No Safe House

  Whenever it was his birthday or Christmas, Jane bought Vince a book. Everybody else tended to buy him scotch. He’d said to her once, “You know I’m a thinker, not just a drinker.”

  But what had really touched him was that last year, when her mother was still alive, before things got bad, Jane had bought him a book for Father’s Day. The huge Keith Richards memoir Life. She’d written inside: For a guy who rocks, a book about another guy who rocks. Love, Jane.

  She’d never bought him anything for Father’s Day before.

  This year, Father’s Day had come in the weeks preceding Audrey’s death. Jane’s opinion of him had clearly taken a hit. There was no gift this time.

  She hates me.

  She hated him because he’d let his mother down. Let Jane down, too. Plus, there was the business of the house. A nice two-story up in Orange, on Riverdale Road, just off Ridge, not far from the shopping center. Audrey had owned it when she met Vince, and after moving in with him kept the place and rented it out.

  When she died, Jane assumed the house would go to her, but her mother had willed it to Vince. Jane figured he’d do the right thing and give it to her, and in the normal course of events he would have, except for one thing.

  Bryce. Bryce Withers.

  There was something about that kid Vince didn’t like. It wasn’t just that he was a musician. No, that was giving him too much credit. He played in a band. Calling him a musician, that suggested schooling and training. Talent. Vince didn’t believe Bryce needed any of those things to play in a band.

  Turned out Vince was right. One night he’d wandered into a bar where they were playing. Energy Drink, they called themselves. What the hell kind of lame-ass name was that? Vince never told Jane he’d seen them play. He wanted to get a handle on this guy who was sleeping with his stepdaughter. What he heard convinced him Bryce was more of a noisemaker than a musician. You could put a guitar in a monkey’s hands and it’d produce the same kind of music.

  No, that was unfair to the monkey.

  Jane was making something of herself. She’d landed a good job with a local advertising agency. Not making a fortune, not yet, but doing better than her boyfriend, who Vince had pegged as a first-class mooch. Someone willing to live off his girlfriend’s earnings. And, by extension, any money or property she happened to come into.

  Like her mother’s house.

  If she married this clown and they moved into that house, and then split up and had to sell the place, this dickhead would end up getting half of what had been left to Vince in the first place.

  Vince was okay with everything going to Jane. But not Bryce.

  So he hung on to it and endured Jane’s disdain. Soon as she broke up with Bryce—and sooner or later she’d have to see the light—he’d sit her down, tell her the house was hers.

  It had been weighing on him.

  But now there were new problems. Chief among them was the money missing from the attic of the Cummings house.

  “Vince?” More rapping on the frosted glass.

  “What?”

  “Bert here.”

  Vince put the glass and bottle away, slid the drawer shut, took another couple of deep breaths. He was okay. He was a rock again. He could see this through. Start what you finish, his father used to tell him.

  He came around the desk and opened the door. “Gordie told me you had some trouble.”

  “Yeah. I thought nobody was home.”

  “Cops?”

  “I don’t know what happened after I left.”

  Vince needed to know.

  “What’s happening with Eldon?” Bert asked. Gordie was standing right behind, looking anxious.

  “Eldon’s dead,” Vince said.

  Stunned silence for two seconds, then “Fuck me” from Gordie.

  “What happened?” Bert asked.

  “He took the news badly,” Vince said. “He started acting crazy. Making threats. Blaming me for what happened. Accusing me. I think he was getting ready to call the cops.” He took a breath. “I did what I had to do.”

  Bert looked disbelievingly at his boss. “Wait. Are you saying . . . you fucking killed Eldon?”

  “We’ll have to deal with him later,” Vince said. “Right now, we got other priorities. You two need to pay the dog walker a visit. He’s the only one I can think of who’s got a key and knows the security code for that house. See if he got a little too ambitious. And I’m gonna have to call an old girlfriend and try to talk her out of calling the cops if it’s not already too late.”

