John Connolly - The Lovers

I waited. There was more coming.

“I don’t know what you expect to get out of this,” said Eddie. “Your father did what they accused him of doing. He shot those two young people, and then he shot himself.”

“I want to know why.”

“Maybe there isn’t a why. Can you deal with that?”

“As long as I tried.”

I debated telling him more, but instead asked, “You’d have known if my father was…screwing around, right?”

Eddie reeled slightly, then laughed. It brought on another fit of coughing, and I had to get him some more water.

“Your old man didn’t ‘screw around,’” he said when he’d recovered. “That wasn’t his style.”

He took some deep breaths, and I caught a gleam in his eye. It wasn’t pleasant, as though I’d seen him eyeing a young girl up and down on the street and had watched as the sexual fantasy played out in his eyes.

“But he was human,” he continued. “We all make mistakes. Who knows? Someone say something to you?”

He looked at me closely, and that gleam remained.

“No,” I replied. “Nobody said anything.”

He held my gaze for a while longer, then nodded. “You’re a good son. Help me up, will you? I think I’ll watch some TV. I’ve got an hour in me yet before those damn drugs send me to sleep again.”

I assisted him in getting out of the chair, and helped him into the living room where he settled hi Bd hugsmself on the sofa with the remotes and turned on a game show. The sound drew Amanda from upstairs.

“You two all done?” she asked.

“I believe so,” I said. “I’ll be going now. Thanks for your time, Eddie.”

The old man raised the remote control in farewell, but he didn’t look away from the TV. Amanda was escorting me to the door when Eddie spoke again.

“Charlie!”

I went back to him. His eyes were fixed on the television.

“About Jimmy.”

I waited.

“We were friendly but, you know, we were never really close.” He tapped the remote on the armrest of his chair. “You can’t trust a man who spends his whole life living a lie. That’s all I wanted to say to you.”

He hit a button, changing the channel to an afternoon soap. I returned to where Amanda was waiting.

“Well, was he helpful?”

“Yes,” I said. “You both were.”

She smiled and kissed me on the cheek. “I hope you find what you’re looking for, Charlie.”

“You have my number,” I said. “Let me know how things go with your father.”

“I will,” she said. Then she took a piece of paper from the telephone table and scribbled a number on it. “My cell phone,” she said. “Just in case.”

“If I’d known it was that easy to get your number, I’d have asked a long time ago.”

“You had my number,” she said. “You just never used it.”

With that, she closed the door, and I walked back down the hill to the Muddy Brook Café, where Walter was waiting to take me to the airport.

I WAS FRUSTRATED TObe forced to leave New York with questions unanswered about Jimmy Gallagher’s whereabouts on the day my father became a killer, but I had no choice: I owed Dave Evans, and he had made it clear that he needed me at the Bear for most of the coming week. I also had only Eddie’s word that Jimmy and my father had met that day. It was possible that he could have been mistaken, and I wanted to be sure of the facts before I called Jimmy Gallagher a liar to his face.

I picked up my car at the Portland Jetport, and got back to my house in time to shower and change my clothes. For a moment, I found myself walking in the direction of the Johnson house to pick up Walter, but then I remembered where Walter was and it put me in a black mood that I knew wouldn’t lift for the rest of the night.

I spent most of the evening behind the bar with Gary. Business was steady, but there was still time for me to talk with customers and even get a little paperwork done in the back office. The only moment Che „[1]0%" of excitement came when a steroid jockey, who had stripped down his winter layers to only a wife beater and a pair of stained gym pants, came on to a woman named Hillary Herman who was five two, blond, and looked as if a soft breeze would carry her away like a leaf. When Hillary turned her back on him and his advances, he was dumb enough to lay a hand on her shoulder in an effort to regain her attention, at which point Hillary, who was the Portland PD’s resident judo expert, spun and twisted her would-be suitor’s arm so far behind his back that his forehead and his knees hit the ground simultaneously. She then escorted him to the door, dumped him in the snow, and threw his clothes out after him. His buddies seemed tempted to make their displeasure known, but the intervention of the other Portland cops with whom Hillary was drinking saved her from having to kick their asses as well.

When it was clear that everything had calmed down, and nobody was hurt who didn’t deserve to be, I started bringing cases to the bottle coolers from the walk-in. It was still an hour before closing, but it didn’t look as if we were about to be hit by an unanticipated rush, and it would save me time later. It was as I was bringing out the third case that I saw the man who had taken a seat at the far end of the bar. He was wearing the same tweed jacket, and he had a notebook open beside his right hand. It was Gary ’s end of the bar, but as he moved to serve the new arrival I indicated to him that I wanted to take care of it, and he went back to talking to Jackie Garner, for whom he seemed to have developed a worrying fondness. Even though Jackie was trying to talk to a pretty but shy redhead in her forties, he seemed grateful for Gary ’s company. Jackie didn’t do well with women. In fact, I couldn’t recall Jackie even dating a woman. Usually when a member of the opposite sex spoke to him, he developed a confused expression, like an infant being spoken to in a foreign language. Now he was blushing, and so was the redhead. It looked as if Gary was acting as a go-between in order to keep the conversation flowing. If he hadn’t been helping them along, they might have lapsed into total silence or, if they blushed any more, simply exploded.

“How you doin’?” I said to Notebook Man. “Back for more?”

“Guess so,” he replied. He was shrugging off his jacket. His shirtsleeves were rolled up to his elbows, his tie was loose, and the top button of his white shirt was undone. Despite the casualness of his attire, he gave the impression that he was about to get down to some serious work.

“What can I get you?”

“Just coffee, please.” When I came back with a cup of fresh brew, and some creamer and sweeteners, there was a card beside the notebook, facing me. I placed everything on top of the card without looking at what was written on it.

“Beg your pardon,” said the man. He lifted his cup, then picked up the card and handed it to me. I took it, read it, then put it back on the bar.

“Nice card,” I said, and it was. His name, Michael Wallace, was embossed on it in gold, along with a box number in Boston, two telephone numbers, an email address, and a website. The card named his profession as writer and reporter.

“Hold on to it,” he said.

“No thanks.”

“Seriously.”

There was a set look on his face that I didn’t much B Hip>< like, the kind that cops wore when they were door-stepping a suspect who wasn’t getting the message.

“‘Seriously’?” I didn’t care for his tone.

He reached into his satchel and removed a pair of nonfiction paperback books. I thought that I recognized the first from bookstores: it detailed the case of a man in northern California who had almost managed to get away with killing his wife and two children by claiming that they had drowned when their boat got caught up in a storm. He might have succeeded had a lab technician not spotted tiny chemical traces in the saltwater found in the lungs of the recovered bodies, and matched it to solvent stains found in the sink of the boat’s galley, indicating that the husband had drowned all three victims in the sink before tossing their bodies overboard. His reason for the killings, when he eventually confessed, was that “they were never on time for anything.” The second book seemed to be an older work, a standard serial-killer volume concentrating on sex murderers. Its title was almost as lurid as its subject matter. It was called Blood on the Sheets .