Fear the Worst

  “I’m not a miracle worker, Tim.”

  “I need a lift.”

  “You had to give the car back already?” she asked.

  “It’s gone,” I said. But it was the police who had it, not Laura Cantrell.

  “I’m on it,” Susanne said.

  I hoped she would come pick me up herself. I thought it was unlikely she’d send Bob.

  I was surprised to see Evan drive down my street in the Beetle. There was an ominous rattling sound coming from under the hood. The short wheelbase allowed him to do a tight U-turn in the street, bringing the passenger door right to me.

  I got in and he said, “What’s with the police tape around your house?”

  I said, “Are you going to be able to pay those guys when they come back for the rest of their money?”

  “Yeah,” he said, glancing back at my house as we pulled away.

  “From your dad?”

  “Yeah.” He cleared his throat. “Thanks for that yesterday.”

  “I considered letting them have a go at you,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “Maybe you need to have the shit beat out of you. It might smarten you up.”

  He kept his eyes on the road ahead. “Maybe,” he said.

  “You do drugs, you steal, you’re addicted to online gambling,” I said. “And you slept with my daughter.”

  He shot me a look. “Maybe she saw something in me that you don’t.”

  “She must have,” I said. I didn’t know whether Evan was trying to be on his best behavior because he had me in the car, but he signaled all his turns, kept to the speed limit, and made no improper lane changes.

  I said, “Have you seen Syd’s friend Patty in the last couple of days?”

  “Huh?” he said. “No. Why?”

  I shook my head, not interested in answering his questions since I had more of my own. “You used a fake credit card,” I said. “To pay for some of your gambling.”

  “Yeah.”

  “How does that work? If you win, doesn’t the money go back to the account of the guy whose card number you’ve ripped off?”

  “I hadn’t really thought it through. It’s the playing that matters, not whether there’s money coming in.”

  Once you put yourself in the head of a gambler, that actually made some sense. “Where’d you get the card?”

  “I don’t want to get anyone in trouble,” he said.

  “It was Jeff Bluestein, wasn’t it?” I said.

  Evan glanced over. “How did you—” And then he cut himself off.

  “I didn’t,” I said. “Not until now.” I leaned back into my seat. “He’s my first visit today.”

  Evan seemed to break out almost instantly into a sweat. “Don’t tell him I said anything.”

  I said nothing for a moment. I was listening. Finally, I said, “Does the engine sound funny to you?”

  I SLIPPED IN BEHIND THE WHEEL of the Beetle after we pulled into Bob’s Motors. Susanne, still on the cane, came out of the office as Evan slunk away.

  “What’d you say to him?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” I said. I told her, as I always did, that if I found out anything, I’d be in touch. Even though, sometimes, there were things I chose not to tell her. Like what had happened last night at my home.

  “What can I do?” she asked.

  “Be here,” I said.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Poke around,” I said.

  As I’d told Evan moments earlier, I planned to start with Jeff Bluestein. I knew where he lived. I’d dropped Sydney off there the odd time before either of them had a driver’s license.

  I parked the Beetle out front, strode up to the front door, and leaned on the bell. Jeff’s mother appeared at the door and smiled.

  “Good morning,” she said. Her smile seemed forced, like she really didn’t want to see me. I don’t think she’d liked it, from the very beginning, that her son had been helping me. I was a man with problems, and nothing good could come from letting your son associate with a man like that.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Jeff’s still sleeping.”

  “Wake him up, if you don’t mind. He knows I wanted to see him this morning.”

  Still standing in the doorway, Mrs. Bluestein said, “If this is just about some technical questions about the website, can’t it wait until later?”

  “I’m afraid not,” I said.

  “Just a moment,” she said, letting the storm door close. It was a one-story house, and I watched her cross the living room, go down a hall, and tentatively enter a door on the right side. She was in there about half a minute, then came back.

  “Just another half hour? He’s very sleepy.”

  I moved past her and went down the hall, Mrs. Bluestein trailing after me, saying, “Excuse me! Excuse me!”

  I pushed open the boy’s door, saw Jeff huddled under his covers, and said, making no effort to keep my voice down, “Jeff.”

  “Hmm?”

  “Let’s talk.”

  He blinked his eyes several times, getting me in focus. “It’s really early,” he said, hunkering down.

  “Throw some clothes on. We’ll go get some breakfast.”

  “Mr. Blake!” his mother shouted. “He was out late with his friends.”

  I leaned in close to Jeff, putting my mouth to his ear, enduring his early-morning breath. “You get your ass out of bed and come talk to me or I’m going to ask you all about Dalrymple’s in front of your mother.”

  I didn’t actually know whether she knew about what had happened with Jeff’s restaurant job, but judging by how that made him jump under the covers, I was betting not.

  “Mr. Blake,” his mother persisted, “please leave right now.”

  I backed away from her son. He was already throwing off his covers. He said, “It’s okay, Mom. I just kind of forgot when we were supposed to meet.”

  I flashed his mother a smile. “See?” To Jeff I said, “I’ll be out front. Five minutes.”

  “Yeah,” Jeff said.

