Tiffany speaks first. “I agree with you, and I’m no idealist. Only a psychopath could willingly collaborate with a vicious gangster and pose so successfully as a family man.”
“That’s what I tried to tell the chief and the marshal.”
“I hope they leave us alone.” She glances over her shoulder at Dorothy.
I say, “I can’t promise you won’t have to talk to them. They have access to all the other phones in the house. If any mention of you ever passed between Gabby and her parents by that route, you can expect an official visit, just like all the other people the family had contact with. If you’re as honest with them as you’ve been with me, you shouldn’t have anything to worry about.” I shut my mouth now and open my face. It’s Tiffany’s turn.
“It was yesterday, around noon,” she says after a pause, “the last time I heard from her. I didn’t think anything at the time, except she hung up before I could give her any advice, without saying good-bye. That wasn’t like her. But girls her age can be impulsive. She was probably distracted by something.”
My impatience must show, because she hurries on.
“It may mean nothing. Spring break’s coming, and she often accompanies the family on trips. Young women always want to know what to pack.”
I’m sitting straight up. I don’t even remember shifting positions. “Trip.” There’s no tone in my voice.
“She asked what the weather’s like this time of year in Saskatchewan.”
Chapter 11
Saskatchewan: Where the hell is that, Alaska?
Or someplace equally cold and Jack London-y. Canada? If I hadn’t memorized the capitals of all fifty states, I’d have flunked geography in high school.
Has either Kevin or Margo ever mentioned visiting Canada? Florida, once every couple of winters, and Hawaii on their twentieth anniversary. No place, anyway, where you have to pack mukluks.
But traditionally a place where fugitives in the movies talk about running to avoid US law.
Ridiculous to think in those terms. But Canada’s handy, driving distance from Willow Grove, and maybe far enough outside the reach of a thug like Jeremy Adder. It also explains why Gabby ended her conversation with Tiffany Thurgood so abruptly and why her phone was wiped clean. If either of her parents happened to overhear, it would be snatched from her and every trace removed.
Do I tell Cam Howard and Dale Mercer, or will that lead Adder to the Moores? Don’t gangsters always have cops on the payroll?
I put off the decision. Gabby’s phone is burning a hole in my pocket.
Back on the Moores’ block, I circle twice to make sure the coast is clear. The squad car is nowhere in sight, and the house looks the same. There’s something about an empty house that advertises itself, even if the grass has been kept up and there’s no evidence of deterioration. Of course it’s just my imagination, but it gives me the courage to become a repeat offender.
I park around the corner, but I resist the temptation to enter the way I’d left, through the side door. That would be tougher to explain if I bumped into a cop inside than if I went in the front, and doubled the chance of a neighbor seeing me through a window and becoming suspicious enough to report it.
This time I try not to attract attention by looking over my shoulder. Better to behave as if I still have the right I had this morning, to approach the place where friends live without acting like a cartoon burglar in a striped jersey and little black mask. I make a show of knocking, wait a beat, and insert my key in the lock, shielding the action with my body.
If anything, the place seems more deserted than before. It’s probably just a case of projection, but I sense a tangible loneliness, as if the house itself feels neglected. The flotsam and jetsam of hurried departure has taken on a kind of permanence.
It’s a good sign, though. The fact that nothing’s been moved indicates that no one in authority has gone over the house in detail. Even the sliding door to the deck is still unlocked, the dowel-rod security reinforcement lying outside the track. If the officer who came to the front door while I was inside didn’t notice it, he likely hadn’t discovered a piece of evidence missing.
Unless he’d noticed and just left everything as he’d found it.
I duck into Gabby’s room, hurriedly wipe the phone on my shirt, both sides, as much to remove Sharon’s fingerprints as my own. I let it fall to the bed and poke it under the discarded sweater, touching it only with a fingernail.
Now that it’s back in place I feel as if a thousand-pound weight’s been lifted off my shoulders; but overconfidence is dangerous. I once again let myself out the side door. I slip through the hedge.
Just as a green-and-white police car slides to a stop right in front of me.
A wild sense of panic wells up, but I force it down. The officer may not have seen me coming through the hedge. Even if he did, it didn’t automatically mean I’d been inside the house. Trespassing in someone’s yard isn’t a felony; or is it?
But I can still talk myself out of trouble. I just came to see if my friends had returned. When no one answered the doorbell, I went around and knocked on the side door. Terribly sorry, Officer. I didn’t know it was a violation.
Which sounds quite plausible until the door opens on the driver’s side and Chief Cam Howard steps out, looking more official than ever in his tidy blue suit and clip-on tie.
“It’s my second time past in two minutes,” he says. “I ran your plate. Routine.”
I try to make my voice casual, but it wobbles. “I just came—”
“Later. First, I want to know why you borrowed ten thousand dollars from Kevin Moore and didn’t tell me. And why I shouldn’t put you at the top of the list of suspects in the family’s disappearance.”
Chapter 12
Standing with his hands hovering near his belt holster, Howard resembles a western gunman. His black hair, as glossy and grooved as a phonograph record, completes the effect. The slight breeze doesn’t stir even a strand. He’s plastered it down with mousse or Brylcreem or plain iron will.
