At one o'clock on Thursday Lou's truck was in the fire lane with the engine running and Lou in it, and he didn't come in.
I saw it from the machine room window, in my wet coveralls, coming off the lunch flood. He didn't get out and stamp his boots. He didn't look at the building. He sat with both hands on the wheel at the top and his hat in his lap, and the exhaust going up behind him in a white rope.
"Your phone's been going all morning," Benny said behind me. He had my coat over his arm. "I put it in your pocket. It went like a dentist's drill. Who's calling you?"
"I don't know."
"I can look."
"No," I said, and I took the coat and went out through the lobby, past the snack bar, not looking at it, and across the fire lane in my rink shoes.
He unlocked the passenger side before I got there. The cab was hot, with the heater on high and the windows fogged at the edges, and it smelled like coffee and a man who hadn't been to bed.
"Shut the door, honey," Lou said.
I shut it. I had eleven missed calls. I could see the number from where I sat, a red circle on the phone in my hand. Three were Kovach. Two were a number from downtown. One was Sorensen. One was Garrett. I didn't look at the rest.
He didn't say anything for a while. He looked out at the lot, where the plows had left the ridge along the curb, and at the roof of the building and the red letters.
"I got a call last night," he said. "After the shanty. I want to tell you before you hear it from somebody who'll say it worse."
"Okay."
"The DA's investigator. Ten o'clock at night, I'm standing at my sink." He moved his hat from one knee to the other. "He wants to know did I take a call on the tip line, Sunday morning, two thousand fourteen. Seven fifty-two. I said I took a lot of calls. He reads it to me off Zielinski's sheet, and I said yes. I took that one."
"His boss," I said. "You said his boss called it in."
"I told you that. I said it in the bleachers." He nodded. "A woman named Dee Pasko. Night cook at Peach Street, ran the line. To a dishwasher, the night cook's the boss. She's the one who called it in, twelve years ago. I took that call, ten seconds, never saw her face. Zielinski did the callback, he's the one wrote her name down. And Wednesday she called the DA herself."
"Dee Pasko," I said.
It wasn't anybody. It was two words.
"Twelve years, not a peep," Lou said. "Then Wednesday."
"Why Wednesday?"
"The paper." He reached down by his boot and came up with a Times-News folded open to the police blotter, and laid it on my knee. It was three lines, between a DUI on Peach and somebody's stolen snowblower. Rudnicki, Garrett, cited for defiant trespass at Glenwood rink, Jan. 29, after leaving the lot with a juvenile. "She told them she saw in the paper he's been at your rink, with your boy. She couldn't hold it."
"Hold what?"
"That he watched the girl," Lou said. "That was her word. He watched her. Your sister came in to the diner, a couple of times a month, with her friends, always the booth by the pie case, and the dishwasher would find a reason to carry bus tubs past it. Dee noticed. She says he asked the waitress her name once. He asked what she ordered."
"Chocolate milk and fries."
"That's what I'm saying." He looked at me. "You tell me how a dishwasher knows what a girl in a booth orders."
I opened my mouth. Everybody in that diner watched your sister. She was loud.
"He said everybody did," I said.
"He would."
"And she just remembered this. Wednesday. Off three lines in the paper."
"She says seeing it shook it loose." Lou rubbed his jaw, the place under it he'd missed with the razor.
"Shook it loose."
"It happens, honey. You wouldn't believe what a face can do. You see somebody you haven't seen in twelve years, you open the paper, and all of a sudden it's two thousand fourteen again."
"Did anybody show her his picture?" I said.
"What?"
"The DA's man. Did he put a picture of him in front of her."
"Honey." He looked genuinely hurt. "She'd seen him on every channel for two weeks. He's been on the news every night."
"Yeah," I said.
I folded the paper back up and put it on the dash. Across the lot a kid in a Squirts hoodie was standing at the lobby glass with his nose against it, looking in at the pretzels.
"Where is she now?" I said.
