Уильям Макгиверн - Summitt

Davic said, “You’ve already earned my gratitude, Captain. What you’ve told me about Earl is very significant.”

“That he wanted to shaft the people who’d bailed him out?”

“That’s important to know, Captain. If we save him, he’s likely to do the same to us... we’ll want to keep that in mind... But that’s not the immediate problem. Thomson and Dom Lorso are too complacent. Winning is a habit with them. They have money, power and a friend in need on the bench. They figure that’s enough. Usually they’d be right. But in a rape case, with a stormy character like Selby and an unreliable defendant, there’s always the chance of a live grenade rolling into the courtroom. We need all the insurance we can get.”

Slocum chewed on another mint, filling the warm interior of the car with its fragrance. Someone with a transistor radio blaring walked behind their cars and on toward the shuttered snack bar.

“That brings us to the point, sir,” Slocum said. “The insurance you want to buy.

“You can depend on us, Captain.”

“I also depend on Ex-Lax and antifreeze in the winter. But not to pay my bills.”

“I think you know we’ll take care of you. Thomson’s a generous man.”

“He can afford to be, can’t he?”

Davic removed an envelope from his briefcase and handed it to the captain. “That’s a down payment. Money isn’t our problem, and it won’t be yours. I guarantee that. Any other help you want or need, now or in the future, will also be available.”

Slocum didn’t count the money. He put the envelope away and took out a notebook which he opened under the dash light.

“I can’t find anything more on Selby’s connection with Goldbirn,” he told Davic. “Could be he simply did the Jew boy a favor. No evidence he got paid off for it. The house and farm is clear, but Selby used money his mother-in-law left, and a couple of pro-bowl bonuses. About the prosecutor, she went to school at Bryn Mawr, got her law degree at Yale. Big deal. She was married for a year or so, then divorced. Her ex-husband lives in Cleveland, designs furniture. He remarried. Her father’s a retired accountant, lives in Florida. She’s got two sisters in Maine.”

“How long since her divorce?”

“Five years.”

“She didn’t remarry?”

“No.”

“She lives alone?”

Slocum nodded. “Nice place over near the river.”

“Any men in her life?”

“I get your drift, or what you’re looking for. She dates guys occasionally. They could be beards, but there’s no obvious butch pals.”

“No Commie causes, radical affiliations, that sort of thing?”

Slocum put his notebook away. “No, but something funny hit me when I was checking out her schools. I checked around St. David’s and Bryn Mawr on the Main Line, cops and newspapers, gave ’em a bullshit story about looking for who assaulted Shana Selby. I found a local story going back nine years about our lady DA. She was beat up one night. Happened in the college gym. She was swimming late all alone in the pool. Some stud sneaked into the locker room and waited for her. Guy name of Toby Clark. He was slated the next morning on an assault charge. Clark worked at the school, a handyman. I smelled something.” Slocum looked at the lawyer, the dark light flickering on his smile. “There was no follow-up story in the papers. I checked records. The charges were dropped. But Clark got fired.”

“What interested you about that?”

“Hard to say. Call it my cop’s nose at work. But maybe there was some kind of shit going on with her and that classy ladies’ school.”

“I’ll put my people on it,” Davic said. “They’re from New York. They’re brothers, Ben and Aron Cadle. Very discreet but effective. If you need anything from them, don’t hesitate.”

“Tell ’em to find that Toby Clark character to start with.” Slocum patted the money envelope in his pocket. “Good talking to you, but from now on wait till you see my car in Eberle’s slot.”

Stepping from the car, Slocum closed the door respectfully. Crossing behind the Cadillac, he waited beside his Olds until Davic drove off, then lit a cigar and listened to guitar music drifting on the frosty air. The girl was playing “Red River Valley.” Her friends were singing too. Slocum loved that song... “The maiden who loved you sooo true...” Damn...

From the darkness of the shuttered snack bar Eberle joined him. “Nice night,” the lieutenant said. “Good, healthy weather.”

“Cold, too cold for me.” Slocum blew on the tip of his cigar. “You get it all?”

“Every word.” Eberle patted the wireless receiver bulging below his holstered police special. Slocum nodded and gave him the suction-mike he had removed from the rear bumper of Davic’s Cadillac.

“Big city lawyer,” Eberle said. “Big fucking deal.”

Slocum said: “Big cities, bigger buildings, bigger problems, bigger jackasses. Erase my voice from that tape and bring it by tomorrow night when you pick me up for bowling. Good night to you, Gus.”

“One thing, Captain.” Eberle rubbed a hand across his wet lips. “It got out of hand. I only meant to scare the piss and wind out of that piney—”

“I didn’t even hear that, Gus,” Slocum said, and got in his car. “Pick me up around seven tomorrow. League title’s up for grabs and them Knights of Pythias are tough. We better be lucky. I shit you not, Gus.”

Neighbors in Little Tenn brought covered dishes to Casper Gideen’s trailer, noodle and hamburger casseroles, meat loaves and pans of biscuits. A man whose left hand had been ground to a stump in a sawmill accident forty years ago came by to dicker for the coon hounds.

Gideen’s sons were in the kitchen of the trailer with a TV glowing silently. A sleeting rain struck the windows. In the kennel run, the redbones were barking.

Lori Gideen sat in the front room near a squat iron stove backed by aluminum panels. Rows of brick formed a hearthstone. Maple logs were stacked beside it, short and thick and tinder-dry. It was the careful way Casper had done everything, Selby thought, the logs cut to fit the stove exactly, and aged so long that starting a fire was no more trouble for Lori than striking the match.

She had called after Sergeant Ritter. “State Police claim it was an accident,” she told him. “Gun wasn’t on safe, and went off under his chin. He must have tripped on something in the dark.”

Lori Gideen was tall and thin with a solemn girlish face and red-knuckled hands now lying open on her knees.

She said, “Casper set a store by you, Mr. Selby. He’d be pleased you’d come by.”

“I tried to get in touch with him these past few days.”

“I know. He wasn’t here.”

“When did you talk to him last?”

She hesitated and wiped her flushed cheeks. Her eyes were dry but strangely enlarged, as if she were straining to see everything very clearly. “I talked to him yesterday, Mr. Selby, after breakfast, it was, Casper called from a gas station.”

“He wasn’t staying here?”

“Stayed where he pleased, you know that.”

“Lori, your husband and I were friends. Can you tell me what he was worried about?”

“That was his business. Didn’t do to ask. You know how Casper was, you better’n most maybe. Didn’t believe in explaining.”

One of Gideen’s sons came into the living room, Eli, who was sixteen, with wide shoulders and thick blond hair. “My ma is worn out now, Mr. Selby.” Selby remembered that Shana had once made Eli a woolen skating cap for Christmas. “We’d just as soon be with our own selves now.”

“I understand, I’ll be going, Eli. But your father didn’t trip over a shotgun like some goddamn fool out with a gun for the first time. Anybody who says he wouldn’t put his gun on safe before climbing a fence is a liar. His death wasn’t an accident, Eli.”