She shoved herself back onto the seat. “If you want to try trucking, finish this run with me, and we’ll talk to my dad. We don’t have enough work at this time to hire another driver, but maybe business will pick up soon and be too much for me to handle by myself. My dad will have some ideas. He knows lots of the other independents. But you might even want to get some training and then start out with one of the big lines as an apprentice, though you wouldn’t want to stay with them long, I guarantee. You get some experience on the road, maybe you can drive for us later on. I’m not going to keep doing this when I have little kids.”
“Kids,” Lloyd repeated. “Yeah. I’ll bet you’ll be a good mother, too.”
“Thank you.” She was still staring at him. “How about it?”
He nodded. “I’ll certainly consider it. It’s just I was thinking of going on west, maybe all the way to the Pacific Ocean.”
“When did you get that idea? While you were sleeping?” Her right eyebrow was arched. She shook her short hair. The red baseball cap was hanging on one of the gearshift levers. “You’re just talking miles. There’s other ways to get a fresh start that don’t call for traveling, you know. Anyhow, wherever you go you’ll be taking yourself along, right?”
Her grin made him wonder whether she was making fun of him, something he could not have tolerated had it been done by a man. But maybe she was simply being nice again. If so, he was touched. “All right,” he said levelly. “I’ll stick around awhile, at least until you head back, and I will think about what you said. But only on the condition that whatever happens I’m making a list of what I owe you, and I’m going to pay it back as soon as I can.”
“That’s your problem. Now, come on, if you’re going to the showers. Because if you are, I’ll lock up here. Go on ahead, if you want. I first got to go to a phone and call my dad.”
“You must be the best daughter in the world,” Lloyd said.
She inspected his face, as if to determine whether he was speaking in derision. “It’s no strain on me. I guess he really wanted a boy, and I’m just trying to make it up to him.”
“How’d you know he wanted a boy?” Lloyd asked indignantly. “Did he tell you?”
“No!” Molly said. “He’d never do anything to hurt my feelings. I just figured it out. All the stuff he likes to do most, or liked to do before the accident—fishing and hunting and all, and going to football games—wouldn’t it have been more fun to do them with a boy?”
“Maybe it’s even more fun with a girl who cares so much about you she will do things to please you that she wouldn’t otherwise consider. You might look at it that way.” He did not know where this wisdom, if it could be called such, came from. He was not accustomed to deliberating on the problems of others, because you could be reminded that way of how inconsequential your existence was to the rest of the world.
But Molly seemed to value it. “What a nice thing to say! You know, Lloyd, I really have a hard time trying to figure you out. You can say such nice things, but then you were just going to take off.”
He was more puzzled than she, however. “I don’t see that the two matters have any connection.”
“See?” she asked, chuckling. “You’re weird.” And then she quickly leaned across and kissed him on the cheek, so quickly she was out her door before he could react.
Moody and LeBeau had caught up with Marty Conway’s van at the intersection of Laurel with Warren Avenue and, after identifying themselves, asked him to follow their car to Homicide, but only if he did not mind. Moody also asked for permission to ride as passenger in the van.
“What’s the emergency?” Conway asked. “I was just on my way to see you, in fact.”
“Lucky we ran across one another, then,” Moody said. He took the little rights-card from the case that held his shield and picture ID. “Just let me read this. You have the right—”
“Hey!” Conway complained. “What is this? Are you charging me with something? What?”
“Just to be on the safe side, Marty,” Moody said. “We want to ask you some questions, and we’re just protecting all parties. You ought to thank us.”
The plumber made a cynical sound as Moody resumed the reading, but he said nothing more until the ritual was finished, then asked again, “What is this?” Conway seemed to be of average height, though as yet Moody had not seen him out of the driver’s seat. His build was wiry, as was his sand-colored hair. He was one of those scrawny people who wear skin-tight knitted shirts with very short sleeves that show as much of their muscleless arms as possible. He was also a cigarette smoker, judging from the lingering odor in the van, though no pack was in evidence and the ashtray was closed.
