فصل 08 - بخش 04

8

There were plenty of things Ralph didn’t know about administrative leave, never having been on it before. One was whether or not he was even allowed in the cop shop. With that in mind he waited until mid-afternoon to go there, because the daily pulse of the station was slowest then. When he arrived, there was no one in the big main room except for Stephanie Gould, still in civvies, filling out reports on one of the old PCs the city council kept promising to replace, and Sandy McGill at the dispatch desk, reading People. Chief Geller’s office was empty.

‘Hey, Detective,’ Stephanie said, looking up. ‘What are you doing here? I heard you were on paid vacation.’

‘Trying to stay occupied.’

‘I could help you with that,’ she said, and patted the stack of files beside her computer.

‘Maybe another time.’

‘I’m sorry about the way things went down. We all are.’

‘Thanks.’

He went to the dispatch desk and asked Sandy for the key to the evidence room. She gave it to him without hesitation, hardly looking up from her magazine. Hanging from a hook beside the evidence room door was a clipboard and a ballpoint. Ralph thought about skipping the sign-in, then went ahead and entered name, date, and time: 1530 hours. No choice, really, when both Gould and McGill knew he was here and why he’d come. If anyone asked about what he’d wanted to look at, he would flat-out tell them. It was administrative leave he was on, after all, not a suspension.

The room, not much bigger than a closet, was hot and stuffy. The overhead fluorescent bars flickered. Like the ancient PCs, they needed to be replaced. Flint City, aided by federal dollars, made sure the PD had all the weaponry it needed, and more. So what if the infrastructure was falling apart?

Had Frank Peterson’s murder been committed back when Ralph first came on the force, there might have been four boxes of Maitland evidence, maybe even half a dozen, but the computer age had done wonders for compression, and today there were only two, plus the toolbox that had been in the back of the van. That had contained the standard array of wrenches, hammers, and screwdrivers. Terry’s prints had been on none of the tools, nor on the box itself. To Ralph that suggested that the toolbox had been in the van when it was stolen, and Terry had never examined the contents after stealing the van for his own purposes.

One of the evidence boxes was marked MAITLAND HOME. The second box was labeled VAN/SUBARU. This was the one Ralph wanted. He cut the tape. No reason not to, with Terry dead.

After a brief hunt, he came up with a plastic evidence bag containing the scrap of paper he remembered. It was blue, and roughly triangular. At the top, in bold black letters, was TOMMY AND TUP. Whatever came after TUP was gone. In the upper corner was a little drawing of a pie, with steam rising from its crust. Although Ralph hadn’t remembered that specifically, it must have been the reason he’d thought this scrap had been part of a take-out menu. What had Jeannie said when they were talking early this morning? I believe there’s another dozen thoughts lined up behind each one I’m aware of. If it was true, Ralph would have given a fair amount of money to get hold of the one lurking behind that yellow bra strap. Because there was one, he was almost sure of it.

Another thing he was almost sure of was how this scrap had happened to be lying on the van’s floor. Someone had put menus under the windshield wipers of all the vehicles in the area where the van had been parked. The driver – maybe the kid who’d stolen it in New York, maybe whoever had stolen it after the kid dumped it – had torn it off rather than just lifting the wiper, leaving that triangular corner. The driver hadn’t noticed then, but once he was rolling, he would have. Maybe he’d reached around and pulled it free, dropping it on the floor instead of just letting it fly away. Possibly because he wasn’t a litterbug by nature, just a thief. Possibly because there’d been a cop car behind him, and he hadn’t wanted to do anything, not even a little thing, that might attract attention. It was even possible that he’d tried to throw it out the window, and a vagary of wind had blown it right back into the cab. Ralph had investigated road accidents, one of them quite nasty, where that had happened with cigarette butts.

He took his notebook from his back pocket – carrying it was second nature, administrative leave or not – and printed TOMMY AND TUP on a blank sheet. He replaced the VAN/SUBARU box on the shelf it had come from, left the evidence room (not neglecting to jot down his out time), and re-locked the door. When he gave the key back to Sandy, he held his notebook open in front of her. She glanced up from the latest adventures of Jennifer Aniston to glance at it.

‘Mean anything to you?’

‘Nope.’

