No Time for Goodbye (26 page)

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?”

Vince tossed Baldy aside, walked out of the room and nearly ran into the maid.

“You not supposed—” she started to say.

“How long ago?” Vince asked, taking a twenty out of his wallet and handing it to her.

She slipped it into the pocket of her uniform. “Ten minute?”

“What kind of car did he have?” I asked.

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Just a car. Brown. Dark window.”

“Did he say anything to you, say if he was heading home, anything like that?” I asked.

“He didn’t say anything to me.”

“Thanks,” Vince said to her. He tipped his head in the direction of his pickup, and we both got back in.

“Shit,” Vince said. “Shit.”

“What now?” I said. I had no idea.

Vince sat there a moment. “You need to pack?” he asked.

“Pack?”

“I think you’re going to Youngstown. You can’t get there and back in a day.”

I considered what he’d said. “If he’s checked out,” I said, “it makes sense he’s going home.”

“And even if he isn’t, looks to me like that might be the only place at the moment where you might find some answers.”

Vince reached across the car in my direction, and I recoiled for a second, thinking he was going to grab me, but he was just opening the glove box. “Jesus,” he said, “fucking relax.” He grabbed a road map, unfolded it. “Okay, let’s have a look here.” He scanned the map, looking into the upper left corner, then said, “Here it is. North of Buffalo, just north of Lewiston. Youngstown. Tiny little place. Should take us eight hours maybe.”

“Us?”

Vince attempted, briefly, to fold the map back into its original form, then shoved it, a jagged-edged paper ball, at me. “That’ll be your job. You get that back together, I might even let you do some of the driving. But don’t even think of touching the radio. That’s fucking off-limits.”

39

Looking at the map
, it appeared our fastest route was to head straight north, into Massachusetts as far north as Lee, head west from there into New York State, then catch the New York Thruway up to Albany and west to Buffalo.

Our route was going to take us through Otis, which would put us within a couple of miles of the quarry where Patricia Bigge’s car had been found.

I told Vince. “You want to see?” I asked.

We’d been averaging over eighty miles per hour. Vince had a radar detector engaged. “We’re making pretty good time,” he said. “Yeah, why not?”

Even though there were no police cars marking the entrance this time, I was able to find the narrow road in. The Dodge Ram, with its greater clearance, took them a lot better than my basic sedan, and when we crested the final hill, where the woods opened up at the edge of the cliff, I thought, sitting up high in the passenger seat, that we were going to plunge over the side.

But Vince gently braked, put the truck in park, and engaged the emergency brake, which I’d never observed him do before. He got out and walked to the cliff’s edge and looked down.

“They found the car right down there,” I said, coming up alongside him and pointing.

Vince nodded, impressed. “If I was going to dump a car with a couple people inside,” he said, “I could do a lot worse than a spot like this.”

I was riding with a cobra.

No, not a cobra. A scorpion. I thought of that old American Indian folktale about the frog and scorpion, the one where the frog agrees to help the scorpion across the river if it promises not to sting him with its poisonous venom. The scorpion agrees, then halfway across, even though it means he, too, will perish, he plunges his stinger into the frog. The frog, dying, asks, “Why did you do this?” And the scorpion replies, “Because I am a scorpion, and it is my nature.”

At what point, I wondered, might Vince sting me?

If he did, I couldn’t imagine it would be like with the frog and the scorpion. Vince struck me as much more of a survivor.

Once we neared the Mass Pike, and the little bars on my phone started reappearing, I tried Cynthia again. When there was no answer on her cell, I tried home, but without any real expectation that she would be there.

She was not.

Maybe it was just as well that I couldn’t reach her. I’d rather call her when I had real news, and maybe, after we’d reached Youngstown, I’d have some.

I was about to put the phone away when it rang in my hand. I jumped.

“Hello?” I said.

“Terry.” It was Rolly.

“Hi,” I said.

“Heard anything from Cynthia?”

“I spoke to her before I left, but she didn’t tell me where she was. But she and Grace sounded okay.”

“Before you left? Where are you?”

“We’re just about to get on the Mass Turnpike, at Lee. We’re on our way to Buffalo. Actually, a bit north of there.”

“We?”

“It’s a long story, Rolly. And it seems to be getting longer and longer.”

“Where are you going?” He sounded genuinely concerned.

“Maybe on a wild-goose chase,” I said. “But there’s a chance I may have found Cynthia’s family.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“No.”

“But Terry, honestly, they must be dead after all these years.”

“Maybe. I don’t know. Maybe someone survived. Maybe Clayton.”

“Clayton?”

“I don’t know. All I do know is, we’re on our way to an address where the phone’s listed under the name Clayton Sloan.”

