Finders Keepers (32 page)

“Tina, does Pete have a special friend he might have talked to about what's bothering him?”

Tina thinks it over. Holly takes the opportunity to snatch a Nicorette from the open pack beside her computer and pop it into her mouth.

“I don't think so,” Tina says at last. “I guess he has friends at school, he's pretty popular, but his only close friend was Bob Pearson, from down the block? And they moved to Denver last year.”

“What about a girlfriend?”

“He used to spend a lot of time with Gloria Moore, but they broke up after Christmas. Pete said she didn't like to read, and he could never get tight with a girl who didn't like books.” Wistfully, Tina adds: “I liked Gloria. She showed me how to do my eyes.”

“Girls don't need eye makeup until they're in their thirties,” Holly says authoritatively, although she has never actually worn any herself. Her mother says only sluts wear eye makeup.

“Really?”
Tina sounds astonished.

“What about teachers? Did he have a favorite teacher he might have talked to?” Holly doubts if an older brother would have talked to his kid sister about favorite teachers, or if the kid sister would have paid any attention even if he did. She asks because it's the only other thing she can think of.

But Holly doesn't even hesitate. “Ricky the Hippie,” she says, and giggles.

Holly stops in mid-pace. “Who?”

“Mr. Ricker, that's his real name. Pete said some of the kids call him Ricky the Hippie because he wears these old-time flower-power shirts and ties. Pete had him when he was a freshman. Or maybe a sophomore. I can't remember. He said Mr. Ricker knew what good books were all about. Ms. . . . I mean Holly, is Mr. Hodges still going to talk to Pete tomorrow?”

“Yes. Don't worry about that.”

But Tina is plenty worried. She sounds on the verge of tears, in fact, and this makes Holly's stomach contract into a tight little ball. “Oh boy. I hope he doesn't hate me.”

“He won't,” Holly says. She's chewing her Nicorette at warp speed. “Bill will find out what's wrong and fix it. Then your brother will love you more than ever.”

“Do you promise?”

“Yes!
Ouch!
”

“What's wrong?”

“Nothing.” She wipes her mouth and looks at a smear of blood on her fingers. “I bit my lip. I have to go, Tina. Will you call me if you think of anyone he might have talked to about the money?”

“There's no one,” Tina says forlornly, and starts to cry.

“Well . . . okay.” And because something else seems required: “Don't bother with eye makeup. Your eyes are very pretty as they are. Goodbye.”

She ends the call without waiting for Tina to say anything else and resumes pacing. She spits the wad of Nicorette into the wastebasket by her desk and blots her lip with a tissue, but the bleeding has already stopped.

No close friends and no steady girl. No names except for that one teacher.

Holly sits down and powers up her computer again. She opens
Firefox, goes to the Northfield High website, clicks OUR FACULTY, and there is Howard Ricker, wearing a flower-patterned shirt with billowy sleeves, just like Tina said. Also a very ridiculous tie. Is it really so impossible that Pete Saubers said something to his favorite English teacher, especially if it had to do with whatever he was writing (or reading) in a Moleskine notebook?

A few clicks and she has Howard Ricker's telephone number on her computer screen. It's still early, but she can't bring herself to cold-call a complete stranger. Phoning Tina was hard enough, and that call ended in tears.

I'll tell Bill tomorrow, she decides. He can call Ricky the Hippie if he thinks it's worth doing.

She goes back to her voluminous movie folder and is soon once more lost in
The Godfather Part II
.

12

Morris visits another computer café that Sunday night, and does his own quick bit of research. When he's found what he wants, he fishes out the piece of notepaper with Peter Saubers's cell number on it, and jots down Andrew Halliday's address. Coleridge Street is on the West Side. In the seventies, that was a middle-class and mostly white enclave where all the houses tried to look a little more expensive than they actually were, and as a result all ended up looking pretty much the same.

A quick visit to several local real estate sites shows Morris that things over there haven't changed much, although an upscale shopping center has been added: Valley Plaza. Andy's car may still be parked at his house out there. Of course it might be in a space behind his shop, Morris never checked (Christ, you can't check
everything
, he thinks), but that seems unlikely. Why would you put up with the hassle of driving three miles into the city every morning and three miles back every night, in rush-hour traffic, when you could buy a thirty-day bus-pass for ten dollars, or a six-month's pass for fifty? Morris has the keys to his old pal's house, although he'd never try using them; the house is a lot more likely to be alarmed than the Birch Street Rec.

