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  And now I was holding a check and reading the father’s note. He said they never got my bill, so he hoped this would cover it but let him know if it didn’t and he’d send more. I sat for a few minutes and stared at the walls of my office, and then I got some stationery out of the top drawer of my desk and wrote a note to Mr. Singletary, thanking him and suggesting that he donate my fee to an organization that helps parents locate their missing children. I placed the check and the note inside an envelope, which I addressed, stamped and sealed. Turning off the lights, I left my office and began walking back home. Along the way, I dropped the envelope in a mailbox and thought about what Uncle Leo had told me the day I’d first expressed an interest in joining him in the business. The most important thing, he’d said, was learning to balance the highs and the lows, “‘cause you’re gonna have both, the good and the bad. Ya gotta learn to balance them, son, or the demons’ll be dancin’ in your head way too many nights.”

  I’m still learning.

  Chapter 9

  I arrived at Angie and Simon’s place just a few minutes before Angie did. I have a key, but I spent the time in their backyard, playing with Pepper, which made me feel better than I had thirty minutes earlier. Pepper, I thought, as I heard Angie’s car pull into the driveway, you do good work, and, at about two Milkbones per session, your rates are exceptional.

  I walked around to the front of the house and met Angie as she got out of her car. I was surprised to see that the kids weren’t with her, since she usually picked them up after school.

  “Kids couldn’t take the constant nagging anymore, huh? Hired themselves a lawyer and sued for parental malpractice. Gonna live at Chuck E. Cheese’s for the duration of the trial. I’ve seen this coming for a long time, Ang.”

  Angie smiled and said, “Jeremy, you do brighten up a person’s day.”

  “Funny,” I told her, “I was just telling Pepper the same thing.”

  “The kids are visiting friends for a while. C’mon in the house, JB. We need to talk.”

  “Uh-oh,” I said, as we walked up the steps of the porch. “This sounds serious.”

  “It is, but I’m hoping it’s the good type of serious.”

  Once she’d dumped her briefcase in the family room, we continued back to the kitchen, where I made coffee while Angie went out and said hello to Pepper. Then we sat at the island and she got to it.

  “I had a long talk with Tommy last night, JB. I decided not to wait until today, so I let him sleep for a while after you brought him back, poured a lot of coffee into him, then sat him down right here in the kitchen. We went over a lot of stuff, some of it going way back.”

  “Hm-mmm,” I said.

  “Yeah, I know. Tommy and I have had these little talks before, and nothing’s ever changed. But this time, I told him that, one way or another, there would be a change. Either he gets help with his drinking, or he stops coming around here.”

  “That must have been hard, Ang.”

  “It was.”

  “What made you decide to issue the ultimatum this time? Excuse me for saying it this way, but you’ve never used the kids before.”

  “I know, but it’s all I have left. Simon and I talked about it, and we decided that Abby and Matt deserve better from their uncle. I told Tommy that, and I asked him if he wanted to end up like our father, spending the last years of his life going from one bender to another until he dies of liver disease.”

  “If Tommy’s going to get sober, he’s going to have to do it for himself, Angie, not for the kids. As harsh as that sounds, you know it’s true.”

  “Of course I do, JB, but I’m desperate, and I’m hoping the threat of not seeing the kids again will be enough to at least get him started. At some point, maybe he’ll decide to do it for himself.”

  “How’d he respond?”

  “At first, the usual. He denied that he has a problem, said he never hurts anyone, can’t a guy enjoy a beer or two once in a while. You know. Then I asked him about Abby’s entry in her school’s science fair last week. He had no memory of it, of course, because he was in a bar somewhere that night, even though he’d promised her he would be there. And I reminded him that he hadn’t shown up to take Matt fishing this past Saturday. I told him I was tired of my kids being disappointed all the time by their uncle, and it was gonna stop.”

  I could picture Angie and Tommy sitting here, with Angie not letting her brother evade her questions. I’d seen her in action. She would have made a good prosecutor.

  “So,” I said, “is he is or is he isn’t?”

  Angie took a deep breath.

  “I told him that Simon had done some research, and there’s a place up near Edinboro that’s got a good reputation. It’s a minimum eight-week program, and we’ll help him with the cost. He says he wants to do this, JB. He seems serious, but there’s one thing he insisted on.”

  “And that is?”

  “That you be the one to take him up there. He says he knows if he tries to chicken out at the last minute, you won’t let him get away with it, that you’ll make him go in and register and get started.”

  “You and Simon could do that just as easily as I could.”

  “I know, but Tommy said he didn’t want to embarrass himself in front of us, which, considering all the times we’ve hauled his sorry behind home from one bar or another, is kinda silly.”

  “Maybe it’s a good sign that he’s at least concerned about hurting your feelings.”

