Bloodline (13 page)

“Great. He won't arrest me, but he'll have me committed.”

“We'll all come visit.”

“How much do I have to pay you to stay away?” I said.

“Not much. But you know what was funny? This Poole guy, he asked me if you do drugs. If you were into cocaine or that scene.”

“You said no.”

“I said you were an Eagle Scout.”

“Liar.”

“With a weakness for English ale.”

“No Scout's perfect.”

I thought for a moment.

“So it was drugs that he wanted to know about?” I asked.

“I'd say so. That seemed to be the direction he was heading. I got the feeling he wanted to know what kind of connections you would have. So what's it all about? If you don't mind my asking.”

“I'm not sure. But I think Poole finds it hard to believe that my interest in these high-school-age kids is confined to a magazine story. He probably thought I made the whole thing up. That I'm dealing cocaine. When he was here, I got the feeling he was trying to figure out what I did for a living.”

“Reasonable question. And when you told him you were a journalist, he slapped the cuffs on.”

“No, he didn't even blink. The guy's kind of inscrutable, actually.”

“Seemed like a nice-enough chap,” Slocum said. “Not enough to crack this hardened witness, but I must admit that he was polite and pleasant, in a quiet sort of way.”

“But thorough.”

“Yeah,” Slocum said. “Quiet and unrelenting.”

“Great,” I said.

That afternoon I heard from a personnel person at the
Times
, Regina something, whom I'd known a little bit. Regina had read about the irises, called the magazine for my whereabouts, and rung
me up to let me know she'd heard in the halls that some cop from New Hampshire or someplace had called about Jack McMorrow. The watercooler speculation was that I was in some sort of serious trouble. Either that or I'd been in a bad accident. I didn't tell her it was a little of both. In fact, I didn't tell her anything. I was sure that when she hung up the phone she would immediately convey to my former colleagues at that giant news mill that I hadn't been in an accident.

So it had to be serious trouble.

And what had I done?

The more I thought about it, the more annoyed I became. Some idiot blows the windows out of my house with a shotgun and a detective calls all over hell-and-gone asking questions about my character. If I'd been killed, would they have asked the same questions? Probably more. After all, you can't slander a dead man.

I'd never been in this position before. Even in Androscoggin, when one of the guys on my staff actually had been murdered, I never felt like I was at all a suspect. In fact, I'd had to push the cops over there to get off their duffs. But then, Investigator Poole didn't work in Androscoggin County.

So what should I do? Call the guy up and proclaim my innocence? Leave the guy to pull out his high school
Hamlet
: “He doth protest too much, methinks.”

Well, I doth think I was getting smeared, that was for sure. No matter how discreet this guy tried to be, every inquiry raised suspicion. Some detective calling from out of state? Asking if I had connections to the drug trade? Come on. What were they going to think? That it was a routine background check for the Rotary Club?

The more I thought about it, the more outrageous it seemed. Was the guy going after Kenny and his buddies, or was he spending all
his time sifting through my résumé? Was it the BMW in my driveway that raised his suspicions? Or my cellular phone, Rottweiler, and machine guns? Good thing Poole didn't see the bats. He'd be calling around to see how long I'd been practicing black magic.

I picked up the phone and put it back down. Picked it up again. Put it down and stood there with my hand on the receiver. Threaten to sue him? Tell him to worry less about me and more about the guys who took target practice in my front yard? Tell him I wasn't any more a drug dealer than I was Al Capone? Or was I losing perspective on the whole thing?

Grabbing a six-pack of Budweiser bottles from the fridge, I went off to find some.

Perspective, that is.

A walk was always good for the head, so I hoofed it up the road to Clair's. A white cat trotted out from the college girls' yard and entangled itself in my legs. I shooed it back toward their house and told it to stay, but it didn't. There was no other sign of life at the girls' house. They'd probably gotten a call from Poole and now they didn't want to be left alone next door to a drug-crazed coke dealer who was always getting into shoot-outs.

Either that, or they'd be over to make a buy.

Clair's pickup was parked in front of his barn door and the lights were on in the shop. I walked up the drive and saw Mary out in the perennial gardens behind the house. She was cutting off some tall plants and putting them in a garden cart in sheaves. When she saw me, she waved and smiled.

Poole hadn't gotten to her yet.

There was music on in the barn, country western. I stepped past the pickup and in the door and looked for Clair. There was no one in
sight and I waited, then heard a clatter in the loft. In a moment, Clair appeared at the top of the loft ladder, some long boards balanced on his shoulder. I put the beer on the workbench and went to the base of the ladder and he handed the boards down to me.

“Got 'em?” Clair said. “Now turn 'em into a jelly cupboard.”

“What are you gonna do?”

“I'm gonna supervise. Otherwise you'll cut corners.”

“Cut fingers is more like it,” I said.

It was woodworking that day, another of Clair's many skills. He had more power tools than a catalog. A table saw. A band saw. A chop saw and a router. The blades for the table saw were hung on the wall over the bench, round disks with teeth of all shapes and sizes, arranged like big metallic flowers.

Clair had explained to me the differences between them. Plywood blades with fine teeth. A dado blade for cutting grooves. Crosscut blades for just lopping stuff off. It was all interesting, and I'd even helped him out on a couple of occasions when the crudeness of the project suited my modest abilities. But even then, my cuts were always off a sixteenth of an inch. My angles were off by a couple of degrees. If I ever had to give up drug dealing, woodworking probably wouldn't be my next career.

