The Judgment (14 page)

“Quite a turnout,” I said into his ear. “Not many cops on the road tonight.”

“It’s all right,” he shouted. “They’re good boys, they all have fun. You see the strip girl? No? Too bad. Nice, if you like skinny.”

I thought back to the woman I’d met in the hall. “Skinny’s okay.”

“She sit on Benda’s lap. Give him a kiss. Very funny.” He gave me a pat on the arm. “You go. Have a drink on me. Just the first one, though. You tell my nephew behind the bar.”

I laughed at that, gave him a wave, and plunged into the crowd. Pushing in at the end of the bar, I managed to attract the attention of one of the two bartenders as he whirled by and ordered a ginger ale. As he slammed it down in front of me, he said, “That’s the first one of those tonight!” I held out a couple of singles. He shook his head. “Forget it. You’re the designated driver for this whole mob. You can have all the ginger ale you want.” I left a dollar on the bar.

No, they weren’t drinking ginger ale, or Pepsi or Diet Coke or any of the usual substitutes. You could tell that just surveying the bar. One thing I’ve found out as a recovering alcoholic: You never feel quite so sober as when you find yourself in a roomful of drunks. Everybody else seems to be acting weird. They talk louder, laugh at things that aren’t funny, and flail their arms in big, grand gestures. Was I like that once? Sometimes I was. When I was up, I’m sure I must have behaved just as they did—loud, laughing, and flailing. But when I was down, I was really down. It was those down days that drove me to AA.

I started up the bar, looking for Sue. Somewhere along the way, I felt a strong hand on my shoulder. It belonged to Bud Billings, a detective on the homicide squad. He looked bad, like me at my worst a few years ago. Somehow, in this milling crowd, he was all alone, perched on a stool and sipping at a whiskey. He seemed oblivious to everything around him. Except me.

“Charley.” It sounded a little like a plea for help.

“Hello, Bud.”

He pulled me close, so he wouldn’t have to shout. “I saw you there last night on Clarion Road.”

There was no point in denying it. “Yeah, I drove Sue Gillis out. I was only there for a little while. Have you seen Sue here, by the way?”

Billings ignored my question. “What did you think of that—you know, the little girl?” Actually, he was pretty drunk and was slurring his words badly, but I understood him.

I hesitated, realizing I couldn’t put him off. I had to tell him the truth. Leaning over, I said into his ear, “I threw up, I vomited, tossed my cookies.”

“Good man, Charley. It’s the only fucking thing you
can
do when you see something like that.”

Was he waiting for a response from me? If so, I didn’t have one.

But no. After collecting his thoughts, he went on. “I got a daughter, Caitlin. We live just outside Hub City, so she goes to school there, big yellow school bus, every day.”

“Okay, Bud.”

“Okay.” Another pause. “She was in the same class as this Catherine Quigley, the one, you know, out there on Clarion Road. In plastic. Jesus! They were friends!
Jesus!”
There were tears in his eyes. “Caitlin and Catherine—same name, see? Basically, the same name.”

“I understand, Bud.”

“Anyway, the kids in the class, my daughter’s class, whear that Catherine is absent today because she’s dead. That’s what the teacher tells them. What the fuck’s wrong with that teacher? How coldhearted can she be? Can you beat that, Charley?”

Now there was something in my eyes, too. Suddenly I felt almost as bad as I had the night before with Bob Williams. All I could do was shake my head and tell him no, I couldn’t beat that.

That must have been all Billings needed, because then he
went on: “I don’t think that’s right, Charley. I don’t think that’s fucking right at all. You don’t say that to seven-year-old kids and then tell them to open up their arithmetic books, which is what she did. She should’ve taken the whole morning to, I don’t know, explain it to them.”

“Well, maybe the teacher couldn’t explain it. I can’t explain it to myself.”

“I know what you’re saying, Charley, but it’s a pretty rough way to treat those kids.”

I nodded. “Right.” And then I suggested that maybe it was time for him to go home.

“I ought to. I wasn’t even going to come here tonight. Then I went out to the crime scene this afternoon, and it hit me again just as hard. I just wanted to go out and get smashed.” He sighed. “Didn’t help.”

“It never does. Listen, you mind leaving your car here? I’m going to pick up Sue Gillis. We’ll give you a ride home.”

