Redemption (A Joe Burgess Mystery, Book 3) (35 page)

He headed down to the car. As he pulled out on the rainy street, he called Kyle. "It's Joe. Just so you won't worry about me if you call and no one answers, I'm going over to see Maura." He hesitated. "And Chris has left."

"I
was
worried." Kyle diplomatically didn't comment on Chris's absence. "Look, now that I've got you on the phone, you're not the only one I'm worried about. Didn't you think Stan was a little off tonight?"

"More than a little. He's been off ever since he got beat down by that hulking asshole." Stan had been edgy as hell tonight. The signs, if Burgess had been paying attention, of someone about to go off the rails. "You thinking what I'm thinking?"

"'Fraid so."

"Call him, Ter. Tell him we're coming to see him and we want to find him there when we arrive. Tell him to stay put."

"If he's home."

"He goes off the reservation, we're in a world of shit. I had to call in a lot of chips to keep him out of trouble the last time. You'd think his ass would be burned enough—"

"Hurt pride," Kyle said. "He can't stand it that some woman jerked his chain like that."

"Boy's still thinking with his pecker." Kyle started to say something else and shut it off. Burgess's bad news also involved a wayward pecker, or at least, pecker trouble. "Not that we haven't all got troubles. Michelle's thinking about a baby."

"Don't they know what a fucked up—"

"Women are different," Kyle said. "We're thinking that no one without their head wedged could possibly want to bring a child into this shit storm we call life. They're thinking that children are about love and life and the future."

"Or the fucked-up past."

"I love my girls," Kyle said. From the background sounds, Burgess thought he was doing dishes. "Who knows? Maybe your kid will bring you pleasure. You ever think about that?"

"I'm Catholic, or I was. We don't think about pleasure, Ter, you know that. We think about the consequences of pleasure. Hell, pleasure didn't have so damned many consequences, cops and priests would be out of work."

"You shoulda
been
a priest," Kyle said.

"You're confusing us. You're the one shoulda been a priest." Kyle's lean, ascetic body and deep, suffering eyes were much more priestly than Burgess's bulk and glower. Or his temper. And Kyle, for all his cynicism, was more genuinely religious. "Call him, then call me back."

His tires hissed through the wet streets, slithering occasionally on tight turns, the pavement coated with the leaves the increasingly wild rain was bringing down. It took him back to fall nights in his youth. A bunch of them would pile into someone's car and go out cruising. On a night like this, when wind and rain had brought the leaves down, skidding on slippery leaves had been a favorite activity. Slipping, sliding, cornering too fast, leaving rubber, coming way too close to going off the road. He'd had one crazy friend who liked to throw his mother's Buick, the one with Positraction, into reverse at forty, just to see what would happen.

Half the guys he'd hung with had had no sense of what a repair to the family car might cost. They just had a warped and wild sense of fun. They hadn't spent their childhoods afraid that something might break; weren't desperately aware that a mechanic's bill might mean the phone or the heat would go, or that meals would be a tiny bowl of pasta and thin sauce or too much Hamburger Helper with too little hamburger to help for a month or more. They'd been a proud family. They'd worn their repair tape inside their shoes, mended worn clothes and socks. Burgess had mowed lawns, raked leaves, babysat for grocery money.

Maybe that was what kept him on the street dealing with "people" issues, trumping any ambition to rise up the food chain. He knew firsthand about poverty and fear and drunks and violence. He knew what a driver desperation was. When other cops were scornful of the women who stayed with violent husbands, when they said in disbelief "why doesn't she just leave?" as though leaving were easy, he understood how deep a tie the sanctity of marriage vows could be—for better or for worse taken literally—and how much a woman would sacrifice or endure to keep her children warm and fed.

Children. Shoot. Tomorrow he'd wake up and his plate would still be full of them.

He stopped at a Dunkin' Donuts to get some cocoa and donuts and muffins, then pulled to the curb in front of Maura's building. Must be an early crowd. Most of the windows were dark. But there were lights in Maura's. He pressed the button and got buzzed in. Scary how easy it was. A house full of the vulnerable and they persisted in acting invulnerable.

