No Time for Goodbye (23 page)

33

As a high school English teacher
, I didn’t have a lot of experience in how to handle being grabbed by a couple of thugs out front of a doughnut shop and tossed into the back of an SUV.

I was learning, very quickly, that no one was particularly interested in what I had to say.

“Look,” I said from the floor of the backseat, “you guys have made some kind of mistake.” I tried twisting around a bit, onto my side, so I could at least get a glimpse of the bald man who was pressing down on my thigh with his boot.

“Shut the fuck up,” he said, looking at me.

“I’m just saying,” I said, “I’m not the kind of guy anyone would be interested in. I don’t mean you guys any harm. Who do you think I am? Some gang guy? A cop? I’m a
teacher
.”

From the front seat, Blondie said, “I fucking hated all my teachers. That’s enough right there to get you capped.”

“I’m sorry, I know there are a lot of shitty teachers out there, but what I’m trying to tell you is I don’t have anything to do—”

Baldy sighed, opened up his jacket, and produced a gun that was probably not the biggest handgun in the world, but from my position below him, it looked like a cannon. He pointed it at my head.

“If I have to shoot you in this car, my boss is going to be pissed that there’ll be blood and bone and brain matter all over the fucking upholstery, but when I explain to him that you wouldn’t shut the fuck up like you were told to do, I think he’ll understand.”

I shut up.

It didn’t take a Sherlock Holmes to figure out that this had something to do with my asking questions about where to find Vince Fleming. Maybe one of those two guys at the bar at Mike’s had made a call. Maybe the bartender had phoned the auto body shop before I’d even got there. Then somebody’d put in a call to these two goons to find out why it was I wanted to see Vince Fleming.

Except nobody was asking that question.

Maybe they didn’t care. Maybe it was enough that I was asking. You ask around about Vince, you end up in the back of an SUV and nobody ever sees you again.

I started thinking about a way out. It was me against three big guys. Judging by the extra fat they were carrying around their middles, maybe not the fittest thugs in Milford, but how in shape did you have to be when you were armed? I knew for sure that one of them had a gun, and it seemed reasonable to assume the other two did as well. Could I get Baldy’s gun from him, shoot him, open the door, and jump from a moving car?

Not in a million years.

The gun was still in Baldy’s hand, resting on top of his knee. The other leg remained propped on top of me, and his boot had left a gravelly smudge on my jeans. Blondie and the driver were talking, nothing to do with me, but about a ball game from the night before. Then Blondie said, “What the fuck is that?”

The driver said, “It’s a CD.”

“I can see it’s a CD. It’s what CD it is that’s got me worried. You are not putting that in the player.”

“Yeah, I am.”

I heard the distinctive whir of a CD being loaded into a dashboard player.

“I don’t fucking believe you,” Blondie said.

“What?” Baldy asked from the backseat.

Before anyone else could say anything, the music started. An instrumental intro, and then, “Why do birds suddenly appear…every time…you are near?”

“Fuck me,” said Baldy. “The fucking Carpenters?”

“Hey,” said the driver. “Knock it off. I grew up with this.”

“Jesus,” said Blondie. “This chick singing, isn’t she the one who wouldn’t eat anything?”

“Yeah,” the driver said. “She had anorexia.”

“People like that,” said Baldy. “They should have a fucking hamburger or something.”

Could three guys debating the merits of a seventies singing group really be planning to take me someplace and execute me? Wouldn’t the mood in the car have to be a bit more grim? For a moment, I felt encouraged. And then I thought of the scene in
Pulp Fiction
where Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta are arguing over what a Big Mac is called in Paris, moments before they go up to an apartment and commit murder. These guys didn’t even have that kind of style. In fact, there was an unmistakable whiff of body odor coming off one or more of them.

Is this how it ends? In the backseat of an SUV? One minute you’re having coffee in a doughnut shop, trying to find your missing wife and daughter, and the next you’re looking down the barrel of a stranger’s gun, wondering if the last words you hear will be “They long to be…close to you.”

We took a couple of turns, went over some railroad tracks, and then it felt as though the SUV was descending, ever so slightly, as though we were heading toward the shore. Down toward the Sound.

