Clean Slate

Chapter 23

But oh well, Mac thought. What was his alternative? Shrug and move on? The mere thought of doing that made him feel nauseous.

To Abigail he said, briskly: "I guess what we need to do is talk to as many people as we can find who knew him. See if we can get a handle on who he might have pissed off enough to want him dead."

"Wouldn't be too hard, would it?" Abigail wondered. "He can't have had that large a social circle."

"Not hardly." Mac considered. "To start with, it would help if I knew the name of the lawn service he was working for, when he got nailed this last time."

"Not in the file?"

"No. Just never came up. And I know he didn't mention it."

"Okay. So," she said brightly. "Just what do we know about him?"

Mac propped his sneaker on the edge of the desk and leaned back in his chair. "Well," he said slowly, "I know a lot. Question is, is any of it helpful." He thought. "He was married years ago to a woman named Angela Gladwin. They lived in the, uh, eighteen hundred block of Bluemound. But she moved away."

"Okay."

"He did two stretches in Harbor Light rehab, one in ninety-five and the other in ninety-eight. Counselor both times was a guy named Abram Wiener. Don't know if Eddie's still in contact with him. I could call and ask."

"You could."

Mac sighed. "What else. Skimpy stuff, just rags and tags. Of course he was in the Army. Two tours in Vietnam. Then a stretch in the reserve. His C.O. was Lieutenant Dodds, a real idiot. He drove a Sportster as a kid, still liked to hang out with the bikers over at Pleasant Park on weekends. He said he had a girlfriend. He mentioned her several times, just this past week, but no idea of the name." Mac, in his own zone, became aware that Abigail was staring at him. "What?"

"All that stuff," she fumbled. "All those details. How do you remember all that?"

Mac grinned. "Oh, Eddie and I have been interacting a long time."

She was shaking her head. "You've had hundreds of offenders. How do you remember all this about him?"

Mac dropped his foot to the floor, folded his arms. Okay, he thought. I don't like to get personal with co-workers, and I sure as hell don't like to toot my own horn. But Abigail had asked an honest question, and deserved a straight answer. "Well," he said, "I sort of have a photographic memory."

"Really," she said, eyes measuring him.

"It's not. . .it's only for stuff I read. If I read something, I pretty much can picture it in my mind later, like I'm looking at it again. It just shows up in my brain."

"Wow," she said. "What a great skill to have. Especially for college."

"Yeah, it helped."

Abigail smiled. "Well. I'm impressed. You don't even really need to take notes or look at files or anything."

"Problem is," Mac said, "a lot of my file-reading here is skimming, and I don't retain a lot of that so well. That's why I'm coming up so dry on Eddie." Just then, a slide snapped into place in his mental vision. He smiled. "There is one other thing. The scrap yard he worked for. Where he got his hand mangled. I & M Iron and Metal, over on Conant."

"Good," she nodded.

"Yeah. He was there a long time, off and on. Maybe there's somebody there still knows him. Point me in some direction. Give me," he added drily, "entree into his world." Mac rose. "Can you keep busy for a couple of hours?"

"Oh sure," she said, rising also, smoothing her blazer. "I've got two meetings before lunch. After that I'm in the field. Employer visits."

"Okay," Mac said. "I'll check back in with you. I'll probably finish the pre-sentencings tonight at home."

"What I can do," she offered, "is some drafting, this afternoon. Email them to you. Okay?"

Mac grinned. "What a terrific offer. I accept. Thanks."

"You're welcome," she said primly, and strolled through the archway into her office.

Mac sat back down at his computer, organized some files, and emailed them to his home address. He was clear for appointments, and had Abigail covering his backside; he was free to go out and see what he could dig up on Eddie. He felt self-conscious, in part. He really had nothing to go on, nothing but his instinct. And nothing but the smile on Eddie's face as he stood at Mac's office door and said "I'll be back."

Just not right, Mac thought, for the man to vanish forever, with questions unanswered.

And speaking of not right: while Mac wrapped up his desk work, he observed Garry Overbye, Abigail's errant ex, in her office through the archway. Their talk was brief, low, tense, unintelligible. From Abigail's tone, Mac inferred she was determinedly telling Garry to get lost. As it happened, Mac headed out just as Garry stormed down the hall. Mac caught up with him in the DPP waiting room. As they emerged into the broad marble corridor, Mac, without planning it, and certainly against his better judgment, glanced at the shorter, curly haired man and said, quietly: "Do not come back."

"What?" Overbye retorted, fixing Mac with a glare. "Who the hell are you?"

"I," Mac said, "am the one telling you, once again: Do not come back."

"Fuck you," Overbye said jauntily, honestly amused, as if an insect had given him the finger. "I go where I want."

"Not any more," Mac said, leaving Overbye behind as he took the stairs two at a time to the ground floor.

