Silent Victim - C. E. Lawrence [145]
Lee also remembered—and wished he didn’t—the slow, painful descent back down the trail. He was in worse shape than Diesel, who had suffered a flesh wound to his side—whereas, as it turned out, Lee had three broken ribs and smashed nose cartilage. Somehow the four of them made it down the hill. Butts had driven them to the emergency room in the nearest town, grumbling all the way that he should have been there, and that he would now start a program of diet and exercise, and so forth.
Lee took a long, deep swallow of beer and looked around the room. He liked the atmosphere here. True to its origins as a bar for working-class Irish men, McSorley’s sported a thick layer of sawdust on the floor. An even thicker layer of dust covered the musical instruments, knickknacks, paintings, and photographs occupying every spare inch of wall. There was always a smell of onions in the air—he liked to order the cheese and crackers and onions, which were served “on the house” to the nineteenth-century working-class customers.
The bell over the door tinkled, and in strode Detective Butts, carrying a leather gym bag. He nodded to the waiter—a big, burly Irishman, probably an ex-cop—as the man slung half a dozen beers onto one of the thick oak tables, as though he were wielding billy clubs instead of beer mugs.
Butts lowered himself into the chair next to Lee with a groan, putting the satchel on the floor next to him. “Just came from the gym,” he said with a rueful but triumphant smile. “Bench presses and abs today.”
“Do you think you’re tackling this fitness thing a little too vigorously?” Lee asked, sliding a beer across the table toward him.
Butts looked at the mug of beer. “I shouldn’t,” he said, patting his generous girth. “Aw, what the hell,” he shrugged, lifting the glass to his lips. “You only live once, right?”
Drinking deeply, he set the mug down with a satisfied clunk.
The waiter appeared again, wiping his hands on the long white apron tucked into his pants.
“Ready for another round, then, are ya?” His accent was pure County Cork.
“Yeah,” Butts said. “This one’s on me.”
The mugs were small, and needed refilling often, but that meant the beer was always cold and fresh. They drank again, and Lee settled back into his chair, the edges of the room softened by alcohol.
“Okay,” Butts said. “So I have answers to some loose ends you were asking about.”
“Right.”
“Turns out that Baldy was someone he picked up at the Jack Hammer. When I showed pics of him around the place, some of the guys remembered seein’ him on more than one occasion.”
“So the pickup went bad in some way, and—”
“—and Baldy was history. He must have got as far as the guy’s apartment, but what happened next I guess we’ll never know.”
“What about the doctor—the anesthesiologist?”
Butts took a long swig of beer and wiped his mouth.
“Far as I can make out, poor guy was at the wrong place at the wrong time, I found a pickup request at Fleet Limos that McNamara responded to at Roosevelt Hospital. Some-thin’ must have gone down in that limousine—maybe a proposition gone wrong, I dunno. Whatever happened, it got McNamara mad enough to off the doc.”
He took another swallow of beer. “Tox screens came back positive for GHB on all the vics. In some cases they drank the stuff, but with a couple it looks like he injected them with it.” Butts traced one of the deep groves in the dark wood of the table with his finger. “I, uh—I watched some more of the videotapes, too.”
“Yeah?”
“That is some weird shit, let me tell you.”
“Like what?”
“Well, Perkins has this Caleb guy convinced that in his past life he killed his mother, see? I think it was some twisted notion of therapy, to try and get the truth of what happened to the kid in childhood. It was somethin