At End of Day by George V. Higgins Read Free Book Online Page A

that they need. They’re still at their desks because they hadda close look at their older friends, retired; saw how miserable they were; figured out in
their
jobs, nobody could kick them out or drag ’em out. So they didn’t leave.
    “And those wives who were so keen on their husbands getting through—they don’t like their men retiring either, once they’ve tried it for a while. That’s why you see so many stories in the paper all the time, letters, all these women writing in—husbands, sick, retired, always underfoot. In the way all the time, giving orders; trying to run everything around the house—which the women always ran before any way they liked because the boys were off at work. And then the other women writing in, tell them to stop complaining—least their husbands’re
alive
, get in their way and take them ballroom dancing and give them a little cuddle now and then—don’t hear much about that nasty sex stuff, though, except now and then there will be one, speaks for all the rest of them—‘Thank God
that’s
over with,’ and the day the old goat comes home with any of that Viagra stuff’s the day she’s out the door—because the women who’re now writing in to tell them to shut up, their husbands’re dead, and if they knew then? They’d be lightin’ the big candles in the sanctuary every single blessed day.
    “Caroline’s the light of my life and the mother of my childen and I’ll always love her dearly, but I’m putting retirement off aslong as I possibly can. I know what it’s gonna be like—I am not lookin’ forward to it. Even now, still years away, every so often I catch her warming up the engine when she thinks I’m not lookin’, payin’ attention, gettin’ ready, run my life soon’s I turn in the badge. Suppose it hasta come someday, but I’m not lookin’ forward to it. Could also be the day I start to see the end of my marriage comin’.”
    Except on ceremonial occasions, Detective Lieutenant Inspector James Dowd of the Special Investigations Bureau, Massachusetts State Police had been wearing plain clothes on the job for nineteen years. Arriving a few minutes late meeting Naughton for one of their very occasional lunches at the Terrace, on Soldier Field Road between Harvard Stadium on the Boston side of the Charles River, he thanked Eileen, the hostess, for showing him to Naughton’s table. “Never would’ve recognized him, all decked out like this.”
    “Wouldn’t recognize myself,” Naughton said, trying to smile and not managing very well.
    “You get used to it,” Dowd said, sliding into the other bench in the booth. “Only time I’m in full pack now’s when I have to go into a building where they’ve got someone freshly dead who was real important. Usually don’t mind it—disliked him enough alive, verifying that he’s dead makes it all worthwhile.
    “Eileen, since at least in theory I’m on a day off from a case driving me nuts, I do believe I’ll have a Guinness. You’re not on the clock ’til eight, right, Emmett? Interest you in one?”
    “Oh, might as well,” Naughton said, pushing his iced tea aside. Eileen nodded, smiled and said, “Ettie’ll be right with you,” and put two menus on the table as she went away. Dowd took one for himself and slid the other one in front of Naughton. Soon a dark-haired waitress in her early forties, her good looks in her mind seriously marred by an overbite thatcould have been corrected easily thirty years or so before, brought their pints of dark-brown Guinness with the café-aulait-colored heads of foam and set them on the table. “Hullo, Ettie,” Dowd said, picking his glass up at once. “How’re all belongin’ to yah?”
    “Fine, thank you, James,” she said, working a smile around the teeth and making a small curtsey. “And those in your own household—well too?”
    “No complaints, except with me,” Dowd said. “And those no more’n the usual, I’m very glad to say.”
    She nodded.