Free Limitless by Alan Glynn Page B

table and picked up the brown paper bag. He opened it and took out the items inside – the two coffees, the muffin, the Canadian bacon, the condiments – and laid them out along the table in a line, like the fragments of a skeleton displayed in a forensics laboratory.
    ‘So, how well did you know this … Vernon Gant?’ he asked.
    ‘I saw him yesterday for the first time in ten years. Bumped into him in the street.’
    ‘Bumped into him in the street,’ he said, nodding his head and staring at me.
    ‘And what line of work was he in?’
    ‘I don’t know. He used to collect and deal furniture when I knew him.’
    ‘Oh,’ Foley said, ‘so he was a dealer ?’
    ‘I—’
    ‘What were you doing up here in the first place?’
    ‘Well …’ I cleared my throat at this point, ‘… like I said, I ran into him yesterday and we decided to meet up – you know, chew over old times.’
    Foley looked around. ‘Chew over old times,’ he said, ‘chew over old times.’ He obviously had the habit of repeating lines like this, under his breath, half to himself, as though he were mulling them over, but it was clear that his real intention was to question their credibility, and to undermine the confidence of whoever he was speaking to at the time.
    ‘Yes,’ I said, letting my irritation show, ‘chew over old times. Anything wrong with that?’
    Foley shrugged his shoulders.
    I had the uneasy feeling that he was going to circle around mefor a while, pick holes in my story, and then try to extract a confession of some kind. But as he spoke, and fired more questions at me, I noticed that he’d begun eyeing the coffee and the wrapped-up muffin on the table, as though all he wanted or cared about in the world was to sit down and have some breakfast, and maybe read the funny papers.
    ‘What about family, next of kin?’ he said, ‘you have anything on that?’
    I told him about Melissa, and how I’d phoned and left a message on her answering machine.
    He paused and looked at me. ‘You left a message ?’
    ‘Yes.’
    He actually did mull this one over for a moment and then said, ‘The sensitive type, huh?’
    I didn’t respond, although I certainly wanted to – wanted to hit him. But at the same time I could see his point. Even from the remove of a mere thirty or forty minutes, what I’d done by leaving that message now seemed truly awful. I shook my head and turned away towards the window. The news itself was bad enough, obviously – but how much worse was it going to be for her hearing it from me , and on an answering machine? I sighed in frustration, and noticed that I was still shaking a little.
    I eventually looked back at Foley, expecting some more questions, but there weren’t any. He had taken the plastic lid from the regular coffee and was opening the foil wrapper on the toasted English muffin. He shrugged his shoulders again and threw me a look that said, What can I tell you? I’m hungry .
    *
    After another twenty minutes or so, I was led out of the apartment and taken in a car to the local precinct to make an official statement . No one spoke to me on the way, and with different thoughts vying for space in my mind, I paid very little attention to my immediate surroundings. When I next had to speak I was in a large, busy office, sitting across a desk from another overweight detective with an Irish name.
    Brogan.
    He went over the same ground as Foley had, asked the same questions and showed about as much interest in the answers. I then had to sit on a wooden bench for about half an hour while the statement was being typed up and printed out. There was a lot of activity in the room, all sorts of people coming and going, and I found it hard to think.
    I was eventually called back over to Brogan’s desk and asked to read and sign the statement. As I went through it, he sat in silence, playing with a paper clip. Just before I got to the end of it, his telephone rang and he answered it with a yeah . He paused