Night Passage (23 page)

“You in the Marines?”

“Semper Fi,” Jesse said. “You?”

“Navy.”

“What was your job?”

Burke smiled.

“Lot of stuff. I was a lifer.”

“Twenty years?”

“Yeah. This is my retirement.”

Jesse smiled. Burke drove the car up Indian Hill Road. The startling leaves had finished turning, Jesse noticed. Many of the trees were leafless, or nearly so. And, puzzlingly, some of them still had leaves and the leaves were still green.

“Ever do any demolition work?” Jesse said.

Burke’s eyes shifted almost imperceptibly as he glanced involuntarily at Jesse and then looked back at the road.

“Yeah, some.”

Jesse nodded. At the top of Indian Hill, Burke drove the patrol car slowly into the park. It was during school hours, and it was chilly. There was no one in the park except a white-haired man in a black-and-red wool jacket walking an aging yellow Lab.

“Funny how quiet a town is during school hours,” Jesse said.

Burke didn’t say anything.

“Ever been to Denver?” Jesse said.

“Denver?”

“Yeah.”

“Why you asking?”

Jesse smiled at him.

“Why not?” Jesse said.

“Jesse, you got something on your mind, I think you just better say it right out.”

“I am saying it right out,” Jesse said, still smiling. “You ever been to Denver?”

“Yeah.”

Jesse’s smile was gone.

“When’s the last time you were in Denver?” Jesse said.

From Indian Hill, you could see the whole harbor, uneventful in the late fall, and the old town, weathered shingle, red brick, and church steeples beside the dark water. You could see across the harbor to Paradise Neck, the big glass facade of the Yacht Club teetering over the water. And you could see across the Neck, mostly evergreen trees, with white and gray houses among them, and look at the Atlantic Ocean.

Burke didn’t answer. He turned the car back down the hill toward the center of town.

“When’s the last time you were in Denver, Lou?”

Burke shook his head.

“Drive us back to the station, Lou.”

Burke was silent. Jesse let the silence stand. There was no reason to let Burke in on what Jesse knew. Jesse had never gotten in trouble saying too little. The patrol car pulled into its slot outside the station.

“I’m going to ask you to take a leave of absence, Lou.”

Burke turned toward him and started to speak, and stopped.

“Leave the handgun and the badge with Molly,” Jesse said.

As they got out of the car Burke turned and looked across the roof at Jesse.

“You sonova bitch,” he said.

Burke’s voice was thick, as if forced out through a closing throat. And there was something in Burke’s face that Jesse felt with a force he wasn’t used to. You didn’t work South Central without seeing hatred. But the passion in Burke’s face was beyond hatred. Jesse felt something like revulsion, as if he’d seen something grotesque for a moment. He felt as if he needed to hold steady against it, the way you lean into a strong wind.

“Gun and badge to Molly, Lou,” Jesse said.

Tammy Portugal’s maiden name was Gennaro. Her mother and father lived in a small ugly house that had once been a summer cottage, facing a swampy saltwater estuary which the local kids called the eel pond. The process of converting the cottage to a full-time home had been apparently a slow one. The rear wall of the kitchen above the sink was still unfinished, the area between the studs filled with the silvery foil backing of the fiberglass insulation.

The kitchen table where Jesse sat was made of metal covered with white enamel. There was a small fold-up leaf at either end. The mug from which Mr. Gennaro was drinking instant coffee was formed in the shape of a gnomish-looking man with a beard. Mrs. Gennaro, in a flowered housedress and white sneakers, was at the stove boiling water, in case there was a call for more instant coffee. The sneaker on her right foot had a hole cut to relieve pressure on her small toe. She was a sturdy woman, not fat, but wide in the hips and shoulders. She had white hair which she wore in a tight perm, and rimless glasses.

“You sure you won’t have coffee?” Mrs. Gennaro said.

“No, thank you, ma’am,” Jesse said.

Jesse hated instant coffee. Across the table from him, Mr. Gennaro put a spoonful of Cremora in his coffee and stirred. He was a wiry little man, no taller than his wife. He worked sometimes as a fisherman, and sometimes as a landscaper, and in snowstorms he drove a plow for the town.

“How are you both doing?” Jesse asked.

Mr. Gennaro shrugged.

Mrs. Gennaro said, “We get through the day.”

“It’ll get better,” Jesse said. “I know it doesn’t feel like that now, but in time, it’ll get better.”