“How did you find out about that?” I ask.
“I talked to the manager of the bank where the Moores keep their accounts. He drew up the agreement and notarized it. You’re to pay off the loan by October. That’s only five months away.”
“What are you implying, Chief?”
“You tell me.”
“You don’t think I did something just to avoid paying him back!”
“People have vanished over sums much smaller.”
“My God! This morning, you and I were friends. Now I’m a murder suspect?”
“You said murder; I didn’t. Let’s go inside.”
I walk around to the front door, feeling him close behind. On the step I wait for him to open the door.
“Use your key, Houdini. That’s another thing you forgot to mention this morning when you and I were friends.”
“I didn’t think it was important. The door was unlocked when I was here before.”
“Which time? We locked up after checking the place out. Then one of the men I sent to talk to the neighbors drops by for a routine check and finds the side door wide open.”
“It wasn’t—” I stop myself too late.
“Uh-huh. How much did you take?”
“I didn’t take anything!”
“Inside. Now.” His voice is a thin strip of steel.
It takes three tries to get the key into the hole, and then the tumblers resist. It’s as if the house has thrown in with the police against me. Finally the bolt slides back and I fumble the door open.
“After you,” he says.
He directs me into the den, where he locks the sliding door and rolls the dowel rod over the lip of the track and in place with a foot, maintaining a distance between us of four feet. He’s taking no chances. I must look like I’m desperate enough to try to overpower him.
“Sit.”
I lower myself onto the worn sofa. This is the room where the family
gathers to watch TV and the kids entertain their friends.
It’s also the room where Kevin sat at the desk to make out a check in my name.
Now Cam Howard sits facing me across the orderly desktop. He’s a man who turns any room he’s in into a place of official business.
“I didn’t take anything, Chief.” Which is a lie; but not in connection to what’s in his mind. To a former big-city cop, a man who’d commit one kind of crime would commit another, and when money was involved he’d plunder the house for more.
I’d decided to come clean and give him the benefit of what I’d learned from Tiffany Thurgood. Now that seems a hundred years ago. Then I was trying to clear the Moores of suspicion. Now I have to clear myself.
He says nothing. Instinctively he knows my central weakness: inability to avoid filling an awkward silence with jabber.
“You and Mercer had your minds made up that Kevin’s in cahoots with Adder,” I say. “I told you how wrong you were, and that if you weren’t going to treat them as victims, I’d look for them myself.”
“Why’d you come back twice?”
“I didn’t think to look outside the first time. I wanted to check out the grounds, in case one of them dropped something on the way out.”
He doesn’t buy it. I know, because he doesn’t even ask if I found anything.
“Why’d you put the arm on Moore? Gambling debt, drugs, pay back a loan shark?”
“I don’t gamble or do drugs, and I wouldn’t know a loan shark if I saw one. If I did, I wouldn’t have gone to Kevin. When I bought my house, I signed a fifteen-year-mortgage, with a balloon payment of ten thousand dollars due in year fifteen. It made the rate lower, so it seemed like a good deal. I thought I’d have the money by then. The payment came up last October, and I didn’t have it. It was a friendly loan, Chief.”
“I might have bought it, if you’d told me before.”
“I swear the loan didn’t even cross my mind. It has nothing to do with the Moores going missing.”
“What happens come this October?”
“I’m taking on extra clients. Today’s date with Kevin was the last weekend I don’t plan to work straight through. If I don’t have the entire amount, he’ll probably agree to cut me some slack, but I’m hoping I won’t have to ask.”
Again he makes no response. Sweat trickles down my spine, finding every nook and cranny on the way.
He stands. “Get up.”
I obey.
“Turn around and put your hands behind you.” He produces a shiny pair of handcuffs from under his coattail.
“You’re arresting me?”
“If I don’t, Mercer will. The feds get a lot of mileage out of obstruction. Do what I said.”
I begin to turn. A ride in the back of a patrol car, my fingerprints taken, a strip-search, an orange jumper—
“Okay, Gillett.”
I stop. He puts away the cuffs.
“You mean—?”
“Next time I won’t be bluffing. The FBI’s got the drag out for the Moores, and Mercer’s sitting on his hands until they show and agree to protection. I won’t muck up a major assignment with a penny rap. The Sherlock act stops now. Now.” A finger thumps my chest hard.
“Yes, sir.”
“And since you’re such a fan of crime fiction, you know what comes next.”
“‘Don’t leave town’?”
He holds out a hand and snaps his fingers. “The key, Boston Blackie. You’ve broken into your last crime scene.”
Chapter 13
I’m not sure who Boston Blackie is, but I’m pretty sure I don’t qualify.
Not when it comes to being a detective, or even a good citizen. I don’t know if I held out on Howard out of fear he’d charge me with something even more serious than interfering in a police investigation, or because I’m angry at him for suggesting I have something to do with this.
Back home, I sit and stare at the mound of work waiting for me. It’s as if I’m seated in someone else’s office, looking at unfinished projects I know nothing about.