"DA won't say. Erie someplace. Married, different name, I'd guess." He put his hat on, and took it off. "They protect a witness. They wouldn't give me so much as a phone number, and I'm the one they called to vouch for her."
"Did you? Vouch?"
"I told him the call was real. I told him a woman who calls the tip line at seven fifty-two on a Sunday morning isn't doing it for fun." He heard it as he said it and turned his head. "That's all I told him."
"I know what you told him."
"She was in the DA's office at eight this morning. Sworn, on tape. They announced at eleven."
"Announced what?"
"You haven't heard?" He reached over and turned the radio up, and a man was reading it in the voice they use, flat, like a weather report. The district attorney's office announced this morning that the Commonwealth intended to retry Garrett Rudnicki. The district attorney cited what he described as new information from a witness known to the defendant in the weeks before the murder. A motion to revoke bail was also filed, and a complaint charging the defendant with intimidation of a witness.
Lou shut it off.
"Intimidation," I said.
"That's you. They say he's been leaning on you." He kept his eyes on the lot. "The rink, the note on your truck, the boy in the car. They've got the trespass report from last Thursday. And now they've got her, on tape, saying he was always the kind to watch."
"I got in his car. Nobody made me."
"I know that. Does it sound like that on paper?"
I put my forehead against the cold window. The glass fogged where I breathed. A big yellow plow was going down Thirty-Eighth with its blade up, going nowhere, looking for something.
"There's something else," Lou said. "And I'm going to say it and then you're going to get out and go work." His voice went down. "Bottom of the ninth, I'm sorry, Nellie, but somebody's walked in from the bullpen who we didn't know was warming up. That's all this is. Somebody new. And she throws harder than you."
I took my head off the glass. I looked at him. He was looking at the hat.
I got out.
\ \ \*
Kovach picked up on the first ring this time. She didn't have anything in her mouth.
"I was going to call you," she said. "I was going to call you from the car. I'm on my way over."
"Don't come. I'm at work."
"Then I'll say it quick." I heard a door and her coat. "The DA took a statement from a woman at eight o'clock this morning. I read it at ten. He went around me. Of course he did, he's a man in an election year. I'd have told him that statement's standing on a ten-second phone call from twelve years ago, and the man who took that call is Lou Moynihan, and the man who vouched for it last night is Lou Moynihan. You know who I'd put in front of a jury behind Lou Moynihan? Nobody. But that's not the part you've got to worry about."
"The intimidation."
"The intimidation of a witness. Which is you, hon." She took a breath. "They're saying he's leaning on you. They're using the trespass report from the twenty-ninth and her statement. A judge is going to sign a warrant for his arrest, and not long from now. Maybe tomorrow. I'll find out and I'll tell you."
"He didn't lean on me."
"I know that. I'm telling you what's on paper." A pause, and the crackers. "And Monday. Are you still going in to sign?"
I looked at the lobby wall. The trophy case. The poster about no skates on the carpet.
"Who told you that?"
"His lawyer's got a lot of friends and a loud printer. I figured." She said it kindly. "If you sign a take-back now, the DA says he got to you. It's his whole case, you understand? Right now it's a man who writes you letters and sits next to your kid. If you take it back, it's the man who got what he wanted. You'd be helping them hang him."
"That's not fair."
"I know it's not."
"I'm telling the truth."
"Telling the truth's not what a take-back looks like from across a table. And one more thing, and then I'm going to hang up. Did you see him this week?"
I thought about the Wegmans lot. The binder clip.
"I saw him Tuesday," I said. "He has pictures. In the console of his car. Of the rink lot. About twenty. My truck, and Owen getting in, and Cody's truck, and Benny's, and, I don't know. At night."
There was one second of nothing.
"You looked in his car."
"I put them back."
"Hon." She was in a hallway now, somewhere with an echo. "Okay. Stop. Don't tell me anything else. Don't touch anything of his again. I'll talk to Sorensen." She breathed out through her nose. "Photographs of a witness's child. That's not good, Nell. That is not good for him."
