The Road To Ruin

24

BUDDY SAID, “I hate to say this, but we aren’t getting anywhere.”

Ace looked up, his hands full of jockstraps. “How can you say that? We’re in the guy’s house, aren’t we?”

“Breaking and entering,” Buddy said, and shook his head. “We never broke any laws before.”

“Stalking,” Mac suggested.

Buddy rejected that at once, “Whadaya mean, stalking? We’re just observing our former boss’s habit patterns, that’s all, nothing wrong with that. But this jock here—”

Ace dumped the jockstraps back into the dresser drawer and slammed it with his hip.

“—he isn’t a boss of ours,” Buddy went on, “he’s nothing to do with us except Monroe Hall’s a customer of his. What we’re doing here, Mac, is breaking and entering, and it’s against the law, and you know it.”

“To tell you the truth, Buddy,” Mac said, “that part doesn’t bother me so much. What bothers me so much, we aren’t getting anywhere.”

Ace had another bureau drawer open. “We’re learning a lot about this guy,” he insisted, holding up a neatly rolled Ace bandage.

“What does it do for us?” Ace wanted to know. “We broke in here, into the guy’s house, three times now, and we’re using information and equipment we got from a cop cousin in New Jersey that’s an ACWFFA supporter—”

“Great guy,” Ace announced. “Best cop I ever met.”

“But,” Mac said, “he took a big chance with his own career, and for what? We keep searching the guy’s house; nothing. We searched his car; nothing. Not even room for three of us to hide in it, by the way.”

“Well, maybe,” Buddy said.

Mac kept to his own thought. “We made a copy of his address book and followed up on everybody he knows and they’re all clients or doctors or other health freaks. We found nothing to help us, and all we’re doing is spinning our wheels, and God knows what those Harvard boys are doing, but they aren’t standing around not getting anywhere like us.”

“You notice,” Ace said, “they haven’t been in touch.”

“And we,” Mac said, “haven’t been in touch with them. Probably for the same reason.”

Alarmed, Buddy said, “You think they’re up to something?”

“Of course they’re up to something,” Mac said. “So are we. Why wouldn’t they be up to something?” Looking at his watch, he said, “We gotta get outa here. And I don’t see any reason to break in here again.”

“Jeez …” Ace said, looking around the bedroom, once again restored by them to neatness.

“Forget it, Ace,” Mac advised him. “We just aren’t going to find any stuff in here we can use for blackmail.”

Looking hurt, Ace said, “That’s a nasty word, Mac.”

Riding over that, Mac said, “No child pornography, no bigamy, no double identity, not even any overdue library books. Alphonse Morriscone is a Boy Scout, and I say we leave him alone from now on. Come on.”

As they walked toward the rear door, their usual route through Morriscone’s house, Buddy said, “I hate to invade this guy as much as you do, Mac, but what the heck else are we gonna do?”

“There’s other things go in and outa that compound,” Mac said. “The oil truck makes deliveries.”

Ace said, “If you think I’m gonna hold my breath in an oil truck for forty minutes, you’re crazy.”

Mac shook his head and opened the back door. “That’s not what I’m saying. Be sure it’s locked, Buddy.”

“Right.”

“So what are you saying?” Ace demanded, as he followed Mac out to the small neat back porch while Buddy made sure the kitchen door was locked. From here it was a simple walk across a lawn flanked by privacy fencing in rough wood verticals—if Morriscone did nude sunbathing out here, he didn’t take pictures of the fact—and through the hedge at the back to the unoccupied house on the next block with the FOR SALE sign out front. The way it was set up, they could get in and out of Alphonse Morriscone’s home unseen any time they wanted. The only problem was, there was no reason to want to.

As they walked from Morriscone’s house around the for-sale house and down the street to where they’d parked the Taurus, Mac said, “It isn’t just oil deliveries. They get food to that house, they send their dry cleaning out.”

Buddy said, “You’ve watched their procedures, Mac. All those delivery trucks get completely searched by those rent-a-cops at the gate. Boy Scout Morriscone is the only one who just drives in.”

Ace said, “Well, there’s some employees. Staffers.”

“No use to us,” Mac said.

“And the wife does, too,” Ace said.

They looked at him. Buddy said, “Now you wanna kidnap the wife? The three of us go into the estate hidden in one of those little dinky cars she drives?”

“I could hide under her skirt,” Ace offered with a big grin around at everybody, which fell away when he saw they didn’t think that was funny.

Morosely, Mac said, “Maybe we oughta try to find the Harvards.”

•

“Look at those capering apes,” Os said, binoculars to his eyes.

“You probably mean Ace,” Mark said, since he didn’t have binoculars to his eyes. “He’s the worst of them.”

“God,” Os said. “Not only proles, but useless.”

“I think it’s our friend Morriscone who’s useless.” Mark suggested. “We could find nothing in his background that we could use against the man, and by now, after three B and Es, it’s becoming quite clear our friends in the labor movement haven’t found anything in his foreground, either.”

“Time is going by,” Os said.

Across the way, the trio were getting into their Taurus. Watching them through the naked eye, Mark said, “We have to use those people. Somehow use them. Use them somehow.”

“Good,” Os said.