“You just getting started on this one?” I asked as we set the boards on the floor next to the bench.

“Old lady's been after me for months. I figured I better at least scope it out.”

“So you don't want a beer, then?”

“Well, Jack,” Clair said. “I figure you lugged those things up here for a reason. And I hate to see a man drink alone. Mary can get along without this jelly cupboard for one more day, I suppose.”

So I popped open a couple of beers and we leaned against the workbench and sipped. Neither of us said anything for a minute or two.

“You hear about the woman who went down to the corner store?” Clair said.

“Nope,” I said.

“She's up by the counter and she sees this barrel of nice red apples. She says to the lady behind the counter, ‘Those look good. My husband loves those apples. But do they have any sort of poison sprayed on them?'

“‘No, they don't,' the lady behind the counter says. ‘You'll have to go up to the hardware store and get that yourself.'”

I smiled.

“Yessir,” Clair said. “You're gonna do the old boy in, you gotta poison your own apples.”

He paused.

“So your buddies with the shotgun getting to you or what?”

“I don't know,” I said. “I didn't think so. Even though it isn't my idea of a good time. Getting shot at, I mean.”

“Beats getting shot.”

“By a long shot,” I said.

“You got that right.”

Clair sipped his beer. He wasn't a heavy drinker. When he had a beer, he savored it, like a man who knew what it was like to go without.

“No, what's bugging me is this cop.”

“The guy who was there when I was?”

“No. The next morning. A detective. Poole. He's jumped right on the case, all right. He's spent the last day calling my former employers to find out if I'm a drug dealer or a cokehead.”

“Mustn't have liked your looks,” Clair said.

“Either that or the postcards from Colombia on the refrigerator door.”

“I think it was that truck you drive.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“He probably figures a junk like that has to be some kind of front.”

We both sipped.

“I don't know,” I said. “It's just pissing me off. Really pissing me off. I came up here because it was either that or drive down to this guy's office and let him have it. I get shot at and he starts investigating me to find out if I'm a criminal. Maybe I'm wrong, but I thought cops were supposed to catch the bad guys.”

“He's trying to figure out who that is.”

“I'm not riding around with a shotgun across my lap.”

“Not yet.”

“Maybe I should, but the nuns didn't raise me that way.”

“That's your problem. The New Testament. In the good old Old Testament, you would have marched over to this kid's house and blown him away.”

“Or his family.”

“Right. None of this namby-pamby turn-the-other-cheek stuff,” Clair said.

“Right,” I said. “That's for sissies. What we need to do is turn this town into a war zone.”

“Half the world can't be wrong.”

Clair leaned back on the bench.

“You know what I think?” he said.

“Nope, but I'm gonna find out.”

“You should put yourself in this cop's place. You figure he doesn't know you from Adam, but he knows this kid is a wise guy. Here you are, this guy who just got here—from New York City. An evil goddamn place. You're from away, you listen to Beethoven, and you go bird-watching. And who are you having a run-in with? The local bad-ass.”

“Not by choice.”

“But look at it like this guy Poole would look at it. And remember: This writing stuff to him is just a lot of mumbo jumbo, I would think. The bottom line to this fella is that you don't have a job.”

“I'm a struggling writer.”

“Well, this ain't Paris, Jack. To him, you're living here with, how do they put it, no source of income. He can't tell where you get your money, so he's gonna ask questions.”

“How 'bout if I show him the story about the flowers?”

“Then he'll decide you're something else altogether.”

“If he hasn't already.”

I finished my beer and pulled out two more. Clair still had half of his left. A man of discipline.

“No. I had this sergeant, Dooley his name was. Guy was into war like nobody you ever met before. Not killing people. I mean the thinking part of it. The gray matter. And he used to tell me, before you meet a man in battle, you've got to understand how he thinks. What motivates him. Why does he do what he does? What will he do next?”

“Kind of outdated in the age of laser-guided missiles, isn't it?”

“Well, this was a long time ago,” Clair conceded. “But you aren't fighting with laser-guided missiles.”

“Not yet.”

“And this Poole's job is ninety-nine percent psychology. Goddamn detectives, that's all they do. Try to figure people out. I like that. If I hadn't gone into the military, I would have liked to be a homicide cop. Oh, couldn't I get into that.”

“And you'd be calling all over hell to check me out, too, I suppose.”

“Hell, yes. I'd know what brand your underwear was, Bones. What you put under your picture in your high school yearbook. How much money you make, how you spend it, and who you spend it with.”

Clair spoke like a starving man describing a steak.

“So you'd be worse than Poole,” I said.

“You'd better believe it.”

“But I didn't do anything wrong.”

“So? That don't matter. What matters is you're the unknown quantity, you know what I mean? You're the x in the equation, the missing variable or whatever you want to call it.”

“So you're saying the guy's just doing his job.”

“Yessir. And you're getting all wound up about it, which is going to send him the wrong message.”

“That I've got something to hide.”

“Which you might. I won't know for sure until I complete my investigation.”

Clair drained his beer, put the empty bottle on the bench, and reached for another one.

He grinned at me.

“I'd just call this Poole fella up today and say you're ready to sign a confession,” he said. “No use prolonging the agony.”

“It is a first offense,” I said.

“That's what you say. You could've been shot all kinds of times.”

“But that was under an alias.”

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