  Mrs. Bluestein attempted to ask me if this was about something other than the website, but I deflected all her questions. I went out to the car, got in behind the wheel, and would have passed the time listening to the radio if the knob hadn’t broken off in my hand.

  Jeff came out in four minutes, walked across the lawn, and got in next to me.

  “What do you want?” I asked him.

  “Huh?”

  “For breakfast.”

  “I’m not really hungry,” he said.

  “McDonald’s it is, then,” I said, and cranked the engine.

  I drove us to the closest one, led the way inside, and ordered an Egg McMuffin with coffee and a hash brown. As we slipped into a booth sitting across from each other, I noticed Jeff eyeing my hash brown.

  “You want that?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Take it,” I told him, and he did.

  “How did you hear about Dalrymple’s?” he asked.

  “That’s not important right now,” I said. “But I want you to tell me all about it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I do,” I said.

  “What’s it to you?”

  “I won’t know that until you tell me,” I said. “Maybe nothing, but maybe something.”

  He took a bite of hash brown. “It’s got nothing to do with Sydney. I mean, that’s why you’re asking, right?”

  “What did you do?” I asked.

  “It was no big deal. Nobody really got ripped off. The credit card companies don’t make people pay for stuff they don’t buy.”

  I wasn’t up for giving a lecture on how theft drives up the price of everything, so I let it go.

  “You’d been doing it for a while before the manager caught you, is that right?”

  “Not that long, but yeah, it was for a while.”

  “If it had been somebody else who caught you, it’d be a d
ifferent story now, wouldn’t it? We might be holding phones and looking at each other through a pane of glass.”

  Jeff looked mournful. “I know it was a stupid thing to do. I did it to make some extra money.”

  “Tell me what you did, exactly,” I said.

  Jeff hung his head down, ashamed, but not so ashamed that he couldn’t finish the last bite of my hash brown. I took a sip of coffee.

  “I had this little thing, you could swipe Visa and MasterCard and American Express cards through it, and it kept all the data, you know, like the numbers and all that stuff. It could hold the information from lots and lots of cards.”

  “Who gave it to you? Who wanted you to do it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I put down my sandwich and leaned across the table, so close our heads were nearly touching. “Jeff, I’m not fucking around here. I want answers.”

  “You’ve never liked me, have you? Like, when Sydney and I were going out, you didn’t like that.”

  “Don’t try that with me, Jeff. Maybe you know how to pull your mother’s heartstrings, make her feel guilty, but I don’t care. Does she even know about any of this? Did your dad tell her?”

  “How do you know my dad knows?”

  “I’m guessing that means no. You want me to go back and tell her what you did?”

  “No,” he whispered.

  “The thing is, you’re not the only one in trouble anymore. Evan, for example?”

  “What’s going on with Evan?”

  “His little online gambling problem? That’s out in the open now. He’s been stealing money to pay off his debts. And he used at least one fake credit card that he got from you.”

  “Oh man,” Jeff said. “He wasn’t supposed to tell anybody about that.”

  “Did you give him money, too?”

  “I loaned him some, the odd time. He’s never paid me back.”

  “There’s a surprise.” I shook my head tiredly. “Look, I’m not interested in getting you in any more trouble than you’re already in.”

  “You don’t understand,” he said. “I could get in a whole lot more trouble.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The guy, the one who was paying me to rip off the credit cards in the first place, he was kind of creepy. Like, smarmy?”

  “What was his name?”

  “I don’t remember,” Jeff said.

  “How’d you get in touch with him?”

  “He gave me a cell phone number.”

  “What do you mean, the guy was smarmy?”

  “Like, I just got this vibe off him, like if you crossed him you’d really pay for it.”

  “He must have been pissed when you got caught.”

  “I only heard from him once after that. He was pissed, but when he found out I wasn’t being charged, and that my dad got the manager at Dalrymple’s to forget about it, I guess he thought it was better not to stir things up.”

  “What about your dad? Didn’t he want to find out who the guy was?”

  “He was so mad, right? But he didn’t want my mom to know, because she’d have totally freaked out about it, so he decided it was better to let it go, too.”

  “So this guy,” I said. “What’d he look like?”

  Jeff shrugged. “Just a guy, you know?”

  It was like pulling teeth. “Was he tall, thin, fat, black guy, white guy?”

  “A white guy,” Jeff said, nodding, like that should do it.

  “Fat?”

  “No, he was in pretty good shape. And he had kind of light-colored hair, I guess. And he had pretty decent clothes. He smoked.”

  “How old was he?”

  “He was pretty old,” Jeff said.

  “Like what, sixties, seventies?”

  Jeff concentrated. “No, I think thirties.”

  “How much was he paying you?”

  “Well, he gave me the thing, you know, the wedge he called it, and he said he’d give me fifty bucks for every card I swiped through it. But mostly he wanted them to be high-end cards, like gold cards and stuff like that. So in a single shift, I could make a thousand bucks. Dalrymple’s, they were paying, like, just minimum wage, plus tips, but some nights they were good and some nights they weren’t, although I always told my mom they were big so she wouldn’t wonder why I had so much money.” He paused. “While it lasted.”

  It wasn’t hard to understand the appeal for a young kid looking for some fast cash.

