Kurtz knew what she was talking abouthis wino mentor, Pruno, had given him a long reading list for his years in Attica and Edward O. Wilson had been on the list for year sixbut he wasn't going to show her he understood the comment. He gave Rigby the flattest gaze he was capable of and said, "I draped O'Toole over my back like a shield. She's a hefty woman. She would have stopped a twenty-two slug at that range."
"Well, she did," said Rigby. She stood. "If you regain any more memory, Joe, phone it in."
She walked out through the southwest door of Broadway Market.
His phone rang as he was driving the Pinto back to Chippewa Street.
"Errand is all done," came Angelina Farino Ferrara's voice.
"Thanks."
"Fuck thanks," said the female acting-don. "You owe me, Kurtz."
"No. Consider us even when I give you the down payment back, and spend the fifteen wisely. Go buy a new bra for your Boxster."
"I sold the Boxster this spring," said Angelina. "Too slow." She disconnected.
The office smelled of coffee and cigarettes. Kurtz had never picked up the habit for the second and felt too queasy to enjoy more of the first.
O'Toole's computer memory had divulged everything under questioningpassword-protected files on her thirty-nine clients, her notes, everything except the password-protected e-mail. Most of what they got was garbage. O'Toole obviously didn't use the company computer for personal stuffthe files were all business.
The files on all the ex-cons, including on Kurtz himself, piled up the usual heap of sad facts and parolee bullshit. Only twenty-one of the thirty-nine were "active clients"i.e., cons who had to drop in weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly to visit their parole officer. None of O'Toole's notes for the last few weeks' visits started with"Client so-and-so threatened to kill me today" In fact the level of banality was stunning. All of these guys were losers, many of them were addicts of one or many things, none of themdespite the veil of O'Toole's cool, professional summariesseemed to show any real signs of wanting to go straight.
And none of them seemed to have a motive for killing his parole officer. (All of O'Toole's clients were male. Perhaps , Kurtz thought, she didn't like ex-cons of the female persuasion.)
Kurtz sighed and rubbed his chin, hearing the stubble there rasp. He'd showered this morningmoving slowly through the haze of pain and queasinessbut he'd decided that the stubble went with the purple and orange raccoon mask and dissolute visage. Besides, it hurt his head to shave.
Arlene had left the office after their meeting this morningon Fridays she usually went to have coffee with her sister-in-law, Gail, often to discuss Sam's daughter, Rachel, for whom Gail now acted as guardian. So Kurtz had the office to himself. He paced back and forth, feeling the heat from the back room filled with humming servers at one end of his pace and the chill from the long bank of windows at the other end. Yesterday had been brisk and beautiful; today was cold and rainy. Tires hissed on Chippewa Street, but there wasn't much traffic before noon.
He kept shuffling the five pages with their thirty-nine names and capsule summaries and considered ruling himself out as a suspect. The honed instincts of a trained professional investigator . No other strategies or conclusions came to mind. Even if he just cut the list to the twenty «active» clients she was seeing weekly or bi-weeklyand there was no logical reason to do that, nor any logical reason to think it was just one of her current clients who did the shooting since it could have been any of the hundreds or thousands who had come beforeit would take Kurtz a week or two to get a door-to-door investigation under way.
But something was gnawing like a rodent at Joe Kurtz's bruised brain. One of the names
He shuffled the pages. There it was. Page three. Yasein Goba, 26, naturalized American citizen of Yemeni descent,
lives in a part of Lackawanna called "back the Bridge," meaning south of the first all-steel bridge in America, in what was now one of the toughest neighborhoods in America. Goba was on parole after serving eighteen months on an armed robbery conviction.
Kurtz tried to remember what his bag lady informer, Mrs. Tuella Dean, had saidrumors about "some crazy Arab down in Lackawanna talking about wanting to shoot someone."
Pretty thin . Actually, Kurtz realized, thin was too grandiloquent a word for this connection. Invisible, maybe.
Kurtz knew that his search for this Yemeni, if he did it, went straight to the heart of the most pressing question in his world right nowIf the odds are that someone was after Peg O'Toole rather than me, why the hell am I looking into that shooting rather than the heroin killer thing ? After all, Toma Gonzaga was going to kill a guy named Joe Kurtz inKurtz glanced at his watchseventy-eight hours, unless Kurtz solved the mobster's little serial killer problem. Kurtz had only met Toma this one time, but he had the strong feeling that the man meant what he said. Also, Kurtz could use one hundred thousand dollars.