Bloodline (30 page)

“That's for you to figure out,” Poole said. “But don't guess wrong.”

“Rats. I thought it was more like an essay question. You know—no wrong answer.”

“Nope,” Poole said. “Screw this one up and you're out of here.”

And he smiled. The son of a bitch.

26

“H
ow are things going? Oh, good. Busy but good.”

It was Roxanne on the phone, from her hotel room in Cambridge. When she'd called, I'd been picking the dried blood out of my nose and my ear. It was one of those daily hygienic activities required for good grooming. Kind of like flossing your teeth.

“You still want to see me?” she said.

“More than you know.”

“Maybe I should just come up there, when this conference is over. I could come Sunday morning. Save you the trip.”

“No, I'd like to see you there. I mean, I need to see you there. Get out of here for a while.”

Roxanne paused.

“Is something wrong?”

“No. It'd just be fun to do the city thing. You know. The restaurants. The theater. The racy movie channel in the hotel room.”

“In your room, you mean.”

“Oh, sure. Wait, you didn't think I meant that we, I mean the two of us, would be in the same—”

“Bed? No way. We have to take this slow. The first night you can sleep on the floor.”

“And the second night I'll move to the chair.”

“And I'll unbutton the top button on my flannels. If things go well,” Roxanne said. “Which brings me back to my original question: How are things going there?”

“And my original answer: Good.”

“You're a lousy liar, Jack McMorrow.”

“Some people don't think so.”

“Anything you want to talk about?”

I sighed silently.

“Oh, I don't know. It can wait until I get there, I guess.”

“Long story?”

“You might say so.”

“Why do I have this funny déjà vu feeling?” Roxanne asked.

“I don't know. Because all hotel rooms look the same?”

Neither of us spoke for a moment. I wanted to—wanted to spill the whole thing. Tell her I was picking blood off my face, that I looked like I'd just taken a twelve-count and been declared a TKO. That I needed a deer rifle for protection. That the cops thought there was a distinct possibility that I'd murdered someone.

“Jack?”

“Roxanne?”

“Jack, the last time I talked to you, you were talking about babies. What's going on?”

“Well, you know how one thing leads to another.”

“Like what?”

“Well, like the cops up here think maybe I'm dealing coke.”

“What?”

“Either that, or a murderer.”

“Jack!”

“Then again, it could be both.”

“My God!”

“And on top of all that, I've got a deadline coming up. When it rains, it pours, you know?”

“Jack, cut the crap and start talking.”

I did. Laid it all out there, starting with Missy alive, covering Missy dead. I told Roxanne about Poole and the state police, and how I came to be the proud owner of a red Toyota pickup. I almost didn't tell her about Clair and his rifle, knowing how much she hated guns, but then I figured I might as well be honest and open if we were going to try to make this thing work, which still remained to be seen.

“How do you manage this?” Roxanne asked, when my story had wound down.

“Oh, I don't know. I try to prioritize things. You know, make a lot of lists. And when I get one thing done, I check it off. Otherwise, it can get kind of overwhelming.”

“Jack, come on. How do you manage to have everything get so, I don't know, so completely messed up? Why can't anything be simple? You talk to your people, write your story, cash the check. Isn't that the way it's supposed to work?”

“It's sort of what I was counting on.”

“And now all this. A suspect in a murder. My God. Are they serious?”

“They try to be. After all, they are policemen. Although I must say, this guy Poole, the detective, he did drop a half-decent pun this morning. Something about having time to kill. Get it? Time to kill? You know, murder?”

I waited.

“I guess you had to be there,” I said.

“Speaking of which, do you still want to see me?”

“Yeah, I do. More than ever. I need to see you.”

“Should I come there?”

“The cops would like that. I'm a good-looking guy, but you'd sure liven up their surveillance. Wear something slinky. Provocative but subtle.”

“Are they really watching you?”

“I'm not sure. I imagine they take a peek every once in a while, just to make sure I haven't taken off.”

“How 'bout to Boston?”

“I'd like that. When are you available?”

“This thing lasts three days. Everybody leaves Sunday morning. But it's pretty much over by Saturday at five. I don't plan on hanging around the hospitality suite.”

“Somebody in your class is going to be disappointed.”

“That's why they fill the bathtub with beer.”

“They do? Well, how 'bout I go to the hospitality suite. You stay in the room and watch bad movies.”

“So I'll see you Saturday?” Roxanne said.

“I'll be there by five. The Hyatt in Cambridge, right?”

“Yup.”

“Okay. That gives me a couple of days to straighten things out here. You know, vacuum the living room, put the dishes away, catch the real murderer.”

“Jack, take care of yourself. I mean it.”

“Oh, I'll be fine,” I said, fingering the scrape on the side of my head. “I'm gonna stay home today and clean my gun. Now, is the
safety on when you pull the little thing back? Or is it on when you push the little thing forward?”

“I mean it,” Roxanne said.

“I know.”

“You know I need to see you, too,” she said.

“Just look for the guy with the deer rifle. If there's more than one of us in the lobby, I'll be the guy with the Remington.”

“Jack, please.”

“But I won't wear the cartridge belt,” I said. “Just for you.”

I'd always said I worked better up against a deadline, and now I had one, of sorts. I had to be in Cambridge by five on Saturday. I had to be in one piece, mentally and physically.

Still standing there by the phone, I could feel myself regrouping. It was what Roxanne did to me, among other things. She was rational and concrete and analytical. When I was with her, I focused more clearly and applied myself to the job at hand. Of course, when I was with her, she tended to become the job at hand, a phenomenon attributable to the fact that she was very pretty and very sexy and loved to make love.