  FORTY-ONE

  HEYWOOD Duggan parked his car on the street behind a row of downtown Milford storefronts. His office was tucked in back of a shop that sold wedding dresses, with a ground-floor entrance a few steps from a Dumpster. It wasn’t much more than a ten-foot-square room, with a bathroom he had to share with the women who ran the dress shop. He had a desk, a computer, two chairs, and a filing cabinet, and never met prospective clients here. But it was a good place to get paperwork and research done.

  As he got out of the car and headed for his office entrance, his cell phone rang. He glanced at the screen, saw who it was, and answered.

  “Mr. Quayle,” Heywood said, phone in one hand, keys in the other.

  “I did it,” Quayle said. “I called the son of a bitch.”

  Was there any point in telling him he shouldn’t have done that? Not now. “What’d he say?” Heywood asked.

  “He was spooked. I rattled his cage, no doubt about it.”

  Heywood fiddled with his keys, singled out the one for his office. “Rattled because he didn’t know what the hell you were talking about, or rattled because you’d found him out?”

  “Definitely the latter. Once I told him about the vase being dusted for fingerprints.”

  “You didn’t really tell him that.”

  “I did. I told him you were doing that right now.”

  Heywood sighed as he slipped the key into the lock. It didn’t turn the way it usually did. Had he forgotten to lock up the night before?

  “Mr. Quayle, that was a foolish thing to do. Listen, I just got to my office. I’ll call you back in an hour or so.”

  He slipped the phone back into his jacket and pushed open his office door.

  There was a woman sitting in the chair behind his desk. She looked at him and smiled.

  “How the hell did you get in here?” Heywood asked.

  That was when he felt something cold and hard, but no broader than a dime, press up against the back of his head. When Heywood went to turn around, the man holding the gun said, “I wouldn’t.” And then he closed the door.

  The woman said, “I’m going to ask you a question, and I’m only going to ask it once. So I want you to listen very carefully to it, and then I want you to think very carefully about how you answer. What I do not want you to do is answer my question with a question. That would be very, very unproductive. Do you understand?”

  Heywood said, “Yes.”

  The woman said, “Where is it?”

  FORTY-TWO

  TERRY

  GRACE was ecstatic about the text messages from Stuart Koch. Cynthia, only recently up to speed on our troubles, was eager to put a good spin on them, too.

  “So she didn’t do it,” Cynthia said, unable to conceal her enthusiasm. “Grace didn’t shoot that boy. And no one else did, either. He’s okay.”

  We’d left Grace in her bedroom and gone into our own, closing the door almost all the way. “So it seems,” I said.

  “And you said Vince told you that he was going to see that the broken window at that house got fixed. So it’ll be like it never happened. No one ever has to know what a stupid thing our girl did. And she’s going to learn from this—I truly believe that. She’ll never do anything like this again.”

  Cynthia shook her head in exasperation. “And there’ll have to be some new rules around here. Strict curfews. When she goes out someplace—when we let her go out someplace—we’re going to know w
here she’s going, who she’s going to be with, how long she’s going to be there, when—”

  “Sure,” I said. “We’ll have her fitted with one of those ankle bracelets. We can sit on the computer all night and watch where she goes.”

  “You’re mocking me.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “This happened on your watch,” she reminded me.

  “I’m aware of that,” I said.

  “I’m not saying it’s your fault,” she added quickly. “It’s as much mine, because I haven’t been here.” She took a seat on the edge of the bed. “I’m just glad we’re past this part. At least now we don’t have to spend the day getting Grace a lawyer.”

  “Yeah,” I said slowly.

  “What’s wrong?” she said. “You don’t see this as good news?”

  “Sure, yes, of course it is. I don’t want to be the one who bursts the bubble. But it was just a text.”

  “What are you saying?” Her face started to fall.

  “It’s not like Grace actually talked to him.”

