Jeff Abbott - No Rest for the Dead

“What’s Olsen got with Nunn?”

“Don’t play so naïve, my man,” Calvin said “You know as well as I do what the cops are like in this city. A lot of them play both sides.”

Zacharius remained silent.

“Speaking of cops who play both sides, ever hear of Artie Ruby?” Calvin asked.

“Artie who?”

“Artie Ruby, the cop who got into trouble for walking off with evidence years ago-white, powdery evidence from what I remember-and all of a sudden, just like that, he wasn’t a cop anymore, and he was working security at the McFall Museum.”

Zacharius felt a rush of adrenaline. “Why would a museum hire a rogue cop to provide security?”

Calvin chuckled. “You know Chris Thomas was crooked… drugs, forgeries, you’ve heard the rumors.”

“And…”

“If you’re so convinced Rosemary Thomas didn’t kill her husband, you might want to talk to Ruby. I hear he’s available for pretty small money.”

“Any ideas where I can find him?”

Calvin shrugged. “Know a place named Steve’s?”

“The Bogie rip-off by the Embarcadero?”

“I would start there.”

Neon and blackpaint.

Zacharius felt that the attempt by the management of Steve’s to create a noir ambience had failed miserably. Still, despite or perhaps because of the stench of stale booze, body odor, and cheap perfume, the place was busy. It took a twenty, but a heavily rouged barfly on the last stool pointed him to a back room that was hazy with cigarette smoke. He spotted Artie Ruby immediately-a skeletal, Runyonesque man with serious bags under his eyes, and the stub of a cigar poking out of the corner of his mouth. The worn leather easy chair next to the former cop was vacant. An ashtray on a stand next to the chair was filled to overflowing.

“So much for California’s fearsome smoking ban,” Zacharius said, moving the ashtray a few feet away and settling down in the chair.

“The cops are no more expensive than the fines,” Ruby replied, staring straight ahead. “In fact, those two smoking over there are both detectives. Who are you by the way?

Zacharius introduced himself.

“Yeah. I’ve heard of you.”

Zacharius rubbed at the stinging in his eyes. He had stopped smoking eighteen years ago and now was like a human bloodhound when it came to cigarettes, able to tell someone was a smoker ten feet away. Ruby had yet to make direct eye contact with him, but even at this angle, something about him was pathetic. Small . That was the word that popped into Zacharius’s head. This was a small, limited man.

“I have three twenties in my pocket,” Zacharius said. “They’re yours if you’ll come someplace away from this smoke and talk to me for a minute.”

Zacharius wondered if he should have offered more, but something about Ruby said Zacharius could dole out what remained of his hundred and a half a bit at a time.

“You got any more than that?” the oddly pathetic man asked.

“If I like what you have to say, I do.”

“Call me Artie,” he said, pushing himself up abruptly and leading the way back down the hall.

They moved through the crowded nightclub to a small table in a black-lit corner that seemed to have been forgotten.

It was hard to believe that this twitchy, sad-eyed sack of a man was once a cop.

“You once worked in security at the McFall museum.” Zacharius said. “You must have known the place pretty well, known Rosemary and Chris Thomas.”

Artie continued staring off into the crowd. “You know, I never stole that cocaine from the evidence room. I was an honest cop. Oh, I cut a corner here and there, and maybe made a deal with a small-time crook to get at a bigger one. But I never deserved what came down on me.”

“Who hired you to work at the museum?” Zacharius asked, trying to keep the conversation on topic.

“I ended up becoming a fucking pariah.” The sadness in Artie’s eyes had intensified, and for a moment Zacharius thought Artie was actually going to cry. Instead, he got Zacharius’s assurance to cover his tab and ordered a boilermaker with Wild Turkey and a Heineken.

“Artie, tell me about Chris Thomas.”

“I don’t know anything. Thomas was a curator; I was a security guard-the two don’t mix. I said good-night to him when he’d leave for the night. That’s all.”

The boilermaker arrived and the shot of Wild Turkey was gone before the waitress had turned away. Zacharius now sensed that Artie had been drinking before he arrived.

“You’ve heard the rumors about Thomas…”

“Yeah, so what, he used to screw around on his wife, lots of guys do that.” Artie still wouldn’t look Zacharius in the eye.

“No, I don’t mean that. There was talk about drugs, forgery, theft…”

“I can’t tell you anything about that. Like I said, I used to do my job and go home.”

Zacharius knew that the window for getting any useful information was rapidly closing. The Heineken was gone and Artie’s words were beginning to slur. Hesitatingly, Zacharius slipped all of his wad but a twenty under the table and stood to go.

“Pay for your drinks out of that,” he said.

Zacharius had taken just a step when Artie Ruby cleared his throat, looked up at him, and spoke in a coarse whisper. “You should let sleeping dogs lie, Zacharius. You’re messing around in a cesspool, and the whole mess is going to blow up in your face. Now, how’s that for a fucking image?”

After Chinatown, I went to a meeting, and when one didn’t work, I went to a second one. The idea of seeing Sarah at the memorial, now that it was drawing closer, made my guts roil. I wanted to see her. I didn’t want to see her. I wanted to smack Stan Ballard in the face. No, that’s not true. I wanted to put a bullet through his heart. That way we’d match. We’d both have holes there.

I knew those scumbags would all come out to mark the occasion. They’d have to. Snakes can’t hide under rocks all their lives. To give the appearance of having nothing to hide, they’d all be there; that’s what I was counting on. Rosemary’s good-for-nothing brother would come for sure. How could he stay away? He was in the witness room that night, and I noticed one thing about him that no one else seemed to catch. The other people there had the good grace to shed a tear or two, or at least they pretended to look sad. Not Peter Heusen. He had watched, grim faced and dry eyed, as they put the needle into his sister’s arm. Maybe it was the drink. I don’t know. He followed me out to the parking lot that warm, dark night. We had a few words. Rather, he did. Then I watched him drive away from his sister’s execution in an older-model Lincoln. And after he left, I drove away too, fully intending to get drunk. Evidently I did that in spades. By the time I finally sobered up, well, Sarah was gone for good and my job was history. And Peter Heusen? As the legal guardian for both his niece and nephew and as the conservator of the Thomas estate, he had come up in the world. Way up. As far as Sarah and her new husband, Stan, were concerned, they seemed to be living in much improved circumstances as well. They had all moved on in Rosemary’s unlamented absence, and as far as I could see, they had all prospered.

When the second AA meeting was over, I went to a third. It wasn’t all about drinking either. I had managed to keep my craving for liquor in check. Nowadays my drug of choice was guilt-the hard stuff, pure and unadulterated. To quit that addiction, I’d need far more than ninety meetings in ninety days. There was only one cure and it hadn’t changed: I needed to find the person who was really responsible for Rosemary’s death. To do that, I had to find Christopher’s killer, his real killer. And that’s what I was doing. The ball had started rolling and there was no way to stop it now.