Bad Blood (27 page)

Brinkman half turned, spoke to the man next to him. “You Donnelly?”

“Yessir,” Donnelly said cheerfully.

“He say anything I should know about?”

Donnelly scrunched up his face, thought about what I’d said. “I don’t think so, Sheriff.”

“Okay,” said Brinkman. “You can go.” He turned back to me. “You shoot Antonelli, Smith?”

I felt color fill my face like a flood tide. I could have leapt out of that chair and broken his neck.

Eve said quietly, “Sheriff.”

I stepped on her word as I said, “Brinkman, you’re an idiot.”

“You were alone out there. No one saw what happened but you.”

“Other people saw the car.”

“A car driving out of a parking lot. In a hurry to get to the next drink.”

Wordlessly, I let my eyes meet his. Then I pulled my gun out of my pocket, held it out to him.

He smiled delightedly. “Why, how’d you know? Just what I wanted.”

“Tony’s a friend of mine, Brinkman,” I said quietly.

“Wouldn’t be the first time a man crossed up a friend.” He sniffed at my gun. “Could even be you had a good reason.”

“The gun’s been fired,” I said. “At the car.”

“At the car.” He nodded. “Now tell me the whole story.”

I told him. It was a short story. Donnelly, dismissed, didn’t move, but sat gaping at the excitement he’d missed.

“And, of course,” Brinkman said when I’d finished, “you have no idea who might be shooting at Antonelli, or at you. Do you, city boy?”

I told him what I’d told MacGregor. His response surprised me. “Frank Grice,” he said. “You and me, that’s something we think the same on.”

“Then what’s this shit about me shooting Tony?”

“Well, that was mostly to get a rise out of you,” he
grinned
. “See, the way I look at it, anybody’d rather shoot you than him.”

“Brinkman,” I said carefully, “it’s been a long, long day. If you’re through, I’d appreciate it if you’d go to hell.”

But he wasn’t quite through. First he took a statement from Eve. Her calm, low voice was like a warm place to watch a storm from. Then he wanted to hear about the car, so I told him about the car. Then he asked me where Jimmy Antonelli was.

“You think Jimmy shot Tony?” I asked.

“It would make me happy.”

“Making you happy isn’t high on my list, Brinkman, or Jimmy’s either.”

“Maybe he’s dead,” he said thoughtfully. “Maybe that’s why I can’t find him.”

“Well,” I said, “maybe if he’s dead, he’ll come looking for you.”

That made Donnelly laugh. It made Brinkman narrow his beady eyes and scowl. “When I find him,” he said, “and he tells me you knew where he was all along, that’ll make my day.”

“Glad to help,” I said.

Then he gave me the usual warnings about not leaving the area, about making myself available. Then he left, about a year after he’d come, with my .38 in his hand and Donnelly trailing behind him.

The waiting area was very, very quiet without cops. I stood. “You want coffee?” I asked Eve.

“Yes, I suppose I do.”

I got coffee and peanut butter crackers from the vending
machines
. “Dinner,” I said. She smiled and we ate crackers and drank coffee and said nothing.

I spent the night in Tony’s hospital room. It had been close to an hour before Lydia had arrived, and another half hour after that until the surgeon, discreetly triumphant in a redstreaked green gown, had pushed through the doors to tell us Tony had lived through surgery and had a good chance of staying alive.

Eve had been willing to go home then. While she was in the ladies’ room, Lydia asked me, “What do you want me to do?”

“What you came here for: keep an eye on Eve.”

“This doesn’t change things?”

“I don’t know what this does. I feel as though I’ve been working blindfolded for days. Every time I think I’m close, something happens I don’t understand.”

“Think about it,” Lydia said slowly, “as though you didn’t know these people. As though you really were an outsider.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I’m not sure. It’s just—I can’t lose the feeling there’s something you’re not seeing. I wish I could see it, Bill. I wish I could help.”

I gave her a tired grin. “Just standing there, you help.”

“God, you’re impossible. If you didn’t look so pathetic I’d slug you.”

“That’s why I practice looking like this. Actually I feel great.”

Eve came back, asked me to call her in the morning. I promised I would. I watched through the glass doors as
they
crossed the parking lot together, saw Eve incline her head to catch Lydia’s words, saw Lydia’s smile flash as she unlocked her car.