---

The scrap yard owner, Mel Hooyberg, invited Mac into his small cluttered office. Outside the big window, crane booms swivelled and rotated in the sky, and various machines roared, severing and crunching and compressing various types of scrap metal. Hooyberg, a hefty little guy in open-necked shirt and khaki pants and not one, but two cell phones, was friendly enough, with a wide-open face and alert eyes and a smear of hair across his dome of head. A certain shiftiness of eye Mac determined was actually Mel's efforts to keep an eye on the big scale outside as huge trucks paraded across, bellowing diesel.

"Eddie was a good guy," Mel said. "I mean, as yard rats go. Good worker, when he was sober."

"That was always his problem," Mac nodded.

"Loyalty here works both ways," Mel said. "When he got hurt, he hung in with us, and we hung in with him." Mel shook his head. "I can't believe he's dead."

"I'm trying to get a line," Mac said, "on his current friends, associates, and so on."

Mel squinted. "I don't know. He's been gone a while."

"He worked for a lawn service later," Mac said.

"Oh, I wouldn't know where he worked after he left here," Mel said.

"He told me he had a girlfriend," Mac pressed. "Know anything about that?"

"No, no, no," Mel murmured. "Nothing about a girlfriend. Frankly, I don't remember off hand who his running buddies were. If he had any in the yard here." His squint faded abruptly, and he nodded. "He was pretty good pals with one of my metal traders. Jed Tweddle. They drank together. And maybe more than that, who knows."

"Jed around?"

"Oh hell no. I canned him a couple years ago." Mel shook his head. "He's supposed to be a salesman. Salesmen are supposed to stay out on the road. Instead he tended to hang around here, chatting up my scale girls. Who needs that shit."

"Tweddle," Mac repeated. "Where is he now, do you know?"

Mel laughed. "Heard he's selling boats. Supposably. One of those outfits over by the Bend."

---

Just east of downtown, the Sabbath River curved sharply and widened, creating the alcove known as Sawyer Bend. There were, by Mac's count, eleven boat dealers scattered among the marinas and commercial docks in the Bend. What could have been a lengthy exercise ended quickly when the first dealership Mac inquired of pointed him at Mareo Watercraft, where, they said, Jed Tweddle worked. "Everybody knows Jed," she said, and smirked.

Mac found him at a picnic bench on the deck outside the small Mareo office. Three narrow wood docks jutted out into the river. About half their slips held powerboats and cabin cruisers of a wild assortment of colors and configurations. The deck, the sidewalk, and the rippling cobalt blue river water teemed with terns and other waterfowl, wheeling and diving. Less busy was Tweddle himself. Inert, in fact, better described him, as he stared out at the river from beneath the bill of his blue #3 hat, soft white hands folded in front of him on the table. A long awkward moment of silence, during which Tweddle seemed unaware of his arrival, passed. Then Mac asked, "Got a minute?"

Tweddle started and looked up at Mac. "Oh sure," he said, voice reedy. Tweddle was of older middle age, Mac judged. Well fed, quiet, very pale, his round flat face a little jowly, and unaccustomed to expressing anything but the mildest of emotions. He wore a riotous yellow and red Hawaiian shirt over canvas shorts and white slip-on deck shoes. Big rings bedecked his fingers, and an ashtray jammed with straight-end cigarette butts sat as if for shelter between his pale hands. "Just got in a thirty-six-foot Eliminator Daytona," he said, as if in answer to a question. "Only 96 hours on her. Sweet."

"That's nice," Mac said dutifully, and seated himself at the picnic bench opposite Tweddle. "I'm Mac McGladrey. I work over at the Court House. And --"

"I paid it," Tweddle said, blinking.

"Excuse me?"

"I mailed the check the other day. You must have gotten it by now."

"No no no," Mac said. "This is about something else. A guy you used to know. Eddie Fant."

Tweddle blinked, and then smiled, showing tiny even teeth. "Eddie," he mused.

"Yeah. What can you tell me about him?"

"The Daytona, just so you know, goes two and a quarter," Tweddle informed him.

"A bit out of my range," Mac answered. "Do you remember Eddie?"

"Oh, sure. Torchman at the yard."

"When'd you last see him?"

Tweddle's large soft face screwed up with the effort of thinking. "I don't know, six months ago."

"What was his girlfriend's name? Do you remember?"

"Vaguely," Tweddle said vaguely. "Martha, I think."

Big help. Mac tried a different tack. "Where was Eddie working?"

"I got him a gig tending bar," Tweddle said.

Mac recalled nothing about this. "Where?"

"Third Base. Over on Lex."

"Okay."

Tweddle leaned closer to Mac, grinning. "I've got a line on a twenty-two-foot Donzi? The Z22? Probably more like your price range. Seventeen five."

