I’d done what she wanted, I was just baggage.
She had a roll of paper towels and a can of air freshener in the bag. She cleaned up my puke, dropped it in the gutter (hundred-dollar fine for littering, I found out later), and then sprayed the car with something that smelled like flowers.
“Get in,” she told me.
I’d been turned away so I didn’t have to look at what remained of my lunchtime ravioli (as far as cleaning up the mess went, I thought she owed me that), but when I turned back to get in the car, I saw Kenneth Therriault standing by the trunk. Close enough to reach out and touch me, and still grinning. I might have screamed, but when I saw him I was between breaths and my chest wouldn’t seem to expand and grab another one. It was as if all the muscles had gone to sleep.
“I’ll be seeing you,” Therriault said. The grin widened and I could see a cake of dead blood between his teeth and cheek. “Champ.”
26
We only drove three blocks before she stopped again. She took out her phone (her real one, not the burner), then looked at me and saw I was shaking. I maybe could have used a hug then, but all I got was a pat on the shoulder, presumably sympathetic. “Delayed reaction, kiddo. Know all about it. It’ll pass.”
Then she made a call, identified herself as Detective Dutton, and asked for Gordon Bishop. She must have been told he was on the job, because Liz said, “I don’t care if he’s on Mars, patch me through. This is Priority One.”
She waited, tapping the fingers of her free hand on the steering wheel. Then she straightened up. “It’s Dutton, Gordo…no, I know I’m not, but you need to hear this. I just got a tip about Therriault from someone I interviewed when I was on it…no, I don’t know who. You need to check out the King Kullen in Eastport…where he started, right. It makes a degree of sense if you think about it.” Listening. Then: “Are you kidding? How many people did we interview back then? A hundred? Two hundred? Listen, I’ll play you the message. I recorded it, assuming my phone worked.”
She knew it had; she’d checked it on our short three-block drive. She played it for him and when it was done, she said, “Gordo? Did you…shit.” She ended the call. “He hung up.” Liz gave me a grim smile. “He hates my guts, but he’ll check. He knows it’ll be on him if he doesn’t.”
Detective Bishop did check, because by then they’d had time to start digging into Kenneth Therriault’s past, and they’d found a nugget that stood out in light of Liz’s “anonymous tip.” Long before his career in construction and his post-retirement career as an orderly at City of Angels, Therriault had grown up in the town of Westport, which is, natch, next door to Eastport. As a high school senior, he’d worked as a bag boy and shelf stocker at King Kullen. Where he was caught shoplifting. The first time he did it, Therriault was warned. The second time he got canned. But stealing, it seemed, was a hard habit to break. Later in life he moved on to dynamite and blasting caps. A good supply of both was later found in a Queens storage locker. All of it old, all of it from Canada. I guess the border searches were a lot less thorough in those days.
“Can we go home now?” I asked Liz. “Please?”
“Yes. Are you going to tell your mother about this?”
“I don’t know.”
She smiled. “It was a rhetorical question. Of course you will. And that’s okay, doesn’t bother me in the slightest. Do you know why?”
“Because nobody would believe it.”
She patted my hand. “That’s right, Champ. Hole in one.”
27
Liz dropped me off on the corner and sped away. I walked down to our building. My mother and Barbara hadn’t gone for that drink after all, Barb had a cold and said she was going home right after work. Mom was on the steps with her phone in her hand.
She flew down the steps when she saw me coming and grabbed me in a panicky hug that squeezed the breath out of me. “Where the fuck were you, James?” She only called me that when she was super-pissed, which you might have already guessed. “How could you be so thoughtless? I’ve been calling everyone, I was starting to think