  “But that last night, when Roy—”

  “Roy?”

  “Roy Chilton, the manager? When he saw me swiping the card an extra time through the wedge, he knew right away what it was and went all ballistic on me.”

  “Why’d you do it, Jeff?” I asked. “You’re a good kid.”

  He shrugged again. “I wanted to get a laptop.”

  I stared out the window for a moment, watched the traffic go past. I asked, “Did Sydney know about this?”

  “No way,” he said. “I never told her anything about it. I kind of didn’t want anyone to know. I told Sydney I got the job at Dalrymple’s, but when I got fired right away I told her I dropped a family’s entire order all over the floor and that was why they got rid of me. And I made Evan swear not to tell Sydney anything about the card I gave him.”

  I could recall Syd mentioning something about Jeff losing his job, but never the reason why.

  “You’re not saying anything,” Jeff said. “You pissed at me?”

  I laid my hands flat on the tabletop and closed my eyes for a moment. When I opened them, Jeff was looking at me warily, wondering, I think, whether there was something wrong with me.

  “You probably weren’t the only kid this guy had doing this,” I said. “That’s a lot of fake cards, a lot of identities getting ripped off for a lot of money.”

  “One time,” Jeff said, “he made some mention, it was to get some people started, people who’d just come to the country, so they could get things and stuff.”

  I thought about that a moment.

  “You still have that cell number for this guy?”

  Jeff shook his head.

  “You sure you don’t remember his name?”

  Jeff struggled for a moment. “Thing is, he told me his name once, but then when he answered his phone, he said, like, ‘Gary here.’”

  “But Gary wasn’t the name he gave you?”

  “No, it was something else.” Jeff wrinkled his nose, like the answer was out there and all he had to do was sniff it out. “It mighta been Eric.”

  “Eric,” I repeated.

  “I think that was it.”

  “How’d you hook up with him the first time?”

  “Someone told me that if I was looking for a way to make some extra money, to give this guy a call. I thought, maybe I could do something different than the Dalrymple’s thing, or work this other job on the side. Turned out the two of them went together.”

  “Who?” I asked. “Who told you this?”

  “Please, Mr. Blake, I don’t want to get anyone else in trouble.”

  Maybe, if he hadn’t mentioned the name Eric, I’d still think it was possible Jeff’s problems were in no way connected to Sydney. Now I had the feeling there was a very strong link.

  “Spill it, Jeff,” I said. “Who tipped you to this guy?”

  Jeff ran his index finger sideways under his nose, then said, “You know him. He sells cars where you work? Andy?” I blinked. “Andy Hertz?”

  “Yeah, that’s him. But don’t ever tell him I told you.”

  I sat there, trying to put it together. Jeff looked at me and said, “Hey, Mr. Blake, you seen Patty around lately?”

  THIRTY

  DRIVING JEFF BACK TO HIS HOME IN MY BEETLE, I said, “How do you know Andy Hertz?”

  “Last year, when Sydney was working at the dealership, she got to be friends with everybody,” Jeff said. “Sometimes, when Syd and I and Patty and some of our other friends got together, Andy would hang out with us. He was o
lder than everybody else, but he was kind of cool, and plus he could buy beer for us.”

  “Isn’t that great,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Jeff said. “He’s a pretty good guy.”

  “So, Andy just told all of you how to make a little extra money?”

  “No,” Jeff said. “Just me. I mean, the only one I know that he told was me. I got to talking to him alone once about trying to find a job, and he said he had a number for a guy he’d run into a couple of times, that he could fix me up with something.”

  “Really,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you tell Andy what happened?”

  “Like I said, I didn’t want anybody to know, so no, I didn’t tell him. My dad said I couldn’t ever tell anybody. I never even told Andy I got in touch with the guy in the first place.”

  I did my best to concentrate on the traffic ahead of me. I could feel the blood pulsing in my temples. I very much wanted to have a chat with Andy Hertz.

  “You okay, Mr. Blake?” Jeff asked.

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  “You’re not going to mention to Andy that I told you this, are you?” he asked worriedly.

  I glanced over and said nothing.

  Despite his size, he seemed to sink in his chair. In the fishbowl-like interior of the Beetle, he still had plenty of headroom. Jeff was quiet for another moment, then said, “I wonder if I did something to piss Patty off. She usually calls me back.”

  I DROPPED JEFF OFF—his mother was standing at the door and had been there the whole time for all we knew—and as I was backing out of the driveway, intending to head straight over to Riverside Honda and have a few words with Andy Hertz, my cell went off.

  “Hello?”

  “Mr. Blake? Detective Jennings. Where are you?”

  “Driving to work.”

  “I need you to come in to police headquarters.”

  “Can it wait? I need to go to the dealership and talk to—”

  “You need to come in now.”

  Panic washed over me. “What’s happened? Is it Sydney? Have you found Sydney?”

  “I’d just like you to come in,” she said.

  I wanted to tell her I might have a lead on finding Eric, whose real name might be Gary, but decided to wait until I got to the station.

  “I’ll be there in a few minutes,” I said.

  She met me at the door of the police building. “I appreciate you coming right away,” she said.