"Not today, thanks," Mac said, and got to his feet. "Anything else you can tell me about Eddie?"

"Good guy," Tweddle said, shaking a cigarette out of his pack. "Super helpful guy. I'd take prospects over to the bar there, and order gin-and-tonics for myself. But Eddie knew to only put Sprite in my glass." He laughed. "Prospect thought I was getting drunk with him, but I stayed sober! How about that!"

---

The Third Base ("Your Last Stop Before Home") occupied the ground floor of a high narrow wood building on Lexington, the main cracked-concrete thoroughfare in the St. Marys neighborhood known, for some reason, as Watertown. Its origins as a German Catholic community were evident in the dark-brick church, St. Hugo the Worker, that shot its twin spires into the blue late-morning sky, attended by a school, rectory, cemetery, and shrine to the unborn – occupying most of a city block. The Third Base, opposite, anchored a row of homes and small shops, clustered close and bustling with traffic on wheel and foot. Mac pushed his way inside and took a stool at the gleaming mahogany bar, noting, with some amusement, a man who, at the sight of him, moved rather quickly out the back door.

It was not lunch time yet but the place was already half full. Windowless, the saloon had that lost-in-time look. The jukebox played Alabama, and from the aroma, someone had thrown up in there recently. Menus, headed "The Hot Corner," scattered the bar, but from what sat in front of most of the customers, Mac could see that this place was more about drinking than eating.

The barkeep, a tall angular woman with short dark hair combed over and back, moseyed over. "You're not out of our substation," she observed, not unkindly.

"Actually," Mac said, "I hang my hat at the Court House. Got a diet handy?"

"Somewhere," she grinned, and pulled it for him. She was in her fifties, and had lived much, some parts better than others. She wore a loose orange blouse and comfortable blue pants and bits of inexpensive jewelry on wrists, digits, and lobes. "Sure threw a scare into Clayton," she noted. "You hardly ever see him move so fast. Clean forgot to pay his bill, imagine that."

"Want me to run him down and stomp your dough out of him?"

"You'd do that for me?"

"You know us government folk," Mac replied. "Eager to serve."

"Oh," she said lazily, "thanks awfully. But I'm not worried. Soon as the coast is clear, he'll slink back." She eyed him. "So. Is this a business visit, or were you lured here all the way from downtown by word-of-mouth praise for our noon cuisine?"

Mac grinned. "Actually, a ground round and onion rings would go down real nice just about now."

"You paying?" she asked archly. "Or are we to deem this yet another contribution to the powers that be?"

"What do you think?"

She studied him, then nodded. "I'll be damned." Stepping over to the kitchen, she called back the order, then returned.

"Why I'm here," Mac said, "is to ask about a man named Eddie Fant. I hear he worked here."

"Yes he did," she said. A customer at the bar, a couple places up, coughed. "Well," the woman amended, Eddie was employed here for a time." The customer coughed again. The woman sighed. "All right. He occupied space here from time to time, and we paid him. How much actual work he did for his pay, that's whole other discussion. I'm Eileen, by the way."

"Mac." They shook. "How well did you know Eddie?"

"Well enough," she said sardonically. "He's one of a long line of not-quite-Harvard-MBA types we've employed here."

"As it happens," Mac said, watchful as he delivered the deliberate words, "he's dead."

She hardly blinked. "Really. That's too bad. Not all that surprising. Drunk driving?"

"No. Crushed by a runaway truck."

"Oooh, shit. Shit." She winced, sighed, looked away for a moment, shaking her head. "Wouldn't have wished anything like that on him." Another customer hove to, and with dispatch Eileen handled his shell order. "What's your interest?"

"I was his PO," Mac said. "There's some loose ends to clean up. I'm trying to track down his girlfriend."

"Can't help you," Eileen said. "I remember him talking about her. Never saw her in here. Never heard her name. Frankly," she said, unnecessarily lowering her voice, "I kind of wondered if she really existed. I mean, Eddie was not, you know, all that hot, if you know what I mean."

"For everybody," Mac said easily, "there is somebody."

She laughed. "Speak for yourself. I done used up all my somebodies."

"No you haven't."

"Really?" She drew back. "Promise? Cross your heart?"

Mac laughed, but was thinking: No, Eileen, I can't promise. For how would I know? Who do I have? Suzanne? Right. "Well," he said, "anybody else you can point me at? Who might know more about Eddie?"

She was nodding. "I was just going to say, there's this guy Leon. Driver for, whoever," she said, snapping fingers repeatedly, "you know, the limo service works out of the airport? What's their name?"

"Metro Wheels," grunted the customer two stools down.

"That's right," Eileen said. "Leon, his name was. He's a regular. There was something about, he was getting Eddie a job out there. They were pretty chummy."

"Leon," Mac repeated. "Metro Wheels. Okay."