Then the truck slowed, did an abrupt right, bounced up over a curb, and came to a stop. Looking up through the windows, I saw mostly sky, but also the side of a house. When the driver killed the engine, I heard seagulls.

“Okay,” said Baldy, looking down at me, “I want you to be nice. We’re getting out and going up some stairs and into a house, and if you try to run away, or if you try shouting for help, or try doing any other kind of retarded thing, I’m going to hurt you. You understand?”

“Yes,” I said.

Blondie and the driver were already out. Baldy opened his door, got out, and I pulled myself up first onto the backseat, then scooted over until I was out the side.

We were parked in a driveway between two beach houses. I had a pretty good idea we were on East Broadway. The houses are packed in pretty tight together along there, and glancing south between the houses I could see beach and beyond that, Long Island Sound. When I saw Charles Island out there, I was even more sure where we were.

Baldy motioned for me to climb up a set of open-back stairs that went up the side of a pale yellow house to the second floor. The first floor was mostly garage. Blondie and the driver went ahead, then me, then Baldy. The steps were gritty with beach sand and made soft, scratching noises under our shoes.

At the top of the stairs the driver held open a screen door, and the rest of us walked in ahead of him. We entered into a large room with sliding glass doors facing the water, and a deck that was suspended over the beach. There were some chairs and a couch just inside the door, a shelf weighed down with paperback novels, then as you moved back into the room there was an eating table and a kitchen along the back wall.

A heavyset man with his back to me was standing at the stove, steadying a frying pan with one hand, a spatula in the other.

“Here he is,” Blondie said.

The man nodded without saying anything.

“We’ll be down in the truck,” Baldy said, and motioned for Blondie and the driver to follow him out. The three of them walked out and I could hear their boots receding on the steps.

I stood there in the center of the room. Normally, I would have turned to take in the view out the glass doors, maybe even walked out onto the deck and taken in a whiff of sea air. But instead, I stared at the man’s back.

“You want some eggs?” he asked.

“No thanks,” I said.

“It’s no trouble,” he said. “Fried, scrambled, over easy, whatever.”

“No, but thanks just the same,” I said.

“I get up a little later, sometimes it’s nearly lunchtime before I make breakfast,” he said. He reached up into a cupboard and brought down a plate, transferred some scrambled eggs to it, added some sausages that had been sitting on some paper towel that he must have cooked earlier, then reached into a cutlery drawer for a fork and what appeared to be a steak knife.

He turned around and walked over to the table, pulled out a chair, and sat down.

He was about my age, although I think I can say, objectively, that he looked a bit worse for wear. His face was pockmarked, he had an inch-long scar above his right eye, and his once black hair was now heavily peppered with gray. He was in a black T-shirt, tucked into some black jeans, and I could see the bottom edge of a tattoo on his upper right arm, but not enough to know what it was. His stomach strained against his shirt, and he sighed at the effort of plopping down into his chair.

He motioned to the chair opposite him. I approached, cautiously, and sat down. He upended a bottle of ketchup, waited for a huge dollop to land on the plate by his eggs and sausage. He had a mug of coffee in front of him, and when he reached for it, said, “Coffee?”

“No,” I said. “I just had some at the doughnut shop.”

“The one by my business?” he said.

“Yes.”

“It’s not very good there,” he said.

“No, it’s not. I threw out half of it,” I said.

“Do I know you?” he asked, shoving some eggs into his mouth.

“No,” I said.

“But you’re asking around for me. First at Mike’s, then at my place of business.”

“Yes,” I said. “It wasn’t my intention to alarm you.”

“‘Wasn’t my intention,’” he parroted. The man I now knew to be Vince Fleming speared a sausage with his fork, held it in place, then picked up the steak knife and cut off a piece. He shoved it into his mouth. “Well, when people I don’t know start asking around for me, that can be a cause for concern.”

“I guess I didn’t fully appreciate that.”

“Given the kind of business I do, sometimes I run into people with unorthodox business practices.”

“Sure,” I said.

“So when people I don’t know start asking around for me, I like to arrange a meeting where I feel I have the advantage.”

“I think you do,” I said.

“So who the fuck are you?”