“It’s a murder investigation,” Moody answered. “So we got to be sure we don’t do anything to jeopardize any information we collect. That’s how we have to spend a lot of our time nowadays, Marty. First I better ask what your preference is, Marty or Mr. Conway?”
“Marty’s fine.”
“You can speed it up a little,” Moody told him. Conway had been driving at about five mph through streets of sparse traffic.
“Hey, sure,” Marty cried. “You can fix a ticket!” But he accelerated only slightly.
“I’m not going to distract you by asking anything much till we get to the bureau,” Moody said. “So you got time to get your story straight.”
“Come on, man,” Conway said with spirit. “I ain’t got a story. You’re making me nervous, with all the pressure you’re putting on for no reason. So I was in the neighborhood on a job, so I drove through Laurel. I admit I was rubbernecking the house. After all, I done work here in the past. It’d be natural for me to want to look at it now.”
“You watch TV?” Moody asked. “The house is all over the news.”
“So? Come on,” Marty wailed. “If you don’t want people driving through the street, why don’t you block it off, then? Is there a law against looking?”
He continued to maintain the same note when they reached the interrogation room, or more or less the same, but the detectives made the most of minor inconsistencies. Had he repeated himself word for word they would of course have accused him of having memorized a prefabricated story.
“What you told me in the van was you just found yourself in the neighborhood, so you swung through the eleven hundred block,” Moody pointed out after Conway now specified he was coming back from a service call in the district called Ashwood, a mile or so to the northwest of the Howland address. “So let’s have the name and phone where you say you had this call.”
Marty was not taken aback by the request. He said, “I didn’t memorize it, but it’s down in the van.” He smirked with only one side of his mouth. “But it’ll be in the book: L. T. Upchurch.”
LeBeau got up. “I’ll check it out,” he said, and left.
Marty looked smug, from which Moody assumed he was telling the truth about this part of the matter. “Ordinarily I’d take Disney Road all the way to Linton, then come right back on Linton into Grove Street. Instead I hung a left at Bronson, and—”
“We’re not the Auto Club,” Moody said. “I just want to know what you were doing cruising the house.”
“Cruising?” Marty asked. “What’s that mean? Looking for sex?”
“You mention sex. I didn’t. Why would that idea come to your mind in connection with the Howland place?”
“It was just that word of yours,” said Marty, sniffing.
“Uh-huh.” Moody was silent for a while.
“Don’t they use it for what those, uh, guys do through that alley off Acorn?”
“What are you talking about?”
“That meat rack down there, where the young boys hang out and the old queens cruise, you know.”
“You go down there, Marty?”
“You oughta know better than that.” To dramatize his exasperation Marty scanned the blank walls while breathing heavily. “Didn’t I tell you I had a wife and kids?”
“I thi
nk you know that’s not an answer,” Moody said.
“No, for Chrissake, no, I’m not queer!” Marty looked worried. “Can you still say that?”
“What?”
“‘Queer’? You’re supposed to say ‘gay’?”
LeBeau briskly returned. “It checks out. He—”
He was interrupted by Marty’s triumphant outburst. “What did I tellya?”
Dennis resumed. “Upchurch woman said he put in a new kitchen sink.”
“Porcelain was cracked. Somebody dropped a heavy object in—”
“All right,” said Moody. “But I happen to know those streets well, and you have to go way out of your way to come anywhere close to Laurel, and it’s ‘Brownson,’ not ‘Bronson,’ and it’s one-way west, so you couldn’t make a left turn into it from Disney.”
Marty stared briefly at each of them in turn, and he sighed as if the jig were up for him, but what he said was of another character. “So I got lost. I drove all over the place. I never had a call from Ashwood before. She got me out of the book, I guess, but I don’t know why. Maybe the closer plumbers were busy. Maybe her checks bounce and they all now refuse to come. Maybe I been suckered.”
