “I don’t like it.” Katz muttered. He turned away from the window at last and faced us. “I mean, it sounds swell and bighearted-you guys working overtime in order to clear an innocent man. But it doesn’t have to be true. I’m not calling you liars, but look at what you’re facing. There are two alternatives: you reaffirm Davis’s guilt and get rapped on the knuckles for having been slightly sloppy; or you discover he’s totally innocent, and you all get fired and sued within an inch of your lives. You’d like us to believe you’re hell-bent on suicide. I’m a little skeptical.”

  “It is true,” Bellstrom added, “that by clearing everything through you first, we jeopardize the integrity of the facts as we find them. You could conceivably influence us to color things just enough to change their meaning. Look, Stan may not like to admit it, but we both know you folks are okay. We’ve worked well together over the years. But the fact remains that we’re lambs and tigers-I’ll resist saying who’s which-we’re natural enemies. We may spend most of our lives in perfect harmony, but that doesn’t mean that one morning Mother Nature won’t suddenly remind us of who’s who, and then it’s best friend-for-breakfast time.”

  Brandt sighed. It wasn’t noon yet, and I could feel him staring ahead at a long, long day of similar conversations. “So. No deal.”

  Bellstrom gave him his most sympathetic smile. I’ll grant him that-he had the perfect personality for this kind of discussion. “I’m afraid not, Tony, at least not formally. Let’s leave it that we’ll play it by ear. On the assumption that our hearts are all in the right place, that ought to be enough.”

  Brandt gave him a weary look. “I’m sure Davis would agree.”

  Bellstrom stood to leave and wagged his finger. “Cheap shot, Tony.”

  Brandt nodded and stood also. “I know. Sorry. Look, the earlier offer still stands. I have to huddle with the board soon, but afterward I’d like to let Stan in on some of the detail stuff. There’s no point letting people think Ski Mask is more of a menace than he is, and what we’ve got won’t jeopardize what Joe’s looking into right now.”

  “All right. Thanks. Is that okay with you, Stan?”

  “Sure, as long as I don’t have to promise I’ll publish any of it.” Brandt shook his head. “Christ, what a hard-ass. I think you’ll consider it news, even coming from me.”

  “That reminds me, Stan.” I asked. “How did you link up with Susan Lucey?”

  Stan smiled and shook his head.

  “Come on, Stan, give him that much.” Bellstrom nudged his arm. “It’s not like you’re revealing a source.”

  Katz was obviously torn between keeping a secret and revealing his cleverness. He finally gave in. “I followed you. After you left her place, I had a chat with her myself. You made a big impression on her and she wasn’t very giving, although I sure as hell was-she’s very expensive. Anyway, I didn’t learn much, but I left her my number and told her to call me-that I’d make it worth her while.

  “So she calls me in the middle of the night. She’s been beaten up; you’re nowhere to be found; she feels totally betrayed. She said she asked for protection and you ignored her. All of a sudden, she wasn’t so keen on you, so she spilled her guts. That’s about it. You ought to be nicer to your snitches.”

  He was right.

  21

  “Who is it?” she asked from behind the door.

  “Joe Gunther. The cop who talked to you yesterday.”

  “Go fuck yourself.”

  “I came to see how you were.”

  “Lousy, thanks to you.”

  “I’ve got a peace offering.”

  The door was almost ripped off its hinges. Her face, its left side badly bruised, was red with fury. “A peace offering? What the hell do you think this is? A lover’s spat? Your first visit gets me beaten up, this one’ll probably get me killed, and you have a peace offering? You’re a real head case, you know that?”

  Her hand was half lifted to strike me, so I filled it with what I was holding. It was an automatic coffee maker. It looked more extravagant than it was; the whole thing had set me back about fifty dollars. That was certainly less than meeting me had cost her.

  She stared at it with her mouth open. A gust of wind blew past me and hit her in the face. She grabbed my coat, pulled me inside and slammed the door. “Don’t get any ideas. I just don’t want to catch pneumonia.” Still, she kept the coffee maker.

  “What the hell made you choose this?”

  “I noticed you didn’t have one.”

  She peered at it closely. “You think this cheap piece of crap is going to get you off the hook?”

  I didn’t answer.

  She gave me a long baleful look. “The bastard hurt me-bad. I asked you for protection.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “That doesn’t do me a hell of lot of good, does iink Ssked you ft? I’m not going t
o get much business looking like a smashed grapefruit, am I?” I was probably reaching, but I thought some of the heat had gone out of her.