What good would it do to explain to the chief how that loan came to be? He’d just think I was trying to wiggle out from under suspicion.
Coincidentally enough, a similarly dissociative situation had taken place after one of our Saturdays on the basketball court. Kevin had a pass that allowed him and a guest to use the university gym when the team wasn’t practicing or no event was scheduled.
It was as if I’d never played before. I couldn’t dribble or block. I missed four easy shots and wiped out on the fifth, slipping and landing elbow first on the hardwood floor. My friend helped me into the locker room, where Kevin got some ice that he folded into a towel, wrapped it around my throbbing elbow, and tied it off as neatly as a sports doctor. We sat side by side on a bench, me rocking back and forth until the numbness took over.
“Better?”
I nodded. “Guess I don’t make MVP this season.”
“Brother, you sucked.”
That sped up the cure. He can always surprise a laugh out of me. “Don’t hold back on my account. Tell me what you really think.”
But his face was troubled. “What is it, buddy? You’re no Michael Jordan, but you’ve usually got your head in the game. You worry me lately, and not just on the court. What is it, work or a woman? Still getting the cold shoulder from Sharon?”
“Who told you I liked Sharon?”
“You did. You’re still talking about her six months after she fixed your power button.”
That reminded me just how well he knew me. So I told him about the balloon payment.
“Is that all?” he said. “I thought maybe you had a lump in your testicle.”
“I’m not sure that’s worse. I’ve got insurance for that.”
He said nothing, registering his opinion of that remark. As usual, I can’t let a silence go unplugged.
“What a bonehead, right? Like I was surprised the fifteen years got used up.”
“Everybody’s a bonehead sooner or later, and it’s usually got to do with money. How much you need?”
“No.”
“Hey, what are friends for? If that doesn’t work, I’ve got other clichés.”
“Forget it, Kev. I wasn’t hinting. I can sell my car, ride my bike.”
“When was the last time you pedaled?”
I gaze at the ceiling. “Labor Day, nineteen ninety-seven.”
“Did it have training wheels?”
I laughed again and put my arm across his shoulders, forgetting the elbow. It reminded me with a sharp stab.
He said, “You’ve got to meet clients here; that’s a twenty-mile round trip. A sweaty, red-faced tech writer doesn’t inspire confidence, and by the time you got back home you’d be too stove up to write for a week. A couple of hours a week on the basketball court doesn’t make you Tour de France material. Come on, how much? That bonus I got from Adder’s just sitting in the bank.”
So we went to his bank and drew up a formal agreement with a specific due date for repayment. I insisted on it, despite his protests that it was a matter between friends and I could pay him back when I could. Kevin’s savvy in most things, but even I knew that so casual an arrangement regarding money is a friendship killer.
Killer. What makes me use that word?
That’s what I’ll be—at least an enabler—if the Moores are truly in danger and I keep my mouth shut about where they may have fled.
If they’ve fled, and their disappearance wasn’t someone else’s idea.
I scoop up the phone and call the police department.
The doorbell rings while the line’s purring. I cradle the receiver and answer. For all I know it’s Howard. He’s changed his mind and decided to arrest me anyway. Maybe he’s talked it over with Marshal Mercer, who’d push for it.
But the visitor on my doorstep is a stranger, a smallish man in an orange-and-silver jogging suit with chestnut hair falling over one eye, lending him the illusion
of youth. But the face, the skin an orangish hue courtesy of a tanning bed, is deeply lined. He’s sixty if he’s a day, much older than his dazzling set of smiling teeth.
Behind him is a pristine, square cobalt-blue seventies Cadillac with aprons on the fenders; it looks like a pontoon boat beached in my driveway. And although I’ve never laid eyes on the man before, I know who he is before he introduces himself.
“Ray Gillett? You don’t know me, but we’ve got a mutual friend in Kevin Moore. I’m Jeremy Adder.”
Chapter 14
My chest clenches. I look at his hands, expecting a pistol. They’re empty.
“You ever drive a Caddy?”
I pause, then answer numbly. The question is no more surreal than the prospect of a gangster on my doorstep. “In college. I worked for a limo service part-time.”
“Those stretch jobs handle like a truck. You’re in for a treat. Let’s cruise. You’re not busy.”
Not a question. I manage indignation. “Actually—”
“You work at home, but you’ve been spending time with cops. After that, a man has to take a break or he can’t concentrate. I know, and I’m more used to the situation.” His smile is unnerving. That the teeth are dentures is only partly responsible for this impression. “I know what those bozos have been saying about me. I’m not taking you for a ride.”
Wouldn’t he say just that, to get me in the car? Then I realize what else he said. “How do you know I’ve been—?”
“There are no secrets in a small town. I don’t live here, but a lot of people I employ do. I’ll have you back here in ten minutes. But don’t take my word for it. You see that gray Buick parked down the block? See the plate?”
He doesn’t turn his head, but I peer past his shoulder. The plate reads US-623.
“Government. I’ve got two feds on me around the clock. I stop too quick, they step on my heels. That’s your tax dollars at work. If I was Jack the Ripper, you think I’d try anything?”