  “Yeah, but it came from Stuart’s phone,” Cynthia said.

  “I know.”

  “Grace seemed to think it was him. These kids, they probably have their own kind of ‘voice’ when it comes to texting. You can tell who it is by the short forms they use and everything.”

  “You’re probably right,” I said. “Let’s say Stuart’s okay. He’s hiding somewhere until things blow over. What’s that got to do with someone trying to break into the house?”

  Cynthia looked off to the side, as though the answer were written down on a pad on the bedside table.

  “Maybe the two things aren’t connected,” she said. “This mess happened with Grace, and someone tried to break into our house.” She paused. “A coincidence.”

  “Which would mean we should call the police,” I said. “Because the reason Grace and I wanted you to hold off is because we thought it had something to do with her, and we didn’t want police involved until things had sorted themselves out or we had Grace a lawyer. You want to call the cops now?”

  I could see her struggling with it. She rubbed her mouth, then briefly put both hands on the top of her head, as if she had the world’s worst headache and was trying to keep her brain from exploding.

  “God, I have no idea. If that man really has nothing to do with what happened to Grace, then we should call the police. He could return, or break into someone else’s house, or—hell, I don’t know.”

  “But . . .”

  She stood, went into the bathroom, ran some water into her hand and scooped some into her mouth. I followed, stood in the doorway.

  “Here’s what I don’t get,” I said. “If Stuart’s alive, why didn’t Vince just tell me? He could have said the kid’s okay, but instead ordered me to let the matter drop. If he’d just told me Stuart was fine, I probably would have dropped it. I wouldn’t have gone looking for him this morning, at the hospital and his apartment.”

  I paused, thinking it through. “Maybe that’s why we got the text. Vince found out—don’t ask me how—I was nosing around, and came up with that idea.”

  “So it was Vince texting Grace, on Stuart’s phone.”

  “Vince, or one of his bunch.”

  “Oh shit,” she said, bracing herself on the countertop with her hands, looking at me in the mirror.

  “We still have to know,” I said. “With certainty.”

  The phone in the bedroom rang, startling both of us. I got to it first. The ID declared the caller to be unknown.

  I picked up. “Hello?”

  “Is your wife there?”

  I knew the voice.

  “What do you want?”

  “Just put her on,” Vince said.

  Cynthia was standing in the bathroom doorway, mouthing, “Who is it?”

  I held out the receiver. “Vince,” I told her.

  Her eyes went wide. She reached out, put the receiver to her ear. “Vince,” she said.

  She let me put my head up next to hers so I could hear both sides of the conversation.

  “Cynthia,” he said. “I need to know whether you’ve brought in the police. Are they there now?”

  “Why would I have called the police, Vince?”

  “Because there was an incident. At your home. Not your apartment. About an hour ago.”

  “That’s right,” she said. “There was. How would you know about that?” She gave me a quick look.

  “You haven’t answered my question.”

  “No,” Cynthia said. “The police are not involved.” She paused. “Yet.”

  Another pause, at Vince’s end. Was that a sigh of relief?

  “That’s good,” he said. “I owe you an apology.”

  Cynthia’s face started to flush. “An apology? That was you? That was one of your goons?”

  “Like I said, I owe you an—”

  “No!” she said. “You owe me a fuck of a lot more than an apology! You owe me—us!—some answers, that’s what you owe us, you son of a bitch!”

  “Cynthia, I—”

  “No more bullshit! Why the hell was someone, working for you, trying to get into our house? How did you get a key? What’s going on? And what about Stuart? Was it you? Did you send those texts?”

  “What texts would those be?” he said.

  “To Grace. She received text messages from Stuart, just a few minutes ago.”

  “I didn’t send Grace any texts,” he said.

  Those sounded like weasel words to me. He didn’t say he didn’t know about it. But Cynthia was going in another direction.

  “Our house, Vince. You sent someone to break into our house. What was the plan? Was it to get Grace? To keep her from talking? My God, is that what the plan was?”