  “No.”

  “So what gives you the balls to drop by with presents, huh?”

  “Nothing. That’s it. I just wanted to see if you were okay. I paid your hospital bill.”

  She shook her head and crossed the room to put the machine on the kitchen counter. “Bully for you. You really are a bastard, you know that? I ought to shove this thing down your throat.”

  “I won’t stop you.”

  She leaned against the counter and crossed her arms. She was wearing blue jeans and a sweat shirt of dubious cleanliness. “Where the hell were you, anyway? I thought you cops were supposed to keep in touch with each other.”

  “A partner of mine got killed a week ago. His widow got back home from her daughter’s last night, so I went over to keep her company. I thought she might be lonely, her first night back in her own house. I forgot to leave word where I was.”

  She didn’t say anything for a few moments, and when she did, her voice had finally softened. “Was that the guy who died in the car crash?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Gunther… You were the one with him, weren’t you? The one who ended up in the hospital.”

  “That’s right.” She flared up again briefly. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me that the first time? I might have known what to expect.”

  It flashed through my mind that if I told her someone else had killed Frank, she’d probably throw me through the window.

  I pretended Ski Mask was the one and only. “I never thought of it. I did warn you, but to be honest, I didn’t think you’d ever set eyes on him. What he did to you was totally out of character.”

  “Out of character? What do you know about his character? Katz says the man’s a fucking nut case, and I can swear to it.”

  “Katz only knows half of what we know, and we don’t know much. But everything Ski Mask has done has been thought out beforehand, with no visible emotion.”

  “My God, he’s killed people. How emotional do you want him to get? And he sure as hell wasn’t cool, calm and collected when I met him.”

  I couldn’t argue with that. Considering my prowess to date, any psychological evaluations by me were rightly suspect. “I screwed up. I am sorry.”

  She waved her hand at me angrily. “Sorry, sorry. All right, so you’re sorry. I’m sorry I ever set eyes on you, so that makes two of us.” She crossed over to her armchair and sat. “I’ll live.” She reached under the chair for her stash and began filling her tiny pipe. She lit up. “Want a pull?”

  I shook my head. “Are you going to be all right?”

  She held her smokehel ali for a couple of seconds and exhaled. “You tell me.”

  “What did he want?”

  She snorted. “Same thing you did. So I told him what he wanted to know-I mean, shit, it was no big secret, right?”

  “No.”

  “I did what you told me to do, right?”

  “Right.”

  There was a lull. She smoked some more, stared at the floor, ran her fingers through her hair. When she spoke again, the anger was missing. “He wasn’t just after information. He had something else going, you know? When I told him about some of what Kimberly and I had done together, he kind of flipped out. That’s when the beating started. I mean, I knew I had blown it. I shouldn’t have told him as much as I did. Then he wanted to know everything. I had to tell him positions, whether we’d made it together without a guy in the middle, whether she ever took it up the ass, all kinds of stuff. I mean, he scared the shit out of me. I’m not going to forget him for a long, long time.”

  As she talked, her voice as tough as usual, the light from a gap in the curtains caught the tears running down her cheek. “He had real pale eyes, not really blue or anything. They were weird-colorless-and cold. I mean, I knew sure as hell I wasn’t going to live, that he was going to kill me and that it was going to hurt. And he did hurt me bad. Not the face stuff-I’m used to a few punches-but there was other stuff, things he enjoyed. The more it hurt, the more he liked it… Fucking creep.”

  She raised her eyes to me, openly crying now, the toughness suddenly gone. She looked like a kid in dirty clothes, her body shaking helplessly. “If you ever catch him, could you blow his balls off for me?”

  I knelt and put my arms around her. The embrace was prompted by more than mere sympathy. Through her suffering, Susan Lucey had just illuminated one of the murkier corners of the case. Ski Mask’s reaction to the information she had given him went a long way to connecting him emotionally to Kimberly Harris rather than to Bill Davis. While I still didn’t know specifically what Ski Mask was after, I now felt pretty sure it wasn’t solely to get Davis out of jail. Susan Lucey had paid a large price to get me that information. I was definitely in her debt.

  After a short while, she stopped sobbing and pulled back a little. Her hands were clasped in her lap. Her face was flushed and bruised and wet with tears. “Fuck, I probably would have met someone like him sooner or later. I probably will again. It’s the turf.”