But he also has the keys to Andy's car, and a car might come in handy.

He walks back to Bugshit Manor, convinced that McFarland will be waiting for him there, and not content just to make Morris pee in the little cup. No, not this time. This time he'll also want to toss his room, and when he does he'll find the Tuff Tote with the stolen computer and the bloody shirt and shoes inside. Not to mention the envelope of money he took from his old pal's desk.

I'd kill him, thinks Morris—who is now (in his own mind, at least) Morris the Wolf.

Only he couldn't use the gun, plenty of people in Bugshit Manor know what a gunshot sounds like, even a polite
ka-pow
from a little faggot gun like his old pal's P238, and he left the hatchet in Andy's office. That might not do the job even if he did have it. McFarland is big like Andy, but not all puddly-fat like Andy. McFarland looks
strong
.

That's okay, Morris tells himself. That shit don't mean shit. Because an old wolf is a crafty wolf, and that's what I have to be now: crafty.

McFarland isn't waiting on the stoop, but before Morris can breathe a sigh of relief, he becomes convinced that his PO will be waiting for him upstairs. Not in the hall, either. He's probably got a passkey that lets him into every room in this fucked-up, piss-smelling place.

Try me, he thinks. You just try me, you sonofabitch.

But the door is locked, the room is empty, and it doesn't look like it's been searched, although he supposes if McFarland did it carefully . . .
craftily
—

But then Morris calls himself an idiot. If McFarland had searched his room, he would have been waiting with a couple of cops, and the cops would have handcuffs.

Nevertheless, he snatches open the closet door to make sure the Tuff Totes are where he left them. They are. He takes out the money and counts it. Six hundred and forty dollars. Not great, not even close to what was in Rothstein's safe, but not bad. He puts it back, zips the bag shut, then sits on his bed and holds up his hands. They are shaking.

I have to get that stuff out of here, he thinks, and I have to do it tomorrow morning. But get it out to where?

Morris lies down on his bed and looks up at the ceiling, thinking. At last he falls asleep.

13

Monday dawns clear and warm, the thermometer in front of City Center reading seventy before the sun is even fully over the horizon. School is still in session and will be for the next two weeks, but today is going to be the first real sizzler of the summer, the kind of day that makes people wipe the backs of their necks and squint at the sun and talk about global warming.

When Hodges gets to his office at eight thirty, Holly is already there. She tells him about her conversation with Tina last night, and asks if Hodges will talk to Howard Ricker, aka Ricky the Hippie, if he can't get the story of the money from Pete himself.
Hodges agrees to this, and tells Holly that was good thinking (she glows at this), but privately believes talking to Ricker won't be necessary. If he can't crack a seventeen-year-old kid—one who's probably dying to tell someone what's been weighing him down—he needs to quit working and move to Florida, home of so many retired cops.

He asks Holly if she'll watch for the Saubers boy on Garner Street when school lets out this afternoon. She agrees, as long as she doesn't have to talk to him herself.

“You won't,” Hodges assures her. “If you see him, all you need to do is call me. I'll come around the block and cut him off. Have we got pix of him?”

“I've downloaded half a dozen to my computer. Five from the yearbook and one from the Garner Street Library, where he works as a student aide, or something. Come and look.”

The best photo—a portrait shot in which Pete Saubers is wearing a tie and a dark sportcoat—identifies him as CLASS OF '15 STUDENT VICE PRESIDENT. He's dark-haired and good-looking. The resemblance to his kid sister isn't striking, but it's there, all right. Intelligent blue eyes look levelly out at Hodges. In them is the faintest glint of humor.

“Can you email these to Jerome?”

“Already done.” Holly smiles, and Hodges thinks—as he always does—that she should do it more often. When she smiles, Holly is almost beautiful. With a little mascara around her eyes, she probably would be. “Gee, it'll be good to see Jerome again.”

“What have I got this morning, Holly? Anything?”