  “No,” he said. “He thought the house was empty.”

  “He?”

  “Bert. It was Bert.”

  I took the phone. “Why, Vince? Why would Bert be trying to break into our house?”

  Another moment of silence at the other end of the line.

  Finally, Vince spoke.

  “Because that’s where the money is.”

  FORTY-THREE

  IT was nearly ten thirty when Jane Scavullo arrived at the offices of the Anders and Phelps advertising agency with her purse over one shoulder, the strap of an oversized gym bag, the handle of a tennis racket sticking out one end, over the other.

  “Hey, Jane,” Hector, the young guy on the front desk, said as she walked through the lobby. “Lookin’ a little wasted there.”

  “Fuck off, Hector,” she said.

  “Late, too,” he said with pleasure.

  She had to admit she’d looked better. Not nearly enough sleep last night. All that drama with the Cummings house and Grace and Vince. Then, this morning, finding out that Bryce had lied to her. Finally, making a stop on the way to work to deal with another matter.

  She dumped the gym bag in the well under her desk and kicked it forward, then saw the light on her phone was flashing. She wasn’t ready yet to face her messages, so she got up and went around the corner to the lunchroom to see whether anyone had put on a pot of coffee yet.

  Yes.

  She grabbed a mug and filled it. Jane drank her coffee black, the way Vince drank his. If you’re going to have coffee, he’d told her, have coffee. Don’t pussy it up with milk or cream and sugar.

  She blew on it, then had a sip, caught her reflection in the glass of a framed newspaper ad: “Riverside Honda! We’ve Rebuilt and NOW We’re Having a Fire Sale!”

  Not one of her ads. That was before her stint here began, although she remembered when the car dealership burned down a few years ago. She hadn’t worked at Anders and Phelps—A&P, everyone around here called it—long enough to earn a framed piece of work on the wall, not even here in the lunchroom. And these days, an effective ad was unlikely to be something you could frame. Who advertised in newspapers anymore? Who looked at newspapers anymore? Jane couldn’t remember th
e last time she’d picked one up, not even the New York Times. When Jane wanted to know what was going on in the world—which was not that often, if you wanted to know the truth—she went online. That’s where she liked to see her clients’ ads placed. You just had to find the right Web site so you were going after the right demographic. Or figured out peoples’ surfing habits and made the ad pop up wherever they went. There was radio, too, which seemed like the oldest medium on the planet next to newspapers. But it was still a good choice. People driving around in their cars all day, radio turned on for background noise. That could work.

  Like she gave a shit about any of this.

  Was this what she really wanted to do? Mr. Archer, he’d figured her out. She wanted to write, and not stupid jingles for gas stations and furnace repair companies. She wanted to write novels. She wanted to write about what it was like to be a young woman growing up today. Wondering what the hell you were going to do with your life. Having to fight for everything you got. Nobody wanting to give you a permanent job. All short-term contracts. No benefits. The whole 22-22-22 thing. If you were twenty-two, companies worked you twenty-two hours a day for twenty-two thousand dollars a year. And if you didn’t like that, well, tough shit.

  Kind of like Anders and Phelps.

  She went back to her desk, set the coffee down, and retrieved her messages. She’d made cold calls the day before to a couple of dozen random Milford-area businesses. She got three callbacks, all saying thanks but no thanks, they didn’t have the budget to advertise at this time.

  Dumbasses. If things were slow, you had to get your name out there. If there wasn’t a lot of business, you had to make sure what business there was went to you. Jane tried to tell them, but some people were dumb as turnips.

  Fucking Bryce.

  Talking about his gig, how the evening had gone, but he hadn’t even been there. Jane hadn’t let on that she’d seen his text. She’d left his phone facedown on his bedside table. When he’d come out of the bathroom, she’d said his phone had buzzed. Bryce checked it, turned his back to her.