"It's the whole lot. It's not just Owen."
"Say that to a judge," Kovach said, and hung up.
I stood there with the dead phone. I'd said nothing about the card. It hadn't come up. It was three places on a piece of paper, and two of them had a line through them.
\ \ \*
I went to the counter because it was the nearest thing with a light on.
Dolores was at the far end stacking lids, a sleeve of them, small white ones, snapping the top of each one down with the heel of her hand. She didn't stop.
"Coffee," I said.
"Pot's on." She snapped a lid.
The pot sat on the burner behind her, half full, going dark at the bottom. She didn't turn around to it. She snapped another lid.
I hit the glass of the pretzel case with my open hand. It rang. A man at the corner table looked up from his phone, and looked down.
"Dolores. Coffee."
"I heard you." She still didn't look up. "Lids, then coffee. You want it fast, there's a machine in the vestibule."
"I don't want a machine, I want—"
"Your boy's skates are a size small, Dorsey."
She put the sleeve of lids on the shelf and went through the swinging door into the back. I stood at the glass with my palm stinging for the second time that week and looked at six pretzels under the lamp, all of them perfect, nobody's eraser holes in any of them. Nobody poured the coffee.
At ten past four the whistle went. I kept Owen in the sharpening room with Benny and the grinder, and Benny showed him how you can read the angle of a blade by how a spark leaves the wheel, and Owen said it was technically the best place in the whole building and could he stay until the end of the world. I stood at the door of the sharpening room with my arms crossed and watched the end of the lobby through the glass. Cody Hartzell went by with a bucket of pucks. He looked in at us. He lifted his chin.
\ \ \*
It was seven-thirty when Garrett called. I was on the back step of the double with the door shut behind me and my coat over my pajamas, because it was the only place the bathwater didn't carry. Owen was singing in the tub, the carpet-store jingle. He'd learned it off my mother on Wednesday, and he'd gotten the second line wrong, and he was committed to it.
"Nell," Garrett said. "Is it all right that I called?"
"No. They're going to arrest you."
"Yes. I have been told." He said it like he was telling me the time. "Ruth Ann says a judge will sign a warrant, perhaps tomorrow, and that I will be expected to surrender. She says I should. She is right, I think."
"They said you were leaning on me."
"I know what they said."
"You are. You're leaning on me right now. You're calling my house."
"That is also true." He didn't sound hurt. "Detective Kovach spoke with Ruth Ann this afternoon. She asked whether her client owned a camera."
I looked at the yard. It was snow to the fence, and the fence was a gray line, and past it somebody's kitchen light was on.
"I told her," I said. "About the pictures. She asked if I'd seen you, and I wasn't going to lie to her."
"I would have preferred that you had not."
"Then you should've put them somewhere I couldn't find them."
"Yes." A long breath. "I should have."
Inside, the water stopped. Owen shouted my name once, to see if I was there, and I shouted back that I was, and he went on.
"I have not slept at the motel since this morning," Garrett said. "I am not going to tell you where I am. If I am arrested tonight, I do not come out, and then no one goes where I want you to go. I want to ask you for one day. Saturday."
"Saturday what?"
"I will show you. Not the list, not the card. The place. It is not a thing I can tell you on a telephone. It is something you have to stand in front of."
"I can't be seen with you. You heard Lou, you heard the radio. They'll say I'm in it. They'll say you took me there."
"Yes. That is why it has to be Saturday." He said it softly, exactly, as if setting a plate on a table. "There is a man across the road who leaves for his daughter's in Ohio at noon on Saturdays. After noon, there is no one. After noon, there is no one to see us."
"What road?"
"Saturday, Nell."
"I haven't said yes."
"No," he said. "I know you have not."
He hung up without saying goodbye. He never did.
I stayed on the step with the phone against my chest. The kitchen light across the fence went out. Inside, Owen was calling that the water was cold, and I called back to add hot.
Saturday was the seventh of February.