Neither one said anything. Probably didn’t want it to get better right now, Jesse thought, probably were so into the grief that it was their life, and without it they wouldn’t have anything at all.

“I see you have your daughter’s house on the market,” Jesse said.

“Yeah,” Mr. Gennaro said. “No sense paying for an empty house.”

“You selling it furnished?” Jesse said.

“No,” Mrs. Gennaro said. “We got a man to come in and take everything out. He paid us for the furniture.”

“That’s good,” Jesse said. “It would be painful doing that yourself.”

Mrs. Gennaro nodded. The steam began to spout from the kettle. She turned the heat down beneath it and came to the table.

“I hope you were able to keep some memories,” Jesse said.

Mr. Gennaro shifted a little in his seat.

“What do you mean?” Mrs. Gennaro said.

“You know,” Jesse said, “pictures, letters, diaries, stuff like that.”

They were silent.

“She keep a diary?” Jesse said.

Simultaneously, Mr. Gennaro said “Yes” and Mrs. Gennaro said “No.”

Jesse smiled politely and didn’t say anything. The Gennaros looked at each other. Jesse waited. No one said anything. Jesse could hear the hot water in the teakettle stir restlessly on the stove over the low heat.

“If she kept a diary it might help us find who killed her,” Jesse said.

The Gennaros looked at each other and back at Jesse. Still they didn’t speak. Jesse knew they were silent because they didn’t know what to say. He needed to get them started.

“I want to punish the man who killed your daughter,” Jesse said.

Silence. Mr. Gennaro shifted again in his chair. Mrs. Gennaro’s face was clenched like a fist. Her cheeks were red.

“I know there are diaries,” Jesse said.

Mrs. Gennaro shook her head.

“I need to see them.”

Still she shook her head. Jesse looked at her husband.

“You want the man that killed your daughter?” Jesse said.

His voice was still quiet, but the pleasantness was gone.

“You embarrassed by what’s in there?” Jesse said. “What would she say? Would she say, ‘Cover up for me and let the man who killed me get away’? Would she say that?”

“No,” Mr. Gennaro said.

“Eddie,” Mrs. Gennaro said sharply.

Gennaro stared at the tabletop, shaking his head slowly.

“No,” he said again.

Then he stood and walked into the next room.

“Eddie,” Mrs. Gennaro said again, louder, and sharper.

Gennaro came back into the kitchen with a cardboard beer case filled with small books covered in red imitation leather, each little book with a brass lock. Gennaro put the diaries on the table in front of Jesse and went back to the other side of the table and sat down.

“This is them,” he said. He nodded at his wife. “She got the keys.”

“I won’t give them to you,” Mrs. Gennaro said.

“You don’t have to, ma’am,” Jesse said.

“I raised a decent girl,” Mrs. Gennaro said. “She was a decent girl until that Portugal …”

“She was decent anyway,” Gennaro muttered.

“I don’t want him prying into those books, Eddie,” Mrs. Gennaro said.

“He’s going to,” Gennaro said and kept his eyes on the table. “I want him to.”

“Don’t you care what I want?” Mrs. Gennaro said.

“I want the guy caught,” Gennaro said.

Jesse picked up the beer case with the diaries carefully stacked in it.

“How you going to open them without the keys?” Mrs. Gennaro said.

“Probably pry them open,” Jesse said, “with a screw-driver.”

Mrs. Gennaro looked at the diaries without speaking for a moment, then she said, “Wait a minute.”

She left the kitchen. Jesse waited. Gennaro sat silently staring at the kitchen tabletop. After a moment Mrs. Gennaro returned and gave Jesse a collection of little brass keys tied together with a red ribbon.

“I want them books back,” she said, “with no damage.”

“I’ll get them back to you, ma’am,” Jesse said.

Neither of Tammy Portugal’s parents said anything else as Jesse carried the diaries from the house.

They sat in Hasty’s car in the parking lot of the Northshore Shopping Center. The nose of the car pointed north so that the afternoon sun streamed in over Hasty’s shoulder and made him a dark silhouette as Burke turned in the seat to look at him.

“Something will have to be done about Stone,” Burke said, squinting, trying to look at Hasty. But the sun was too fierce. Burke gave up and looked away.

Hasty was silent.

“He knows,” Burke said. “He knows I was in Denver. He knows more than that. Sonova bitch doesn’t say much, but he knows.”

“Maybe he doesn’t say much because he doesn’t know,” Hasty said.

