talking to a dead line.
“Hello?”
“Yeah, I’m here. Look, if Dan wants to talk to you he’ll talk to you. You call him. He’s in the book.”
“What, the phone book?”
“That’s right. I gotta go.”
He hung up. I felt foolish. I never even considered the phone book because I never knew a cop who put his name in it. I dialed information for Baltimore again and gave the former detective’s name.
“I have no listing for a Daniel Bledsoe,” the operator said. “I have Bledsoe Insurance and Bledsoe Investigations.”
“Okay, give me those and can I get the addresses, please?”
“Actually, they are separate listings and numbers but the same address in Fells Point.”
He gave me the information and I called the investigations number. A woman answered, “Bledsoe Investigations.”
“Yes, can I speak to Dan?”
“I’m sorry, he’s unavailable.”
“Do you know if he’ll be in later today?”
“He’s in now. He’s just on the line. This is his service. When he’s out or on his line it rings through. But I know he’s there. He checked for messages not ten minutes ago. But I don’t know for how long. I don’t keep his schedule.”
Fells Point is a spit of land east of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. The tourist shops and hotels give way to funkier pubs and shops and then old brick factories and Little Italy. On some streets the asphalt has worn off the underlying brick and when the wind is right there is the damp tang of the sea or the smell of the sugar factory just across the inlet. Bledsoe Investigations and Insurance was in a one-story brick building at Caroline and Fleet.
It was a few minutes after one. On the door of his small street-front office was a plastic clock face with adjustable hands and the words BE BACK AT. The clock was set at one. I looked around, saw no one making a run for the door to beat the deadline and decided to wait for him anyway. I had nowhere else to go.
I walked down the market on Fleet, bought a Coke and went back to my car. From the driver’s seat I could see the door to Bledsoe’s office. I watched it for twenty minutes until I saw a man with jet-black hair, a middle-age paunch peeking through his jacket and a slight limp walk up, unlock the door and go in. I got out with my computer satchel and headed for him.
Bledsoe’s office looked as though it had once been a doctor’s office, though I could not figure out why a doctor would have hung a shingle out in this working district. There was a little entry room with a sliding window and counter behind which I imagined a receptionist at one time sat. The window, glazed like a shower door, was closed. I had heard a buzz when I had opened the door but no one responded to it. I stood there a few moments looking around. There was an old couch and a coffee table. Not much room for anything else. A variety of magazines were fanned across the table, none of them fresher than six months old. I was about to call out a hello or knock on the door to the inner sanctum when I heard a toilet flush somewhere on the other side of the sliding window. Then I saw a blurred figure move behind the glass and the door to the left opened.
The man with the black hair stood there. I noticed now that he had a mustache as thin as a freeway on a map traveling over his lip.
“Yes, can I help you?”
“Daniel Bledsoe?”
“That’s right.”
“My name’s Jack McEvoy. I’d like to ask you about John McCafferty. I think we both might be able to help each other.”
“John McCafferty was a long time ago.”
He was eyeing the computer satchel.
“It’s just a computer,” I said. “Can we sit down someplace?”
“Uh, sure. Why not?”
I followed through the door and down a short hallway that had three more doors lined along the right side. He opened the first one and we stepped into an office of cheap faux maple paneling. His state license was framed on the wall as well as some photos from his days as a cop. The whole thing seemed about as cheesy as his mustache but I was determined to play it out. The thing I know about cops, and I guessed that it extended to former cops, was that looks were deceiving. I knew some in Colorado who would still be wearing pale