I nodded again.
“Hey, Patrick? I’m not judging you, man. I’m saying sometimes we do the right thing but it wouldn’t hold up in court. It wouldn’t survive the scrutiny of”—he made quotation marks with his fingers—”society.”
I heard that yuh-yuh-yuh yammering Earle had made under his breath, saw the puff of blood that had spit from the back of his neck, heard the thump as he’d fallen to the floor and the spent shell skittered on the wood.
“In the same circumstances,” I said, “I’d do it again.”
“Does that make you right?” Remy Broussard ambled over to the jungle gym, poured some more rum into my cup.
“No.”
“Doesn’t make you wrong, though, does it?”
I looked up at him, smiled, and shook my head. “No again.”
He leaned back into the jungle gym and yawned. “Nice if we had all the answers, wouldn’t it?”
I looked at the line of his face etched in the darkness beside me, and I felt something squirm and niggle in the back of my skull like a small fishing hook. What had he just said that bugged me?
I looked at Remy Broussard and I felt that fish hook dig deeper against the back of my skull. I watched him close his eyes and I wanted to hit him for some reason.
Instead I said, “I’m glad.”
“About what?”
“Killing Corwin Earle.”
“Me too. I’m glad I killed Roberta.” He poured more rum into my cup. “Hell with it, Patrick, I’m glad none of those sick pricks walked out of that house alive. Drink to that?”
I looked at the bottle, then at Broussard, searched his face for whatever it was about him that suddenly bothered me. Frightened me. I couldn’t find it in the dark, in the booze, so I raised my cup and touched the plastic to the bottle.
“May their hell be a lifetime in the bodies of their victims,” Broussard said. He raised his eyebrows up and down. “Can I get an amen, brother?”
“Amen, brother.”
28
I sat for a long time in the ashen, half-dark of my moonlit bedroom watching Angie sleep. I ran my conversation with Broussard over and over in my head, sipped from a large cup of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee I’d picked up on my walk home, smiled when Angie mumbled the name of the dog she’d had as a child and reached out and stroked the pillow with the palm of her hand.
Maybe it was shell shock over the interior of the Tretts’ house that had triggered it. Maybe it was the rum. Maybe it was just that the more determined I am to keep painful events at bay, the more likely I am to focus on the little things, minutiae, a casually dropped word or phrase that rings in my head and won’t stop. Whatever the case, tonight in the playground, I’d found a truth and a lie. Both at the same time.
Broussard had been right: nothing worked.
And I had been right: facades, no matter how well built, usually come down.
Angie rolled onto her back and let out a soft moan, kicked at the sheet tangled up by her feet. It must have been that effort—trying to kick with a leg encased in plaster—that woke her. She blinked and raised her head, looked down at the cast, then turned her head and saw me.
“Hey. What’re…” She sat up, smacked her lips, pushed hair out of her eyes. “What’re you doing?”
“Sitting here,” I said. “Thinking.”
“You drunk?”
I held up my coffee cup. “Not so’s you’d notice.”
“Then come to bed.” She extended her hand.
“Broussard lied to us.”
She pulled the hand away, used it to push herself farther up the headboard. “What?”
“Last year,” I said. “When Ray Likanski bolted the bar and disappeared.”
“What about it?”
“Broussard said he barely knew the man. Said he was one of Poole’s occasional snitches.”
“Yeah. So?”
“Tonight, with half a pint of rum in him, he told me Ray was his own snitch.”
She reached over to the nightstand, turned on the light. “What?”
I nodded.
“So…so maybe he just made an oversight last year. Maybe we heard him wrong.”
I looked at her.
Eventually she held up a hand as she turned toward the nightstand for her cigarettes. “You’re right. We never hear things wrong.”
“Not at the same time.”
She lit a cigarette and pulled the sheet up her leg, scratched at her knee just above the cast. “Why would he lie?”
I shrugged. “I’ve been sitting here wondering the same thing.”
“Maybe he had a reason to protect Ray’s identity as his snitch.”
I sipped some coffee. “Possibly, but it seems awful convenient, doesn’t it? Ray is potentially a key witness in the disappearance of Amanda McCready; Broussard lies about knowing him. Seems…”
“Shady.”
I nodded. “A bit. Another thing?”
“What?”
“Broussard’s retiring soon.”
“How soon?”
“Not sure. Sounded like very soon. He said he was closing in on his twenty, and as soon as he reached it he was turning in his shield.”
She took a drag off her cigarette, peered over the bright coal at me. “So he’s retiring. So what?”
“Last year, just before we climbed up to the quarry, you made a joke to him.”
She touched her chest. “I did.”
“Sí. You said something like ‘Maybe it’s time we retired.’”
Her eyes brightened. “I said, ‘Maybe it’s time we hung ’em up.’”
“And he said?”
She leaned forward, elbows on her knees, and thought about it. “He said…” She jabbed the air with her cigarette several times. “He said he couldn’t afford to retire. He said something about medical bills.”
“His wife’s, wasn’t it?”
She nodded. “She’d been in a car accident just before they were married. She wasn’t insured. He owed the hospital big.”
“So what happened to those medical bills? You think the hospital just said, ‘Ah, you’re a nice guy. Forget about it’?”
“Doubtful.”
“In the extreme. So a cop who was poor lies about knowing a key player in the McCready case, and six months later the cop’s got enough money to retire—not on the kind of money a cop gets after thirty years in, but somehow on the kind a cop gets after twenty.”