I walked over. Lee saw me coming and did a quick draw, shooting me with finger pistols, his thumbs the hammers. It was a routine he pulled when he was jacked up on Benzedrine.
“You were supposed to meet me. Remember?”
Arclight glow gave Lee’s raw nerved face a blue-white cast. “I said this was priority. Remember that?”
Looking off in the distance, I saw other vacant lots illuminated. “It’s priority for the Bureau, maybe. Just like Junior Nash is priority for us.”
Lee shook his head. “Partner, this is _big_. Horrall and Thad Green were down here a couple of hours ago. Jack Tierney’s been detached to Homicide to run the investigation, with Russ Millard backstopping. You want my opinion?”
“Shoot.”
“It’s a showcase. A nice white girl gets snuffed, the Department goes all out to get the killer to show the voters that passing the bond issue got them a bulldog police force.”
“Maybe she wasn’t such a nice girl. Maybe that old lady that Nash killed was somebody’s loving granny. Maybe you’re taking this thing too personal, and maybe we let the Bureau handle it and get back to our job before Junior kills somebody else.”
Lee balled his fists. “You got any other maybes?”
I stepped forward. “Maybe you’re afraid of Bobby De Witt getting out. Maybe you’re too proud to ask me for help to scare him away from the woman we both care for. Maybe we let the Bureau chalk up that dead girl for Laurie Blanchard.”
Lee uncoiled his fists and turned away: I watched him rock on his heels, hoping he’d be fighting mad or wisecracking or anything but hurt when I finally saw his face. _I_ made fists, then shouted: “Talk to me, goddamnit! We’re partners! We killed four fucking men together, now you pull this shit on me!”
Lee turned around. He flashed his patented demon grin, but it came off nervous and sad, used up. His voice was raspy, stretched thin.
“I used to watchdog Laurie when she played. I was a scrapper, and all the other kids were afraid of me. I had a lot of girlfriends–you know, kiddie romance stuff. The girls used to tease me about Laurie, go on about how much time I spent with her, like she was my real sweetheart.
“See, I doted on her. She was pretty and she was a trouper.
“Dad used to talk about getting Laurie ballet lessons and piano lessons and singing lessons. I was gonna work goon squad at Firestone Tire like him, and Laurie was gonna be an artiste. It was just talk, but I was a kid, and it was real to me.
“Anyway, right around the time she disappeared, Dad was talking up this lesson stuff a lot, and it made me mad at Laurie. I started ditching her when she went to play after school. There was this wild girl who’d moved into the neighborhood. She was a roundheels, and she used to get tanked on bathtub and put out for all the boys. I was dicking her when Laurie got snatched, when I should have been protecting my sister.”
I reached for my partner’s arm to tell him I understood; Lee pushed my hand away. “Don’t tell me you understand, because I’ll tell you what makes it bad. Laurie got snuffed. Some degenerate strangled her or chopped her up. And when she died, I was thinking ugly things about her. About how I hated her because Dad thought she was a princess and I was a thug. I pictured my own sister cut up like that stiff this morning, and I laughed about it while I was with that floozy, screwing her and drinking her father’s booze.”
Lee took a deep breath and pointed to the ground a few yards away. A separate, inside perimeter had been staked, the two halves of the body marked in quicklime. I stared at the outline of the spread legs; Lee said, “I’m gonna get him. With you or without you, I’m gonna get him.”
I dredged up a ghost of a smile. “See you at the Hall tomorrow.”
“With you or without you.”
I said, “I heard you,” and walked back to my car. Hitting the ignition, I saw another empty lot a block to the north light up.