“No?” Gerry said. “You saw the body, did you?”

“No.”

He sipped from the shot glass. “I did. I caught the squeal. Me and Brett Hardiman.”

“Alec Hardiman’s father.”

He nodded. “My partner.” He leaned forward and poured some vodka into my shot glass. “Brett died in eighty.”

I looked at my shot glass, nudged it six inches away from me as Gerry refilled his own.

Gerry caught me at it, smiled. “You’re not like your father, Patrick.”

“Thanks for the compliment.”

He chuckled softly. “You look like him, though. A dead ringer. You must know that.”

I shrugged.

He turned his wrists upward, looked down at them for a moment. “Blood’s a strange thing.”

“How’s that?”

“It’s passed into a woman’s womb, creates a life. Could be near identical to the parent who created it, could be so different the father starts suspecting the mailman delivered more than the mail. You got your father’s blood, I got my father’s, Alec Hardiman had his father’s in him.”

“And his father was…?”

“A good man.” He nodded more to himself than to me and took a sip from his glass. “A fine, fine man actually. Moral. Decent. So, so, so smart. If no one told you, you’d have never guessed he was a cop. You’d have taken him for a minister or a banker. He dressed impeccably, spoke impeccably, did everything…impeccably. He had a simple white colonial house in Melrose and a sweet, kind wife and a beautiful, blond son, and you’d swear you could eat lunch off the seat of his car.”

I sipped my beer as the second TV gave way to Old Glory followed by a blue screen and noticed that it was now The Chieftains’ “Coast of Malabar” on the jukebox.

“So he’s this perfect guy with this perfect life. Perfect wife, perfect car, perfect house, perfect son.” He peered at his thumbnail. Then he looked at me and his soft eyes were slightly unhinged, as if they’d stared too long at the sun and were just regaining a sense of the shapes and colors before them. “Then Alec, I dunno, something went in him. It just…went. No psychiatrist could ever explain it. One day he was this normal, regular kid, and the next…” He held up his hands. “The next, I don’t know.”

“And he killed Cal Morrison?”

“We don’t know that,” he said and his voice was thick.

He couldn’t look at me for some reason. His face had grown ruddy and the veins in his neck stuck out like cables and he looked at the floor and kicked his heel into the wall of the cooler. “We don’t know that,” he said again.

“Gerry,” I said, “let me in here. Last I knew, Cal Morrison was stabbed in the Blakey by some drifter.”

“Black guy,” he said, the soft grin again playing on his lips. “That was the rumor at the time, wasn’t it?”

I nodded.

“Can’t find someone to blame, blame a jig. Right?”