This time Mrs. Flaherty was warier.
“What do you want now?” she asked.
“I’m investigating the accident,” I told her.
“Investigating?”
“That’s right. I’m beginning to think it didn’t happen the way they said it did.”
“Who said? I don’t understand.”
“The other driver. I don’t think it happened the way he described it.”
“You think he’s lying?”
“Maybe he’s confused. Or he thinks the accident was his fault, so he made things up.”
“They told me Dennis drove into the wrong lane.”
“Yeah. That’s what the other driver said.”
No, I realized. The other driver had said Dennis drifted into the wrong lane.
I suddenly understood.
His depression, his drinking…
Mrs. Flaherty thought Dennis had done it on purpose-steered his car into oncoming traffic in a moment of suicidal clarity.
“You don’t believe him? This other driver-what was his name, Earl?” she asked.
“Ed. Ed Crannell.”
“You don’t believe him?”
“Maybe not.”
“It doesn’t matter, does it?” she said softly. “My son’s dead.”
I heard what sounded like sobbing.
I waited. It was 8:32 a.m. Norma hadn’t come in yet. The office of the Littleton Journal was a simple storefront sandwiched between Foo Yang Chinese takeout and Ted’s Guns amp; Ammo, which offered Michael Moore targets with every purchased handgun.
“Mrs. Flaherty? Can you describe Dennis for me?”
“What?”
“Can you describe your son?”
“Why?”
“He wasn’t biracial, was he?”
“Biwhat?”
“I mean, Dennis was Caucasian. White, right?”
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“Nothing. I’m just trying to…”
“What are you saying?”
“Just clarifying things…”
“The police said it was Dennis. I buried him.”
“Of course. Five-foot-nine, brown hair, olive eyes. That’s your son, Dennis?”
“Why’d you ask if he was negro?”
“Look, forget I even…”
“You think it wasn’t him, is that it?”
“No…”
“That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it? You think it might’ve been someone else. A negro. He was all burned up… black.” She wasn’t asking anymore; she was stating. Hope had infused her voice with the sudden fervor of the true believer.
I should’ve stopped her, of course. Right there. I should’ve said that wasn’t my point at all, no, I was merely getting his description in the interest of journalistic accuracy.
Maybe the words journalistic accuracy were legally banned from my vocabulary. There was that catch in her throat to contend with. That thrilling willingness to swallow something whole. I’d heard that seductive sound before-around the table at editorial roundups, where I’d offer stories for approval amid the sweet buzzing of acolytes.
Understand and forgive. It was like blowing smoke in the face of a nicotine addict.
“Just supposing,” I said to Mrs. Flaherty, “that someone robbed Dennis? What if someone stole his car, his wallet? The body was unrecognizable. I’m just trying to be 100 percent sure here.”
“Yes… yes, of course,” she said. “Dennis had brown hair, olive eyes-just like you said. He had a little scar on his right cheek. He fell off the monkey bars when he was 5. Is it possible… Mr…?”
“Valle. Tom Valle.”
“Is it possible they’re wrong? It is, isn’t it? It’s not him? It’s someone else?”
She took down my address.
She told me she’d send me a picture of Dennis.
She rattled off a few particulars of Dennis’s sad travesty of a marriage.
She provided me with the phone number of Dennis’s ex-wife.
She told me Dennis had won five merit badges as a Boy Scout.
I had a hard time getting her off the phone.
When Hinch came in, he asked me what I was working on.
Hinch was big-boned, broad-shouldered, a largess that had lately migrated south to his stomach. Some mornings he arrived with gray stubble still clinging to his chin. I suspected Miss Azalea wasn’t doing well.
“Following up on the crash.”
“That crash on Highway 45? Old news, isn’t it?”
“There are a few things I’m trying to clean up.”
“Like?” Hinch had made his way to the coffee brewer, which I’d generously started percolating-usually Norma’s job.
“Like there was no definite ID. Except for the man’s wallet.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning I don’t know exactly. But the ME thought…”
“The who?”
“Dr. Futillo. He was convinced…”
“Dr. Futillo?” Hinch snorted. “He’s no medical examiner. You know anything about Dr. Futillo?” As owner, editor in chief, and sole editorial columnist of the Littleton Journal, Hinch made it a point to know just about everything about everyone in town.
“He’s a good bowler.”
“He’s also good at prescribing OxyContin to patients who don’t actually need it. He relocated here under, let’s say, murky circumstances. I wouldn’t believe everything Dr. Futillo tells you. Especially about forensics.”
I thought Hinch was making a point. That there were two people who’d relocated to Littleton under murky circumstances, and neither one of them was remotely trustworthy.
Sheriff Swenson was right; Hinch was related to my probation officer, who’d asked me at our last meeting what I intended to do with my life, now that no paper within 3,000 miles would hire me. The answer was simple. Find a paper within 3,001 miles. Once my PO had a word with its editor in chief-Hinch, her cousin on her mother’s side. It wasn’t much of a paper, of course-one step up from the penny circular-but its desert location had appealed to my desire for isolation and self-scourging.
“I won’t write it unless it checks,” I said.
Which was pretty much word-for-word what Hinch had told me the day I arrived in my beat-up Miata. That he wouldn’t publish anything unless it checked.
Even if all we were talking about was the annual book sale down at the Littleton Library. It better be the right date, okay?
I’d promised I wouldn’t let him down.
Hinch stared at me for a long moment, as if credibility was something that could be visibly gauged.
“All right,” he said.
He retreated into his office and shut the door.
I’D GOTTEN AN IPOD.
Norma had sold me on its myriad benefits. She’d recently begun performing lunchtime aerobics to the latest from Outkast, slipping into baggy pink Danskins and mouthing along to Andre 3000.
In a very short time, I’d fattened up my iPod with 1,032 songs. Mostly oldies-but-goodies.
The entire canon of Hendrix.
Some Jackson Browne.
Santana. Fleetwood Mac. Jethro Tull.
A few anomalies thrown in. Side by Side by Sondheim. Sinatra at Caesar’s. Judy Collins singing “Where or When.”
If you’ve never heard her rendition of that haunting Richard Rodgers tune, you’re really missing something.
I was listening to “Where or When” on the way to my car.
I was going to cover the opening of a new department store. And maybe something else.
I was focusing on the words.
Things that happened for the first time seem to be happening again…
Yes.