Cunningham, mostly.”
“Burke Cunningham? Guy who defends all the killers?”
“Alleged killers,” I said.
“Figured you’d say that. Anybody else?”
“I freelance. People hire me on the side.”
“Cunningham knows about those jobs?”
“Sure. Recommends people sometimes.”
“Why do you freelance? Cunningham doesn’t pay enough?”
“I have more than one ex-wife and two sons I pay a considerable sum in child support for. Happily pay, I might add. Mind explaining what all this has to do with anything?”
“Talked to the officer who took the report earlier,” Fielding said, ignoring me. “Nothing missing from your house?”
“That’s right.”
“But this time they took a laptop?”
“That’s right,” I said again.
“But not your wallet.”
“Apparently not.”
“Any idea why they didn’t take the computer the first time?”
“It was in my van,” I said. “Forgot I’d left it there. I was retrieving it after the break-in.”
“Lucky for you.”
“Lucky?”
“Lucky it was in the van. At least the first time they came by.”
“That’s assuming it was the same people.”
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
“I don’t know. There was only one guy in the alley. Gal next door saw two leave my house.”
“Only one guy that you saw.”
“I put up a little bit of a fight,” I said. “I’m thinking a second guy would have jumped in to help.”
“Waiting in a getaway car?” Fielding suggested.
“He wasn’t dressed the same way.”
“The same way?”
“This guy was in all dark clothes. The other guys were wearing gray sweatshirts.”
“OK, same gang, third guy. You said it sounded like he knew who you were.”
“Everybody knows who I am. The first nurse in here gave me a look like I kill puppies in my spare time.”
“Do you?” said the nurse working on my shoulder.
“Only if their eyes aren’t open yet,” I said. “I’m sure he recognized me. You did, didn’t you?”
“Anything important on the laptop,” Fielding said, ignoring me again.
“Important enough,” I said carefully. “Files, documents. The usual.”
Fielding said, “I’m just wondering. A break-in, nothing taken. Pretty rare, in my book. An hour later, you’re jumped and he leaves your wallet but grabs the one valuable thing that wasn’t in the house earlier. Leaves a pretty nice video camera, too.”
“OK.”
“Just seems odd, is all.” He waited. I didn’t say anything. Problem was, I agreed with him.
I was starting to wonder whether it was time to come clean about Pete Freeley and Jennifer Rawlings when the nurse who’d been torturing my shoulder interrupted.
“Gotta take your pulse,” she said.
“It’s sixty-eight,” I said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I’ve got a resting pulse of sixty-eight.”
“Thank you, Dr. Kildare,” she said as she placed a small plastic clamp on the pointer finger on my left hand. That’s when I noticed.
“My ring,” I said.
Fielding said, “What?”
I raised my hand. The nurse told me in no uncertain terms not to.
“My ring. Big Ten champions.”
“I remember,” Fielding said.
“Me too,” I said. “It’s missing.”
“When’s the last time you saw it?”
“When the other officer asked me about it two hours ago. After the break-in.”
“He didn’t have it when he came in,” the nurse concurred. “And your pulse is 69.”
“Must be nervous,” I said.
Fielding wrote some things in his notebook. He said: “Laptop, Big Ten ring.”
“I got mugged,” I offered.
“Or someone made it look like a mugging.”
“Are you always like this?” I said.
“Like what.”
“So conspiratorial.”
“Only with gridiron heroes,” he said, but without the slightest trace of humor in his voice.
“In that case, you’ve got the wrong guy.”
Grant is not much more than a mile from my house, and I thought briefly about walking after Fielding was done and I’d politely told Nurse Ratched I wouldn’t be accepting the hospital’s invitation to spend the night for observation, whatever that means. The pounding in my head dissuaded me from attempting the journey, along with the stab of pain in my side and the fact that my knee couldn’t bend. I thought about calling a cab, but I was tired of strangers for the night. I considered asking Burke, but it didn’t seem worth getting him out of bed, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to explain about the laptop.
In the end I called Roy. He showed up about twenty minutes later in his battered white van with “Church of the Holy Apostolic Fire” emblazoned across the side. He had a backseat passenger, as was often the case. A woman looking as if she’d seen not just better days but better decades.
“Jesus,” he said, looking at me. “You look worse than people I saw in Fallujah.”
“Says the guy who left part of a leg there,” I said, climbing slowly into the passenger seat.
“Had a spare,” he said. “No big deal. Theresa,” he said,
