I saw his fist coming a half second too late. I swerved, and he missed my jaw, but the blow socked my right shoulder. I kicked him on the shin and went for his solar plexus, but water suddenly poured over my head, my eyes, my mouth, and I was choking: Hazel had turned the hose on us, spraying her husband as thoroughly as she was me. Alito and I backed away from each other, breathing hard. I stared at him for a long second, then turned abruptly and opened the door to the kitchen.

“You can’t go through the house, you’re all wet,” Hazel observed in her unemotional nasal voice.

I followed her off the deck without looking again at her husband. She pointed me toward a narrow path that separated her house from the one next door. As I walked up the lane to my car, I could see curtains twitch at windows along the way. If I had to live with Larry Alito, I wouldn’t fill the house with china kittens. I’d have a large collection of axes.

17 - THE FRIENDLY MAN FROM MOUNTAIN HAWK

17

THE FRIENDLY MAN FROM MOUNTAIN HAWK

GOING HOME, I DROVE EAST ALL THE WAY TO THE BIG LAKE before starting south. I stayed on the local roads. It made for a longer trip, with all the stoplights in the little towns, but the breeze off Lake Michigan was cool, and it was easier to think without the congestion and impatience that clogged the tollway.

Partway down the coastal road, I stopped to walk over to the lake. The water was a purply gray in the summer twilight; I could see running lights away from the shore, but I was alone on the beach. Crickets and frogs chirped around me.

Alito hadn’t been surprised to see me. Who had warned him? I didn’t want to think it was Bobby. That opened the door on a kind of ugly possibility that I couldn’t bear to examine: my father’s best friend in league with a drunk, abusive cop.

Maybe Arnie Coleman had called after seeing me at the Krumas fundraiser. I tried to remember what I’d said when we were sparring at the Krumas table. It was Petra who blurted out that I was working on a case going back to Gage Park in the sixties. And I had mentioned Johnny Merton. If the Sawyer trial lay heavy on Coleman’s conscience, he could have connected the dots, although I had a hard time imagining anything lying heavy on my old boss’s conscience.

The other thing that this afternoon’s interview showed was that Alito knew Lamont Gadsden’s name. Had Lamont been his snitch, then, after all? Had Merton killed Lamont to punish him for fingering Sawyer? The Hammer was capable of anything. Murder was all in a day’s work for him.