The subject of these ruminations looked slyly off into the distance, scratched the wattles below his chin, then shifted his bloodshot gaze back to Dees. ‘Claire didn’t say nothing about no cab or limbo, but he did say something else.’
‘That so?’
‘Yep,’ Ezra said. He unzipped a pocket of his grease-stained coverall, removed a pack of Chesterfields, lit one up, and coughed a dismal old man’s cough. He looked at Dees through the drifting smoke with an expression of half-baked craftiness. ‘Might not mean nothing, but then again, it might. It sure struck Claire perculyer, though. Must have, because most of the time old Claire wouldn’t say shit if he had a mouthful.’
‘What was it he said?’
‘Don’t quite remember,’ Ezra said. ‘Sometimes, you know, when I forget things, a picture of Alexander Hamilton sorta refreshes my memory.’
‘How about one of Abe Lincoln?’ Dees asked dryly.
After a moment’s consideration — a short one — Hannon agreed that sometimes Lincoln also did the trick, and a portrait of this gentleman consequently passed from Dees’s wallet to Ezra’s slightly palsied hand. Dees thought that a portrait of George Washington might have turned the trick, but he wanted to make sure the man was entirely on his side . . . and besides, it all came out of the expense account.
‘So give.’
‘Claire said the guy looked like he must be goin to one hell of a fancy party,’ Ezra said.
‘Oh? Why was that?’ Dees was thinking he should have stuck with Washington after all.
‘Said the guy looked like he just stepped out of a bandbox. Tuxedo, silk tie, all that stuff.’ Ezra paused. ‘Claire said the guy was even wearin a big cloak. Red as a fire engine inside, black as a woodchuck’s asshole outside. Said when it spread out behind him, it looked like a goddam bat’s wing.’
A large word lit in red neon suddenly flashed on in Dees’s mind, and the word was BINGO.
You don’t know it, my gin-soaked friend, Dees thought, but you may have just said the words that are going to make you famous.
‘All these questions about Claire,’ Ezra said, ‘and you ain’t never once ast if I saw anything funny.’
‘Did you?’
‘As a matter of fact, I did.’
‘What was that, my friend?’
Ezra scratched his stubbly chin with long, yellow nails, looked wisely at Dees from the corners of his bloodshot eyes, and then took another puff on his cigarette.
‘Here we go again,’ Dees said, but he produced another picture of Abe Lincoln and was careful to keep his voice and face amiable. His instincts were wide awake now, and they were telling him that Mr Ginhead wasn’t quite squeezed dry. Not yet, anyway.
‘That don’t seem like enough for all I’m tellin you,’ Ezra said reproachfully. ‘Rich city fella like you ought to be able to do better’n ten bucks.’
Dees looked at his watch — a heavy Rolex with diamonds gleaming on the face. ‘Gosh!’ he said. ‘Look how late it’s getting! And I haven’t even been over to talk with the Falmouth police yet!’
Before he could do more than start to get up, the five had disappeared from between his fingers and had joined its mate in the pocket of Hannon’s coverall.
‘All right, if you’ve got something else to tell, tell it,’ Dees said. The amiability was gone now.
‘I’ve got places to go and people to see.’
The mechanic thought it over, scratching his wattles and sending out little puffs of ancient, cheesy smell. Then he said, almost reluctantly: ‘Seen a big pile of dirt under that Skymaster.
Right under the luggage bay, it was.’
‘That so?’
‘Ayuh. Kicked it with my boot.’
Dees waited. He could do that.
‘Nasty stuff. Full of worms.’
Dees waited. This was good, useful stuff, but he didn’t think the old man was wrung completely dry even yet.
‘And maggots,’ Ezra said. ‘There was maggots, too. Like where something died.’
Dees stayed that night at the Sea Breeze Motel, and was winging his way to the town of Alderton in upstate New York by eight o’clock the next morning.
5
Of all the things Dees didn’t understand about his quarry’s movements, the thing which puzzled him the most was how leisurely the Flier had been. In Maine and in Maryland, he had actually lingered before killing. His only one-night stand had been in Alderton which he had visited two weeks after doing Claire Bowie.