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“What makes you think I’d have any idea?” He glanced toward his legs. “Old times are old times.”
“I heard you guys kept in touch. It’s important.”
“Well, you’re wasting your time here, Lieutenant,” he said, suddenly turning formal.
I knew he was lying. “When was the last time you spoke with Coombs?”
“Maybe just after he got out. Could be once or twice since then. He needed some help to get on his feet. I may have lent him a hand.”
“And where was he staying,” Jacobi cut in, “while you were lending him this hand?”
Keating shook his head. “Some hotel down on Eddy or O’Farrell. Wasn’t the St. Francis,” he said.
“And you haven’t spoken with him since?” My eyes flicked toward Helen Keating.
“What do you want with the man, anyway?” Keating snapped. “He’s paid his time. Why don’t you just leave him alone?”
“It would be easier this way, Tom,” I said. “If you’d just talk to us.”
Keating pursed his dry lips, trying to size up where his loyalties fell.
“You put in thirty years, didn’t you?” Jacobi said.
“Twenty-four.” He patted his leg. “Got it cut short at the end.”
“Twenty-four good years. It’d be a shame to dishonor it in any way by not cooperating now….”
He shot back, “You want to know who was a goddamn expert in lack of cooperation? Frank Coombs. Man was only doing his job and all those bastards, supposedly his friends, looked the other way. Maybe that’s the way you do things now, with your community action meetings and your sensitivity training. But then we had to get the bad guys off the streets. With the means that we had.”
“Tom.” His wife raised her voice. “Frank Coombs killed a boy. These people, they’re your friends. They want to speak with him. I don’t know how far you have to take this duty-and-loyalty thing. Your duty’s here.”
Keating glared at her harshly. “Yeah, sure, my duty’s here.” He picked up the TV clicker and turned back to me. “Stay here all day if you like; I don’t have the slightest idea where Frank Coombs is.”
He turned up the volume on his TV.
Chapter 79
“FUCK HIM,” Jacobi said as we left the house. “Old-school asshole.”
“We’re halfway down the peninsula already,” I said to him. “You want to drive down to Stanford? See Frankie’s kid?”
“What the hell.” He shrugged. “I can use the education.”
We hooked back onto 280 and made it to Palo Alto in half an hour.
As we pulled onto the campus drive—the tall palms lining the road, the stately ocher buildings with their red roofs, the Hoover Tower majestically rising over the Main Quad—I felt the spell of being part of campus life. Every one of these kids was special and talented. I even felt some pride that Coombs’s son, despite his rough beginnings, had made it here.
We checked in at the administrative office on the Main Quad. A dean’s assistant told us Rusty Coombs was probably at football practice down at the field house. Said Rusty was a good student, and a great tight end. We drove there, where a student manager in a red Stanford cap took us upstairs and asked us to wait outside the weight room.
Moments later, a solidly built, orange-haired kid in a sweaty Cardinals T-shirt wandered out. Rusty Coombs had an affable face spotted with a few freckles. He had none of the dark, brooding belligerence I had seen in photos of his father.
“I guess I know why you guys are here,” he said, coming up to us. “My mom called, told me.”
The heavy sound of weight irons and lifting machines clanged in the background. I smiled affably. “We’re looking for your father, Rusty. We were wondering if you have any idea where he might be?”
“He’s not my father,” the boy said, and shook his head. “My father’s name is Theodore Bell. He’s the one who brought me up with Mom. Teddy taught me how to catch a football. He’s the one who told me I could make it to Stanford.”
“When was the last time you heard from Frank Coombs?”