“Terry, you shouldn’t even be attempting this. You don’t know what you’re getting into.”

“Maybe,” I said, then glanced over at Vince and added, “but I’m with someone who seems to know how to handle himself in tricky situations.”

Unless, of course, just being with Vince Fleming
was
the tricky situation.

Once we’d crossed over into New York State and had picked up our toll ticket at the booth, it wasn’t long before we were to Albany. We both needed something to eat, and to take a whiz, so we pulled off at one of those interstate service centers. I bought us some burgers and Cokes and brought them back out to the truck so we could eat and drive.

“Don’t spill anything,” said Vince, who kept the truck pretty tidy. It didn’t look as though he’d ever killed anyone in here, or would want to, and I chose to take that as a good sign.

The New York Thruway took us through the southern edge of the Adirondacks once we got a bit west of Albany, and if my mind had not already been occupied with my current situation, I might have appreciated the scenery. Once we were past Utica, the highway flattened out, along with the countryside around it. The odd time I’d done this drive, once heading up to Toronto years ago for an educational conference, this had always been the part that seemed to drag on forever.

We made another pit stop outside Syracuse, didn’t lose much more than ten minutes.

There wasn’t a lot of conversation. We listened to the radio—Vince picked the stations, of course. Country, mostly. I looked through his CDs in a compartment between the front seats. “No Carpenters?” I said.

Traffic got bad as we neared Buffalo. It was also starting to get dark. I had to refer to the map more here, advise Vince how to bypass the city. As it turned out, I didn’t do any of the driving. Vince was a much more aggressive driver than I, and I was willing to suppress my fear if it meant that we’d get to Youngstown that much quicker.

We got past Buffalo, proceeded on to Niagara Falls, stayed on the highway without taking the time to visit one of the wonders of the world, up the Robert Moses Parkway past Lewiston, where I noticed a hospital, its big blue “H” illuminated in the night sky, not far from the highway. Not far north of Lewiston, we took the exit for Youngstown.

I hadn’t thought, before we left my house, to get an exact address off the computer under the listing for Clayton Sloan, nor had I printed off a map. I hadn’t known, at the time, that we were going to be making this trip. But Youngstown was a village, not a big city like Buffalo, and we figured it wouldn’t take that long for us to get our bearings. We came in off the Robert Moses on Lockport Street, then turned south on Main.

I spotted a bar and grill. “They’ll probably have a phone book,” I said.

“I could use a bite,” Vince said.

I was hungry, but I was also feeling pretty anxious. We were so close. “Something quick,” I said, and Vince found a place to park around the corner. We walked back, went inside, and were awash in the aromas of beer and chicken wings.

While Vince grabbed a chair at the counter and ordered some beer and wings, I found a pay phone, but no phone book. The bartender handed me the one he kept under the counter when I asked.

The listing for Clayton Sloan gave the address as 25 Niagara View Drive. Now I remembered it. Handing the book back, I asked the bartender how to get there.

“South on Main, half a mile.”

“Left or right?”

“Left. You go right, you’re in the river, pal.”

Youngstown was on the Niagara River, directly across from the Canadian town of Niagara-on-the-Lake, famous for its live theater. They held the Shaw Festival there, I remembered, named for George Bernard Shaw.

Maybe some other time.

I ripped the meat off a couple of wings and drank half a beer, but my stomach was full of butterflies. “I can’t take this any longer,” I said to Vince. “Let’s go.” He threw some bills on the counter and we were out the door.

The truck’s headlights caught the street signs, and it wasn’t any time at all before we spotted Niagara View.

Vince hung a left, trolled slowly down the street while I hunted for numbers. “Twenty-one, twenty-three,” I said. “There,” I said. “Twenty-five.”

Instead of pulling into the drive, Vince drove a hundred yards farther down the street before turning off the truck and killing the lights.

There was a car in the driveway at number 25. A silver Honda Accord, maybe five years old. No brown car.

If Jeremy Sloan was headed home, it looked as though we’d gotten here before him. Unless his car was tucked into the separate, two-car garage.

The house was a sprawling one-story, white siding, built in the sixties most likely. Well tended. A porch, two wood recliners. The place didn’t scream rich, but it said comfortable.

There was also a ramp. A wheelchair ramp, with a very slight grade, from the walkway to the porch. We walked up it, and stood at the door together.

“How you wanna play this?” Vince said.

“What do you think?”

“Close to the vest,” Vince suggested.

There were still lights on in the house, and I thought I could detect the muted sounds of a television somewhere inside, so it didn’t look as though I was going to wake anyone up. I raised my index finger to the doorbell, held it a moment.

“Showtime,” Vince said.

I rang the bell.