Free Hangman: A Novel by Stephan Talty Page B

its cheeks pockmarked with old acne craters, the nose sharp and red. His eyes were blue and sly, his hair was thecolor of old carrots. Dyed, Abbie thought. His potbelly was under control, but it strained the green knit sweater he was wearing. He had a gold chain around his neck and on it was a miniature gold badge.
    Her heartbeat dropped down and she nodded. At first glance, McGonagle looked like a bookie or a boxing promoter or a “friend” who comes to ask you when you’re going to have the third installment of that money you got from the local loan shark. There were two kinds of detectives when it came to clothes. There were those like her father who dressed like English squires, who took their first big paycheck when they moved up from patrol and went to the best store in town and ordered brown leather shoes that shone like mirrors, Irish walking hats, checked wool pants, and white oxford shirts, ties with a floral pattern or maybe a conservative stripe. Who had a certain mental image of the detective as the prince of the department and dressed to match it. Maybe guys like her father wanted to put as much distance between themselves and the perps on the street, to emphasize that they represented Society with a capital S, so they dressed like what they imagined the gentry to be. Upper-class swells with a dash of boulevard style.
    That was her dad. Dressed to the nines to go see a dead bouncer rotting in an alley down near Chippewa.
    Something twinged in Abbie’s chest. She’d forgotten for just a second that her dad was dead. It happened to her once or twice a day. She caught her breath; it was like a rib had shifted and brushed her heart.
    Then there were the other kind, those like McGonagle, who dressed closer to the men they chased. Who wore leather and gold chains and black, always black. They wanted people to know they were associated with the hard men in the city. A whiff of danger and uncertainty. They
wanted
you to look at them and not know for a tantalizing second or two which side they were on, whether you were about to be greeted with a gruff “Buffalo PD” or smacked in the mouth. Men like McGonagle enjoyed blurring the lines. They were comfortable with evil. Maybe they even saw the humor in the chase, or the futility.
    Both types could go bad. She wouldn’t judge him. Yet.
    “Yeah?” A deep, gruff voice.
    “I’m Abbie Kearney from the PD.”
    The voice came reluctantly, each word parsed, heavy. “I know who you are. I want you to know that I respected your father greatly. I didn’t get a chance to tell you that at the funeral.”
    She didn’t want to think about her father or the funeral now, but a surge of warmth pressed through her heart. The County was at its finest when it was mourning, seemingly the only time it was permissible for the Irish to express actual emotion. The elaborate bouquets in the shape of a harp (from the Irish-born) or a shamrock (from those who thought that’s what the Irish liked) from people he’d given a break to twenty years before, the burly men taking her hand and pulling her in for an embrace, sobbing while they stroked her hair, the matronly women with voices too choked by emotion to speak. The filmy eyes of old widows whose walks he’d shoveled or whose sons he’d gotten plea-bargained for bashing some guy’s head in …
    If they knew anything, the Irish knew grief.
    “Thank you,” she said.
    “That’s the only reason I’m talking to you.”
    Ah, that’s the County I know, thought Abbie. She said, “I thought the fact that there’s a serial killer on the run might be a motivator, too.”
    “I won’t joke about that fucking cockroach,” McGonagle rasped. “You have to catch him.”
    “There are probably two thousand people actively looking for him right now. We’ll get him.”
    “Not unless they get very lucky.”
    Abbie sat on the stool next to McGonagle. “Why do you say that?”
    “Because I tracked him. And he was the most careful