DETECTIVE CHERRY GOT HOLD of Bruce Wingstaff. I heard only half the conversation, which struck me as surprisingly friendly. “Okay, so we’ll catch up with you there,” Cherry said, and rang off. “He’s good for seven. That gives us a bit of time. You got plans for dinner?”
I said no. “But I don’t want to be any trouble. Like, I don’t want you to miss dinner with your wife or anything.”
“No wife, no kids,” Cherry said. “We’ll grab something.”
I followed him out of the building the back way. We were almost to his unmarked Ford sedan when Cherry stopped abruptly and said he had to go back inside and tend to one thing he’d forgotten. I waited in the car and he reappeared about ten minutes later. We drove across town to a run-down-looking building that could have been a small motor repair shop, but was actually a restaurant. The clue was the Good Eats neon sign hanging over the doorway. Cherry led me inside, and a cloud of cigarette smoke billowed out as he opened the door. A waitress with big hair, lots of lipstick, and, I had to admit, a rather spectacularly engineered figure smiled at Cherry like he was a regular and showed us to a table.
I waved my hand in the air as Cherry got out some cigarettes.
“This town doesn’t have antismoking bylaws?” I asked.
Cherry nodded. “Sure. We just choose not to enforce them. And Rose, who runs this joint, she pretends not to notice.” He tipped his cigarette pack toward me. “Smoke?”
“No thanks,” I said, “I’ll just breathe the air. How’s the food here?”
“Basic. But good.” The big-haired waitress came over and got close enough to the booth so Cherry could give her a friendly squeeze around the middle. He pushed his head into her breasts. “How’s my honey?” he said.
She smiled. “They ain’t a pillow, Mikey,” she said. “What’ll you have?”
Cherry ordered a cheeseburger with onion rings and I said I’d have the same. When the waitress walked away, Cherry lit up, leaned across the table almost conspiratorially, and said, “So, you’re suspended.”
For a second I thought maybe I’d pretend not to be shocked that he knew this, but I didn’t have the stuff to pull that off.
“That’s right,” I said.
“I made a call when I went back inside. To your paper, to check you out. And they know you there, no question about it. But evidently you were put on a bit of a leave recently. I don’t like it, people don’t play straight with me.”
I swallowed, took a sip from my glass of water. “I haven’t told you anything that wasn’t the truth.”
Cherry put his index finger in the air. “Ahh, but, you haven’t told me everything. That’s a little bit like lying.”
“I’m still on the Metropolitan payroll. And with any luck, if I can figure out what happened up here, and find out what happened to Trixie Snelling, I think I might be able to end this suspension.”
“If you’re straight with me, then I can be straight with you. And if you’re not,” he leaned back in the booth, took a long drag on his cigarette and blew out smoke like he was a steam engine, “I can kick your ass all the way back to the city.”
“Do you think I could get a beer?” I said.
Cherry waved his waitress over. “Couple of beers here, hon,” he said. She had the bottles on our table in under two minutes.
I told Cherry everything I could think of. Finding Martin Benson’s body, Trixie’s disappearance, my being left handcuffed in the basement. Flint’s investigation. How Trixie’s dragging me into this mess might cost me my career with the paper. That once I’d learned all I could in Canborough, I was off to Groverton, based on no more than a gas station receipt I’d taken from Trixie’s car.
“If you find her,” Cherry said, “you might learn something that could help me with my open file on the Kickstart murders.”
“Maybe,” I said.
He took a swig from the long-neck bottle, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Are you going to dick around with me anymore?”
“No,” I said.
Our cheeseburgers arrived. They were the size of curling stones, without the handles.
“That’s good. Because you seem like a nice guy, and I’ve set up this thing with Bruce, and it would be a shame to cancel.”
“I appreciate it,” I said.
Cherry worked his hands around the cheeseburger. “If this doesn’t make your heart stop, you’ll really enjoy it.”
My heart was still beating when we left, but I was pretty sure I’d come down with a touch of lung cancer. My clothes reeked of cigarette smoke. When we came out into the night air, I sucked in as much of it as I could, feeling as though I’d just emerged from a house fire.