“Terry Archer. You know my wife.”

“I know your wife,” he said, as if to say,
So?
“Not anymore. But a long time ago.”

Fleming scowled at me as he took another bite of sausage. “What is this? Did I fool around with your old lady or something? Look, it’s not my fault if you can’t keep your woman happy and she needs to come to me for what she needs.”

“It’s not that kind of thing,” I said. “My wife’s name is Cynthia. You would have known her when she was Cynthia Bigge.”

He stopped in mid-chew. “Oh. Shit. Man, that was a fucking long time ago.”

“Twenty-five years,” I said.

“You’ve taken a long time to drop by,” Vince Fleming said.

“There have been some recent developments,” I said. “I take it you remember what happened that night.”

“Yeah. Her whole fucking family vanished.”

“That’s right. They’ve just found the bodies of Cynthia’s mother and brother.”

“Todd?”

“That’s right.”

“I knew Todd.”

“You did?”

Vince Fleming shrugged. “A bit. I mean, we went to the same school. He was an okay guy.” He shoveled in some more ketchup-covered eggs.

“You’re not curious about where they found them?” I asked.

“I figure you’re going to tell me,” he said.

“They were in Cynthia’s mother’s car, a yellow Ford Escort, at the bottom of a lake in a quarry, up in Massachusetts.”

“No shit.”

“No shit.”

“They must have been there awhile,” Vince said. “And they were still able to tell who they were?”

“DNA,” I said.

Vince shook his head in admiration. “Fucking DNA. What did we ever do without it?” He finished off a sausage.

“And Cynthia’s aunt was murdered,” I said.

Vince’s eyes narrowed. “I think Cynthia talked about her. Bess?”

“Tess,” I said.

“Yeah. She bought it?”

“Someone stabbed her to death in her kitchen.”

“Hmm,” Vince said. “Is there some reason why you’re telling me all this?”

“Cynthia’s missing,” I said. “She’s…run off. With our daughter. We have a daughter named Grace. She’s eight.”

“That’s too bad.”

“I thought there was a chance Cynthia might have come looking for you. She’s trying to find the answers to what happened that night, and it’s possible you might have some of them.”

“What would I know?”

“I don’t know. But you were probably the last person to see Cynthia that night, other than her family. And you had a run-in with her father before he brought Cynthia home.”

I never saw it coming.

Vince Fleming reached across the table with one hand, grabbed my right wrist with his left, yanked it across the table toward him, while his other hand grabbed the steak knife he’d been using to cut his sausage. He swung it down toward the table in a long, swift arc, and the blade buried into the wood table between my middle and fourth finger.

I screamed. “Jesus!”

Vince’s hand was a vise on my wrist, pinning it to the table. “I don’t like the sound of what you’re suggesting,” he said.

I was panting too hard to respond. I kept looking at the knife, desperate to reassure myself that it had not actually gone through my hand.

“I have a question for you,” Vince said very quietly, still holding my wrist, leaving the knife standing straight up. “There’s been a guy, another guy, asking around about me. You know anything about that?”

“What guy?” I said.

“In his fifties, short guy, might have been private. Asked around without being quite so obvious as you.”

“It might have been a man named Abagnall,” I said. “Denton Abagnall.”

“And how would you know that?”

“Cynthia hired him. We both hired him.”

“To check up on me?”

“No. I mean, not specifically. We hired him to try and find Cynthia’s family. Or at least, what happened to them.”

“And that meant asking about me?”

I swallowed. “He mentioned that he thought you were worth taking a look at.”

“Really? And what’s he found out about me?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I mean, if he did find out anything, we don’t know what it was. And we’re not likely to find out, either.”

“Why’s that?” Vince Fleming asked.

He either didn’t know, or was very good with the poker face.

“He’s dead,” I said. “He was murdered, too. In a parking garage in Stamford. We think it might have something to do with Tess’s murder.”

“And the boys also said some cop was nosing around asking for me. Black chick, short and fat.”

“Wedmore,” I said. “She’s been looking into all of it.”

“Well,” said Vince, letting go of my wrist and working the knife out of the table, “that’s all very interesting, but I don’t particularly give a fuck.”