The Second Mouse - Archer Mayor [52]
And Joe had a good notion of just where to find it.
Susan Bedell returned downstairs and handed him a battered fake-leather notebook, labeled with the relevant year. “Here you go. Use it to good effect and tell Beverly I was tickled pink that I could help her out. No way is the ledger balanced. I’ll always feel bad about what happened. But maybe this’ll count for something.”
Gunther flipped through the pages of tight, careful handwriting. “Not to worry, Susan. I’ll make sure this makes her day.”
Bedell opened the front door to show him out. “You know the final irony?” she asked him as he stepped out onto the walkway.
“What’s that?”
“Morgenthau, the grieving widower. For all the pain that Medwed thought he’d feel by losing a wife and child both, he went out and married a young thirty-something within six months and had two kids just like that.” She snapped her fingers. “We could’ve ducked the whole mess just by being honest from the start.”
Joe nodded and thanked her again, pondering the truth of her last assumption. He’d simply gotten too old to believe that honesty would set you free. He’d seen too many people destroyed as a result, at least politically.
He was a fatalist nowadays, more burdened by what people did than by how and why they did it.
Chapter 10
Mel stared sourly at the shot glass he’d just smacked down onto the bar top. “You’re not much fun since you stopped drinking.”
Ellis glanced up from his Diet Coke and took in the rows of bottles across from them, his face suddenly flushed with guilt. “Feel better, though,” he said in a neutral tone, hoping the poor lighting would shadow his expression.
“I don’t give a shit about that,” Mel answered him, not moving. “You’re lousy company. That’s all I know. You and Nancy, both. Might as well be goddamned Holy Rollers.”
Ellis pursed his lips. He didn’t like Mel referring to Nancy. He felt he wore his feelings for her like a scent, available to anyone who took the time to notice. He found himself not mentioning her around Mel, and then worrying that the other man might pick up on the omission. Like the booze—he’d stopped taking it for her sake. This whole thing was driving him crazy.
They were at Piccolo’s, a bar near Benmont, Bennington’s old mill district and its perpetual low-income neighborhood. It was the kind of establishment that hard drinkers retired to after the polite bars had called it a night. Tellingly, the sheriff’s office was just around the corner. Ellis had resisted Mel’s invitation to join him, fearful of how the atmosphere might undermine his newborn abstinence. But now that he was here, he’d discovered that the old urge was less strong than in the past—something he ascribed solely to Nancy.
Not that there’d been much choice in the matter. Mel’s invitation had amounted to a command—at least as Ellis had treated it.
“There,” Mel said suddenly. “That’s the guy.”
Ellis looked up into the long mirror reflecting the dark room behind them. A young man with long, greasy hair and a soiled red baseball cap was walking among the decals of beer logos adorning the mirror’s surface.
“See him?” Mel insisted.
“Yeah,” Ellis acknowledged carefully.
“That’s High Top—the one I was telling you about.”
Ellis watched the man, dreading what might be coming next. “Dumb name.”
“It’s ’cause his brain’s fried. Too much dope. Doesn’t even need it anymore to get where he’s going. Not that that stops him.”
“What do we want with him?”
Ellis’s tone clearly lacked the enthusiasm he once might have shown. Mel straightened and gave him a painful jab in the arm. “What the fuck do you care? You his mother? You actually give a shit if he lives or dies?”
Ellis hesitated. There was a time when he might not have. But the past couple of weeks had felt like a rebirth. Not that he could admit any of that to this man. “No.”
“What we want with him, douche