“You need to hang out in more dives,” Cherry said. “I thought newspaper reporters were a bunch of hard-drinking, heavy-smoking types.”
“That’s kind of changed over the years,” I said. “Now we all own minivans and have to leave work early to get our kids to soccer.”
“Funny you should mention that,” Cherry said.
“What?” I said.
“You’ll see.”
Cherry turned into an industrial area on the outskirts of Canborough. He slowed as we passed a low-rise concrete-block building with bars on the windows. Surveillance cameras and spotlights were mounted in several spots just under the eaves. Half a dozen motorcycles, big ones with sweeping handlebars, were parked out front.
“Clubhouse,” Cherry said. “This is where the Comets hang out, conduct their business. Some of them even sleep here, pretty much live here.”
“Wingstaff?”
“No. He’s got a house in town. Doesn’t look like a bunker, but it’s still got plenty of surveillance equipment around it.”
I felt a sense of unease sweep over me. “We’re going in here?”
“Huh? No. This is just part of the tour. We’re meeting Bruce someplace else.”
Cherry turned around in the gravel lot out front of the clubhouse and headed back into the city’s older residential district. We were driving through a neighborhood of traditional Victorian-type homes when we came upon a large park illuminated with flood-lamps.
We parked, and as we walked toward the park, we could hear the sounds of children’s voices, pounding feet, soft chatter. It was a kids’ soccer match, boys about ten years old, kicking the ball back and forth, working their way from one end of the field to the other. Standing along the sidelines, and sitting in a set of wooden bleachers, parents watched and cheered.
“What are we doing here?” I asked.
Cherry ignored me, working his way through the parents. He glanced up the bleachers and started climbing them, a row of seats with each step. Sitting at the top, off to one side, was a large man in his forties, not fat but big, dressed in black jeans and a windbreaker. He was clean-shaven, with dark, neat hair and glasses. A bit Clark Kentish. This, I concluded, could not be the head of a biker gang. Maybe this guy was going to tell us where we could find Wingstaff.
“Hey, Bruce,” Cherry said.
Okay, so I was wrong.
Wingstaff kept his eyes on the field. “Mike, how’s it going?”
“Who’s winning?”
“Other side. We’re getting our ass kicked. Blake got a goal, though.” His eyes caught something, and he was on his feet. “Hey!” he shouted. “Come on!” He sat back down. “It’s not hockey, for Christ’s sake. You can’t check a guy like that.”
“This is the guy I told you about,” Cherry said. Wingstaff sized me up in half a second and returned his eyes to the field.
“Hi,” I said. “Thanks for seeing me.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Anything for Mike here.” His voice dripped with sarcasm. “You’re looking for some woman?”
“That’s right. I think, although I don’t know for sure, that she might have something to do with Gary Merker, maybe from a few years ago. Or Leonard Edgars.”
“This lady you’re looking for got a name?”
“Trixie Snelling.”
Wingstaff was on his feet again. He coned his hands around his mouth and shouted: “Hey, ref! You wanna borrow my glasses?” He sat back down. “Name don’t mean nothing to me.”
“Maybe she wasn’t using that name at the time,” Cherry offered.
“Well, if you don’t know what name she might have been using, then I don’t know how I can help you. Hey, Blake’s got the ball. Come on, come on…Ah, fuck. He’s got to learn how to hang on to it. He’s falling all over himself.”
“Show him the picture,” Cherry prompted me.
It was nighttime, but we were under the spotlights. I got out the picture from the Suburban and handed it to Bruce Wingstaff. He looked down, squinted, reached into his pocket for a pair of reading glasses and slid them on.
“Nice looking,” he said. “But I don’t know…” He glanced up at the field, looked again at the picture. “You know who it could be?”
I felt my pulse quicken. “Who?”
“Well, maybe not, the hair color’s not right, but it looks a bit like maybe it could be Candace.”
“Candace?” I said.
“Yeah, what was her last name…Shit. She got knocked up by Eldon Swain. Remember him?” He was asking Cherry.