“Court at ten o'clock. The assault thing.”

“Oh, right. The guy who tuned up on his brother-in-law. Belson the Bald Beater.”

“It's not nice to call people names,” Holly says.

This is probably true, but court is always an annoyance, and having to go there today is particularly trying, even though it will probably take no more than an hour, unless Judge Wiggins has slowed down since Hodges was on the cops. Pete Huntley used to call Brenda Wiggins FedEx, because she always delivered on time.

The Bald Beater is James Belson, whose picture should probably be next to
white trash
in the dictionary. He's a resident of the city's Edgemont Avenue district, sometimes referred to as Hillbilly Heaven. As part of his contract with one of the city's car dealerships, Hodges was hired to repo Belson's Acura MDX, on which Belson had ceased making payments some months before. When Hodges arrived at Belson's ramshackle house, Belson wasn't there. Neither was the car. Mrs. Belson—a lady who looked rode hard and put away still damp—told him the Acura had been stolen by her brother Howie. She gave him the address, which was also in Hillbilly Heaven.

“I got no love for Howie,” she told Hodges, “but you might ought to get over before Jimmy kills him. When Jimmy's mad, he don't believe in talk. He goes right to beatin.”

When Hodges arrived, James Belson was indeed beating on Howie. He was doing this work with a rake-handle, his bald head gleaming with sweat in the sunlight. Belson's brother-in-law was lying in his weedy driveway by the rear bumper of the Acura, kicking ineffectually at Belson and trying to shield his bleeding face and broken nose with his hands. Hodges stepped up behind Belson and soothed him with the Happy Slapper. The Acura was back on the car dealership's lot by noon, and Belson the Bald Beater was now up on assault.

“His lawyer is going to try to make you look like the bad guy,” Holly says. “He's going to ask how you subdued Mr. Belson. You need to be ready for that, Bill.”

“Oh, for goodness sake,” Hodges says. “I thumped him one to keep him from killing his brother-in-law, that's all. Applied acceptable force and practiced restraint.”

“But you used a weapon to do it. A sock loaded with ball bearings, to be exact.”

“True, but Belson doesn't know that. His back was turned. And the other guy was semiconscious at best.”

“Okay . . .” But she looks worried and her teeth are working at the spot she nipped while talking to Tina. “I just don't want you to get in trouble. Promise me you'll keep your temper and not
shout
, or wave your
arms
, or—”

“Holly.” He takes her by the shoulders. Gently. “Go outside. Smoke a cigarette. Chillax. All will be well in court this morning and with Pete Saubers this afternoon.”

She looks up at him, wide-eyed. “Do you promise?”

“Yes.”

“All right. I'll just smoke
half
a cigarette.” She heads for the door, rummaging in her bag. “We're going to have
such
a busy day.”

“I suppose we are. One other thing before you go.”

She turns back, questioning.

“You should smile more often. You're beautiful when you smile.”

Holly blushes all the way to her hairline and hurries out. But she's smiling again, and that makes Hodges happy.

14

Morris is also having a busy day, and busy is good. As long as he's in motion, the doubts and fears don't have a chance to creep in. It
helps that he woke up absolutely sure of one thing: this is the day he becomes a wolf for real. He's all done patching up the Culture and Arts Center's outdated computer filing system so his fat fuck of a boss can look good to
his
boss, and he's done being Ellis McFarland's pet lamb, too. No more baa-ing
yes sir
and
no sir
and
three bags full sir
each time McFarland shows up. Parole is finished. As soon as he has the Rothstein notebooks, he's getting the hell out of this pisspot of a city. He has no interest in going north to Canada, but that leaves the whole lower forty-eight. He thinks maybe he'll opt for New England. Who knows, maybe even New Hampshire. Reading the notebooks there, near the same mountains Rothstein must have looked at while he was writing—that had a certain novelistic roundness, didn't it? Yes, and that was the great thing about novels: that roundness. The way things always balanced out in the end. He should have known Rothstein couldn't leave Jimmy working for that fucking ad agency, because there was no roundness in that, just a big old scoop of ugly. Maybe, deep down in his heart, Morris
had
known it. Maybe it was what kept him sane all those years.