Without her, I tended to let things lapse, to let myself be knocked around by events. In past months, it had become my natural state, this bemused inertia, especially if the refrigerator was full of beer. And Roxanne snapped me out of it. I didn't exactly run out and get my doctorate in biochemistry, but I would pick up the beer cans. Maybe I'd even make the bed.

I slumped into the nearest chair, ran my hand thoughtfully over my cuts and bruises, and, with Roxanne's clear, sweet voice still ringing in my ears, surveyed the room and my situation.

Since she'd left for Colorado, I hadn't gotten a lot done, at least not the sort of thing you could hold in your hand. I'd watched a lot of birds. Gotten much better at spring and fall warblers, though I had a long way to go. I'd spent a lot of time alone in the woods, which was good for the soul, and after my last job, my soul had needed some mending. Death and deceit, violence and betrayal, do not tend to bolster your faith in humanity, or even your belief in yourself. When your friends kill your friends, you lose something that isn't easy to get back.

So I'd set myself adrift, really. Camped out in this house. Protected myself with anonymity and obscurity. You couldn't hurt me if you couldn't find me. In Prosperity, Maine, this hideaway in a forgotten county, I lived under my own name with an assumed life. It was a retreat in more ways than one, a sabbatical that found me either in the woods, prowling the ridges and bogs alone, or plunked in a chair with a good book on my lap and a beer in my hand. And a pile of empties beside me.

It had taken a long while to come out of it. To talk to Clair. To see the goodness in people again. And just when I'd started to regain a little of my faith, I'd slid back into the predicament that now faced me. I'd really liked Missy Hewett. I'd liked her courage and her hardness and the little-girl naiveté that fueled her faith in herself and belief that sheer hard work really did get you someplace. And then somebody had gone and killed her. Desecrated her, really.

And sitting there in the chair, looking out on the brush and the woods and the bright blue morning, I figured I could do either of two things. I could just let myself slide way back down into my hole,
maybe all the way down to a jail cell. Or I could take a little of Missy's spirit for myself. Maybe some of Roxanne's, too. And Clair's. And even something from the people at the
Times
, with their belief that they and their paper were the best in the world.

I could fight back, put a new twist on the old saying: I don't get sad. I get even.

Besides, it was too early for a beer.

I went upstairs and grabbed a couple of shirts, two pairs of boxer shorts, my razor and toothbrush. I stuffed all of it in a very weathered L.L. Bean duffel and went back down the loft stairs. Inside the back door, I stopped. Went back up to the loft and got another pair of boxers, the plaid preppy ones Roxanne had always liked.

And from the back of my sock drawer, where they'd been gathering dust, my last two condoms.

I left a note on Clair's kitchen table saying I'd be gone for a couple of days, and I'd put his rifle in my kitchen closet and the bullets in my sock drawer. That done, it was down the dump road and out to Route 137. I drove the five miles to Albion, where I stopped at the general store and bought orange juice and a
Boston Globe.
From there, I headed south to China, where I picked up Route 202 and continued south, past the glimmering basin of China Lake with its fringe of fall foliage. In twenty minutes, I was in Augusta, where I drove past the gold-domed State House and noted, for the hundredth time, that it seemed too big and grand for the mini-malls that surrounded it. At the end of a long fast-food strip, I caught the interstate and quickly brought the little truck up to seventy. After an hour on the spruce-lined strip of highway, Portland broke into view.

It was a miniature city, with a couple of bank towers, a short tired Main Street that had been pummeled by a suburban mall, and a chichi restored waterfront that you could walk through in fifteen minutes. Portland had a little of everything. A little waterfront facing a bay full of little islands. The little university that Missy had attended. A little bit of old money, a little more of new. Little housing projects that, compared to New York's endless ghetto canyons, seemed like Plimoth Plantation. Portland even had certified genuine junkies, but only enough of them to fill a school bus, maybe. The hard-core hookers you could gather up in an airport limo. It was a civilized city where nothing had gotten out of hand, where the graffiti was restrained and the pay phones still had phone books.

I pulled up to the first phone booth I saw, on Congress Street, the main drag downtown. There was a convenient space in front of a parking hydrant, so I slipped in and parked the truck. If anybody said anything, I'd break out my doughnut line.

But nobody said a word. The phone was outside a pleasant little coffee shop, and the smell of brewing hazelnut filled the air. I got out my notebook and looked up the name of the law firm, the number of which had been on Missy's phone bill. Wheaton, Hinckley, Prine, and McSalley. I looked in the Yellow Pages under lawyers and found their listing. The firm was medium-size for Portland, with maybe twenty-five partners and associates, the names of whom were listed in that grave, lawyerly way that somehow made them seem like twenty-five pallbearers listed in an obituary. Their grave, lawyerly offices were at One Portland Center, which I presumed to be some sort of snooty office tower.

And I'd forgotten to bring a tie.

I put a piece of paper in the phone book to mark my page and went into the coffee shop and bought a large tea with two bags and
a splash of milk. The tea was very hot, and I came back out and set it on the stainless-steel shelf of the phone booth, next to some nasty words that had been etched into the metal with some kind of blade. At some point, this booth had been occupied by a very angry person. I trusted this troubled soul had been able to find appropriate therapeutic services.

As city-type people strode by on the sidewalk—women in suits and pumps, men carrying the ubiquitous
Times
and briefcases, a homeless guy with laceless shoes and a dark-green trash bag slung Santa-style over his shoulder—I went to work. I unfolded Missy's telephone bill and put it on the shelf beside the phone book. Then, one by one, I looked up the home telephone numbers for each of the lawyers listed for Wheaton, Hinckley.