After they’d driven away I sat back down, thought about what Lydia had said. My mind chased ideas around like a greyhound after a whole pack of mechanical rabbits, until I finally gave up and got up to talk to the nurse.

Tony didn’t wake that night. Because it was a country hospital, the nurses found a cot for me—“From Pediatrics,” they confided—and pillows and blankets and even a toothbrush in a cellophane wrapper. Because it was a hospital, I didn’t sleep well anyway. Nurses came and went all night, checking Tony’s tubes and bandages, his temperature and his breathing. I woke each time, and then lay awake, breathing the bitter, antiseptic air, watching the moon, tired but dutiful, move across the sky. It finally gave up and set, discouraged.

A long time after the moon had set, the sky began to show streaks of red and iron blue, like a slow-to-develop bruise. Sometime after that I heard the jingle of glass and metal that tells you the doctors are making rounds, accompanied by nurses with trays of syringes and pills and other things patients need. By then the sky was a sullen gray, as bright as it probably meant to get. I got up, washed and dressed, zipped my jacket over my bare chest because I didn’t want anyone’s sympathy.

I stood watching Tony, who with the aid of a complex network of machines and tubes and drugs was able to successfully complete each breath he started. His face was
pallid
, yellow-tinged, his eyelids dark and sunken. He already looked like a man who’d been sick a long time, a man who’d be a long time getting well.

The attending physician, a younger, colder man than the surgeon, asked me to wait outside while he did his work. When he came out he was noticeably friendlier. He told me Tony was doing well. I recognized that thaw, that softening of the armor in which he wrapped himself in case he had to deliver bad news. Relax, I wanted to tell him. You get used to it. Eventually the armor turns to stone around you. Then it doesn’t soften anymore; but then you’re never caught without it, either.

I didn’t go back into Tony’s room when the doctor was gone. Tony was not likely to wake until later. The cop MacGregor had sent was sitting patiently in the hall— had, it turned out, been sitting there most of the night, while I was tossing on the cot. Let him wait to hear from Tony. I had to move. I had to do something, while the ideas slugged it out in my head until a winner was declared.

The hospital cafeteria wasn’t open yet, so I drove to Friendly’s, just before the state highway entrance—E-Z-Off, E-Z-On. I had fried eggs because I knew they couldn’t make fried eggs from powder, and I had bacon and potatoes and toast and coffee and orange juice and more coffee, but before any of that I called Eve Colgate.

She answered on the second ring.

“It’s Bill,” I said.

“Are you all right?” Eve asked. “I just called the hospital.
They
’ve upgraded Tony’s condition to ‘stable.’ They said you’d gone.”

“He’s doing all right, but the doctor says it’ll be a slow recovery.”

“Did he wake up? Did you speak to him?”

“No.”

“So he doesn’t know you were there.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“If you’re not staying with him, maybe I’ll come down. He should have a friend there when he wakes.”

“He’ll tell you he’d rather be left alone.”

“When he tells me that, I’ll leave,” she said easily. “Bill, how are you?”

“I’m okay. How are you two doing?”

“We’re fine. We’re having breakfast.” A note of amusement crept into Eve’s voice. “We just got back from doing the morning chores.”

“What’s funny?”

“Lydia did quite well,” Eve said gravely.

“Oh, God,” I said.

“She wants to talk to you.”

A pause, and then Lydia. “Bill? Do you know how big cows are?”

I chuckled.

“Don’t laugh!” she demanded. “The closest I ever was to a live chicken before is the Grand Street kosher market. Did you know chickens get annoyed when you take the eggs away?”

“Only if your hands are cold.”

“Oh, you’re so smart. Did you ever milk a cow?”

“Did you?” I asked, impressed.

“Well, sort of. Eve showed me. I wasn’t real good at it. I mean, they do it all by machines anyway. We just got enough for breakfast.” She stopped for breath, then asked, “How’s Tony?”

I repeated what I’d told Eve.

“It sounds as though he’ll be all right,” she said. “I’m so glad.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Me, too.”

“What are you going to do now?”

“I’m going over to Frank Grice’s place, on the other side of Cobleskill. If I can’t find him I’m going to try that other dump.”

“Be careful.”

“I’m always careful.”