She went back to her mag. Ralph went to Officer Gould, who was still entering hard copy info into some database and swearing under her breath when she hit a wrong key, which seemed to be often. She glanced at his notebook.

‘Tup is old-timey British slang for screwing, I think – as in “I tupped me girlfriend last night, mate” – but I can’t think of anything else. Is it important?’

‘I don’t know. Probably not.’

‘Google it, why don’t you?’

While he waited for his own out-of-date computer to boot up, he decided to try the database he was married to. Jeannie answered on the first ring, and didn’t even need to think when he asked her. ‘It could be Tommy and Tuppence. They were cutie-poo detectives Agatha Christie wrote about when she wasn’t writing about Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple. If that’s the case, you’ll probably find a restaurant run by a couple of British expats and specializing in things like bubble-and-squeak.’

‘Bubble and what?’

‘Never mind.’

‘It probably means nothing,’ he repeated. But maybe it did. You chased this shit to make sure, one way or the other; chasing shit was, apologies to Sherlock Holmes, what most detective work was about.

‘I’m curious, though. Tell me when you get home. Oh, and we’re all out of orange juice.’

‘I’ll stop by Gerald’s,’ he said, and hung up.

He went to Google, typed in TOMMY AND TUPPENCE, then added RESTAURANT. The PD computers were old, but the Wi-Fi was new, and fast. He had what he was looking for in a matter of seconds. The Tommy and Tuppence Pub and Café was on Northwoods Boulevard in Dayton, Ohio.

Dayton. What was it about Dayton? Hadn’t that come up once before in this sorry business? If so, where? He sat back in his chair and closed his eyes. Whatever connection he was trying to make courtesy of that yellow bra strap continued to elude him, but this new one he got. Dayton had come up during his last real conversation with Terry Maitland. They’d been talking about the van, and Terry had said he hadn’t been in New York since he honeymooned there with his wife. The only trip Terry had taken recently had been to Ohio. To Dayton, in fact.

The girls’ spring vacation. I wanted to see my dad. And when Ralph had asked if his father lived there, Terry had said, If you can call what he’s doing these days living.

He called Sablo. ‘Hey, Yune, it’s me.’

‘Hey, Ralph, how’s retirement treating you?’

‘It’s good. You should see my lawn. I heard you’re getting a commendation for covering that dipshit reporter’s delectable body.’

‘So they say. Tell you what, life has been good for this son of a poor Mexican farming family.’

‘I thought you told me your father ran the biggest car dealership in Amarillo.’

‘I might have said that, I suppose. But when you have to decide between truth and legend, ese, print the legend. The wisdom of John Ford in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. What can I do for you?’

‘Did Samuels tell you about the kid who originally stole the van?’

‘Yeah. That’s some story. Kid’s name was Merlin, did you know that? And he sure must have been some kind of wizard to get all the way down to south Texas.’

‘Can you reach out to El Paso? That’s where his run ended, but I know from Samuels that the kid ditched the van in Ohio. What I want to know is if it was somewhere near a pub and café called Tommy and Tuppence, on Northwoods Boulevard in Dayton.’

‘I could take a shot at that, I guess.’

‘Samuels told me this Merlin the Magician was on the road a long time. Can you also try to find out when he ditched the van? If maybe it was in April?’

‘I can try to do that, too. Do you want to tell me why?’

‘Terry Maitland was in Dayton in April. Visiting his father.’

‘Really?’ Yune sounded totally engaged now. ‘Alone?’

‘With his family,’ Ralph admitted, ‘and they flew both ways.’

‘So there goes that.’

‘Probably, but it still exercises a certain particular fascination over my consciousness.’

‘You’ll have to ’splain that, Detective, for I am just the son of a poor Mexican farmer.’

Ralph sighed.

‘Let me see what I can find out.’

‘Thanks, Yune.’

Just as he hung up, Chief Geller came in, toting a gym bag and looking freshly showered. Ralph tipped him a wave, and got a scowl in return. ‘You’re not supposed to be here, Detective.’

Ah, so that answered that question.

‘Go home. Mow the lawn, or something.’

‘I already did that,’ Ralph said, getting up. ‘Cleaning out the cellar comes next.’

‘Fine, better get to it.’ Geller paused at his office door. ‘And Ralph … I’m sorry about all this. Sorry as hell.’

People keep saying that, Ralph thought as he went out into the afternoon heat.