Redemption Street by Reed Farrel Coleman Page B

working on her fourth beer since my arrival—about other kids she had known in school and what had become of them. I took the opportunity to slow my own alcohol intake and try to refocus. No matter how appealing a suspect Robby Higgins might appear to be, I had to guard against latching on too hard. An old detective I knew at the 60th had warned me not to fall too deeply in love with any one suspect. “Love blinds you in both eyes,” he said. “And pressure to make a case dulls a cop’s vision enough to begin with.”
    Eventually, I steered Molly’s ramblings around to the subject of Councilman Richard Hammerling. If the tipsy Molly was even half accurate, the Hammerling she described sounded like a cartoon cutout of a small-town politico. He was a publicity hound, fighting hard to get as much media attention as he could. It seemed he was a believer in that old adage about there being no such thing as bad publicity. To hear Molly tell it, old Dick Hammerling was never afraid to look silly as long as they spelled his name right.
    “You know that stupid groundhog they have in Pennsylvania every year?” Molly slurred.
    “Sure.”
    “Well, Dick came up with Beaver Day. Beaver’s the state animal, you know?”
    “No,” I confessed. “In Brooklyn you sorta grow up assuming pigeons are the state animal.”
    “Anyhows, Dick is always the guy who yanks Old Rotterdam Rodney the beaver out of his hutch or den or whatever beavers live in, and shows him his shadow. It drew a lot of coverage for a few years, but just lately only the Catskill Trib and the local radio station send reporters.”
    “But Hammerling shows up nonetheless, huh?”
    “Yessiree. Hey, Moe, how do you know if a beaver sees his shadow?”
    “How?”
    “You ask him!”
    Molly thought this hysterically funny and laughed so hard she began choking. Sam Gutterman she wasn’t. When Molly got done catching her breath and drying her eyes, she continued detailing Hammerling’s career. Not only was he a publicity whore, but apparently he was power-hungry as well, always trying to wrangle the chairmanship on as many committees as he could get appointed to.
    “I think he wants to be governor someday,” Molly opined. “He does a bad job of hiding that.”
    He had a lot of other egomaniacs on line ahead of him. When I expressed a version of this sentiment to Molly she disagreed.
    “I guess Dick’s got his faults like everyone else, but his trying to reopen the Fir Grove business ain’t winning him too many friends in these parts.”
    “It’s gotten him a lot of press, hasn’t it?”
    “Maybe so,” she granted, “but it cuts against the grain around here. The fire’s the worst thing ever happened in this town. The whole place went to hell in a handbasket after that. People don’t like it being dragged up again. It’s a part of the past I think we’d all prefer stay buried.”
    As she had earlier, Molly started off on a tangent. This time I was treated to the details of Richard Hammerling’s other foibles. Unfortunately, none of this stuff was either pertinent or particularly interesting. I passed the time watching a bald-headed guy playing darts in the corner. I think maybe his hairline reminded me of the strange guy I’d seen pass by the front window of the hardware store earlier in the day. In any case, I decided to interrupt Molly’s version of the life and times of Richard Hammerling before I began to twitch.
    “Molly, let me ask you ask you a strange question.”
    “How strange?”
    I described the man in the threadbare coat and waited for Molly to delve into the vast minutiae of his life, including his birth weight. However, for the first time all evening, Molly was speechless. She excused herself to go to the ladies’ room. When she got back, she went to the bar to buy a pack of smokes. Then she bummed a few bucks off me and took the better part of a fortnight selecting tunes on the box that had already been played five times. Clearly,