  “That’s what Simon said. Anyway, will you do it, Jeremy?”

  “Sure,” I said. “When’s the big day?”

  “This Saturday. That’s the earliest Simon could get Tommy admitted.”

  “Where’s Tommy now?”

  “At work, I hope. He told us that he wanted to go to work the rest of the week, said he was going to tell everyone there what he was going to do and how long he’d be gone. I had to trust him. And I think he needed me to trust him. But he did ask if he could spend the nights here, which I also took to be a good sign.”

  “What time shall I be here on Saturday?”

  “Why don’t you come over and have breakfast with us, around seven-thirty or so? Simon says the drive up there shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours, and they said they’d register Tommy anytime between nine and twelve.”

  “I’ll be here, Ang.”

  “Thanks, Jeremy. I know I don’t have to tell you how much this means to Simon and me, so . . . just, thanks.”

  “Hey, Tommy’s important to me, too.”

  “Seems like all I’m doing lately is asking you for favors. Anything happening yet with Rachel Pendleton?”

  “I met with her earlier today, and I talked with Denny at lunch. Gonna sit down with the detective in charge of the case tonight.”

  “I know it’s early, JB, but do you think Rachel’s right, I mean about the murder not being exactly what the police think?”

  “I’m not sure yet, but even with the little that I know, I have to admit that something doesn’t feel right about the thing. I’ll have a better idea after I talk to this detective tonight, who, according to Denny, is a bit of a jerk.”

  Angie grinned and said, “Any chance of my being a fly on the wall while you’re talking to him?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “That you’re not exactly famous for being tolerant of jerks.”

  “I’ll have you know that I can be the most circumspect of individuals whenever I choose.”

  “Hm-mmm, right, Jeremy, whatever you say. Where did you say you were meeting this detective.”

  “I didn’t and I ain’t,” I said.

  “Well, in that case, I guess Simon and I’ll just have to rent a video for tonight’s entertainment.”

  Chapter 10

  Certain things you can almost always count on in life. One is that within a few hundred feet of every elementary school in any city, you’ll find a candy store. I think it’s some kind of ordinance. And in that same ci
ty, somewhere in every police precinct, you’ll find a cop bar, a place where cops can go after their shifts and relax with each other, talk about the day, say things that they wouldn’t necessarily repeat anywhere else, because other people, people who hadn’t just spent the day chasing bad guys and giving them their rights and filling out forms, well, those people might not always understand where the cop was coming from with some of his or her comments. I realize now that, when I was a high school teacher, the faculty room had probably been the equivalent of a cop bar for many of my colleagues and me. I understand the mentality behind the concept. Every profession needs a place where the workers can feel free to express themselves without fear of being challenged at every turn. That doesn’t mean that everything that’s said in these places is politically correct or even correct in a general sense, just that people need a place to blow off steam once in a while.

  Cop bars aren’t off-limits to the general public, and a lot of groupie-types tend to hang out at the bars, pretending to be part of the scene. As long as they stay in the background, the groupies are pretty much tolerated by the cops. In fact, some of the groupie types are quite attractive, and in those cases, there are always cops who are more than willing to strike up casual friendships with the groupies. I’m not saying it’s right or wrong, just that it’s there. As for anyone else who wanders into a cop bar, that person figures out pretty quickly that he or she is not in your typical tavern. Too many of the people in the place seem to know each other too well, which immediately brands anyone else as an outsider. It’s not that anyone tells you to leave, just that you can sense that you don’t belong there, even if you’re not exactly sure why.

  Clancy’s was a cop bar, had been for a long time. When I walked in at about ten after seven, I got a few looks but nothing more. People knew I wasn’t a cop, but they could also tell I wasn’t there to cause any trouble. A lot of it’s just the way you carry yourself. I don’t have an attitude about cops, probably because I know they’re basically like everyone else, some good, some bad. When I was a teacher, I had first-hand experience with a situation where one group of people was blamed for just about everything that went wrong. I had kids who came to class maybe once every two weeks, I called them drop-ins, and when they did show up, they’d usually put their heads down and go to sleep. Yet when those kids failed my class, I often had administrators questioning me about my “failure rate.” I did the best I could, under what at times were impossible circumstances. Some of my fellow teachers were fantastic, a few were awful, but condemning the entire staff or the profession itself never seemed to make much sense to me. I feel pretty much the same way about cops.

  Denny had described Wykcoff for me, but I’d have known he was a cop anyway. Anywhere cops go, they act like they own the joint. In fact, during the years that I taught, other than the teachers and other staff members, the only people who came into the schools and didn’t seem the least bit intimidated by all the teenagers were cops.