“Uh-huh. I’d feel better if I were with you.”

“I’d feel better if you were with me, too. But I want you to stay with Eve. And think of all you’re learning. This will be good, for when we buy our little rose-covered cottage. You can milk the cows and collect the eggs and bake cherry pies while I split firewood and shoot things for food for the winter.”

“If this were my phone I’d hang up on you.”

“If this were your phone your mother would already have hung up on me. I’ll call again later. ’Bye.”

I drank the coffee and worked my way through all that food. I wondered if the gun in Jimmy’s truck actually was the one that killed Wally Gould. I wondered why Wally Gould was killed. I wondered if Lydia’s hands had been cold. I wondered who had shot Tony, and whom they’d meant to shoot, and why.

A half mile from Friendly’s there was a Valu-Center, a supermarket as big as a New York City block. They sold everything there: food, lawn furniture, hardware, clothing. I bought a T-shirt, a sweater, and a carton of Kents, and I bought gloves. Back in the car I pulled the clothes on, lit a Kent, and headed across Cobleskill, to the place Jimmy had said Grice lived. I went past once-elegant frame houses, a couple of public buildings built out of gray stone from the quarries, and a municipal park that looked tired and old in the dull morning light. As I crossed the bridge over the state highway I caught a glimpse of the Appleseed plant, enormous painted trucks coming and going, pale smoke pouring into the sky from a stainless-steel chimney. On a day like this even the stainless steel didn’t shine.

The complex of three-story buildings Grice lived in was the only one like it in Cobleskill, maybe in the county. Luxury Condos, a sign announced. Balconies, Euro-style kitchens, 1 ½ baths. Pool. The buildings were tan-colored stucco. The pool was empty, except for a small congealed lump of winter leaves. The paint on the sign was peeling.

The first building, Jimmy’d said, on the third floor. I found the bell labeled Capone. I pushed it; nothing happened. I started, methodically, to push all the second-floor bells. I was halfway through them when the intercom barked, “Who’s there?” I put my mouth very close to the speaker, growled something loud and unintelligible. The question came again and I growled again. I was buzzed in.

I found the first-floor garbage room and waited there, gave my benefactor a chance to give up and stick his head back in his door. After a few minutes I slipped out,
continued
along the corridor to the fire stair and up to the third floor.

Grice’s apartment wasn’t hard to find and it wasn’t hard to break into. That was disappointing. What I really wanted was to talk to Grice; this little excursion was just an irresistible side trip. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, and it seemed likely that a man who made it so simple to get into his place wouldn’t have left anything to find.

That turned out to be true. The apartment didn’t have quite the ambience of the green house near Franklinton, but there was nothing about it to make me want to spend my retirement there. A thick gold carpet lay prostrate under a large brown leather sofa and matching La-Z-Boy recliner. In a smoked-glass wall unit there was an enormous projection TV and VCR. There were three used high-ball glasses on the glass coffee table, and a full ashtray. I examined the butts. Marlboro Lights, mostly; but among them, two Camels. Without filters.

In the bedroom the bed was unmade, but it would be hard to say how many people had slept in it, or when. There were dirty dishes in the Euro-style kitchen sink.

The whole place had an air of grease and uncaring that made me want to open a window, open all the windows. I resisted because I didn’t want any movement up here to be seen from outside.

Wearing my new gloves, I worked fast. I opened everything that was closed, pawed through drawers, rifled through piles. I found both cocaine and marijuana in a kitchen cabinet, but in small amounts, like what a host might keep on hand for guests. There was change and a
pile
of bills in a bowl by the bed, and in the same bowl a pair of jeweled and tinkling earrings, which I pocketed, but no large amounts of cash. No phone bills, which I would’ve been interested in. No credit card receipts, no datebook.

No lists, no ledgers, no maps to the pirate gold.

Okay, the hell with it. What had I expected, a signed confession? “I killed Wally Gould and I’ve been trying to frame Jimmy Antonelli for it. I did it because he was an ugly little creep and he got on my nerves. I’m writing this because the guilt is too much to bear. Yours truly, Frank Grice.”

I was wasting time.

I left. Down the way I’d come, out the rear door this time, around the side of the building. Out of habit, I surveyed the parking lot before heading across it to my car. It was almost empty, and I didn’t see any bad guys.