Maura answered the door readily enough, but stepped back without a trace of recognition. Of him, anyway. She recognized the donut bags. "Oh, goody," she said. "You brought me something."

"Don't I always, Maura?" She'd aged a decade in a week, he thought, as she tipped back on her small feet and stared up at him. Those last hints of youth and beauty were gone. In their place was a frowzy old woman with unwashed hair and food-stained clothes. He wondered, without much hope, if her daughter had checked on her.

"Cocoa," he said, taking the cup out of the bag and putting it into her waiting hand. "I'm still working on what happened to Reggie, Maura. I have some questions you might be able to help me with." There was no recognition or response on her face. He hesitated. "Maura, do you remember me? Joe Burgess? I'm the detective? Reggie's friend?"

"Find Joe," she said, tipping her head sideways like a bright-eyed bird. "Reggie always said, you need help, Maura, you find Joe. He'll take care of it."

He was doing a piss-poor job of taking care of anything, but it wouldn't help her to hear that. "It's about Joey," he said. "I'm trying to find him. You got any ideas where he might go?"

Maura knotted her hands together, looking like an upright squirrel as she tipped her head to the left and to the right. She studied him like he was under a microscope. Then she nodded, as though he'd passed some invisible test. "You're Joe," she said.

"That's right, and I—"

"You're looking for Joey. I know. Joey's in trouble?"

Burgess nodded.

"He's run away, hasn't he?"

Burgess nodded again. Despite the lack of recognition, she was unusually lucid tonight.

"Claire wouldn't want you to know this"—Maura leaned forward, far into his personal space, bringing with her the too-familiar smell of unwashed skin and hair and careless bladder; if his life had a scent-track, it was unmistakably this—"but Joey will have gone to the cottage."

She moved away a little, so she could see his face. "Mind you, I said 'cottage' not 'camp.' This is Claire's place, so it is no camp. Long Lake. Harrison. Beautiful place. Better than most people's houses. Me and Reggie went up there once... not inside, you know. Reggie wasn't ever welcome... but we drove by hoping maybe we'd see Joey outside." She tapped a finger against her jaw. "Reggie, you know, he wanted to see how Joey was doing, and Claire, she wouldn't let him anywhere near, so Reggie had to sneak—"

She interrupted herself, her voice rising, angry and less controlled. "Ain't it just the biggest shame what that cold bitch put him through? Making him sneak around to see his own kid? Him renting a car when he didn't have no money, just for maybe a glimpse?"

Burgess was afraid he'd lose her before he got the information he needed, but before he could intervene, her face changed again, this time she looked dreamy. "He had a good job, you know, Reggie did. He bought me a present. You want to see?"

He wanted out of there. He wanted a linear explanation of the visit to Claire's cottage and some details that would help him find it. He said, "Sure. I'd like to," and waited while she dug through the ratty tote bag again and pulled out the dirty white box. Dirtier and more worn than the last time he'd seen it. He imagined her opening the box and stroking the gloves, over and over, as she remembered Reggie.

"Gloves," she said proudly, thrusting the box toward him. "For the winter."

For form's sake, he opened the box again. The same nice, thick, sheepskin gloves with fleece linings she'd showed him at the station.

Maura started to cry. "He had a job," she said, "out at Mercer Metals, cleaning up the place, wiping down the equipment, odd jobs. Getting materials ready for the next day. Fixing things when they broke, which you know he was really good at. He was so proud. You know about that, doncha? How it mattered to Reggie to have a job and a paycheck and be normal?"

Since when had hearing the word "normal" caused so much pain? Now every one of the phrases that used "normal" seemed loaded. Normal life. Normal relationship. Normal family. He'd always thought there was a big distance between where he was and where Reggie was—had been. Now the gap didn't seem so big.

"You're sure it was Mercer Metals?"

