Small Town

He explained that he was calling on behalf of neighbors of Peter Shevlin, trying to find out what had become of the man.

“I believe he’s ill,” she said. “He failed to come in one day and didn’t call, which is very unlike Peter, and later that same day I had a call from either a cousin or brother of his, I don’t remember which.”

“Saying that he was ill.”

“Yes, and I got the impression that it was serious, the sort of thing one doesn’t recover quickly from.” She paused, then said, “If at all.”

“I see.”

“I was shocked,” she said, “because Peter had been perfectly fine the day before, though he’s not a young man, and I guess things can happen suddenly. But the brother rang off before I could ask him how we could reach Peter. We’d have sent flowers, of course, and called to find out more about his condition.”

“And you never heard anything further.”

“Not yet, no. I’ve been hoping the brother would call back, but so far he hasn’t.”

He told her he’d let her know if he learned anything, and gave her his own number in case she found out more before he did. After he’d rung off he still realized he had no idea what sort of business Fitzmaurice & Liebold carried on, or what Peter Shevlin did there.

Whatever it was, he had a feeling he wouldn’t be doing it anymore.

First, though, he spent the better part of an hour on the phone, doing what he should have thought to do yesterday. He called area hospitals, trying to find one that had Peter Shevlin for a patient. He didn’t think Shevlin was in a hospital, didn’t think he was alive, but he had to make the calls to rule out the possibility.

Hadn’t the Carpenter done this before? In Brooklyn, in Boerum Hill. Hadn’t he called Evelyn Crispin’s office, said she’d been called out of town?

So that no one would come looking for her.

So that he could live in her apartment, water her plants, feed her goddamn cat. Live there in perfect comfort, at least until the smell got too bad and drove him out.

He might have moved on by now. Might have holed up on Shevlin’s houseboat for a few days or a week. But he’d have killed Shevlin somewhere else, not on the boat, so he wouldn’t have the same problem he’d had with Crispin.

Unless his visit yesterday had spooked him somehow, in which case he was in the wind. So long, see you later.

But he didn’t think so. He’d had a feeling about this one right from the start, from the minute Susan started telling him an apparently pointless story about someone neither of them knew. Right away he’d thought of the Carpenter. That was the only thing he thought of, the only thing that could have made him take even a cursory interest in the business, let alone get off his ass and get involved.

Something occurred to him, and he went looking for the photocopies Herdig had made for him at the Two-Oh. He read Shevlin’s description — height, weight, age, complexion, color of hair, color of eyes.

At seventy-two, Peter Shevlin was ten years older than the Carpenter, but everything else was pretty much on target. If you put the two men in a lineup they probably looked entirely different, but that was the point; you could put them in a lineup, because they were close enough in physical type.

Close enough to fool the big galoot with the black beard? Popeye’s worst nightmare?

Yeah, maybe.

If he’d been working the case with a partner they’d toss ideas back and forth, batting them around, throwing verbal spaghetti on the wall to see what stuck. He was running a solitaire version of the same game, tossing his own ideas in the air and taking a swing at them.

Maybe he needed a partner. Maybe he should call Galvin, let him try for another brass ring.

Maybe he should call whoever was heading up the Carpenter task force. Odds were good it was someone he knew, and a hundred percent certain it was someone who knew him.

And if the Carpenter was hanging out, keeping an eye on things?

No way they could infiltrate an area like the Boat Basin in force without making their presence obvious. If he was on the boat, well, fine, they’d have him sewn up tight. But if he wasn’t?

And if he had never been there in the first place, if Peter Shevlin was having a hot time with somebody else’s wife and didn’t want the world to know about it, then what? And wouldn’t the word get around that a certain former police commissioner was just a little bit past it?

You couldn’t go in without backup, he thought. Not unless you were out of your mind. Not even if you were out of your mind.

But you could take a look first. You could do that much. Hang out, sneak a peek, make sure the wild goose was there for the chasing. You could do that, couldn’t you?

He took his cell phone, his holstered .38. Found a set of handcuffs, dropped them in a jacket pocket. And, feeling a little foolish, and wishing the day were cooler, he stripped to the waist and dressed again, this time with the Kevlar vest underneath his shirt.

thirty-eight

The Nancy Dee was still in its slip.