Homicide Related (15 page)

“You never told me,” Dooley said. Not, to be honest, that his uncle had spent a lot of time talking about family. Lorraine hadn't told him, either. No wonder.

“It didn't seem relevant,” his uncle said.

Right.

“Why do you think Randall showed me that picture?”

His uncle shrugged. “Like I said, they're treating Lorraine's death as suspicious. They think someone killed her, so they're starting with her nearest and dearest. That's where they always start because that's where it usually ends.”

“You mean me?” Dooley said, startled.

“I mean me,” his uncle said. He drank down the soda water in a couple of big gulps. “I'm going back to bed. You should get some sleep.”

Dooley sat at the kitchen table for a few minutes, thinking about the picture and about what his uncle—his
uncle
— had told him, especially that last part. He looked at the fridge and thought about the beer that was inside and about the cupboard near the phone where the scotch and vodka were. It had been a long time—a very long time—but he still felt the pull. It was like the most beautiful girl in the world was beckoning him and she would do anything for him if only he fell into her arms.

He stood up and left the kitchen.

Dooley was lying in bed, thinking again about the beer in the fridge and the scotch and vodka in the cupboard near the phone and wondered whether his uncle would hear him if he snuck back downstairs, when his cell phone, charging on his bed-side table, rang. He checked the readout but didn't recognize the number. He answered and heard a familiar, whiny female voice. “Dooley?”

“Teresa?” He glanced at the clock on his bedside table. It was nearly two in the morning.

“Did he say anything to you?” she said. “When he saw you, I mean?”

“Say anything? What are you talking about, Teresa?”

“Jeffie,” she said, her voice shrill. Dooley imagined her with a cigarette in one hand, pacing while she talked. Teresa was one of those wire-thin chicks you'd make for a meth-head the way she was in perpetual motion. Really, she was just high-strung, nervous, always worried about something. Right now, it seemed, she was worried about Jeffie. “He told me he was going to meet you. He hasn't been home since. He hasn't called. He doesn't answer his phone. It's not like him. I'm worried. Did he say anything to you? Did he seem okay?”

“He was supposed to meet me, but he never showed up,” Dooley said. “But that was three days ago, Teresa. You mean you haven't seen him since then?”

“I went to the cops, I was that worried,” she said.

“And?”

“They ran him.”

Dooley could picture their reaction. A guy with Jeffie's record goes missing, you figure he screwed up again and is hiding out somewhere. Or you figure he's screwing someone else. Or he's getting screwed. But you don't worry about him. You don't allocate manpower to finding him. You don't do anything, unless, of course, you catch him dead-to-rights committing a crime, either that or just plain dead.

“I'm sure he's fine,” Dooley said. The most likely scenario—Jeffie was tired of being pressured into marriage. He was nervous, maybe even resentful, about Teresa's getting pregnant. Maybe he'd scored the money he was after and had done what he'd mentioned to Dooley—maybe he'd gone back home. Maybe he'd found someone else who didn't want as much from him as Teresa did. Or maybe he was just lying low for a while, trying to decide what he wanted.

“I'm sure he'll turn up.”

“If you see him or hear from him, tell him to call me, okay, Dooley? Tell him I'm worried about him.”

Dooley said he would.

Seven

S
aturday morning, if he wasn't working, what Dooley liked to do was sleep in, until noon if he could get away with it, which, usually, he couldn't because it seemed to irritate his uncle if Dooley was still in bed while his uncle was up and pumped, usually from a ten kilometer run, and was cleaning the house or working in the yard or whatever.

But this Saturday, Dooley swung his legs out of bed as soon as he heard his uncle go out the back door for his run. He wasn't getting up early so much as he was carrying through the sleepless night that he'd spent thinking about Lorraine after not thinking about her at all for years. Okay, so maybe that wasn't quite true. Every now and then, her face would pop into his mind and he would wonder where she had got to. Wherever it was, he always hoped she was miserable. And now here she was, dead and in his head again. Dead and maybe murdered, and the thing was, if it turned out that was really what had happened, he wouldn't be surprised. He could imagine Lorraine out there partying—she loved to party. And, boy, the kind of people she hung out with—not that he was in a position to criticize. So, yeah, he could see her maybe shaking her ass and teasing some guy or maybe opening her mouth and saying something smart and pissing off some guy and, boom, she's dead.

Or maybe she'd been out there trying to amuse herself—Lorraine was always restless unless she was with people, unless something was happening, like she couldn't stand to be alone with herself, maybe couldn't stand herself, and Dooley could see why, no problem. So maybe she was out there and maybe—he'd give her the benefit of the doubt on this one—maybe she was trying to keep herself straight (Dooley knew what that was all about, how hard that was), but she was with some of her old friends who didn't respect that, hell, who didn't like the fact that she wasn't one of them anymore. He knew what that was about, too.

