The Accident (29 page)

“We’ll take good care of her,” Marcus said.

I gave Kelly a hug before heading out the door, holding on to her so long she finally had to wriggle free.

Once I was back on the road, heading east back to Connecticut, I checked my message.

“Hey, Glen, Alfie here from Milford Fire. Look, your girl Sally called me, and damned if I wasn’t going to give you a call today anyway. We sent out those parts from the fire for analysis, and we got the report back yesterday afternoon, a little too late to call, but yeah, what you were calling about, you were right. Those parts, they weren’t good enough to keep a pen flashlight going. It was crap. Cheap, knockoff crap. This could put you in a shitload of trouble, my friend.”

I dialed his number.

“Sorry about the shitty news,” Alfie said.

“Give me the details.”

“We sent out the bits and pieces left from that circuit breaker panel for analysis, and it was all rubbish. Wire was so thin, once you applied some current to it, it melted away to nothing. We’re seeing more and more of this. I don’t mean us, here in Milford, although this stuff is around. But across the country, it’s getting bad. Some of the stuff going into new
houses, man, I wouldn’t use it in my dog’s house. Listen, Glen, I have to send this on to the insurance company, you know.”

“I know.”

“And once they find out that house had equipment in it that didn’t meet code, they’re not going to pay up. In fact, they might just cancel your entire policy. They’re going to figure, if you put that kind of shit in one house, maybe you’ve put it in any other house you’ve built.”

“I didn’t put that crap in, Alfie.”

“Not you. Glen, I’ve known you long enough to know you wouldn’t knowingly do this, but somebody working for you did.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ve got a good idea who. He’s not working for me anymore.”

“Anybody else that guy
is
working for, they need to know,” Alfie said. “He wires up enough houses with that knockoff shit, sooner or later someone’s gonna die.”

“Thanks for the heads-up, Alfie.”

I flipped the phone shut and tossed it onto the seat next to me.

I wanted to find Theo Stamos. I wanted to find Theo Stamos and kill the son of a bitch. But, seeing as how I was now going through Bridgeport, Theo was going to have to wait while I paid a visit to someone else.

THIRTY-FOUR

Belinda Morton couldn’t believe it when Glen Garber told her he’d put the money in the mail. An envelope with sixty-two thousand dollars? Surely he wasn’t crazy enough to trust all that cash to the mailman. But maybe that was his way of making a point, of showing how angry he was with her.

Not that she could blame him.

She’d just been about to head out for an appointment to show a condo to a couple in their thirties who’d had enough of living and working in Manhattan, had found jobs in New Haven, and were looking for something with a view of the Sound. She phoned and said she’d had a family emergency and had to race home.

And she was almost out the office door when this guy showed up.

Said his name was Arthur Twain, that he worked for some private investigation or security company or something, and he wanted to talk to her about Ann Slocum, and fake purses, and whether she’d been to any purse parties, and did she know that the money that went to buy knockoff products supported organized crime. She could feel herself sweating right through her clothes, even though it was barely sixty degrees out there today.

“I’m sorry,” she said, probably ten times. “I don’t know anything about this. I really don’t.”

“But you were a friend of Ann’s, weren’t you?” Twain persisted.

“I really have to go, I’m sorry.”

Ran to her car, squealed out of the lot so fast she nearly ran down a woman on a bicycle.

“Calm down calm down calm down calm down,” she kept telling herself. She would have to call Darren, tell him about this Arthur Twain, ask him what she should say if he came to see her again.

She hoped that when Glen said he’d put the money in the mail, he meant the mail slot of her home. She got out of the car so quickly she didn’t even bother to close the door. If she hadn’t needed her keys to get into the house, she’d have probably left the motor running.

She ran to the door, nearly rolling over on a heel, tried three times to get the key into the slot before she was able to turn it. She swung the door open, looked down onto the floor where the mail always fell.

Nothing.

“Shit, shit, shit,” she said. She half stumbled three steps into the house and allowed herself to fall onto the stairs, leaned up against the railing and felt herself starting to shake.

Just because the money wasn’t there didn’t mean it had been lost, she told herself. Maybe Glen still had it. Maybe he was planning to drop it off later. Maybe he was on his way.

And maybe the son of a bitch really had put it into the mail. That would be just like him. If there was one thing she’d learned from being friends with Sheila all those years, Glen did have a bit of a self-righteous streak in—

She heard a noise in the house.

It sounded as though it had come from the kitchen.

She froze, held her breath.

Someone was running water into the sink. There was the sound of a clinking glass.

Then someone called out, “Honey? That you?”

Belinda felt a weight being lifted off her chest, but only briefly. It was George. What the hell was he doing home?

“Yes,” she gasped. “It’s me.”

He rounded the corner and saw her collapsed on the stairs. He was in the same suit he wore the day before to the funeral. A different shirt, but still with French cuffs, bands of brilliant white between his hands and sleeves.

“You scared me half to death,” she scolded him. “What are you doing here? Your car’s not in the driveway.”

“When I got to work, I wasn’t feeling all that well,” he said. “I think it might be that fish you made last night. So I decided to come home, work from here today. I’m not going back to the office, so I put the car in the garage.” George ran his management consulting business out of New Haven, but it was just as easy for him to work from home. “And what about you? I thought you had a showing?”

“I … it was canceled.”

“What are you doing on the stairs? You look like you’ve been crying.”

“I’m … I’m fine.”

“Are you sure?” George asked, reaching into his suit jacket and pulling out a brown envelope. “Is it possible it has something to do with not finding this?”

