It was a few minutes after one. On the door of his small street-front office was a plastic clock face with adjustable hands and the words BE BACK AT. The clock was set at one. I looked around, saw no one making a run for the door to beat the deadline and decided to wait for him anyway. I had nowhere else to go.
I walked down the market on Fleet, bought a Coke and went back to my car. From the driver’s seat I could see the door to Bledsoe’s office. I watched it for twenty minutes until I saw a man with jet-black hair, a middle-age paunch peeking through his jacket and a slight limp walk up, unlock the door and go in. I got out with my computer satchel and headed for him.
Bledsoe’s office looked as though it had once been a doctor’s office, though I could not figure out why a doctor would have hung a shingle out in this working district. There was a little entry room with a sliding window and counter behind which I imagined a receptionist at one time sat. The window, glazed like a shower door, was closed. I had heard a buzz when I had opened the door but no one responded to it. I stood there a few moments looking around. There was an old couch and a coffee table. Not much room for anything else. A variety of magazines were fanned across the table, none of them fresher than six months old. I was about to call out a hello or knock on the door to the inner sanctum when I heard a toilet flush somewhere on the other side of the sliding window. Then I saw a blurred figure move behind the glass and the door to the left opened.
The man with the black hair stood there. I noticed now that he had a mustache as thin as a freeway on a map traveling over his lip.
“Yes, can I help you?”
“Daniel Bledsoe?”
“That’s right.”
“My name’s Jack McEvoy. I’d like to ask you about John McCafferty. I think we both might be able to help each other.”
“John McCafferty was a long time ago.”
He was eyeing the computer satchel.
“It’s just a computer,” I said. “Can we sit down someplace?”
“Uh, sure. Why not?”
I followed through the door and down a short hallway that had three more doors lined along the right side. He opened the first one and we stepped into an office of cheap faux maple paneling. His state license was framed on the wall as well as some photos from his days as a cop. The whole thing seemed about as cheesy as his mustache but I was determined to play it out. The thing I know about cops, and I guessed that it extended to former cops, was that looks were deceiving. I knew some in Colorado who would still be wearing pale blue polyester leisure suits if they made them anymore. But nevertheless they were some of the best and brightest and toughest of their departments. I suspected it was that way with Bledsoe. He took a seat behind a desk with a black Formica top. It had been a poor choice when he’d bought it at the secondhand office furniture store. I could plainly see the dust buildup on the shiny surface. I sat across from Bledsoe in the only other chair. He accurately registered my impressions.
“Place used to be an abortion clinic. Guy went away for doing third-trimester jobs. I took it over and don’t care about the dust and looks. I get a lot of my work over the phone, selling policies to cops. And I usually go to clients, the ones that want an investigation. They don’t come to me. The people that do come here usually just leave flowers out by the door. Memorials, I guess. I figure they must be working off old phone books or something. Why don’t you tell me what you’re looking for here.”
I told him about my brother and then about John Brooks in Chicago. I watched his face fill with skepticism as I talked. It told me I was maybe ten seconds from being thrown out the door.
“What is this?” he said. “Who sent you here?”
“Nobody. But it’s my guess that I’m maybe a day or so ahead of the FBI. But they’ll be coming. I just thought you’d maybe talk to me first. I know what it’s like, you see. My brother and me, we were twins. I’ve always heard that longtime partners, especially on homicide, became like brothers. Like twins.”
I held up for a few moments. I had played everything but my ace and I had to wait for the right moment. Bledsoe seemed to cool down a little. His anger was maybe giving way to confusion.
“So what do you want from me?”
“The note. I want to know what McCafferty said in the note.”
“There was no note. I never said there was a note.”
“But his wife said there was.”
“Then go talk to her.”
“No, I think I’d rather talk to you. Let me tell you something. The doer on these cases somehow gets the victims to write out a line or two as a suicide note. I don’t know how he does it or why they oblige him, but they do. And every time the line is from a poem. A poem by the same writer. Edgar Allan Poe.”
I reached down to my computer satchel and unzipped it. I pulled out the thick book of Poe’s works. I put it on the desk so that he could see it.
“I think your partner was murdered. You came in and it looked like a suicide because that was how it was supposed to look. That note you destroyed, I’d bet you your partner’s pension that it’s a line from a poem that’s in that book.”
Bledsoe looked from me to the book and then back at me again.
“You apparently thought you owed him enough to risk your job to make his widow’s life a little easier.”
“Yeah, look what it got me. A piece-of-shit office with a piece-of-shit license on the wall. I sit in a room where they used to cut babies out of women. It’s not very noble.”
“Look, everybody on the force knew there was something noble about what you did, else you wouldn’t be selling any insurance. You did what you did for your partner. You should follow through, now.”
Bledsoe turned his head and looked at one of the photos on the wall. It was him and another man, arms around each other’s neck, smiling with abandon. It looked like it had been taken in a bar somewhere during the good days.
“ ‘The fever called living is conquered at last,’ ” he said, without looking away from the photo.
I slapped my hand down on the book. The sound scared us both.
“Got it,” I said and picked up the book. I had bent the pages of the poems where the killer’s quotes had been taken. I found the page with the poem “For Annie” on it, scanned until I knew I was right, then put the book on the desk and turned it so he could read it.
“First stanza,” I said.
Bledsoe leaned over to read the poem.
Thank Heaven! the crisis—
The danger is past,
And the lingering illness
Is over at last—
And the fever called “Living”
Is conquered at last.
19
As I hurried through the lobby of the Hilton at four, I envisioned Greg Glenn slowly making his way out from behind his desk and heading toward the daily news meeting in the metro conference room. I needed to talk to him and I knew that if I didn’t snag him first he’d be holed up in that meeting and the weekend meeting that followed for the next two hours.
As I approached the elevators I saw a woman stepping through the open doors of the one available car and quickly followed her in. She had already pushed the 12 button. I moved to the rear of the car and checked my watch again. I thought I was going to make it. The editors’ meetings never seemed to get off on time.