He could picture them saying, Come on, Lorraine, just one drink, or just one hit, come on, you want to feel good, don't you? People like that, sometimes they get mad when you say no. Sometimes they take it the wrong way that you're clean. Sometimes they think that
you
think that you're all of a sudden better than they are, which, of course, you aren't. But that's how they see it, mostly because they know they're messed up, even if they don't want to admit it. So first they tease you. Then they wheedle. Then, you can count on it, they force the issue. And when you still say no, maybe you sound self-righteous. Dooley could imagine Lorraine coming across that way; she always was extreme. Then these old friends of yours decide to make it their business to see to it that you have fun. They need you to have fun. They need to drag you down. They need you to drink up or smoke up or shoot up. They'll even help you, whether you want them to or not. And maybe that's how Lorraine ended up dead with a needle in her arm.

He made his way down to the kitchen, noting on the way that his uncle's bedroom door was open, which meant that Jeannie was gone, which meant that she must have slipped out early, maybe in the middle of the night because Dooley hadn't heard her. Dooley wondered why. Usually when Jeannie ended up in his uncle's bed, she stayed there until morning, and usually his uncle brought her a cup of coffee to start her engines before she got up.

What went on between his uncle and Jeannie was none of his business, but Dooley liked Jeannie. He liked the way she never acted awkward about staying over. He liked the way she turned up in the kitchen in the morning wearing a silky robe and skimpy little slippers that let her toes, bright red with nail polish, stick out. He liked the way she wore lipstick to breakfast, and he liked the red lip marks her lipstick left on her coffee cup. He liked the little cloud of perfume that hung in the air wherever she'd been. And he liked her pancakes, especially when she threw a handful of blueberries into the batter. But she wasn't here this morning, so Dooley set up the coffeemaker and switched it on and got out a bowl and a box of cereal—the sweet kind that he had to buy himself and that his uncle glowered at every time he opened the cupboard and saw it and always made some crack about why didn't Dooley just fill his bowl with sugar and spoon that down, he'd get the same amount of nutrition, which was nil, and the same sugar shock, which was astronomical. He got the milk from the fridge. He was working on his second helping between swallows of his second cup of coffee when the phone rang. All Dooley managed to get out was, “Hello,” before the caller—a man—launched into a rapid-fire delivery.

“Mr. McCormack, sorry to bother you so early in the A.M., but I wanted to catch you before you left the house.”

“I'm not—” Dooley began, trying to head the guy off, tell him he wasn't Mr. McCormack. But the man raced on before he could get any further.

“It's about your sister's things—and, by the way, my condolences. You may be aware, Mr. McCormack, that the rental market is pretty tight, this end of it anyway, and I've already had some interest in the apartment. The police were here a couple of times, wouldn't even let me in the place, but they've released it now. I hate to rush you, Mr. McCormack, but if you wouldn't mind … er … that is to say, all of her things are still in the apartment and I'd really appreciate it if you could, you know, take care of them. Or, if you want, I could box everything up for you and you could pick it up. The furniture, well, I could take that off your hands, unless of course you'd like to look after that yourself …”

Lorraine's things.

Dooley couldn't even begin to imagine what they might consist of. Clothes, for sure. Lorraine liked to look good—at least, she did when she wasn't so high she didn't give a shit about anything. She liked to be the one all the guys turned to look at when she walked into the bar or the party or whatever it was. Okay, so she was getting up there. She'd turned thirty-five the day Dooley came to live with his uncle, but from what he'd seen, she didn't look bad, all things considered. Besides clothes, Dooley figured she just had regular household stuff—dishes and furniture and a whole bunch of other crap he had no use for. He wanted to pound his head against the wall and keep on pounding it until he'd driven her out of his head once and for all. She'd been so fucked up.

He was going to say, “I'll tell Mr. McCormack you called.” He was going to let his uncle deal with it. His uncle, who didn't like her any more than he did, but who had gone to the morgue to look at her. Who had arranged the funeral. Who had shouldered it while probably choking on his feelings. His uncle, who wasn't even related to her—unlike Dooley.

“Okay,” he said instead. “I'll come over. I'll take care of it.”

He finished his breakfast and looked at the clock on the stove. It was still early, but he tried Beth's cell phone anyway.

And got her voice mail.

She hadn't returned any of his calls, even the ones when he didn't leave a message, but he still knew that she knew it was him. She could tell by looking at her missed calls.

“It's me,” he said. “It's Saturday morning. Call me.”

He wrote a note for his uncle—
Out. Back soon
—and left the house.

When Dooley got to the building where Lorraine used to live, he scanned the tenant directory for the super's name and buzzed his apartment.