Small Town

“Do you believe me now?”



Oh, yes. Billy, I miss you.



“I miss you, too, my darling.”



I wish you could come home with me.



“Soon,” he said. He looked at her, took in her gentle smile, breathed in her scent. “You’re wearing Woodhue,” he said.



She smiled, delighted. Yes, do you remember? I always wore it. It seems to agree with me again. Isn’t that funny?



“I’ll buy you some for your birthday.”



Oh, Billy. That would be very nice.



“Carole,” he said, “do you see the children?” Oh, yes. They miss you, too.



“And you’re all right? All of you?”



We’re all fine, Billy. Everybody’s fine.



He had a million questions to ask her and couldn’t think of a single one.



I wish you could come with me, Billy.



“I have something I have to do, my darling.” Oh, I know. Men always have their work, and it’s important that they do it.



He’d done his work for years, and had it been so important?



Any of it?



“I’ll be done soon,” he said. “A matter of days.” I have to go now, Billy.



“Don’t go,” he said. “Not quite yet. Stay a few more minutes, Carole.”



But she was fading, disappearing even as he looked at her. He watched her fade away to nothing, and felt her energy dissipate.



The scent of her perfume lingered in the cabin for a time, after every other trace of her was gone.



thirty-four



THE DOORMAN’S NAMEwas Viktor, and his English pronun-ciation was careful and deliberate. Yes, Peter Shevlin lived in the building, and it had been a while since he’d seen him. But he understood one of the other men checked his apartment, and everything was all right.



“I think maybe he goes away for vacation,” Viktor said.



“That’s possible,” Buckram allowed. “I understand one of the tenants was asking about him. A woman, I believe her name is McGann.”



“I don’t know this name,” Viktor said, and asked him to spell it.



He looked at the list of tenants, moved his forefinger down the page as he scanned the names, looked up, shook his head.



Buckram took the list from him, checking for first names. No Kates, but one Katherine, a Mrs. Mabee. If Kate McGann had kept her husband’s name after the divorce, and if it had been Mabee, well, then there she was. A definite Mabee, he thought, and grinned.



“Mrs. Mabee,” he said. “Was she asking about Mr. Shevlin?”



“She does not ask me. This woman asks.” And he pointed to Mazarin, Mrs. Helen. “Every day she asks. You want I call her?”



“Let me start with Mrs. Mabee,” he said.



K A T E M A B E E , N É E M C G A N N , was a small woman, barely over five feet tall. The first thing she did, even before she asked to see some identification, was tell him she used to be taller. “I’m shrinking,”



she said indignantly. “I’m down three or four inches already, and it’s not like I’ve got them to spare. I swear it’s not fair. I got a sister-in-law, I should say an ex-sister-in-law, but I stayed friends with her after I threw him out. You would say she’s statuesque. Three years older than me, and she hasn’t lost an inch. She can still pick apples off the trees.”



“While all you can do,” he said, “is charm the birds out of them.”



“Oh, Jesus, an Irishman,” she said. “Now that I’ve let you in the door, why don’t you show me something that says you’re you?” He showed her some membership cards—the Detectives’ Endowment Association, the International Narcotics Enforcement Officers Association, the National Association of Police Chiefs. And his driver’s license, with his picture on it.



“I know who you are,” she said. “You were the commissioner.”



“For a few years, yes.”



“And now you want to ask me about Peter Shevlin? Jesus, what has he done? If he took money and ran, I hope it was at least a million. Less than that and it’s not worth it, is what my father used to say.”



“My father said the same thing.”



“I suppose it’s too early to offer you a drink?” He said it was, but she should feel free to have one herself. Oh, but it was hours too early for her, she said with a laugh. A small drink before dinner, she said, was her limit, and she’d give that up soon if she kept on shrinking. Not that the two were related, it was calcium fleeing from her bones that caused her to shrink, but the shorter she got the quicker the drink seemed to go to her head, and she was beginning to suspect she’d do better without it.



She was good company, but she didn’t have much to tell him about Peter Shevlin, just that he seemed to have gone missing and that her friend, Helen Mazarin, was up in arms about it. She’d been to the police, and once they’d established that she was no kin of Shevlin’s, that she was not even his lady friend (“though that’s not to say she wouldn’t like to be”), that a search of the apartment had shown no signs of foul play, or of Shevlin himself, and that he was not suffering from Alzheimer’s disease or any other form of senile dementia, they told her there was nothing they could do. It was a free country, they told her, and a man could pick up and go away for a while if he got the urge.



She went back a second time, explaining about his boat, the Nancy Dee, how sometimes it was there and sometimes it was not.



It was a different policeman she talked to the second time, and he agreed to take a statement and file a missing persons report, but she had the feeling he just did it to get rid of her.



“You know about the boat? How it’s there one minute and gone the next?”



