Homicide Related (36 page)

“What are you talking about, Dooley?”

“He wrote the numbers down sometimes, Teresa. He kept them in his pocket. Did he put them somewhere when he got home?”

“I don't know, Dooley.”

If he'd had all those numbers with him when he was killed, the cops would have them, too—unless whoever had killed him had taken them. Or unless he'd been smart for once and had left them at home.

“What about that night you told me about? You said he went out to use a pay phone. Did he take a phone number with him? Did you see if he had a piece of paper or something with him when he was dialing?”

“I don't think so. Why?”

Jeffie was terrible with phone numbers.

“So what did he do? Did he look up the number when he got down there?”

“Look it up?”

“In the phone book?”

“Have you used a pay phone lately, Dooley? They don't have phone books in there anymore. They've all been ripped off.”

“Did you tell the cops about the pay phone, Teresa?”

“No.” There was a pause. “You think I should?”

“No,” Dooley said. “No, it's okay.”

He wondered if he should tell the cops. Would they be able to find out what calls had been made from that phone that night? He bet they could. But did he want them to find out? What if Jeffie had gone out there to call Dooley's uncle?

“That night Jeffie saw something on TV—you don't have any idea what it was?”

“He was flipping channels. And then I was in the kitchen. I'm pretty sure he was watching the news—I heard the theme they play, you know? But I didn't see it.”

“But you said it was Monday night, right?” Whatever he'd seen on TV, he'd seen it right before he'd started calling Dooley. Before he showed up at the store. He'd come up with some way to get the money he owed Dooley and he'd come down to the store to tell Dooley in person that he needed another day to pull it off.

“No,” Teresa said. “It was Sunday night, late.”

What?

“Are you sure, Teresa?”

“I'm positive. When he came back from making the call, he was smiling. He went out for a while, and when he came back, he was in an even better mood. We had a great time that night, Dooley. A really great time.” She started to cry.

Dooley felt his insides go cold when he came down the steps after school and saw Annette Girondin standing beside her car at the curb. Had something happened to his uncle? Had someone—maybe some guy who knew his uncle when he was a cop—attacked him in lockup? Or had the cops finally come up with something that would nail him good?

“What's wrong?” he said.

“The police are going after a DNA warrant for you,” she said. “It's in relation to the murder of Jeffrey Eccles.”

Dooley stared at her. He couldn't tell from her face whether or not she thought he might have had anything to do with that.

But wait a minute. They'd already taken a sample from his uncle for DNA after they'd found Lorraine's blood in his car. So if they were coming after Dooley now, then they must have ruled his uncle out on Jeffie's murder—right? He asked Annette.

“I don't know. They don't share those things with me,” she said. She handed him a business card. “A colleague of mind has agreed to represent you. Call him before you talk to the police, Ryan. It's what your uncle wants.”

Dooley glanced at the card.

“Okay,” he said. He tucked it into his pocket.

“I mean it, Ryan.” What she was really saying was, his uncle meant it.

“Tell him I said okay.”

The cops had ruled out his uncle as Jeffrey's killer.

They had ruled out his uncle, but not Dooley.

He checked his watch.

He had some time to kill before he had to be at work.

Jeffie had told him that the downtown guy who was going to save his ass worked in one of the big towers. Teresa had said Jeffie had been inside the gold building. Dooley caught a bus and headed downtown to check it out. In the late afternoon this time of year, when the sun was sinking in the sky, it lit up the whole tower so that it looked like it was made of solid gold. Dooley wondered if the people looking out from behind all the glass saw the whole city in a tint of gold instead of in the dull gray it really was.

The building was so big that it had entrances on all four sides, which meant on four different streets. But the street address was the same, no matter which side of the building you were on. Inside there were information desks in two corners diagonally across from each other and banks of elevators in between. Some elevators only ran halfway up. Others didn't stop until they had reached the upper floors. Altogether, there were sixty-eight floors. Sixty-eight floors that could hold, who knows, thousands of people.

He strolled around the main floor until he found a building directory. There were dozens of companies on it, some of them occupying more than one floor as far as Dooley could tell. He skimmed the list. His heart slammed to a stop when he came to a company name he recognized.

Jesus.

He glanced around, looking for a pay phone and seeing an information desk instead. He headed for it and asked a surly-looking security guard for the phone number for Integra Financial Services. He repeated the number over and over until he was far enough away that the security guard wouldn't hear. Then he punched in the number and asked to speak to Larry Quayle, his uncle's financial advisor.

“It's Ryan Dooley,” he said to the woman who asked if she could tell Mr. Quayle who was calling.

