“Jesus,” I said, and pointed to the screen for Vince. “There’s a Clayton Sloan listed here on Niagara View Drive.”
“Clayton?”
“Yeah, Clayton.”
“That was Cynthia’s father’s first name,” Vince said, just wanting to be sure.
“Yeah,” I said. I grabbed a pencil and paper from the desk, wrote down the phone number off the computer screen. “I’m going to give this number a call.”
“Whoa!” Vince said. “You out of your fucking mind?”
“What?”
“Look, I don’t know what you’ve found here, or whether you’ve found anything, but what are you going to say when you call? On this phone? If they’ve got caller ID, they know right away who it is. Now, maybe they know who you are and maybe they don’t, but you don’t want to be tipping your hand, do you?”
What the hell was he up to? Was this actually good advice, or did Vince have some reason for not wanting me to call? Was he trying to keep me from connecting the dots because—
He handed me his cell phone. “Use this,” he said. “They won’t know who the hell is calling.”
I took the phone, flipped it open, looked at the phone number on the monitor, took a breath, and entered it into Vince’s phone. I put it to my ear and waited.
One ring. Two rings. Three rings. Four rings.
“There’s nobody there,” I said.
“Give it a little longer,” Vince said.
When it got to be eight rings, I started to pull the phone away when I heard a voice.
“Hello?” It was a woman’s voice. Older, I thought, sixties at least.
“Oh, yes, hello,” I said. “I was just about to hang up.”
“Can I help you?”
“Is Jeremy there?” Even as I said it, I thought, and what if he is? What am I going to say? What on earth am I going to ask him? Or should I just hang up? Find out if he’s there, confirm that he actually exists, then end the call.
“I’m afraid not,” the woman said. “Who’s calling?”
“Oh, that’s okay,” I said. “I can try again in a little while.”
“He won’t be here later, either.”
“Oh. Do you know when I might be able to reach him?”
“He’s out of town,” the woman said. “I can’t say for sure when he’ll be back.”
“Oh, of course,” I said. “He mentioned something to me about going to Connecticut.”
“He did?”
“I think so.”
“Are you sure about this?” She sounded quite perturbed.
“I could be wrong. Listen, I’ll just catch him later, it’s no big deal. Just a golf thing.”
“Golf? Jeremy doesn’t play golf. Who is this? I demand that you tell me.”
The call was already spiraling out of control. Vince, who had been leaning into me as I made the call and could hear both sides, drew a finger across his throat, mouthed the word “abort.” I folded the phone shut, ending the call, without saying another thing. I handed it back to Vince, who slipped it into his jacket.
“Sounds like you got the right place,” he said. “You might have played it a bit better, though.”
I ignored his critique. “So the Jeremy Sloan Cynthia found at the mall is very likely the Jeremy Sloan who lives in Youngstown, New York, at a house where the phone is listed under the name Clayton Sloan. And Cynthia’s father had kept a clipping in his drawer, of him with a basketball team.”
Neither of us said anything. We were both trying to get our heads around it.
“I’m going to call Cynthia,” I said, “bounce this off her.”
I raced back downstairs to the kitchen, dialed Cynthia’s cell. But as she’d promised, her phone was off. “Shit,” I said as Vince came into the kitchen behind me. “You got any ideas?” I asked him.
“Well, this Sloan guy, according to that woman—maybe she’s his mother, I don’t know—is still out of town. Which means he may still be in the Milford area. And unless he has friends or family here, he’s probably in some local motel or hotel.” He got the phone back out of his jacket, brought up a number from his contact list, hit one button. He waited a moment, then said, “Hey, it’s me. Yeah, he’s still with me. Something I need you to do.”
And then Vince told whoever was on the other end of the line to round up a couple of the other guys—I suspected this crew consisted of the two guys who grabbed me and their driver, the ones Jane called the Three Stooges—and start doing the rounds of the hotels in town.
“No, I don’t know how many there are,” he said. “Why don’t you count them for me? I want you to find out if there’s a guy named Jeremy Sloan, from Youngstown, New York, staying at one of them. And if you find out he is, you let me know. Don’t do anything. Okay. Maybe start with the Howard Johnson’s, the Red Roof, the Super 8, whatever. And Jesus, what the fuck is that horrible noise in the background? Huh? Who listens to the fucking Carpenters?”
Once the instructions were relayed and Vince was confident that they were fully understood, he put the phone back in his coat. “If this Sloan guy is in town, they’ll find him,” he said.
I opened the fridge, showed Vince a can of Coors. “Sure,” he said, and I tossed it to him, got one out for myself, and took a seat at the kitchen table. Vince sat down opposite me.
He said, “Do you have any fucking idea what’s going on?”
I swallowed some beer. “I think I might be starting to,” I said. “That woman who answered the phone. What if she’s this Jeremy Sloan’s mother? And what if this Jeremy Sloan really is my wife’s brother?”
“Yeah?”
“What if I just spoke to my wife’s mother?”