“Sue Gillis,” he repeated.

“That’s right.”

“She’s a great little detective. When we went back to Clarion Road, she found something.”

Sue had mentioned that on the telephone. “What was it, Bud?”

“Footprints. In the mud before the snow covered everything. One good one right where the body was.”

“Well, let’s talk about it later. Stay here. I’ll get Sue.”

He thought it over a moment, then nodded.

I looked back at him once as I moved on. He sat like a crumpled tissue on the barstool, staring down blankly at the glass in his hand. He’d keep.

When at last I found Sue, I got a big surprise. She was as far gone as anyone else in the room. Talking loud and shouting, but not laughing. No, she was lecturing the guest of honor and a bunch of his fellow officers, really telling them off. I got that from her body language before I heard a word she spoke. Hands on hips, stamping her foot, shaking her finger.

By the time I got there, they were shouting her down,
telling her to forget about it, she was way off base, this was all that feminist bullshit.

“It’s not bullshit,” she screamed at them. “It’s insulting!”

“Aw, she wasn’t insulted,” said Dominic Benda. “She sat on my lap, didn’t she? She gave me a kiss. I wasn’t insulted.”

“She got paid pretty good for that little number,” one of his buddies said.

“You guys just don’t get it, do you? What if they sent a male stripper instead? That’d be insulting to you, right?”

“A fag show for Dominic? Come on, Sue, you got the wrong boy for that.”

One of them spotted me. “Get her out of here, Charley. She’s ruining the party.”

Sue turned toward me but had a little trouble focusing. “Oh, hi, Charley,” she said at last. “I am not ruining the party.
You
guys ruined it when you brought that stripper in. Who’s insulted? I’ll tell you who’s insulted, I’m insulted.”

She was shaky on her feet. For no good reason she began to lean to the left. But she managed to catch herself before I could put out a hand to steady her.

“Sue,” I said, “I think maybe we should go.”

“Not before I get these guys to understand.” She took a tentative step toward Benda. Again, equilibrium was a slight problem. “Listen, Dominic, your wife’s here, right?”

“Sure,” he said, “Peggy’s sittin’ at that table right over there. I could see her laughin’.”

“I don’t care if she was laughing, that woman—” And at that point Sue made a broad, theatrical gesture in the general direction of Mrs. Benda’s table. It was a big mistake. Not only did she slosh what was left of her drink onto me and the floor, she also lost her balance completely. She threw out her arms and made circles with her hands like she was trying to fly. Yet she kept right on trying to talk. “Was. Insult.” It was gibberish.

She threw me a wild, helpless look.

I was there to catch her when she passed out in my arms.

I
haven’t needed an alarm clock for years. Ever since I went off the sauce, all it takes is a few direct rays of the sun to get me stirring in the morning. And on cloudy days, of which we have our share here in southeastern Michigan, it doesn’t even take the sun. I’m up and about, doing what needs to be done. Now, even on my worst mornings, I feel better than I did on the best ones during my drinking days. I guess you could call that sort of an unexpected side benefit.

Take that morning after Dominic Benda’s retirement “party. I woke up with the sun in my eyes, squinted at my watch, and saw that it was just a few minutes before seven. The sound of snoring from beside me in the bed reminded me that although it would probably come as a big surprise to her, Sue Gillis had spent the night with me.

It’s a myth that women don’t snore. As I eased out of bed and into my robe, she shifted her position, turning away from the light and, in the process, downgraded to heavy breathing. I went into the kitchen to begin preparations for Operation Wake-Up.

If ever I had reason for a bad morning, this would have been it. As I set up the coffee maker, I reran the last hour or so of the evening in my mind. There had been a lot of driving. With the questionable help of Bud Billings, I had managed to get Sue out of the Glisten Inn, half dragging
and half walking her to my car. Even when she collapsed across the backseat with all the grace of a hundred-pound sack of potatoes, she didn’t regain consciousness.

I had given Bud a look then and told him to get into my car. He had started to make the kind of objections drunks usually do about being able to get home on his own, then broke off in midsentence. “Who’m I tryin’ to kid?” he said sheepishly. “I’m in no condition.” And with that, he had climbed onto the front seat beside me, shut the door behind him, and was asleep by the time we were five minutes out of the parking lot.

