Rosemary Harris - Dead Head

“E.D. also stands for erectile dysfunction. Do you think Bob Dole was involved? For pete’s sake, Lucy, the guy was a priest.”

“Oh, and I’m a natural blond? You can buy gladiator outfits online. How hard can it be to get one of those little white collars? I think I have one from a silk jacket I bought in Chinatown.”

“If he’d been Eddie Donnelley,” I said, “Caroline would have recognized him when she saw him at Mossdale’s that first day. He couldn’t have changed that much in twenty years. She recognized Jeff Warren right away, but she didn’t even mention the man at the stables. I think she just saw judgment day coming toward her. She was already spooked by the traffic ticket and the fear that her personal information was being fed into a law enforcement computer system. All Father Damon had to do was say ‘good morning, my child’ and she’d have freaked. Poor guy. I think her reaction caused him to question his calling.”

Lucy fell silent. Neither of us had seen any pictures of Donnelley online, and now that Caroline was hurtling toward Cape Cod, the one person who could give us a description was temporarily unavailable. Correction, the one woman. There was always Jeff Warren. And once he got out of the hospital I might ask him. Maybe I could try him anyway. Plenty of people who’d had car accidents could still talk on the phone. I asked Lucy to get my cell from my backpack. Dead.

“This is aggressively antisocial behavior,” Lucy said, shaking the phone at me. “You do realize that.”

“Chill out.” I plugged the cell into the car’s cigarette lighter to recharge it and heard the snippet of classical music that told me I had a message. It was the one from Roxy I hadn’t deleted. I’d forgotten about it.

“Listen to this.” I replayed the message for Lucy.

“What the hell does that mean? Have you spoken to her?” Lucy asked.

I shook my head. “No idea. Just picked it up a few hours ago. I don’t think even Roxy stays in the office that late. We’ll see her tomorrow.”

Warren’s number was in saved contacts, and I scrolled through to find it. I autodialed but was kicked into voice mail. Now I started to wonder where McGinley was. Was he back in Michigan, having made his report? Or was he still in Connecticut waiting to finish the job he’d been sent here to do? Or was he-long shot here-really crashing at his friend’s place so that they could get an early start hauling those countertops?

I checked the rearview mirror obsessively.

Lucy noticed. “I’m not the nervous type,” she said, “but you’re making me jumpy. No one is following us. Why would they? Let’s just get back to your place.”

We pulled into my driveway at around 3:15. We should have been tired, but we’d both gotten our second winds, or maybe it was nervous energy, and instead of collapsing in bed, we decided to pull an all-nighter just like in the old days.

“What’s the flashing light-radon levels reaching red alert?”

“Pay no attention. Something to do with the alarm system. I haven’t been able to clear it since it went off, and I’m afraid to touch any more buttons for fear it’ll go off again. I found out I’m going to be fined a hundred bucks for having a false alarm that the Springfield police had to respond to and I don’t want it to happen again.”

“Ouch. Can’t you get your cop friend to fix it? Like a ticket?”

Did everyone know how to do that except me?

“I’ll get around to reading the manual one of these days when I have some time, like in December.” I dumped my things on the sofa and headed into the kitchen.

“Let me try.” She pushed the reset button and I held my hands over my ears, gearing up for the sirens, but they didn’t go off and surprisingly the flashing red lights disappeared.

“Excellent.”

We sat on the living room floor with our reheated pizza and I powered on the laptop to google images of Eddie Donnelley. Like Warren, it was a relatively common name and until we added the state and the crime we got nowhere. Even then all we got was a grainy black-and-white mug shot from twenty-five years ago that had been reproduced many times, and had only been resurrected because of Caroline’s recent arrest. It could have been any dark-haired male with a long face and brown eyes. The aviator glasses, long hair, and beard didn’t help, I guess. When you’re a drug dealer or undercover cop, it’s an asset to be able to change your looks quickly. Enlarging it only further distorted the image.

“Could this be Brookfield?” Lucy asked.

It could have been Kevin Brookfield or it could have been Kevin Bacon. I wasn’t prepared to hang the man based on such a sketchy photo.

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. There’s a lot of hair obscuring his face. But the nose looks different.”

“He could have broken his nose in jail,” Lucy said. “Rival gang? Power struggle?” She had an even more active imagination than I did. Maybe she should turn her fugitive story into a screenplay.

“You’ve been watching too much cable,” I said. “I don’t know. I can’t say it’s him, I only saw him briefly.”

While I was at it, I googled Kate Gustafson. And sent the images to my downstairs computer-the one hooked upto the the printer.

We’d bring the pictures to Roxy’s tomorrow and see what she thought. Babe’s, too. Brookfield had camped out at the diner for a while-she might remember him better than any of us.

Tomorrow started four hours later when, sleep-deprived, Lucy and I shuffled into the Paradise Diner.

“Hey, look who’s here. You two girls look like crap. You here to give our girl a makeover or to get one? I heard she did some shopping in your closet after that wedding, but I haven’t seen any new outfits.” Rats. That reminded me of the bag full of Lucy’s hand-me-downs, still in my entrance awaiting my next trip to Goodwill. I hoped she hadn’t seen them.

“No,” Lucy said after they air-kissed. “I’m here on a story-‘I Was a Fugitive.’” She slipped onto a counter stool and spread her hands wide, envisioning the headline and the layout.

“Should I assume you’re no longer a fugitive if you’re announcing it in a public place?”

“That’s correct. Paula, tell Babe what happened last night.”

“Later. Keep it down. We still have a few private issues to discuss.” I robotically ordered two Paradise specials and two coffees and asked Babe to join us at the farthest empty booth when she had a chance. She brought our food and slid into the seat next to Lucy.

“Much as I love to see you, you really should consider keeping a box of cereal in your house for emergencies. Don’t you ever eat at home anymore?”

I shook my head, then pulled out the photo of Eddie Donnelley and showed it to Babe. I watched for a glimmer of recognition in her eyes, but none came.

“Who’s this? He looks like some guy I picked up in a bar in Greenwood, Indiana, in 1984.”

“That’s Eddie Donnelley,” I whispered. “One of the people who was arrested with Caroline. Does he look familiar?”

“You gotta be kidding,” Babe said, “at my age any long-haired hippie in a grainy photo looks familiar.”

I told her who I thought it might be.

“That guy looking for real estate? No way. This guy’s eyes are closer together and he has finer cheekbones. And the nose is totally different.” She’d make a good witness if ever called upon to identify someone in a lineup.

I was starting to feel better about Kevin Brookfield.

“Did he ever come back?” I asked.

Babe had to think. “Yeah, one other time.” I could see her piecing together the scene. “A day or two after you saw him. I thought he was planning to camp out here again, the way he did that day, when the Moms were falling all over themselves to give him real estate advice. He sat down at a table outside with a coffee and those damn brochures again, like he was waiting for someone. I thought it was a real estate agent. Then something happened and he left abruptly. His coffee cup was still warm when I cleared.” She replayed the event in her brain, rewinding like an old videocassette.