If Cynthia’s brother and mother were alive, then how did one explain the DNA tests on the two bodies they’d found in that car they’d fished out of the quarry? Except, of course, all Wedmore had been able to confirm for us up to now was that the bodies in the car were related to each other, not that they actually were Todd and Patricia Bigge. We were awaiting further tests to determine a genetic link between them and Cynthia’s DNA.
I was trying to get my head around this increasingly confusing jumble of information when I realized Vince was talking.
“I just hope those boys of mine don’t find him and kill him,” he said, taking another swig. “It’d be just like them.”
37
“Someone phoned here for you,” she said.
“Who?”
“He didn’t say who it was.”
“Who did it sound like?” he asked. “Was it one of my friends?”
“I don’t know who it sounded like. How would I know that? But he asked for you, and when I said you were away, he said he remembered you saying something about going to Connecticut.”
“What?”
“You shouldn’t have told anyone where you were going!”
“I didn’t!”
“Then how did he know? You must have told someone. I can’t believe you could be that stupid.” She sounded very annoyed with him.
“I’m telling you I didn’t!” He felt about six years old when she spoke to him this way.
“Well, if you didn’t, how would he know?”
“I don’t know. Did it say on the phone where the call was from? Was there a number?”
“No. He said he knew you from golfing.”
“Golfing? I don’t golf.”
“That’s what I told him,” she said. “I told him you don’t golf.”
“You know what, Mom? It was probably just a wrong number or something.”
“He asked for you. He said Jeremy. Plain as day. Maybe you just mentioned it to somebody in passing, that you were going.”
“Look, Mom, even if I did, which I didn’t, you don’t have to make such a big deal about it.”
“It just upset me.”
“Don’t be upset. Besides, I’m coming home.”
“You are?” Her whole tone changed.
“Yeah. Today,
I think. I’ve done everything I can do here, the only thing left is…you know.”
“I don’t want to miss that. You don’t know how long I’ve been waiting for this.”
“If I get out of here soon,” he said, “I guess I’ll be home pretty late tonight. It’s already after lunch, and sometimes I get kind of tired, so I might stop awhile around Utica or something, but I’ll still make it in one day.”
“That’ll give me time to make you a carrot cake,” she said brightly. “I’ll make it this afternoon.”
“Okay.”
“You drive safely. I don’t want you falling asleep at the wheel. You’ve never had the same kind of driving stamina your father had.”
“How is he?”
“I think, if we get things done this week, he’ll last at least that long. I’ll be glad when this is finally over. You know what it costs to take a taxi down to see him?”
“It won’t matter soon, Mom.”
“It’s about more than the money, you know,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about how it’ll be done. We’re going to need some rope, you know. Or some of that tape. And I guess it makes sense to do the mother first. The little one’ll be no trouble after that. I can help you with her. I’m not completely useless, you know.”
38
Vince and I finished our beer, then snuck out through the backyard and returned to his truck. He was going to drive me back to get my car, still parked near his body shop.
“So you know Jane has been having a bit of trouble at school,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“I was thinking, my helping you out and all, maybe you could put in a word for her with the principal,” he said.
“I have already, but I don’t mind doing it again,” I said.
“She’s a good kid, but she has a bit of a temper at times,” Vince said. “She doesn’t take shit from anyone. Certainly not me. So when she gets in trouble, basically, she’s just defending herself.”
“She needs to get a handle on that,” I said. “You can’t solve every problem by beating the shit out of someone.”
He chuckled softly to himself.
“Do you want her to have a life like yours?” I asked. “No offense intended.”
He slowed for a red light. “No,” he said. “But the odds are kind of stacked against her. I’m not the best role model. And her mother, she’s bounced Jane around to so many homes, the kid’s never had any stability. That’s what I’ve been trying to do for her, you know? Give her something to hold on to for a while. Kids need that. But it takes a long time to build up any kind of trust. She’s been burned so many times before.”
“Sure,” I said. “You could send her to a good school. When she finishes high school, maybe send her to some place for journalism, or an English program, something where she could develop her talents.”
“Her marks aren’t too good,” he said. “Be hard for her to get in somewhere.”
“But you could afford to send her someplace, right?”
Vince nodded.
“Maybe help her set some goals. Help her look past where she is now, tell her if she can get some half-decent marks, you’re prepared to cover some tuition costs, so she can reach her potential.”
“You help me with that?” He glanced at me from the corner of his eye.
“Yeah,” I said. “The thing is, will she listen?”
Vince shook his head tiredly. “Yeah, well, that’s the question.”
“I have one,” I said.
“Shoot.”
“Why do you care?”
“Huh?”
“Why do you care? She’s just some kid, daughter of a woman you’ve met. A lot of guys, they wouldn’t take an interest.”
“Oh, I get it, you think maybe I’m some sort of perv? I want to get into her pants, right?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“But you’re thinking it.”
“No,” I said. “I think, if that’s what you were up to, there’d be some clue in Jane’s writing, in how she behaves toward you. I think she wants to trust you. So the question still is, why do you care?”
The light turned green, Vince tromped on the gas. “I had a daughter,” he said. “Of my own.”
“Oh,” I said.
