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He’s a homo, Morris thought wonderingly. He’s a goddam homo. How come I didn’t know that? How come I never saw? He might as well be wearing a sign.
Well, there were a lot of things about Andy he’d never seen, weren’t there? Morris thought of something one of the guys on the housing job liked to say: All pistol and no bullets.
With the waitress gone, taking her toxic atmosphere of girl with her, Andy leaned forward again. ‘Those collectors are out there,’ he said. ‘They pile up paintings, sculpture, first editions … there’s an oilman in Texas who’s got a collection of early wax-cylinder recordings worth a million dollars, and another one who’s got a complete run of every western, science fiction, and shudder-pulp magazine published between 1910 and 1955. Do you think all of that stuff was legitimately bought and sold? The fuck it was. Collectors are insane, the worst of them don’t care if the things they covet were stolen or not, and they most assuredly do not want to share with the rest of the world.’
Morris had heard this screed before, and his face must have shown it, because Andy leaned even farther forward. Now their noses were almost touching. Morris could smell English Leather, and wondered if that was the preferred aftershave of homos. Like a secret sign, or something.
‘But do you think any of those guys would listen to me?’
Morris Bellamy, who was now seeing Andy Halliday with new eyes, said he guessed not.
Andy pooched out his lower lip. ‘They will someday, though. Yeah. Once I get my own shop and build up a clientele. But that’ll take years.’
‘We talked about waiting five.’
‘Five?’ Andy barked a laugh and drew back to his side of the table again. ‘I might be able to open my shop in five years – I’ve got my eye on a little place in Lacemaker Lane, there’s a fabric store there now but it doesn’t do much business – but it takes longer than that to find big-money clients and establish trust.’
Lots of buts, Morris thought, but there were no buts before.
‘How long?’
‘Why don’t you try me on those notebooks around the turn of the twenty-first century, if you still have them? Even if I did have a call list of private collectors right now, today, not even the nuttiest of them would touch anything so hot.’
Morris stared at him, at first unable to speak. At last he said, ‘You never said anything like that when we were pla
Andy clapped his hands to the sides of his head and clutched it. ‘We pla
‘Don’t call me that.’ His temples were throbbing worse than ever.
‘I will if it’s the truth, and it is. You’re batshit-crazy on the subject of Jimmy Gold, too. He’s why you went to jail.’
‘I went to jail because of my mother. She might as well have locked me up herself.’
‘Whatever. It’s water under the bridge. This is now. Unless you’re lucky, the police are going to be paying you a visit very soon, and they’ll probably arrive with a search warrant. If you have those notebooks when they knock on your door, your goose will be cooked.’
‘Why would they come to me? Nobody saw us, and my partners …’ He winked. ‘Let’s just say that dead men tell no tales.’
‘You … what? Killed them? Killed them, too?’ Andy’s face was a picture of dawning horror.
Morris knew he shouldn’t have said that, but – fu
‘What’s the name of the town that Rothstein lived in?’ Andy’s eyes were shifting around again, as if he expected the cops to be closing in even now, guns drawn. ‘Talbot Corners, right?’
‘Yes, but it’s mostly farms. What they call the Corners is nothing but a diner, a grocery store, and a gas station where two state roads cross.’
‘How many times were you there?’
‘Maybe five.’ It had actually been closer to a dozen, between 1976 and 1978. Alone at first, then with either Freddy or Curtis or both.
‘Ever ask questions about the town’s most famous resident while you were there?’
‘Sure, once or twice. So what? Probably everybody who ever stops at that diner asks about—’
‘No, that’s where you’re wrong. Most out-of-towners don’t give a shit about John Rothstein. If they’ve got questions, it’s about when deer season starts or what kind of fish they could catch in the local lake. You don’t think the locals will remember you when the police ask if there have been any strangers curious about the guy who wrote The Ru
‘Juvenile. It’s sealed.’
‘Something as big as this, the seal might not hold. And what about your partners? Did either of them have records?’
Morris said nothing.
‘You don’t know who saw you, and you don’t know who your partners might have bragged to about the big robbery they were going to pull off. The police could nail you today, you idiot. If they do and you bring my name up, I’ll deny we ever talked about this. But I’ll give you some advice. Get rid of that.’ He was pointing to the brown paper bag. ‘That and all the rest of the notebooks. Hide them somewhere. Bury them! If you do that, maybe you can talk your way out of it, if push comes to shove. Always supposing you didn’t leave fingerprints, or something.’
We didn’t, Morris thought. I wasn’t stupid. And I’m not a cowardly big-talking homo, either.
‘Maybe we can revisit this,’ Andy said, ‘but it will be much later on, and only if they don’t grab you.’ He got up. ‘In the meantime, stay clear of me, or I’ll call the police myself.’
He walked away fast with his head down, not looking back.
Morris sat there. The pretty waitress returned to ask if she could get him anything. Morris shook his head. When she left, he picked up the bag with the notebook inside it and walked away himself. In the opposite direction.
He knew what the pathetic fallacy was, of course – nature echoing the feelings of human beings – and understood it to be the cheap, mood-creating trick of second-rate writers, but that day it seemed to be true. The morning’s bright sunlight had both mirrored and amplified his feeling of exultation, but by noon the sun was only a dim circle behind a blear of clouds, and by three o’clock that afternoon, as his worries multiplied, the day grew dark and it began to drizzle.
He drove the Biscayne out to the mall near the airport, constantly watching for police cars. When one came roaring up behind him on Airline Boulevard with its blues flashing, his stomach froze and his heart seemed to climb all the way into his mouth. When it sped by without slowing, he felt no relief.
He found a news broadcast on BAM-100. The lead story was about a peace conference between Sadat and Begin at Camp David (Yeah, like that’ll ever happen, Morris thought distractedly), but the second one concerned the murder of noted American writer John Rothstein. Police were saying it was the work of ‘a gang of thieves,’ and that a number of leads were being followed. That was probably just PR bullshit.
Or maybe not.
Morris didn’t think he could be tracked down as a result of interviews with the half-deaf old codgers who hung out at the Yummy Diner in Talbot Corners, no matter what Andy thought, but there was something else that troubled him far more. He, Freddy, and Curtis had all worked for Donahue Construction, which was building homes in both Danvers and North Beverly. There were two different work crews, and for most of Morris’s sixteen months, spent carrying boards and nailing studs, he had been in Danvers while Curtis and Freddy toiled at the other site, five miles away. Yet for awhile they had worked on the same crew, and even after they were split up, they usually managed to eat lunch together.