Chat - Archer Mayor [79]
“So you don’t want us to tear into the computer?” Cavallaro asked.
Bruce Fellini held up both his hands in surrender. “Hey, I’ll even let you take the whole thing out of here, for as long as you want, if you give me some paperwork. We got insurance for things like this. I was just warning you, is all.”
Spinney had lost interest in the conversation a few sentences ago and was back to surveying the room. Now he returned to the manager and asked him, “Your security camera working?”
Fellini stared at him for a blank second before his brain kicked in. “Oh, yeah. Sure.”
Lester pulled out the photograph of Rockwell that they’d circulated to the newspaper, and displayed it. “This is the guy we think used your computer. He look familiar?”
The small man shrugged. “Vaguely, I guess.”
“How far back do you keep the security tapes?” Lester asked next.
This time Fellini smiled, pointing to the date on Spinney’s printout. “Long enough.”
Chapter 18
“Butch—hand me another beer.”
Willy reached over the side of his bedraggled armchair, flipped open the lid of the cooler parked on the floor, and fished around in the cold ice slurry for a can, which he then handed the older man.
E. T. took it from him, peeled back the tab with a snap, and brought it to his lips in one smooth, well-practiced gesture. He didn’t put it down until it was half empty. On the wooden floor by his feet, scattered among other discarded trash, were the rattling remains of most of a twelve-pack.
They’d settled on the unfinished but enclosed back porch of E. T.’s shambles of a house, dressed in coats, accompanied by two glowing parabolic space heaters and an old sleeping dog of confused lineage.
They were surrounded by frosted glass on three sides and perched on the edge of an enormous gravel pit that fell away from the rear of the building like a meteor crater, revealing a snow-covered assortment of piled stones, sand, and rock, and a haphazardly parked collection of ten-wheelers, a stone crusher, and two enormous backhoes. Willy understood that this was E. T.’s working-class version of a landed lord taking some time to enjoy a small drink while surveying his hard-won worldly assets. Had the setting been conventionally staged, and the old man’s son here instead of an undercover cop pretending to be a newfound friend, the next line would have been a variation on “In a few years, my boy, all this will be yours.”
But E. T. Griffis was not a man of conventional trappings. True to his roots, and regardless of his accumulated wealth, he was happiest—or perhaps least unhappy—when in proximity to the world that had given him birth: trucks, cheap beer, and the fruits of hard labor. New and shiny things, not to mention the commercial world that hawked them from all sides, were not for him, including a new roof on his house, or a truck built in the current decade, or any clothing from somewhere other than Goodwill. Money had become a way to keep score or, perhaps, to exact revenge on ancient devils Willy knew nothing about, but it was not to be used on glitzy frivolities—like insulation or central heating. Or cell phones.
Willy had heard that E. T.’s first and only legal wife had walked out on him so long ago, few people recalled what she looked like. Now that he’d become the man’s newest drinking buddy—following a week of nightly encounters at the bar—and been allowed into the sanctum sanctorum of his home, he didn’t doubt it.
Which wasn’t to say that he didn’t like the guy. For all his renowned faults as a father and husband, E. T. was the proverbial salt of the earth—honest, practical, hardworking, and, at long last, much to Willy’s present benefit, becoming sentimentally philosophical.
“So, anyhow,” he was saying. “Dan’s mother wasn’t Andy’s, and Andy’s mother and me weren’t ever legal. Not that it mattered. She had the first one beat all to hell, and that was everybody’s opinion, including Dan’s.”
“What happened to her?” Willy asked,