“So it was completely by accident you found yourself on Laurel?” LeBeau asked, while reclaiming his chair, which faced Conway.
Marty groaned. “Do I have to go all over that again? What does it matter how I got there? I didn’t do nothing but look, and I explained why.”
Moody crossed his forearms on the table and put the weight of his upper body on them. Marty sat at a right angle to him. “I bet if we asked you nice, Marty, you would let us take a little sample of your blood.”
“What for?” Marty looked solemnly at each detective, then threw back his head and laughed at the ceiling, momentarily calling attention to his gnarled adam’s apple. When his face came down he said, “Now I get it. You’re trying to cross me up. Well, it’s a waste of both our times, gentlemen.”
“You mean you’re too smart for us,” Moody said.
“No,” Marty answered. “I’m actually dumb to sit here, going along with you guys as if you’ve really got something on me, whereas you don’t.”
“How would you know what evidence we got, Marty?” It was Dennis’ question.
“There can’t be any, because I didn’t do anything—unless somebody is trying to frame me.”
“Do you have enemies who might do that, Marty? Or is that something you saw on TV? Be accused of a crime and claim you’re framed?”
Moody did not wait for an answer: the question was not that kind. Instead he asked another. “Why did you say you were on your way to see us? Don’t tell me you can’t remember that either.”
Conway was wearing an almost garish smile. “Don’t give me that either” said he. “There isn’t anything yet I couldn’t remember, and you know it. Sure I said I was coming over to seeya. I guess you’re the one forgot when you called the other night I told you I’d have to look it up when I did the work for the Howlands. Okay, I did. I got the worksheets down in the van. I would of brought them up if you hadn’t taken my mind off ‘em with this crap.”
LeBeau for a while had been crouched as if to spring across the table at Conway, but he now leaned back in his chair. “The worksheets for what you were doing, time of the murders?”
“I don’t know exactly what the time of the murders was, though.”
“They’ve told it often enough in the media.”
“You’re the detectives,” Marty said. “I’m a plumber. I got the workbook for the whole month. Let me go down and get it.”
“Whyn’t you go by memory first?” LeBeau asked in a menacing drawl.
Marty whined. “What is this? I got the records, and now you don’t want ‘em?”
LeBeau put his hand out. “Gimme the keys.”
“The van? It’s my property. I say I got the workbook, and I’m going to go get it, voluntarily.” He glared at LeBeau. “If you ask me, I’m doin’ you a favor, not calling in a lawyer, and you know it. But I’m not gonna get shoved around. I don’t work that way.”
Moody rubbed his hands together. “Looks like we got off on the wrong foot, Marty. Dennis and I just want to save you some trouble. Now, whyn’t you just give him the keys and he’ll go down and get the book while you and me will get a chance to have a little talk that will probably settle the whole thing before he’s back.”
Marty shrugged and meekly surrendered the van keys to LeBeau. But then he said to Moody, with resentment, “Settle the whole thing? What’s there to be settled?”
“You’re getting supersensitive,” Moody told him as Dennis left. “It was just a thing to say.”
“All I did was drive through the block.”
“Here’s something I always wondered about, Marty. You know there’s all kinds of jokes, but does it really happen with plumbers?”
“What?”
“Do they get a lot of tail from female customers?”
“I’m a happily married man. I told you that more than once.”
“Getting a little on the side don’t mean you’re not happily married,” Moody said with a smile. “I mean, hell, it’s offered, so you take it. Who’s to know?” His smile became lofty. “I don’t mean this personally. I’m just getting your professional opinion. Here we’ve got this real good-looking babe, and her husband’s away. What do you think? You’ve been there alone in the house with her, yes? How’d she act? She come on to you in any way?”
Marty curled his lip. “That’s a lousy thing to say about her. She was a nice person, way I remember it, just polite and that’s all.”