She nodded, her face squinted and owlish. "I got this." She crossed the room to a dresser with a hundred candles on top. None of them were burning, but in the center, set up on a box above the candles, was Reggie's picture. One he'd never seen before. A fairly recent picture of Reggie smiling a big, pleased smile, his arm around Maura. They were dressed up, like they were going out to eat or something. "Our special day," she said.

It was an altar. A memorial. And man, he knew about that. He wanted to forget investigating and start lighting those candles. He wanted to get down on his knees with this half-crazy woman and pray for Reggie. To moan and scream as only the truly grieved can. He wanted to have the feelings Joe the cop had to hold at bay.

He jerked his wayward thoughts back to the job as she held out an envelope with a logo that looked familiar. The envelope was worn, with part of the logo missing. Still, he'd bet that if he took it back to 109 and compared it with the fragments from Kevin Duran's wastebasket and Joey's trash, the logos would match.

"He used to get his money in these," she said. "Every week. Reggie was making good money. He said when we'd saved up enough, we were going to take a trip."

"Where were you going to go, Maura?"

She looked over at Reggie's picture and smiled. "Cape Cod. We were going to stay in a place by the ocean and eat clams and lobsters and fried seafood plates and we were going to drink champagne and walk on the beach and watch the sunset. Just like a normal couple on a honeymoon."

Honeymoon? That was romantic. Burgess hated to interrupt her happy reverie but the clock was running. "Can you tell me where Claire's camp is?"

"Oh, sure," she said. She fished around in a drawer, sending a cascade of small pieces of paper tumbling to the floor. "I know it's in here somewhere." More paper fell as her search went from casual to frantic. It looked like a paper storm had occurred before she finally held up a small pink square. "Here you go." She gave it to Burgess with a little flourish.

On it, in Reggie's impeccable writing, was an address and a phone number.

"Thank you, Maura," he said. "I really needed this." He carefully wrote the information in his notebook and then held out the note. "Do you need this back or may I keep it?"

"Keep it," she said. "I don't need it anymore. I was just holding it for Reggie because... you know... he was always losing things." Her blue eyes fixed on him, suddenly both lucid and fierce. "Is Joey in trouble again?"

"I'm afraid so."

"If he didn't have those Libby eyes, I wouldn't believe he was Reggie's," she said. "There's none of his or Clay's decency in that boy. Although I don't guess I'm one to talk. Look at my daughter. If she had herself a shrine, she'd be lighting candles and praying for the day I'll be gone to bother her no more."

In the dim lamp light, he saw a tear glisten. "Seems like everyone has family trouble lately, Maura." He held up the donut bags. "Don't forget about these."

She gave him an indulgent smile. "Donuts are good, Joe. A clear mind and a stable family would just be better. That's what we both hoped for. What we tried to be for each other. I guess..." Her gaze, suddenly, went beyond clear, as though she was seeing right inside him. "I guess none of us are very lucky in that regard."

He knew this kind of sudden, piercing clarity was the flip side of half-crazy, but it still startled him. "Do you know if it was Joey who helped Reggie find that job?"

"I don't," she said. "I'm sorry. You'll have to ask him when you find him." Then, surprising him again, she said, "You know that that place has got a big circular driveway, so you'd better take two cars, block 'em both, be sure he doesn't get away. Next time, he might go somewhere I don't know about." She waggled a cautionary finger. "Maura knows a lot, but she doesn't know everything."

Before his eyes, her shoulders hunched and her eyes grew vague. The footsteps that had carried her with certainty and authority to the drawer to search and back to confront him slowed to an unsteady shuffle as she moved past him to the dresser and started lighting candles.

"You want to light a candle for Reggie?" she said.

It was crazy to encourage someone so unstable to light a single candle, let alone a hundred candles. "Sure," he said. "I'd like that."

He took a long look at Reggie's smiling face, lit a candle, and left.

He was opening his car door when his phone rang. "I think it's hit the fan," Kyle said. "Stan's not home and my cop gut's in a twist. Got any idea where he'd go?"