“Oh yeah.”
“Car pushed in front of the train, with him in it?”
“I remember.”
“And I would like to state, once again, that we had nothing to do with that,” Wingstaff said. “Given half a chance, we mighta, but we didn’t.”
“Sure, Bruce,” Cherry said. I was having some difficulty getting used to this, a bike gang leader and a cop having a casual chat, talking about old murders like they were reminiscing about somebody they’d known in high school.
Wingstaff was on his feet again. “Go, Blake! Go! Go!” I turned and looked at the field. A blond-haired boy was moving up the field, then tripped himself up on the ball, without any interference from an opposing player, and landed on his face.
Wingstaff winced, made a face.
“So you think this woman might be Candace,” I said. “And that she had a child.”
“Little girl, I think,” Wingstaff said.
“Whatever happened to them?”
He looked up at the stars for a moment, as though the answer could be found in them. “After those three got shot, I don’t remember ever seeing her, or her kid, again. Kid couldn’t have been more than a year old at the time, anyway. But come to think of it, she did just seem to disappear. But then, so did a lot of the girls who worked at the Kickstart-they’d come and go-’cept for those that came to work for me.”
“She was a stripper? Or a prostitute?” I asked.
“Uh, I don’t think she did much hooking. Started out dancing, I think, but then she started working in the office. Had a head for figures.” Wingstaff cocked his head at a funny angle, half smiled. “Fuck, now I remember.”
Cherry and I glanced at each other, then studied Wingstaff.
“After that little massacre, Pick arranged a meeting with me. We had to set it up, careful like, because we figured Pick thought we’d put the hit out on his guys. Found some neutral ground, which actually turned out to be a Starbucks on Elmer Street. Anyway, we had this sit-down, and I expressed my condolences, and I figured he’d be accusing me of offing his boys.”
“But he didn’t,” Cherry said.
“Naw, which I thought was kind of interesting. Anyway, he as much as said that he was packing it in, taking Edgars with him. Said it wasn’t just the others getting offed. He was broke. Couldn’t make his bills, no money in the kitty. But he said to me, if I ever saw Candy, I was to let him know. Like, if she came to work for me, or I just saw her around. He said I owed him that, for letting me take over his share of the market. And that if I saw her, he’d see that I got a little reward on top of that.”
“Really,” I said.
“I think he put the word out to the rest of my guys, and others that he knew, like regular customers at the Kickstart. Said no matter where he ended up, they could reach him through his mom, leave a message with her.”
“Where is she?”
“In town here. Getting kind of on, I suspect. Don’t see her out and about. Not what you’d call very motherish.”
“So did you ever see her? Candy?”
Wingstaff shook his head. “Never did. Never really cared. Got my own problems to take care of.”
“Why do you think he was wanting to find her so bad?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Didn’t ask, wasn’t my problem. But you know, you had the sense that maybe she was something of a liability.”
“A liability?” I said.
“Someone who could tell people things,” Wingstaff said. “Sometimes you don’t want people telling other people things.” He gave Cherry a wink. “Ain’t that so, Mike?”
“Certainly is, Bruce,” Cherry said.
A whistle blew. The soccer game was over.
“That’s about all the time I have, gents,” Wingstaff said.
“You come out for your boy’s games a lot?” I asked.
“Never miss a one,” he said. “You have to get the kids involved in things, you know, or they’ve got too much time on their hands, get themselves into trouble.” He nodded and headed down toward the base of the bleachers.
“You think he’s ever killed anybody?” I said quietly to Cherry.
“You mean this week?” the detective replied.
We worked our way down to the field, saw young Blake Wingstaff run over to see his father. His face was muddy from when he’d fallen on the ball.
“We got killed,” the boy said, his face awash with shame. His father, the biker boss, smiled and knelt down and gave his son a friendly rub on the head. You could almost feel him aching to hug the boy, but he didn’t want to embarrass him in front of his teammates.
“You done good,” he told him. “I saw that goal you made.”
“I fell down,” Blake said.
“We all fall down,” Wingstaff said. “Then we get up, and we keep on playing.”