Summer Cool - A Jack Paine Mystery (Jack Paine Mysteries) (11 page)

"I will, Billy."

Paine hung up, and immediately made another call.

"C
ome on in, Jack."

The boxes were gone from the front hallway
;
the garbage-men had come, just as she had said. The house was as clean as ever.

She led him to the kitchen, put a cup of coffee in front of him. She wouldn't look at him, but busied herself at the sink, washing dinner dishes.

The girls were home, watching television in the playroom. Paine heard them alternately laughing and snapping at each other, normal siblings fighting over everything in sight. They came out to see him when he arrived, Mary saying, "Hi, Uncle Jack," shyly and then hiding behind her sister Melissa, who said, "Hi." They looked a lot like their mother, both of them, and Melissa had her mother's straight stare. She looked with it at Paine and it told him she wanted to know where her father was. She looked at her mother at the sink, then turned, and left the room.

"Melissa's having a bit of a hard time," Terry said.

"What did you tell her?"

"I told her her father was gone and wasn't coming back."

"Is that all?"

"It happens all the time," Terry said. "It happened to one of her girlfriends in school last year."

She had turned back to her dishes, refusing to look straight at him.

"I need to talk about Bobby," Paine said.

"Go ahead."

"About his time in the marines."

He could tell that memories were swirling through her,
the way she changed the way she was standing, the way she
put a wet dish into the drying rack absently.

"What about it?" she said.

"Do you have any records, any pictures?"

"No. He didn't keep anything except his discharge
papers."

"Letters?"

A pause. "I threw them out."

"Did he talk about it a lot?"

"No." She let the dish she was washing settle into soapy
water, then turned, drying her hands on a dish towel. She
looked at Paine now. "He never talked about it, Jack."

"Never?"

"Did he ever talk to
you
about it, Jack?"

She waited for him to see her point, and he nodded. "I was sixteen when I met him, and he was just going in. He was there four years. In the beginning, his letters used to tell me where he was, what he was doing, his friends, things like that. Then after a while, he stopped talking about it altogether and just talked about coming home. Especially the last two years."

"Didn't you think that was strange?"

"No, Jack, I didn't. I wanted him home. I didn't want to hear about the war. Nobody did."

"Did he ever mention Jim Coleman in his letters?" She shook her head.

"Any other names you can remember?"

"A couple of guys in the beginning. Then nobody."

She turned back to the sink, closing the conversation; then she turned back, looking at him.

"Look, Jack, about yesterday in your office—"

"Forget it, Terry."

Her gaze didn't waver. "No. I don't want to forget it. I did it because I wanted to."

Paine looked at her, watched the battle on her face, the decision being made there.

"I want you to know he's gone for me, Jack. He's dead. And if what I did means anything to you, I want you to know it's all right. We can take it from there. I know how hard it would be, but I don't care. It will take time, but I don't care about that, either. The girls would be all right, after awhile." She turned back to her dishes. "I know how bad things have been for you, too. I know what you've gone through. There was a time when I almost hated you, because the two miscarriages came while Bobby was helping you out, when he was the only one on the force who stuck his neck out for you. I was wrong. Most of that, the tension, was Bobby, the way he did things. He doesn't back down from anything. I just want you to know it would be all right. I think I could come to love you, Jack."

Paine looked at his coffee; he looked up to see Melissa standing in the doorway, staring at him. She had the eyes of her mother, and she didn't smile.

He opened his mouth to say something, but once again Melissa looked at her mother and then turned and was gone. Somewhere in the back of the house the television set was snapped off in midsentence.

Paine got up and said quietly, "I've got to go, Terry."

T
he police had not been through Jim Coleman's house yet. Paine wondered if they had found Coleman
_;
for a brief moment, the image of that surprised face staring down from the shower head broke through Paine and made him nauseous.

It was easy to get in; like most cops, Coleman believed in his own invincibility more than in security devices, and, after Paine pulled his gloves on, a cut screen on the side near the back, unseen from the street and well concealed by bushes, was all that was needed.

Coleman's wife had left him long ago, and the house looked as though a single man lived in it. The beam of Paine's flashlight showed wallpaper a woman had obviously chosen still covering the walls in the bedroom, but there was nothing else feminine about it. The bed was unmade, shoes in sloppy ranks along the sideboard where Coleman had dropped them from his feet. A television on the dresser was angled toward the bed, a squeeze of aluminum foil helping the bent rabbit ears on top. It was tuned to Channel 11, the Yankees network
;
Paine doubted if it had been changed in months.

Washed clothes were stuffed in the dresser, unfolded, with unmatched socks mixed in with underwear. There was nothing else in the drawers. Under the bed there was dust and a couple of
Playboy
magazines. On the floor of the closet, more magazines, some of them hard-core; a box containing porno novels with a mix of mystery novels, and, surprisingly, a couple of history paperbacks: Carl Sandburg's biography of Abraham Lincoln, Bruce Catton's Civil War books. A few
shirts hung in the closet, two pair of slacks with empty pockets.