“He knows,” Burke said. “We made a bad mistake with him.”

“Mistakes are part of life,” Hasty said. “The important thing is to overcome them.”

To Burke, Hasty’s voice seemed disembodied, coming as it did out of an unseeable place in the hard middle of the sun glare.

“Well, we better overcome this one pretty quick,” Burke said. “Or he’s going to overcome us.”

“What do you recommend?”

“We have to kill him.”

“The death of a second police chief from this town in less than a year?”

“Better than having him take us all down,” Burke said. “We can find a way to cover it, an accident or something.”

“All of us?” Hasty said.

“Well, you know what I mean, he gets me, sooner or later he’ll get you, and … everybody.”

“You are required in these circumstances to give only your name, rank, and serial number.”

“For crissake, Hasty, I’m not a fucking prisoner of war.”

“Of course you are. If our movement is about anything, it is about war with the forces of international mongrelization.”

“I know,” Burke said. “I understand that. But they’re going to arrest me for murder, Hasty.”

“What they do has no effect on what we know to be true,” Hasty said.

“Hasty, I can’t afford theory right now. My ass is on the stove, you know? We need to get Stone out of the way.”

In black silhouette Hasty nodded slowly.

“To save us all,” Hasty said.

“Absolutely,” Burke said.

“What have ‘us all’ to do with your trip to Denver, Lou?”

“Christ, Hasty. You sent me.”

“To do what?”

“To blow Tom Carson up.”

“Because?”

“Because he knew too much and you didn’t trust him to be quiet about it.”

“Un huh.”

There was silence in the car. Across the parking lot, people in bright fall clothing surged in and out of the vast mall. Shop early for Christmas. Take advantage of pre-holiday sales. No payments until January. Many of the people in the late-afternoon surge were teenaged mall rats. For them the mall had replaced playground, Boys Club, street corner, home. The new marketplace.

“I wouldn’t tell them, of course,” Burke said. “But once they start they’re bound to find out.”

“How?”

“Well, I mean they investigate.”

“What?”

“Well, you know, they backtrack my story …”

“And?”

“And who the hell knows what physical evidence they have. Who knows what the Wyoming militia might tell them. They get somebody in jail they can squeeze them, make a deal, go easy on you if you give us the others, you know … I would never do that, but we don’t really know the Wyoming people.”

“Yes,” Hasty said. “Of course. Who’s to do the killing?”

“I figured you could get Jo Jo to do it. He’s got a mad on about Stone anyway.”

“Well,” Hasty said. “I don’t know, Lou. I can promise at least to give it serious theoretical consideration.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“I’ll think about it, Lou. Meanwhile you sit still, and keep your mouth shut. Until you hear from me.”

“We need to move fast,” Burke said.

“I’m aware of that, Lou. And we will, but we will move with deliberate speed. I agree with you that we’ve underestimated Stone, and we don’t want to underestimate him further.”

“Yeah, sure, Hasty. Just as long as we get him before he gets us.”

“He won’t get us, Lou,” Hasty said. “You’re on suspension. Go home, sit in your house, stay there, and say nothing.”

“I’m counting on you, Hasty,” Burke said.

“Of course,” Hasty said.

Jesse began reading Tammy’s diaries from the most recent entry back. It took him a day to reach the parts that seemed interesting, and yet another day to cut and paste them together into a narrative that he could study.

May 11—Talked to Hasty Hathaway at the post office. He is the most important man in Paradise, kind of old.

Memorial Day—Hasty Hathaway was talking to me today at the Parade. He acts kind of interested. Its hard to tell with a guy as geeky as he is, but a girl can listen.

June 28—Had a drink at the 86 last night. Looking good if I do say so. New white sweater, the black jeans I got that make my butt look really good. Hasty Hathaway bought me a drink, took me home. We stopped at Indian Hill on the way, and I thought he was going to come on to me, but we just talked. He’s really kind of nice, sort of a sad person. Who’d think so, all that money and everything. But he says him and his wife haven’t got much going in the sex department. Says he’s pretty lonely. Said he needs somebody like me to talk with. I told him he could take me out to dinner sometime if he wanted. He said he had to be careful in town, him being a married man and all, but we could go into Boston maybe. I said sure. He said did I mind him being married, and I said no. His wife’s married I said, not him. He thought that was pretty cute. Then he took me home and never even touched me. Strange guy. Fun, maybe.