“I was pretty young at the time. Twenty. Knocked up this girl from Torrington. Agnes. No shit, Agnes. My dad, he just about beat the shit out of me, asking how I could be so fucking dumb. Hadn’t I ever heard of a rubber, he wanted to know. Yeah, well, you know how it is sometimes, right? Tried to talk Agnes into, you know, getting rid of it, but she didn’t want to do that, she had the kid, and it was a girl, and she named her Collette.”
“Pretty name,” I said.
“And when I saw this kid, I just fucking loved her, you know? And my old man, he doesn’t want to see me stuck with this Agnes just because I couldn’t keep it in my pants, but the thing was, she wasn’t that bad, this Agnes, and the baby, Collette, she really was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. You’d think, twenty years old, it’d be easy to fuck off, not be responsible, but there was something about her.
“So I started thinking maybe I’d marry her, right? And be this kid’s father. And I was working up my nerve, to ask her, to tell my old man what I was planning to do, and Agnes, she’s pushing Collette in this stroller and they’re crossing Naugatuck Avenue and this fucking drunk in a Caddy runs the light and takes them both out.”
Vince’s grip on the steering wheel seemed to grow tighter, as if he was trying to strangle it. “I’m sorry,” I said.
“Yeah, well, so was that fucking drunk,” Vince said. “Waited six months, didn’t want to do anything too soon, you know? This was after they threw out the charges, lawyer was able to make the jury think Agnes went out against the light, that even if he’d been sober, he’d still have hit them. So, funny thing happens, a few months later, one night, he’s coming out of a bar in Bridgeport, it’s pretty late, he’s drunk again, the bastard hadn’t learned a thing. He was going down this alley, and someone shoots him right in the fucking head.”
“Wow,” I said. “I guess you didn’t shed a tear over that when you heard.”
Vince shot me a quick glance.
“The last thing he heard before he died was, ‘This is for Collette.’ And the son of a bitch, you know what he said just before the bullet went into his brain?”
I swallowed. “No.”
“He said, ‘Collette who?’”
“His wallet got stolen, cops figured it was some kind of robbery.” He glanced over at me again. “You should close your mouth, a bug’ll fly in,” he said.
I closed it.
“There ya go,” Vince said. “So anyway, to answer your question, maybe that’s why I fucking care. Is there anything else you’d like to know?” I shook my head. He looked ahead. “That your car?”
I nodded.
As he pulled up behind it, his cell rang. “Yeah?” he said. He listened a moment, then said, “Wait for me.”
He put the phone away, said, “They found him. He’s registered at the HoJo’s.”
“Shit,” I said, about to open my door. “I’ll follow you.”
“Forget your car,” Vince said, hitting the gas again, whipping out around my car. He headed up to I-95. It wasn’t the most direct route, but probably the fastest, given that the Howard Johnson hotel was the other side of town, at the end of an I-95 off-ramp. He barreled up the on-ramp and was doing eighty-five by the time he was merging with traffic.
Traffic on the interstate was light, and we were to the other side of town in just a few minutes. Vince had to lay on the brakes pretty hard coming down the ramp. He was still doing seventy when I saw the traffic light ahead of us.
He hung a right, then took another right into the HoJo parking lot. The SUV I’d ridden in earlier was parked just beyond the doors to the lobby, and when Blondie saw us he ran over to Vince’s window. Vince powered it down.
Blondie gave his boss
a room number, said if you drove up the hill and around back, it was one of the ones you could pull right up to. Vince backed up, stopped, threw it into drive, and headed up a long, winding driveway that went behind the complex. The road swung hard left and leveled out behind a row of rooms with doors that opened onto the curb.
“Here it is,” Vince said, pulling the truck into a spot.
“I want to talk to him,” I said. “Don’t do anything crazy to him.”
Vince, already out of truck, gave me a dismissive wave without looking back at me. He went up to a door, paused a moment, noticed that it was already open, and rapped on it.
“Mr. Sloan?” he said.
A few doors down, a cleaning lady who’d just wheeled her cart up to a door looked in our direction.
“Mr. Sloan!” Vince shouted, opening the door wider. “It’s the manager. We have a bit of a problem. We need to talk to you.”
I stood away from the door and the window, so if he looked out he wouldn’t see me. It was possible, if he was the man who’d been standing in front of our house that night, that he knew what I looked like.
“He gone,” the maid said, loud enough for us to hear.
“What?” Vince said.
“He just check out, a few minute ago,” she said. “I clean it next.”
“He’s gone?” I said. “For good?”
The woman nodded.
Vince opened the door wide, strode into the room. “You cannot go in there,” the maid called down to us. But even I was inclined to ignore her, and followed Vince in.
The bed was unmade, the bathroom a mess of damp towels, but there were no signs that anyone was still staying in the unit. Toiletries gone, no suitcase.
One of Vince’s henchmen, Baldy, appeared in the doorway. “Is he here?”
Vince whirled around, walked up to Baldy and threw him up against the wall. “How long ago did you guys find out he was here?”
“We called you soon as we knew.”
“Yeah? Then what? You sat in the fucking car and waited for me when you should have been keeping your eyes open? The guy’s left.”
“We didn’t know what he looked like! What were we supposed to do?”