Chat - Archer Mayor [81]
Willy easily swiped away the punch with his good hand, which threw E. T. off balance and sent him stumbling straight into Willy’s lap, breaking the arm of his chair. They collapsed into a pile on the floor.
“Get off me, you son of a bitch!” E. T. yelled, thrashing around.
Willy kept his composure, speaking clearly but quietly into the other man’s ear, “You’re on top of me, E. T. Take a breath. I didn’t mean any harm. I didn’t know.” He repeated slowly, “I did not know.”
Griffis settled down, still lying across Willy like a dropped bear, staring at the ceiling with a wondering expression. “Shit,” he finally muttered. “I know that.”
Willy planted his hand against E. T.’s back and pushed him to an upright position, rising behind him. He decided to go for broke then and there, figuring the opportunity would never come up again.
“Who did it, E. T.?” he asked softly. “Who really killed your son?”
There was no response at first. Griffis just sat there, his legs splayed, his hands in his lap, staring at the floor. For a split second, Willy wondered if he might not have passed out, or whether he was even breathing.
But E. T. proved him wrong with two words. “Wayne Nugent,” he said.
The name Sam hadn’t been able to uncover. Griffis couldn’t see the smile on Willy’s face. Well, that was at least one puzzle solved.
In Ardmore, Pennsylvania, and outside Waterbury, Connecticut, Lester and Sammie, respectively, in the company of their host police agencies, conducted separate searches of the homes of the two men they’d once referred to as Wet Bald Rocky and Dry Hairy Fred.
Lester had gotten lucky with the videotape in the Ardmore Internet café. On film, the same man in the postmortem mug shots that Spinney was carrying around was seen sitting at the right computer and at the same time and date that John Leppman had dug up. Bruce Fellini, the café manager, still didn’t know the man by name, but he did recognize the teenager at the neighboring console. That boy, a regular, was then located and told Lester that the person he was after was Norman Metz. With Detective Cavallaro’s help, the last step to finding Metz’s address—a single room in a house he shared with others in a run-down neighborhood—had been easy.
For Sam, the journey had been farther but easier still. The car abandoned at the Springfield bus depot had been eloquence itself, containing all the myriad details of its owner’s vital records and habits, from his address to his birthdate, to his taste in music and candy. It had also confirmed the name that Detective Wilson had found through its registration—Frederick Nashman—whose identity was confirmed photographically by comparing Sam’s mug shot with Connecticut DMV computer records.
Unlike where Lester was searching in Ardmore, however, Nashman’s home outside Waterbury was a sedate, middle-class two-story house. Unfortunately for Sam, it also came equipped with a wife and teenage child.
Joe sat on what Lyn and he now viewed as his traditional perch, established when they’d first met in Gloucester—at the end of the bar, with his shoulder against the side wall and his hand around a Coke. He watched her traveling along the line of noisy, appreciative drinkers, chatting, laughing, making small talk and change as she served drinks, waved away compliments, and kept an air traffic controller’s eye roaming across the room. He remembered what she’d told him then, after he’d plied her with a milkshake and a lobster roll. She’d said that the bar—the actual physical object—was like a barrier that allowed her access to the public while protecting her from it, thereby becoming the perfect platform for a shy person who longed for company. It had been a comment both intriguing and startling, since he’d always believed—as he figured most people did—that anyone in this