The Affair_ A Reacher Novel - Lee Child [68]
He said, “Geezer Butler.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really.”
“You play bass guitar?”
“Like I haven’t heard that one before.”
“Was your dad a Black Sabbath fan?”
“My mom too.”
“Are you?”
He nodded. “I’ve got all their records.”
I led him inside. He stood in the hallway, looking around. I said, “The challenge here is to get her prints and no one else’s.”
“To avoid confusion?” he said.
No, I thought. To avoid a Bravo Company guy lighting up the system. Better safe than sorry.
I said, “Yes, to avoid confusion.”
“The chief said I should start in the bathroom.”
“Good plan,” I said. “Toothbrush, toothpaste, tampon box, personal things like that. Things that were boxed up or wrapped in cellophane in the store. No one else will have touched them.”
I hung back so as not to crowd him, but I watched him pretty carefully. He was extremely competent. He took twenty minutes and got twenty good prints, all small neat ovals, all obviously a woman’s. We agreed that was an adequate sample, and he packed up his gear and gave me a ride back to town.
I got out of Butler’s car outside the Sheriff’s Department and walked south to the hotel, where I stood on the sidewalk and wrestled with a dilemma. I felt I should go buy a new shirt, but I didn’t want Deveraux to feel that dinner was supposed to be more than just dinner. Or in reality I did want her to feel dinner could be more than just dinner, but I didn’t want her to see me wanting it. I didn’t want her to feel pushed into anything, and I didn’t want to appear overeager.
But in the end I decided a shirt was just a shirt, so I hiked across to the other side of Main Street and looked at the stores. Most of them were about to close. It was after five o’clock. I found a men’s outfitters three enterprises south of where I started. It didn’t look promising. In the window was a jacket made from some kind of synthetic denim. It glittered and shone in the lights. It looked like it had been knitted out of atomic waste. But the only other shopping choice was the pharmacy, and I didn’t want to show up at dinner wearing a dollar T. So I went in and looked around.
There was plenty more stuff pieced together from dubious fabrics, but there was plenty of plainer stuff too. There was an old guy behind the counter who seemed happy to let me poke around. He had a tape measure draped around his neck. Like a badge of office. Like a doctor wears a stethoscope. He didn’t say anything, but he seemed to understand I was looking for shirts and he either frowned and tutted or beamed and nodded as I moved around from pile to pile, as if I was playing a parlor game, getting warmer and colder in my search.
Eventually I found a white button-down made of heavy cotton. The collar was an eighteen and the sleeves were thirty-seven inches long, which was about my size. I hauled my choice to the counter and asked, “Would this be OK for a job in an office?”
The old guy said, “Yes, sir, it would.”
“Would it impress a person at dinner?”
“I think you’d want something finer, sir. Maybe a pinpoint.”
“So it’s not what you’d call formal?”
“No, sir. Not by a long chalk.”
“OK, I’ll take it.”
It cost me less than the pink shirt from the PX. The old guy wrapped it in brown paper and taped it up into a little parcel. I carried it back across the street. I planned to dump it in my room. I made it into the hotel lobby just in time to see the owner setting off up the stairs in a big hurry. He turned when he heard the door, and he saw it was me and he stopped. He was out of breath. He said, “Your uncle is on the phone again.”
Chapter
39
I took the call alone in the back office, as before. Garber was tentative from the get-go, which made me uneasy. His first question was, “How are you?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “You?”
“How’s it going down there?”
“Bad,” I said.
“With the sheriff?”
“No, she’s OK.”
“Elizabeth Deveraux, right?