A Ticket to the Boneyard (Matthew Scudder #8)

"We were talking about a subway series this year," I said. "The Mets and the Yankees, but the Mets lost out in the playoffs and the Yankees were out of it completely."

"I wish I had the time to follow baseball," he said. "But I just don't. Football, I have about half my Sundays off, and I'm almost always free to watch the Monday night games."

Then, over coffee, we got back on track. "Why I asked about a photo," he said, "is at this point you haven't given me enough to justify reopening the case. We'll have to see what we get from the lab work they'll be doing at Booth in Cleveland. If they can say for sure that semen's from somebody else, maybe that'll tilt the balance. Meanwhile, what we got is a piece of mail mailed and delivered in New York City, and that doesn't mean a lot to my chief here in Massillon."

"I can understand that."

"Let's assume you've got the right reading on this and your man did it. The murders took place a week ago last night. I'd say he'd have had to've been in town a few days beforehand, and possibly as much as a week. I suppose it's theoretically possible that he committed the murders the day he arrived, but I'd say it was more likely he took some time to look the situation over."

"I would certainly think so. He's a planner, and he had twelve years to let it all ripen. He'd figure to take his time."

"And he left town with a clipping from Thursday night's paper, so he was still here when the paper hit the street that afternoon. There's a downtown newsstand that gets it around four, but most places don't have it for sale until five or six. So he was here that long, and maybe overnight. When was the postmark?"

"Saturday."

"So he clipped a newspaper Thursday night in Massillon and mailed it Saturday in New York. And it was delivered Monday?"

"Tuesday."

"Well, that's not so bad. Sometimes they take a week, don't they? You know what the post office and the Florsheim Shoe Company got in common?" I didn't. "Half a million loafers they'd love to unload but nobody wants 'em. Why I asked about the postmark, if he mailed it Friday we could be pretty sure he flew from here to New York. Not a hundred percent, because you can drive it in ten hours if you push it. You happen to know if he has a car?"

I shook my head. "I don't even know where he lives, or what he's been doing since they cut him loose."

"I was thinking we could check with the airlines, look for his name on the passenger manifests. You think he'd use his right name?"

"No. I think he'd pay cash and use an alias."

"Or pay with a stolen credit card, and that wouldn't have his right name on it, either. He probably put up at a hotel or motel here, and again I don't suppose we'll find James Leo Motley signed on any registration cards, but if we had a photo to circulate somebody might recognize his picture."

"I'll see what I can do."

"If he flew, he'd have needed a car to get around. He could have come by bus from Cleveland but he'd still need a car in Massillon. You have to show a license and a credit card to rent one."

"He could have stolen one.''

"Could have. Lot of things to check, and I don't know what any of 'em might prove. I don't know how much effort I can get the department to put into checking, either. If the right word comes back from Booth Memorial, then we might do something. Otherwise I have to say our effort will most likely be minimal."

"I can understand that."

"When you've only got so many man-hours available to you," he said, "and when you're looking at a case you were able to close half an hour after it opened, well, you can see how you wouldn't be in a hurry to open it up again."

Afterward he gave me precise directions to the Hall of Fame in Canton. I listened, but without paying much attention. I was willing to believe it was fascinating, but I wasn't in the mood to stare through plate glass at Bronko Nagurski's old jersey and Sid Luckman's leather helmet. Besides, I had to turn in the Tempo in Cleveland or Hertz would charge me for a second day.

I gave it back to them with time to spare. My flight turned out to be overbooked, and before boarding they asked for volunteers to relinquish their seats and take a later flight, with the reward of a free trip anywhere in the continental United States. I couldn't think of anyplace I wanted to go. Evidently enough other people could, because they got their volunteers in short order.

I fastened my seat belt, opened my book, read a paragraph of Marcus Aurelius, and promptly fell asleep with the book in my lap. I didn't stir until we were making our descent into La Guardia.

My seat companion, wearing granny glasses and a Western Reserve sweatshirt, pointed to my book and asked me if it was something like TM. Sort of, I said.

"I guess it really works," she said enviously. "You were truly spaced."

I took a bus and a subway into Manhattan; the rush hour was in full swing, and that figured to be faster than a cab, and twenty dollars cheaper. I went straight to my hotel and checked my mail and messages, none of them important. I went upstairs and took a shower and called Elaine and brought her up to date. We didn't talk long, and then I went downstairs and had a bite and went over to St. Paul 's for a meeting.

