“Roddy was his name? That’s a bad sign right there.”
“He was a screamer, all right.”
“What happened?” Winder asked. “Is he still around?”
“No, he’s not.” Carrie hit the intersection at Highway 1 without touching the brakes, and merged neatly into the northbound traffic. She said, “Roddy’s up at Eglin doing a little time.”
“Which means he’s either a drug dealer or a crooked lawyer.”
“Both,” she said. “Last month he sent a Polaroid of him with a tennis trophy. He said he can’t wait to get out and start trying for a family again.”
“The boy’s not well.”
“It’s all Oedipal, that’s my theory.” Carrie nodded at the IUD and said, “I keep it there to remind myself that you can’t be too careful when it comes to men. Here’s Roddy with his Stanford diploma and his fancy European car and his heavy downtown law firm, everything in the whole world going for him. Turns out he’s nothing but a dipshit, and a dumb dipshit to boot.”
Winder said she’d been smart to take precautions.
“Yeah, well, I had my career to consider.” Carrie turned a corner into a trailer park, and coasted the car to the end of a narrow gravel lane. “Home sweet home,” she said. “Be sure to lock your door. This is not a wonderful neighborhood.”
Joe Winder said, “Why are you doing this for me?”
“I’m not sure. I’m really not.” She tossed him the keys and asked him to get the raccoon costume from the trunk of the car.
Bud Schwartz and Danny Pogue helped Molly McNamara up the steps of the old house in South Miami. They eased her into the rocker in the living room, and opened the front windows to air the place out. Bud
Schwartz’s hand still throbbed from the gunshot wound, but his fingers seemed to be functioning.
Danny Pogue said, “Ain’t it good to be home?”
“Indeed it is,” said Molly. “Could you boys fix me some tea?”
Bud Schwartz looked hard at his partner. I’ll do it,” said Danny Pogue. “It don’t bother me.” Cheerfully he hobbled toward the kitchen.
“He’s not a bad young man,” Molly McNamara said. “Neither of you are.”
“Model citizens,” said Bud Schwartz. “That’s us.”
He lowered himself into a walnut captain’s chair but stood again quickly, as if the seat were hot. He’d forgotten about the damn thing in his pocket until it touched him in the right testicle. Irritably he removed it from his pants and placed it on an end table. He had wrapped it in a blue lace doily.
He said, “Can we do something with this, please?”
“There’s a Mason jar in the cupboard over the stove,” Molly said, “and some pickle juice in the refrigerator.”
“You’re kidding.”
“This is important, Bud. It’s evidence.”
In the hall he passed Danny Pogue carrying a teapot on a silver tray. “You believe this shit?” Bud Schwartz said. He held up the doily.
“What now?”
“She wants me to pickle the goddamn thing!”
Danny Pogue made a squeamish face. “What for?” When he returned to the living room, Molly was rocking tranquilly in the chair. He poured the tea and said, “You must be feeling better.”
“Better than I look.” She drank carefully, watching Danny Pogue over the rim of the cup. In a tender voice she said: “You don’t know what this means to me, the fact that you stayed to help.”
“It wasn’t just me. It was Bud, too.”
“He’s not a bad person,” Molly McNamara allowed. “I suspect he’s a man of principle, deep down.”
Danny Pogue had never thought of his partner as a man of principle, but maybe Molly had spotted something. While Bud was an incorrigible thief, he played by a strict set of rules. No guns, no violence, no hard drugs—Danny Pogue supposed that these could be called principles. He hoped that Molly recognized that he, too, had his limits—moral borders he would not cross. Later on, when she was asleep, he would make a list.
He said, “So what are you gonna do now? Stay at it?”
“To tell the truth, I’m not certain.” She put down the teacup and dabbed her swollen lips with a napkin. “I’ve had some experts go over Kingsbury’s files. Lawyers, accountants, people sympathetic to the cause. They made up a cash-flow chart, ran the numbers up and down and sideways. They say it’s all very interesting, these foreign companies, but it would probably take months for the IRS and Customs to sort it out; another year for an indictment. We simply don’t have that kind of time.”