Eight Perfect Murders(32)

It was a place I’d never been, the Marliave, tucked away on a side street near Downtown Crossing. The entrance was a narrow doorway that led to a tile-floored bar that looked more like a French bistro than the type of place an ex-cop would like to drink. Marty Kingship was at the long bar, talking to one of the bartenders. He almost looked surprised when I grabbed the seat next to him, as though he’d forgotten arranging our meeting.

“You came?” he said.

“Sure.”

“What’re you having? I’m having a Miller Lite but Robert here”—he indicated the bartender—“tells me that I have terrible taste.”

I ordered a Hefeweizen. Marty got another beer and ordered some food—escargot, and a plate of meatball sliders.

I have never been good at making friends. Sometimes I blame it on the fact that I am an only child, and that neither of my parents, excepting my father when he was drunk, was particularly sociable. But I think it goes deeper than that, to an inability to make genuine connections with people. The longer I interact with someone, the more distant I begin to feel from them. I can feel an enormous amount of affection for an elderly German tourist who visits my store for ten minutes and buys a used copy of a Simon Brett novel, but whenever I begin to truly get to know people, it’s as though they start to dim, as though they are behind a glass partition that gets thicker and thicker. The more I learn about them, the harder they are to see and hear in any meaningful way. There are exceptions. Claire, for one. My best friend in junior high, Lawrence Thibaud, who moved to somewhere in Brazil at the end of eighth grade. And characters in books, of course. And poets. The more I learn about them, the more I like them.

Marty, when I first met him, was looking for friends, and for a while I tried to fill that role. He’d been a police officer in western Mass but had quit shortly after his kids had left the house and his wife had filed for divorce. He’d moved into a one-bedroom condo near Dudley Square and considered himself semiretired, even though he did do the occasional security work, and even though he was outlining a novel that I was pretty sure he would never write. He was a funny guy. Also, he was much smarter than he looked with his crew cut and his broken nose, and his pear-shaped body; he easily read about five books a week. For a while he’d come into the bookstore near closing time, stock up on new titles, then we’d go somewhere for a drink. He always had a story, or a funny anecdote, and there was never any silence when we were together. At first, it worked, but like most of my relationships, after a time, I felt that wall come up between us. It was as though we’d hit the natural plateau of our friendship, and it was never going to expand. These days, we usually only get together for a drink around Christmastime.

I didn’t know if Marty could help me, but I thought it was worth a try. He’d have the time, and he’d have the resources to find out information about Norman Chaney. It was a risk, but one that I needed to take. Charlie, whoever he was, had wanted Norman Chaney to die. And I also knew that he wanted someone else to do it, which meant that he would have been a suspect in the killing.

At nine I called Marty.

“Hey, stranger,” he said.

“Did I wake you?”

“Nah. Just got out of the shower. Spent about twenty goddamn minutes trying to get the old sliver of soap to stick to my new bar. I must have bought a new brand and they wouldn’t keep together at all. It’s not like one was green and one was brown or something. They were pretty much the same color and they wanted nothing to do with each other. I’m sure that’s why you called, to find out about my shower, right?”

“No, but that was a great story. You got a lot going on in your life, huh?”

“I do, actually. Cindy’s coming and staying here for spring break. I’m not deluded—she’s interested in some guy at BU. But still, something to look forward to.”

Cindy was Marty’s daughter, the only member of the family with whom he still had regular contact.

“That’s good news, Marty. Look, I actually have a favor to ask from you.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“If it’s something you can’t do, or don’t feel right about, just tell me. It’s not going to be a big deal.”

“You want me to kill someone?” he said and laughed.

“No, but I actually do want some information on someone who was killed. Is that something you can do, as an ex-cop?”

“What kind of information?”

“This has to be just between us,” I said. “You can’t tell anyone.”

“Not a problem. You in trouble?”

“No, no,” I said. During the course of the phone conversation, I’d begun to realize that I would need some sort of reason for what I was asking. I quickly decided on a twisted version of the truth. “The FBI got in contact with me over an old homicide case. A man from New Hampshire who was murdered about four years ago. Norman Chaney. C-H-A-N-E-Y. They didn’t tell me everything but, apparently, he had a lot of books from the store, and they think there might be some connection.”

“What kind of connection?”

“They wouldn’t tell me, exactly. I just . . . I’m feeling thrown by this whole thing, and I was wondering if you could look into it for me, find out something about this guy. I feel like maybe they’re not telling me the whole story, that it might have something to do with Claire, or something.”