Since Bud Billings lived just outside Hub City, there was no way to get him home except to take the route I most wanted to avoid—Clarion Road, where Catherine Quigley’s body had been found just the night before. Even though it had been dark for quite a while, the moon was out, still pretty full, and shining down upon the empty fields. There was no missing the crime scene. Yards of yellow tape marked it. Rather than slow down and look, I sped up, reached over and gave Bud a shake. “Wake up,” I said. “We’re getting close. I’ll need some directions.”

He gave them, and when we got there, he somehow made it into his house under his own power. On the drive back to Pickeral Point, I briefly considered putting Sue to bed in her own apartment but rejected the idea because she’d need a ride out to the Glisten Inn to pick up her car in the morning, anyway. So into my bed she went, and out of my bed she must now come. The coffee was ready. I’d mixed a batch of my old sure-cure hangover remedy—tomato juice, with Worcestershire sauce, a lot of Tabasco, and lemon juice—basically, if I’d remembered right, a very strong Virgin Mary. Preparations were complete. The big moment had arrived. I took a deep breath, headed for the bedroom, and bumped into her as I made the turn through the door.

“Oh, God,” she moaned.

“Are you all right?”

It wasn’t one of my smartest questions.

“I don’t think so.”

I took her arm and led her slowly back into the kitchen. I had to be careful because she refused to open her eyes. Positioning her at the table, I pushed down gently on her shoulders, and she sank into the waiting chair.

I poured a tumbler full of my concoction. “Here,” I said, thumping it down in front of her. “Drink this.”

She opened one eye and stared suspiciously at the dark mixture. “What is it?”

“Just drink it. It’s good for what ails you—Dr. Sloan’s own remedy, proven in the past and certain to please. Take a deep, long drink of it.”

Both eyes open now, she grasped the glass firmly, and did as I directed. She drank deep, all right, but had a little difficulty getting it down. She coughed, her gullet rebelling. At last she managed to swallow.

“Good Lord, Charley, what
is
that stuff?”

“It’s my hangover cure. I hope I got the recipe right. It’s been a few years since I brewed up a batch.”

“Is that what this is? A hangover? I thought it was an abscess of my entire cranial cavity, requiring immediate amputation of the head.”

“Ah yes, I recall that feeling. I remember it well.”

“So smug,” she sniffed. “Seriously, Charley, this is my first, really. You know how much I drink—or how little. I thought a hangover meant feeling slightly sluggish the next day. Not this. Do I have to drink your magic potion?”

“It’ll help, I guarantee it. I’ll get you a cup of coffee, too.”

As I poured one for each of us, she sipped tentatively from the tumbler. I settled down across from her and waited. Somehow she’d managed to grope around and find my shirt by the side of the bed. She was, as my mother might have said, “decent,” though unbuttoned. Although they fluttered shut from time to time, her eyes were now open. She seemed to like my coffee a lot better than my hangover potion.

“Why did I drink so much?” She asked it like she really wanted to know.

“Stress, exhaustion,” I suggested, “exactly the reasons you shouldn’t have been drinking at all. And I’ll bet your fellow officers kept putting drinks in your hand.”

She frowned, trying to remember. “You’re right,” she said. “They just sort of appeared by magic.”

“A lot of men think it’s great fun to get a woman drunk. They sure laughed hard, when you passed out. I thought old Dominic Benda would fall off his barstool.”

“Is that what I did? Pass out?”

“Right into my arms.”

“Thank God you were there.”

“Bud Billings helped me get you into my car. Then I took him home. He was in no shape to drive, either.”

“All the way to Hub City?”

“There and back. You never let out a peep.”

She seemed in better shape than she had only minutes before. Color had crept back into her cheeks. Her eyes held steady. All of which was good because in just a few minutes I’d have to drive her back to the Glisten Inn to pick up her car. Thinking about that reminded me of something else.

“Bud Billings said you’d found something out there on Clarion Road. A footprint?”

“Bud talks too much.” She was immediately professional, her guard up.

“Well, on the phone you said yourself you’d turned up something.”

“Maybe I talk too much, too.”

Cops—they always get tight-mouthed when something looks hot; at least the ambitious ones do, like Sue Gillis. Maybe they’d put someone inside that shoe. “It sounds to me like you’re ready to make a move.” I meant that as a way of congratulating her.