“Give you a cuppa coffee, piece of pie?”
“I bring my own thermos, and I buy my lunch.”
Moody got up and walked to the chair vacated by LeBeau. He leaned against its back, hands on the top crossmember. “Why don’t plumbers ever show up with all the tools they need?”
Marty pushed his chair away from the table. “I don’t have to take this crap. I’m on my way here voluntarily and you haul me in and harass me. I’m going to file a complaint.”
“Now, settle down. Here’s my partner, back already.”
LeBeau showed Marty a sheaf of papers inside a hinged cover made of scratched and dented metal, held shut by a thick rubber band. “Is this what you meant?”
Marty reached for it, but the detective kept it just beyond his grasp. “That’s my property,” the plumber said. “You can’t keep it from me. I’m not under arrest.”
Ignoring him, LeBeau took Moody’s old seat and opened the tin cover of the workbook. He brought his glasses from their case and began to examine the top sheet.
Moody said, “Okay, let’s take a look at what the book says Marty did on the seventeenth.”
Dennis leafed through the worksheets. “Here we are…. What’s this name? Wilton?”
“That’s right,” Marty said eagerly. “Wilton, on Melrose.”
“I can’t find the time of day, though.”
“About eight-twenty,” Marty said. “Takes twenty minutes to get there from my place. I start at eight.”
LeBeau read some more to himself. “You write like a doctor, Marty. What’s this say?”
The plumber reached for the book. “If you’d give it to me, I could tell you.”
“Just tell me from memory if you can.”
“I put in the toilet seal. Then I think I went over on Addison, party name of Bigelow, water on the basement floor. Turned out to be a busted hot-water heater. It had to be replaced. You can’t repair something like that, but people don’t understand, so some of them give you an argument because it’s a fairly big-ticket item and they think it should last forever.”
“See?” Moody said soothingly. “That’s all we wanted to know. How long’s a job like that take?”
LeBeau examined the workbook and whistled. “You charged them for five hours, Marty?”
“I got to go to the supply house and get the tank, don’t I? I
was working by myself. You find anybody who can do it in better time.”
Moody held out his hands, and LeBeau gave him the book. “So,” he said, reading one page quickly and then turning to the next, “you charged them two hours for the toilet seal: means you finished up on Melrose ten-thirty or so. Address on Addison is maybe fifteen minutes away. By time you got the van parked and go in and look at the water on the cellar floor, it’s near eleven.” He peered at Marty. “Who gets charged for lunchtime?”
“I don’t take time out to eat.”
“You just said—”
“That I buy my lunch, yeah. I stopped off for a takeout coffee and burger, coming back with the tank. I ate ‘em at the wheel.”
“Five hours, starting at eleven,” said LeBeau. “That leaves you free right in time for the murders.” He smiled as if he assumed Marty would be eager to agree. “Two-two-three Addison’s about a half mile from the eleven hundred block of Laurel.”
Marty took no visible offense. “Oh, sure,” he said, making his eyelids heavy, “I do heavy labor from eight in the morning on, don’t knock off even for lunch, and then finish up the day by killing somebody I hardly remember.”
“Did you go right home after finishing the Addison job?”
Marty poked the air in the direction of the workbook. “What does it say?”
“Oh, you mean this.” Moody put his face nearer the paper.
“It’s right there,” Marty said, still pointing. “I did an estimate.”
“How’d you originally get the Howlands for customers?”
The plumber scowled impersonally at the wall. “Now, there you’ve got me,” he said at last. “I keep records of the work done, but how I first acquired a customer, now, that never come up before, and there’s no reason to keep that information. If I had to say something, though, I’d say they found me in the yellow pages.”
Moody nodded and continued to leaf through the book. “By the way, I don’t find any work here you did for the Howlands.”
“No,” Marty said, “that was a couple years ago. It’s in the book for that period.” He looked at LeBeau with scorn. “You didn’t get it? It was right there.”