The speaker was a regular member of the group, sober a good number of years, and instead of telling an elaborate drinking story he talked this time about what he'd been going through lately. He'd had conflicts at work, and one of his kids was in bad trouble with drugs and alcohol. He wound up talking a lot about acceptance, and that became the meeting's unofficial topic. I thought about Marcus Aurelius's wise words on the subject, about everything happening the way it was supposed to happen, and during the discussion period I considered talking about that, and relating it to what had happened in a picture-book suburb of Massillon, Ohio. But the meeting ended before I got around to raising my hand.

In the morning I called Reliable and told them I wouldn't be able to come in that day. I'd told them the same thing the day before, and the person I spoke to asked me to hold, and then the fellow I reported to came on the line.

"I had some work for you yesterday and today," he said. "Can I expect you tomorrow?"

"I'm not sure. Probably not."

"Probably not. What's the story, you working a case of your own?"

"No, it's something personal."

"Something personal. How about Monday?" I hesitated, and before I could reply he said, "You know, there's a lot of guys out there can do this kind of work and are glad to get it."

"I know that."

"It's not a regular job, you're not on the payroll, but all the same I need people I can count on to come in when I got work for them."

"I appreciate that," I said. "I don't think you're going to be able to count on me for the next little while."

"The next little while. How long is that?"

"I don't know. It depends how things work out."

There was a long pause, then a sudden bark of laughter. He said, "You're drinking again, aren't you? Jesus, why didn't you just say so in the first place? Give me a call when you've got it out of your system and I'll see if I've got anything for you."

Rage boiled up within me, immediate and volcanic. I choked on it until I heard him break the connection, then slammed the receiver down. I stalked away from the phone, my blood singing with the implacable fury of the falsely accused. I thought of a dozen things to tell him. First, though, I'd go over there and throw all his tables and chairs out the window. Then I'd tell him how he could change my per diem into nickels, and just where he could put it. And then-

What I did was call Jim Faber at work. He heard me out, and then he laughed at me. "You know," he said reasonably, "if you weren't an alcoholic in the first place, you wouldn't give a shit."

"He's got no right to think I'm drunk."

"How is it your business what he thinks?"

"Are you saying I haven't got a right to be angry?"

"I'm saying you can't afford it. How close are you to picking up a drink?"

"I'm not going to pick up a drink."

"No, but you're closer than you were before you talked with the son of a bitch. That's what you really felt like doing, isn't it? Before you called me instead."

I thought about it. "Maybe," I said.

"But you picked up the phone, and now you're starting to cool off."

We talked for a few minutes, and by the time I hung up my anger had lost its edge. Who was I really angry at? The guy at Reliable, who'd as much as said he was willing to hire me again after my bender had run its course? Not likely.

Motley, I decided. Motley, for starting all this in the first place.

Or myself, maybe. For being powerless to do anything about it.

The hell with it. I picked up the phone and made some calls, and then I went over to Midtown North to talk to Joe Durkin.

I never met Joe Durkin while I was on the job, although our years of service overlapped. I'd known him now for three or four years, and he'd become as good a friend as I had in the NYPD. We'd done each other a little good over the years. Once or twice he'd steered a client in my direction, and a few times I'd turned up something useful and passed it on to him.

When I first met him he was counting the months toward his twenty years, figuring to put in his papers the day he hit that magic number. He couldn't wait, he always said, to get off the job and out of the goddamned city. He was still saying the same thing, but the number had changed to twenty-five, now that he'd passed the twenty-year mark.

The years have packed meat around his middle and thinned the dark hair that he combs flat across his head, and his face shows the florid cheeks and broken blood vessels of the heavy hitter. He had quit cigarettes for a while, but now he was smoking again. His ashtray overflowed onto the desktop, and he had a fresh cigarette burning. He put it out before I was halfway through with my story, and he had another one going before I was finished.

When I was done he tilted his chair back and blew a trio of smoke rings. There wasn't a lot of air moving in the detective squad room that morning. The rings drifted to the ceiling without losing their shape.

"Hell of a story," he said.

"Isn't it?"

"This guy in Ohio sounds like a pretty decent fellow. What's his name, Havlicek? Wasn't there a guy with the same name played for the Celtics?"

"That's right."

"Also named Tom, if I'm not mistaken."

"No, I think it was John."

"You sure? Maybe you're right. Your guy any relation?"

"I didn't ask him."

"No? Well, you had other things on your mind. What is it you want to do, Matt?"

"I want to put that son of a bitch where he belongs."

"Yeah, well, he did what he could to stay there. A guy like that's a good bet to die inside the walls. You think they can make any kind of a case against him in Massillon?"

"I don't know. You know, he got a big break when they read it as murder-suicide and closed it out on the spot."

"It sounds as though we'd have done the same thing."

"Maybe, or maybe not. We'd have had his call on file, for one thing. Taped, with a chance of voiceprint ID. We'd have run more elaborate forensic workups on all five victims as a matter of course."