Yesterday's News

that’s his business.”
    “No question you knew Coyne was seeing Jane Rust before he died, right?”
    “We told you that, Bunny and me.”
    “So you did. About the same time you couldn’t quite remember Gail Fearey’s name. And address.” Duckie darkened. “That’s right.”
    “Funny thing about that. She remembers you pretty clearly.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Yeah. She said she used to go with you, and she’s lived in the house there for a long time, used to belong to her parents.”
    “So?”
    “So I’m wondering why the failure of memory from a guy who seems to have everything else pretty straight.”
    Teevens played with his glass, making the little circles again. “Supposing I don’t feel like talking about that?”
    “Feel like listening?”
    He shrugged.
    I said, “You remember pretty well what Gail Fearey looked like some time ago, before she got hooked up with Coyne. I’m thinking that her going for him bothered the hell out of you. Duckie Teevens was trying to make something of himself. The wrong way, maybe, but at least you were going forward. Charlie Coyne was a bum, and you knew it, and it burned you that she couldn’t see it.”
    Duckie spoke to his whiskey. “She could see it.”
    “She just couldn’t do anything about it.”
    “That’s right. Charlie had that, I gotta admit. He had the magic somehow. I never could see it, but the broads sure did.”
    “I’m wondering why your boss would have hired old Charlie.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Well, it’s pretty clear Gotbaum looks on you like a son.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Yeah, which makes it odd to me that he’d hire Charlie who cut you out from a girl you liked.” Teevens emptied his glass and tapped it on the table top. Sherry came over immediately.
    She said, “You want another, Duckie?”
    “That’s what I want.”
    “Kinda early, ain’t it?”
    “Another.”
    “You got it.”
    Teevens waited till the second drink arrived, though he didn’t take any of it. After Sherry went back to the insurance crowd, he said to me, “I asked the boss to put Charlie on.”
    “Why?”
    “Because Charlie was living with Gail, and she was raising his kid, and they needed the money. And sure as shit nobody else was gonna go out of their way to recruit the guy.”
    “Charlie was delivering the porn tapes, right?”
    “I told you, I don’t know nothing about that.”
    “You’re in the business of showing films, Duckie. Dirty pictures. Only it’s a dying trade, like Bunny told me. ‘The VCR’s, they’re wiping me out,’ he said. But you still want to move into the business. Only one way that works. You don’t have the resources to open a legitimate chain of video stores, and the ones already out there offer most of the kinds of movies you’d have anyway. Except the forbidden fruit, right?”
    “You’re fulla shit.”
    “The kiddie stuff, Duckie. Maybe snuff or fake snuff films, too. The kinds of things the suburban fathers can’t quite ask the wife to pick up on the way home from school with the kids.”
    He downed half the second drink.
    “Only to move that kind of stuff, you have to be careful, selective, even secretive. So Charlie Coyne is the mule, carrying the stuff around, customer to customer or maybe club to club. Is that how it works, Duckie? The guys get together in a club to sort of pool their capital and swap their favorites?”
    Teevens took a deep breath, then let it out and spoke low and quietly. “The fuck do you know about it?”
    “Only that I see you with a pretty strong motive for killing Charlie. He gets caught in the net with the wrong kind of movies, and he gets intimate with the wrong kind of reporter, a crusader who thinks she can use him to bring down businesses like yours through her newspaper, bring down the future you’ve put in ten years to inherit.”
    “Twelve years. I been with the boss twelve years.”
    I didn’t say anything.
    He said, “The way you figure it, the same guy who killed Charlie killed the reporter girl, right?”
    “Right. And then ripped the hell out of Gail Fearey’s place looking for something.”
    “What?”
    “The night Charlie was stabbed, somebody ransacked Gail’s house, took a knife to most of the furniture. Looking for something.”
    “I didn’t know about that.”
    “You didn’t.”
    “Not about the searching there, no.”
    “But you were here the night Charlie was killed in the alley.”
    “I was here. I told you that.”
    “Where were you