“Sure. We have at least two forgery experts. Why?”
I handed her the two samples I had of Wetterau’s signature-one with the “P” and one without.
“Could you do me a favor and see if both these signatures were written by the same hand?”
She took them from me. “I guess.”
She turned, pulled a knee up to her chest, propped her chin on top, and stared at me.
“What?” I said.
“Nothing. Just looking.”
“See anything good?”
She turned her head back toward the church, a dismissive gesture, one that said flirting wasn’t part of the menu today.
I kicked at the stone foundation of the wading pool and tried not to say what I’d been feeling these past few months. Eventually, though, I gave in.
“Ange,” I said, “it’s starting to wear me down.”
She gave me a confused look. “Karen Nichols?”
“All of it. The job, the…It’s not…”
“Fun anymore?” She gave me a small smile.
I smiled back. “Yeah. Exactly.”
She lowered her eyes. “Who said life’s supposed to be fun?”
“Who said it’s not?”
The small smile tugged her lips again. “Yeah. Point taken. You’re thinking of quitting?”
I shrugged. I was still relatively young, but that would change.
“All the broken bones getting to you?”
“All the broken lives,” I said.
She lowered her knee and her fingers found the water again. “What would you do?”
I stood, stretched aches and cramps in my back that had been there since Cody Falk’s house that morning. “I don’t know. I’m just really…tired.”
“And Karen Nichols?”
I looked back at her. Sitting on the ledge by the glassy pool, her skin honeyed by the summer and her dark eyes as wide and frighteningly intelligent as ever, every inch of her just broke my heart.
“I want to speak for her,” I said. “I want to prove to someone-maybe the someone who tried to destroy her life, maybe just to myself-that her life had value. That make sense?”
She looked up at me and her face was tender and open. “Yeah. Yeah, it does, Patrick.” She shook her hand free of water and stood up on the pavement beside me. “I’ll make you a deal.”
“Shoot.”
“If you can prove that David Wetterau’s accident deserves a second look, I’ll come in on the case. Pro bono.”
“What about Sallis & Salk?”
She sighed. “I dunno. It’s like I’m starting to worry that all the shit cases they’ve been assigning me aren’t simply about paying my dues. It’s…” She raised her hand from the water, then dropped it again. “Whatever. Look, I don’t break a sweat over there. I can help you-use a vacation day here and there if I have to-and maybe it’ll be-”
“Fun?”
She smiled. “Yeah.”
“So I prove Wetterau’s accident was fishy, and you come on the case. That’s the deal?”
“I don’t come on the case. I help you with it here and there, when I can.” She stood.
“Sounds good.”
I held out my hand. She shook it. The press of her palm against mine opened holes in my chest and stomach. I was starving for her. I’d melt right there if she asked.
She pulled her hand back, stuffed it in her pocket as if it were burning.
“I-”
She stepped back from whatever she saw in my face. “Don’t say it.”
I shrugged. “Okay. I do, though.”
“Sssh.” She put a finger to her lips, smiled around it, but her eyes shimmered with moisture. “Sssh,” she said again.
13
The Holly Martens Inn sat fifty yards off an overgrown, yellowed grass stretch of Route 147 in Mishawauk, a blip-on-the-map sort of town not far from Springfield. A two-story cinder-block collection of units arranged in one long T, the Holly Martens ran across the length of a brown dirt field and ended at a puddle so wide and black there could have been dinosaur remains in it. The Holly Martens looked as if it had been part of an army base or air-raid shelter in the fifties, and nothing about the design seemed to beckon the weary traveler to a second stay. A swimming pool sat to my left as I pulled in toward the front office. Empty and surrounded by chain link with cyclone wire on top, it was littered with shattered green and brown beer bottles, lawn chairs caked with rust, fast-food wrappers, and a three-wheel shopping cart. A peeling sign affixed to the chain link read: NO LIFEGUARD ON DUTY SWIM AT YOUR OWN RISK. Maybe they’d drained the pool because people kept throwing their beer bottles in it. Maybe the beer bottles had been thrown in because they’d drained the pool. Maybe the lifeguard had taken the water with him when he left. Maybe I had to stop wondering about things that didn’t concern me.
The front office smelled like matted animal hair, wood shavings, Lysol, and newspapers spoiled by fecal pellets and dribbles of urine. That’s because behind the reception desk were at least seven cages, and all of them had rodents inside. Mostly guinea pigs, a few hamsters squeaking at their hamster wheels, feet pedaling like crazy, snouts pointed up at the wheel as they wondered why they couldn’t reach the top.
Just no rats, I thought. Please, no rats.
The woman behind the desk was bleached blond and very slim. Her body looked like it was all gristle, like the fatty deposits had run off with the lifeguard, taken her breasts and her ass with them. Her skin was so tan and hard it reminded me of knotted wood. She could have been anywhere between twenty-eight and thirty-eight, and there was a sense to her of a dozen lives lived and spent before she’d turned twenty-five.
She gave me a great, wide-open smile that had a touch of challenge in it. “Hey! You the guy that called?”
“Called?” I said. “About what?”
The cigarette between her lips jumped. “’Bout the unit.”
“No,” I said. “I’m a private investigator.”
She laughed with the cigarette gritted between her teeth. “No shit?”
“No shit.”
She removed the cigarette, flicked the ash on the floor behind her, and leaned into the counter. “Like Magnum?”
“Just like Magnum,” I said, and tried to give my eyebrows that patented Tom Selleck rise and fall.
“I catch it in repeats,” she said. “Boy, he was cute-cute. You know?” She arched an eyebrow at me, lowered her voice. “How come men don’t wear mustaches no more?”