The living room was a mess—open potato chip bags on the scratched coffee table, which was propped up on one end by an old paint can. One good end table, the other a couple of stacked milk crates with an ugly fat lamp on top.
A New York Post
opened to the sports page next to the lamp. A couch between the end tables, a chair with a torn seat next to it, both facing another television, an old color console, against the far wall. Another pair of rabbit ears, newer, again with alu
minum
foil
.
A
TV Guide
on top of the TV, two weeks old.

There was nothing for Paine in the living room, nothing in the dining room.
A
hutch, well preserved but dusty, which stood out against the rest of the furniture: a dining room table and three chairs with worn fabric on the seats, a pile of mail on the table, all junk. On the wall next to the hutch, a wooden case containing a collection of miniature die-cast '50s automobiles.

One of the drawers in the hutch was pulled out. It was empty. Paine went through the rest of them, found nothing: old candles, mail, letters from a brother wanting money. He looked at the open drawer again.

He searched the kitchen, found nothing, backed down the hail and stopped at the bathroom. He pointed the flashlight in.

On the floor, next to the toilet, was a low flat rectangular box, the kind department stores giftwrap shirts in.

Paine went in, picked the box up. He walked back to the living room, sat down on the couch and opened the box, holding the flashlight with his chin, pointing down.

On the top, a three-by-five photograph, four marines bunched together, staring at the camera half solemnly. They shared a comradely look of purpose; one of them on the end, the man Paine and Billy Rader had found beheaded in Fort Worth, smiled grimly.

Next to him was Jim Coleman.

On the other end was Bob Petty.

Paine looked through the rest of the box; there was nothing to do with Vietnam, only the usual valuable papers. It looked as though they had been rifled through, turned aside, until two-thirds of the way down, where Paine imagined the photograph had resided until Coleman had dug it up. The papers around that spot were very old.

On the top of the pile was a ledger book marked Hermano. Paine went through it, found a beautifully neat record of Coleman's dealings that Bryers would love.

Paine put the photograph in his pocket, put the ledger book back in the gift box, closed it, then put the box into the open drawer of the hutch and closed it. He went through the rest of the house, found nothing, went back to the bedroom, turned off his flashlight, and let himself out through the broken screen and went home.

W
hen the telephone rang, Paine was in the bad dream, searching for Rebecca between the stars. But she was not there. He was calling for her, his voice loud on a dark, lonely hillside, but the stars were mute until he heard a voice that he thought was hers. But it was the telephone, and he woke up.

"Jack," a voice on the other end of the receiver said when he put it to his ear. He looked at the red digital numbers on the clock next to his bed. It was 3:04 in the morning.

The voice made Paine come fully awake.

"Bobby."

"How are you?" There was something in the voice Paine had never heard in Petty's voice before, a hard calm laced with something that sounded like spite.

"I've been waiting for you to call, Bobby."

Petty chuckled dryly. "I bet you have. I've had you hopping, haven't I?"

"You have, Bobby." Paine was searching for something truly false in the voice—the effects of alcohol, coercion, drugs—and found only chilling, clean directness.

Again Petty chuckled.

"What the fuck is going on, Bobby?"

"Nothing special, Jack. I've just made a change in my life. That's all." Chilling, spiteful directness.

"Why?"

"You were a cop, Jack. You know there are always reasons."

"What are they?"

"That's not something I want to get into. But I think you should forget about finding me. It would be better for everyone."

"Why?"

"Reasons, Jack." Calm, cold. "I realize that you're too fucking stupid to do that, though."

"Terry wants me to quit, but I don't want to."

"Why not? She told you, I'm telling you. It's none of your fucking business."

"It is."

Passion tempered spite. "Because we were friends? Grow up. That was another fucking life. People die. Sometimes they die while they're still alive. And when they get reborn, they're somebody else."

"I don't believe that."

"Believe it. I'm not the Bob Petty you knew, Jack. He's dead and buried." The voice became wishful. "I don't know if he ever existed. I think a long time ago he did. . . ." Petty paused. "I know he did. He was a little boy, and he believed in a lot of things, and that was me, Jack. That was the me you knew." The voice had hardened again. "So give it up, Jack."

"I won't."

"Because we were friends? Because Terry wanted you to? How is Terry, Jack?"

Paine said nothing.

"I want to tell you some things, Jack. And these are no lies. I despised you for a longtime, and didn't even know why. But now I do. It's because you're weak, Jack. You were weak when you drank, and you were weak when you tried to kill yourself. You were weaker when you couldn't do it. You know damn well what I'm saying is true. A lot of other people told you these things, but I never did because I felt sorry for you. You were the puppy the kid brings home and hides in his room. Nobody wanted you, Jack, so I took you on.

"Well, I was weak to do that. Your old man put a bullet in his head because he couldn't take what he did, what he
felt he had to do, and you're just like him, Jack. Only you don't even have the guts to take yourself out. And I despise you for that.

"When all that shit came down before you got suspended, I was the only one who stood up for you because I knew you couldn't gut it out yourself. That wasn't friendship, Jack. It was pity!'