“Ryan, this is Larry Quayle,” a briskly warm voice said. “Your uncle has told me all about you.” Dooley doubted that. “What can I do for you?”

“My uncle came down to see you a couple of weeks ago—on a Tuesday afternoon,” Dooley said. “The thing is, he had my mid-term report with him. He's been looking for it and he says now he thinks he may have left it in your office.”

“How is your uncle?” Larry Quayle said. Dooley wasn't sure, but he got the impression that Larry knew his uncle was locked up.

“He's okay,” Dooley said. “But he said I should try and track down my report.”

“I see he was here a couple of Thursdays ago,” Larry Quayle said.

“And then he came back the following Tuesday.”

“No, I'm afraid not,” Larry Quayle said. “I don't have that in my appointment book. But, tell you what, I'll take a look around and see if I can find that report for you.”

Dooley thanked him.

He was positive his uncle had said he was coming down here that Tuesday, the day before Lorraine died. Maybe his uncle hadn't killed Jeffie—maybe Jeffie's getting killed had nothing to do with what had happened to Lorraine. Maybe it had to do with the money he owed. But his uncle had lied to him about coming to see Larry Quayle that day. What if he'd arranged to meet Jeffie here so that Jeffie didn't know where he lived? What if he was Jeffie's downtown guy?

Monday night in the video store: a good night if the absolute last thing you wanted to do was slap a smile on your face and make nice with customers because, guess what, there were hardly any customers on Monday night. That invariably meant that the time dragged because, of course, Kevin insisted that Dooley
do something constructive,
which meant straightening up the shelves, putting things back where they belonged instead of where some customer had decided to drop them after he or she—usually he—had changed their mind for maybe the third time. It meant restocking the candy displays and refilling the pop coolers. It meant printing out a list of people whose late returns were about to morph into charges on their credit cards, and then it meant calling those people, which Dooley hated doing and had managed so far to avoid. But Kevin was on his case tonight and had stuck him on the phone before he went on his meal break.

“We can't always have the fun jobs,” Kevin said. “We have to share the pain.”

Dooley thought about the pain he would like to share with Kevin.

As soon as Kevin left the store, Dooley went to the computer and got on the Internet. He pulled out his wallet and dug out the piece of paper on which he'd written the phone number he found in Lorraine's self-help book. He went to the 411 site that Linelle had showed him and typed in the phone number—and got a message that said that the number he'd typed in wasn't a published number. What had Linelle said about that? It meant it was probably a cell phone number. Or an unlisted number. The only way he'd be able to find out who it belonged to was to call it—and he wasn't ready for that. He had no idea what he would say to whoever answered. He couldn't come right out and ask,
Excuse
me, but was my mother in love with you?
Besides, what difference would it make now?

Fuck it.

He thought instead about who Jeffie had called that night before he came to the store. Suppose it was his downtown guy, the guy in the gold tower. Suppose it was someone other than Dooley's uncle …

He typed in the address from the gold building. Up popped a long list of companies, with their phone numbers. Jesus, Jeffie could have called any one of these numbers or none of them at all. But, wait a minute—what had Jeffie said the night he came to the store? The number of his downtown guy was a pizza number. What did that mean? That the guy worked for a pizza company—maybe a pizza company that had its main office downtown? Dooley scanned the list but didn't see anything like that. He shook his head in disgust. What a waste of time! All Jeffie had said about the guy was that he was downtown and he liked to party. Besides, it was a stretch to think that Jeffie had called any of these numbers. He could have called someone else altogether.

Still, he kept reading down the list.

And came to one of those phone numbers you'd have to be brain-dead to forget, the same three numbers followed by four zeros, the kind of phone number you'd hear on a commercial or in a jingle. An easy-to-remember phone number, like—was it possible?—like the number of a pizza chain. A pizza number—a number that even Jeffie couldn't forget.

Dooley reached for the phone, punched in the number, and got a recorded message telling him what company he had reached—it was a string of names that sounded like it might be a law firm or something—followed by the numbers he could punch to get their mailing and shipping addresses, the number he could punch to get the staff directory, the number he could punch to talk to an operator, and, if he knew the four-digit extension of the person he was trying to reach, he could enter that at any time. Dooley punched three to get to the staff directory, which turned out to be alphabetical. He'd listened to nearly twenty names before he got out of the A's and B's and into the C's. The company was huge. There must be hundreds of people working there. You either had to know who you wanted to talk to or you had to have an extension number.

He hung up the phone and stared at the computer screen and at the number you'd have to be a moron not to remember. After a few moments, he picked up the phone again and dialed Teresa's number.