  She hesitated a moment and then gave me the best-and longest-kiss I’d ever had in my life. It left me misty eyed and breathless. “Thanks for the coffee maker, you creep.” She said it without a smile.

  · · ·

  Despite the wide scope of our search for Kimberly Harris’s activities during her three-day weekends, none of us really believed we’d hit pay dirt searching train, bus or cut-rate car-rental files, so all of us that morning had taken either travel agencies or the airline. The airline was going to take longer, of course. Its records were not held locally, and we sent one man across New Hn at="0em" ampshire to hunt them down. But in principle, for once we were on the right track.

  At the end of a long afternoon plowing through box after box of computer printouts, we found two travel firms that clicked. One of them had handled tickets for a Miss Julie Johnson on seventy percent of the right dates, and another had ticketed a Mr. L. Armstrong for the same dates and destinations.

  I found Brandt in his office at about six in the evening. He was sitting in virtual darkness-only his desk lamp on-with his feet on the table and his chair tilted back. His eyes were closed and he was smoking.

  “Rough day, huh?”

  “Long, yeah.”

  “How did the board go?”

  “On and on. I gave them more than they had and less than they wanted. They let me know, in their words, that my ‘future hangs in the balance.’ Utter crap, of course; they’re confusing my job with my life. Typical asshole pomposity.”

  Unusual words for a usually unflappable man. I was hoping his condemnation wasn’t universal-one of those assholes was a woman for whom I had a particular fondness. “Did they all come down that hard?”

  He sighed. “No, not all.” Then he chuckled. “Your own Miss Zigman was her normal levelheaded self, but she was wise enough to lay low in the storm. What have you got?”

  “Julie Johnson and Louis Armstrong had a penchant for flying the same airplanes to the same places, at least according to two separate travel agencies.”

  “Louis Armstrong?”

  “The irreverence of torrid love, I guess. They certainly had an eye for glamour: Vegas, Lake Tahoe, Miami, San Francisco-all the hot spots. We interviewed the agents who booked most of the tickets. It was all done in cash, and it sounds like Kimberly did the arranging for both of them, although she was apparently in disguise-dark glasses, hair hidden, stuff like that. Just enough hocus-pocus to make her impossible to forget. I guess that makes the guy a well-heeled married local, or at least one with access to funds. From what Susan Lucey told me about Kimberly’s taste in men, I would also assume he’s-as they say-mature in years. Either that or a shy-but-precocious fifteen-year-old.” Or, I thought, even Ski Mask himself.

  “Good.” He still hadn’t opened his eyes or moved. “Now what?”

  “Now I go to Bos
ton. I have a date tonight with a friend at the police department.”

  “In search of Pam Stark?”

  “Yup.”

  “Happy trails. Don’t get mugged.”

  I called Gail before I left and congratulated her on surviving the afternoon. She said Brandt had displayed the stoicism of Saint Sebastian and had fared about as well. I apologized for not showing up last night and told her not to expect me tonight either. I had a feeling that what I would find in Boston would keep me out of town for a while. Her reaction was matter-of-fact, with no hint of the emotion she’d shown the day befor thfeeling the. The see-saw was back in balance, thanks to me, and for that, idiotically, I was now sorry.

  To me, driving to Boston at night is slipping toward the heart of a gigantic landlocked amoeba, whose thin and ragged outer fringe extends far beyond its inner core. From narrow, unlit New Hampshire farm roads, lights gradually begin to cluster along the sides of the highway. Occasional houses become occasional towns; the towns begin to link first tenuously with filling stations and a restaurant here or there, then with modest “miracle miles”-commercial stretches of small retailers, low-rent discount stores, and fading supermarkets. Finally, still well over an hour from the city, suburbia takes over in an endless chain of lights and malls and parking plazas and increasingly maddened traffic. By the rules known only to these particular urbanites, behavior behind the wheel metamorphoses into animal cunning. Speed limits are ignored, traffic lights are useless; drivers maneuver for room and advantage, speeding and braking, flowing from one side of the road to the other in a ceaseless attempt to get ahead of the other guy. I entered Boston, as always, like a leaf in a torrent, my only thoughts turning on ways to avoid the rocks.

  I finally beached myself downtown, not far from the city’s government center, and entered the Boston Police Department’s main building on Stuart Street. I found Don Hebard as promised, loitering outside the records division, a plastic coffee mug in hand.

  “Welcome to Beantown.”

  “You people actually call it that?”