Like so many things, he thought, but he said yes, he’d heard about the boat.



“You should talk to her yourself. Helen Mazarin, she’s got a good heart, but I’m afraid she’s a bit more interested in Peter than he is in her, though I’d not be the one to tell her as much. She’s right here in the building, you know, and just two flights up, so you can take the stairs if you don’t feel like waiting for the elevator. Would you like me to call her and tell her you’re coming?” H E L E N M A Z A R I N W A S A strawberry blonde, though he had the feeling she hadn’t started out that way. Time had thickened her at the waist and widened her hips, but she remained an attractive woman for her years, and the way she sized him up confirmed that she had not lost interest in the game.



I’m too young for you, he thought. At the very least, you need a man old enough to grow pubic hair.



She took him into her kitchen, sat him down at a table with an enameled tin top not unlike the one in his own mother’s kitchen, and poured him a cup of coffee. “I’m glad they’re taking this seriously,” she said. “I got the impression the officer I spoke with was going to throw my report in the trash the minute I walked out of there, but here you are.”



He explained that he was a retired policeman, that this was an unofficial inquiry. “A friend of Mrs. Mabee’s thought I could help,” he said, and she nodded, impatient to begin, not really caring whose ear she had as long as she could pour her story into it.



There wasn’t much he hadn’t already heard. Peter Shevlin had disappeared, or perhaps more accurately he had ceased to appear.



And it wasn’t like him to go off like that without a word to anyone, not that he was a man given to a great deal of conversation, but to walk off and not come back? It had been a couple of weeks now since she had seen him last, and she ordinarily saw him every few days.



And the boat, that was the great mystery. How he loved that boat! The Nancy Dee, that was its name, named for his wife, a lovely woman, Nancy Delia Shevlin, and what a cruel lingering death she’d had. She’d gone to the Boat Basin, thinking he might be there, and the boat was gone. And she’d gone another time, and it was back in its slip, and yes, she was quite certain it was his boat, for didn’t it have the name painted on it for anyone to see?



The Nancy Dee, and it came and went, yet she never saw it actually coming in or going out. In fact the last several times she’d gone it had been there, with no signs of activity aboard, but she swore it had been gone on at least two occasions that she’d seen with her own eyes.



Maybe he’d left on an unannounced vacation, he suggested, and gave the use of the boat to a friend. But no, she was sure this wasn’t the case, and he’d realize as much if he knew Peter at all, because the man was very possessive about that boat. She’d hinted a time or two that she wouldn’t mind keeping him company on a cruise of the harbor, and one time she’d more than hinted, she’d outright asked, and he’d merely smiled and changed the subject.



He’d made it quite clear that the Nancy Dee was for himself and himself alone, and if he wouldn’t even allow a friend aboard for an hour, how likely was it that he’d turn the boat over to a stranger to use in his absence?



He said, “The policeman you talked to, the one who took your statement and filed a report. Do you happen to remember his name?”



She’d written it down, she said, and went off to look for it. He was beginning to wonder why this had seemed like a good idea when he woke up this morning. Because it didn’t seem that remarkable to him that Shevlin (or anyone else) would just as soon not welcome Helen Mazarin at the dock and pipe her aboard. Nor did it seem out of the ordinary that the man, probably driven half mad by Mazarin on a daily basis, had slipped out of town without letting her know about it.



For this he’d gotten up early, put on a suit and tie and, for the first time in longer than he could recall, included a shoulder holster in which his service revolver, a .38-caliber five-shot Smith & Wesson, had long reposed. The cops all carried more powerful guns, .45 and 9-mm autos, a necessary response to the heavier weaponry that the bad guys had. He’d signed the order allowing the change but had never upgraded himself, because what did the commissioner really need with a gun in the first place? So why not stick with the one he was used to?



He’d felt silly donning the holster, sufficiently so that he took it off and returned it to the drawer where he kept it. He locked the drawer, put the key in another drawer, put his jacket back on, and was out the door before he changed his mind once again and went back for the gun after all. He hadn’t been able to shake the odd feeling that he was going to need it.



While he was at it, he grabbed his cell phone. He never bothered to carry it, never got calls on it because he’d never given out the number. But it would be handy if he needed to make a call. It saved you the trouble of finding a pay phone that worked.



It made more sense than the gun, anyway. Weighed a lot less, and he was more likely to use it.



He had a Kevlar vest, too, and had made a big thing about that, as part of a campaign to get cops to wear them all the time, not only when they expected to be shot at. Because how often did a cop expect to be the target of hostile gunfire? If you actually expected it, you’d stay home and call in sick. But it was a funny thing, the bullets were just as deadly whether or not you saw them coming, so he insisted his cops wear their vests while on duty. Not all of them did, of course, but he made a point of setting a good example, at least if there was likely to be an opportunity to display it to the news cameras.