Sweetheart Read Free

That’s how we sucker him in.” Thurston moistened his lips as if he had the special spit of a snake. “I’m going to make opera out of this. A big cast of villains. A grand production. You keeping up with me?”
    “You’re going too fast.”
    “I’m thinking big. That’s what you’ve got to do if you ever want my job.” Thurston’s mind raced on. “Who’s Wade? Do you know him?” Blodgett didn’t, and he began to read the cutting again. Thurston said, “Get me a rundown on him. Says there he’s a lieutenant, so he probably took the course at Quantico, which gives us a hook. I want to know all about him. Personal stuff. A complete profile.”
    Blodgett was nonplussed. “Why him?”
    “Because I’ve got a hundred thoughts buzzing in my head right this minute, and that’s the best of them. Get working on it. Blue can help you.”
    Blodgett heaved himself out of the chair and returned the cutting, which bore a damp spot from his thumb. Before he turned to leave, he murmured confidentially, “I suppose the less said to Blue the better.”
    “You suppose right.”
    Thurston dropped back deeply into his swivel chair and stared at two framed photographs on the side wall. One was of Ronald Reagan, and the other, which he peered at the longest, was of himself receiving an award from J. Edgar Hoover a year before the director’s death. He remembered priding himself on looking, a little at least, like Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. He also remembered his awe of Hoover, as if the man were more powerful than God, with dossiers listing everybody’s peccadilloes.
    • • •
    Brother and sister traveled across the state in a chauffeured Cadillac Eldorado to Greenwood Regional Hospital, where they satisfied legal obligations by identifying the bodies of their mother and father. Anthony Gardella had not wanted his sister to make the trip, but she had insisted. In the gleaming basement of the morgue, near the almost soothing drone of a refrigeration unit, she viewed the still and brutalized faces and gagged. She did not cry. The medical examiner led her to a metal chair, which she would not stay in. She rose up and looked enormous. She had on a storm coat and knee boots that would not zip up all the way because of the heft of her calves. “I want to know every injury that was done to them,” she said in a tone that disconcerted the doctor.
    “I don’t know everything yet,” he said delicately.
    Anthony Gardella said, “We know enough.”
    Rita O’Dea raised a fist and clenched it. “You know what I want.” Her face, lacquered with a hard makeup, was, for the moment, fierce. Her brother gave a quick glance at the doctor.
    “Leave us alone,” he said, and the doctor did. The droning in the room seemed to intensify. Gardella, very quietly, said, “Get hold of yourself.”
    “I want to know what you’re doing about this,” Rita O’Dea said in a voice now unsteady. “Let’s discuss it.”
    “Wait till they’re buried.”
    “You should be on it now.”
    “Don’t worry about it.”
    “You don’t do something, I
will
.”
    “You’ll do nothing,” Gardella said evenly. “Everything’s being taken care of.”
    Rita O’Dea fixed her eyes upon him, her concentration intense and almost morbid. She stumbled in place, and her brother swiftly gripped the sleeve of her coat. The doctor returned. There were papers to sign in his office. On the way he said, “If I were you I wouldn’t delay the trip back. It’s starting to snow.”
    The mournful winter sky was already benighted, and the snow fell fast, sticking to the rural road. The headlights picked up a rabbit darting in a jagged direction before the left front wheel killed it in its tracks. In the opulence of the Cadillac, Rita O’Dea pushed her hair back. “I want to drive by the house.”
    “No,” said Gardella. “There’s nothing to see.”
    “There might be some things we want.”
    “There’s nothing we want.”
    “Speak for yourself.”
    “I