  Wyckoff was about my height but he weighed maybe thirty pounds more, most of it around his waist. He looked like someone who’d maybe been in shape a long time ago, but I doubted if he’d seen the inside of a gym for at least a decade, probably longer. He glanced around, nodded to a few people, and then headed straight for the bar, where I was sitting by myself. He was wearing a wrinkled, dark green suit that had probably been out of style when he bought it. Maybe he was waiting for it to come back into fashion. It was going to be a long wait.

  “You Barnes?” he asked.

  “Yep,” I replied.

  “Let’s grab a booth, okay?”

  “Sure,” I said, and I followed him to a small booth near the back of the place. As soon as we sat down, a waitress came over to take our orders.

  “The usual, Carson?” she asked him.

  “Yeah, Elaine, and put it on my friend’s tab.”

  Elaine nodded and turned to me.

  “How ‘bout you, sir? What’ll it be?”

  “Just a Coke, please, with ice.”

  After she left, Wykcoff looked across the table at me for a minute and then said, “You an alkie?”

  “Un-uh,” I told him. “Just never acquired a taste for beer. I’d’ve ordered a white wine spritzer, but I didn’t want to embarrass you in front of your friends.”

  “I checked you out with a couple of people. Heard you thought you was a riot.”

  I stretched my hands out to the sides, palms up.

  “What can I say? It’s a gift that I’m willing to share.”

  “Yeah, whatever. So about the Pendleton case. Who you workin for?”

  “Rachel Pendleton.”

  “The widow, huh? Good looker, that one. Don’t blame ya for wantin’ to drag this out a bit.”

  I ignored that, and asked, “What’s your take on the case, detective?”

  He shrugged and said, “Pretty easy to figure out what happened. Pendleton left for work that morning, ran into a mugger, resisted, they struggled for the gun, and he got shot. Case closed.”

  We paused for a minute while the waitress brought our drinks and then left. Apparently, Wykcoff’s usual was a shot and a beer.

  “What’d the autopsy show?”

  “One shot to the heart, .38-caliber. Guy probably died instantly.”

  “Any ideas on the perp?”

  “Shit, probably a brother. Come down off the Hill, lookin’ for an easy mark, runs into Pendleton.”

  “At seven in the morning? Why would a mugger be roaming around a residential area at 7:00 a.m?”

  “Hell, you know what those people are like, right?”

  My patience was beginning to wear a bit thin with Detective Wykcoff.

  “Actually, no, I don’t. Could you narrow it down a bit for me?”

  “Huh?”

  “Just pick one of those people for me. Identify him, maybe I’ll happen to know the person, so I can tell you what he’s like. Otherwise, I’m probably not gonna be able to help you out here.”

  “Whaddya, some kind of smart guy or somethin’?”

  “Well, I don’t like to brag, but I am a high school graduate. Did it on the first try, too. But you probably didn’t come here to hear about my educational triumphs. We can save that for another night. I can get you a copy of my transcript and everything.”

  Wykcoff frowned and said, “Hey, I’m the one doing a favor here, ya know. You don’t want to take advantage of my expertise, that’s fine with me.”

  There were still some things I needed to know, so I kept my mouth shut, something Angie had been telling me to do more of for about three decades.

  “Rachel Pendleton told me that her husband never would have resisted a mugger. And she said his wallet was still on him when he was found. Were there any indications that he actually did try to fight off someone?”

  “Christ, what else could it have been? He and the mugger fought, the mugger shot him, panicked and ran, that’s it.”

  “How far away was he from the person who shot him?”

  Wykcoff hesitated for a minute and then said, “Coroner says his best guess is about five feet or so.”

  “Five feet? I thought you said they were struggling for the gun. What were they doing, hurling insults at each other from five paces?”

  “Hey, the coroner ain’t always right.”

  “Well,” I said, “you have a point there. All he’s got to work with are those expensive machines and technology and stuff.”

  Before he could say anything, I quickly continued.

  “Look, Detective Wykcoff, did you look into Pendleton’s life at all, check out his background, where he worked, etcetera?”

  Somewhat in a huff, he replied, “I know how to do my job, wise guy. Sure, I checked everything out. Got his bank records, everything okay there. No criminal record. No problems at work, at least as far as I could tell from talkin’ to those tight-asses at Chaney and Cox. No marital problems, and I wouldn’t expect there to be, not with that honey he was married to, although y
ou can’t blame a man for havin a little on the side, no matter how good-lookin’ his wife is.”

  “So as far as you’re concerned, there’s no need to continue investigating this thing?”

  “Like I told you, as far as I’m concerned, the only thing left is to hope we get lucky and nab the guy who shot Pendleton. It’ll probably happen when one of the other brothers gets picked up on an unrelated matter and decides to rat out his buddy. Those people have no sense of honor.”

  The waitress came by to ask about refills. Wykcoff told her he’d have the usual again, and I asked for a couple of aspirin. She said she’d be right back.