Belinda was on her feet. She recognized the envelope immediately. By its thickness, and her own handwriting on the outside. “Give me that.”

She went to grab for it but he pulled it away, slipping it back into his jacket.

“I said give it to me,” she said.

George shook his head sadly, as though Belinda were a child who’d just come home with an F. “So you
were
expecting this,” he said.

“Yes.”

“There’s sixty-two thousand dollars here. I counted it. It was dropped through the mail slot. You knew this was coming?”

“It’s business. It’s a down payment on a property down on East Broadway.”

“What’s this phone number on it? And who makes a down payment with cash, and doesn’t even get a proper receipt? And is it just a coincidence I saw Glen Garber’s truck driving away from the house when I turned down the street? Is Glen the one putting a down payment on a property? Would you mind if I asked him about it?”

“Don’t meddle in my affairs, George. You’ve done enough already, making me talk to those lawyers about Sheila. Do you know how much that hurt Glen? Do you have any idea what that may do? It could wipe him out. It could bankrupt him.”

George was unruffled. “People need to be accountable, Belinda. They need to be held to a certain standard. And if Glen wasn’t cognizant of problems Sheila was having, when he should have been, then there’s a price to pay for that. And envelopes stuffed with cash, dropped through a
mail slot, do not meet those standards. Don’t you realize the sort of risks that exposes us to, to have that kind of cash around the house?”

Cognizant
. She wanted to kill him. All the years she’d put up with this. Thirteen years of his sanctimonious bullshit. The fool had no idea what he was talking about. No idea how deep she was in. And no sense that this money, this envelope stuffed with cash, was her ticket to digging herself out.

“What I’m going to do,” George continued, “is I’m going to put this money away someplace safe for you, and when you can show me what exactly it relates to, and assure me it’s going to be handled in a responsible manner, then I’ll be happy to hand it over.”

“George, no. You can’t do this!”

But he was already walking away, heading to his ground-floor study. By the time she caught up, he was already across the room, swinging out the hinged portrait of his equally sanctimonious, judgmental, ramrod-stiff, son-of-a-bitch father—dead, thank God—to reveal a wall safe.

“I need that money,” Belinda pleaded.

“Well, then you better explain where it came from and what it’s for.” George turned the dial on the safe and opened it in seconds. He tossed the envelope in, closed the door, and gave the combination a spin. “I hope this doesn’t have anything to do with those illegitimate women’s accessories Ann used to sell. Those dreadful parties.”

She glared at him.

“You know how I feel about the sanctity of trademarks and copyright. Selling bags that are not what they purport to be, that are not authentic, that’s just not right. The fact is, I don’t even know why a woman would want a bag that said it was a Fendi or whatever when in fact it was not. You know why? Because you’d always
know
. What pleasure is there in carrying around something you know to be fake?”

She looked at his comb-over attempt.

“For example,” he continued, “if I could get a car that looked like a Ferrari for a fraction of the price, but underneath it was a Ford—well, that’s not a car I would want.”

George in a Ferrari
, Belinda thought. She could no more picture a donkey piloting an airplane.

“What’s happening to you?” she asked. “You’ve always been a self-righteous, pretentious asshole, but these last few days there’s something
else going on. You’re sleeping on the couch, saying you’re sick but you don’t have the flu or anything, and you freaked out when I tried to join you in the shower, you—”

“You’re not the only one who has stresses.”

“And now you’re adding to them. You have to give me that money.”

“It’s up to you. Tell me what’s going on.”

“You have no idea what you’re doing,” Belinda said to him.

“Oh, I know,” he said. “I’m doing the responsible thing.”

She wondered if he’d still be saying that after a visit from Sommer.

THIRTY-FIVE

I found my way to the Bridgeport Business College and parked in a visitor’s spot. It didn’t look all that much like a college. It was a long, flat, industrial-looking building without an ounce of academic charm. But it reportedly had good courses, and that was what had led Sheila to come here for her night classes.

I didn’t know whether Allan Butterfield was part of the regular faculty, or merely taught an evening course here on the side. I went through the entrance doors and approached a man sitting at the information desk in the drab foyer.

“I’m looking for a teacher, his name’s Butterfield.”

He didn’t need to consult anything. He pointed. “Take that hall to the end, go right, office is on the left. Just look for the signs.”

I was standing outside Allan Butterfield’s door a minute later, and rapped on it.

“Hello?” said a muffled voice from inside.

I turned the knob and opened the door on a small, cluttered office space. There was just enough room for a desk and a couple of chairs. Papers and books were stacked helter-skelter.

Butterfield wasn’t alone. A redheaded woman in her early twenties sat on the other side of the desk from Butterfield. An open laptop was balanced on her knees.

“Excuse me,” I said.

“Oh, hi,” Butterfield said. “Glen, Glen Garber.” He remembered me
from our meeting after Sheila’s death, when I’d been attempting to trace Sheila’s final hours.

“I need to talk to you,” I said.

“I’m just finishing up here with—”

“Now.”

The woman closed her laptop and said, “That’s okay, I can come back later, Mr. Butterfield.”

“Sorry, Jenny,” he told her. “Why don’t you pop in tomorrow?”

She nodded, grabbed a jacket she had draped over the back of her chair, and squeezed past me to get out the door. I took her chair without being invited.

“So, Glen,” he said. First time I met him, I put him in his early forties. Five-five, pudgy. Mostly bald, a pair of reading glasses perched on the end of his nose. “Last time we spoke, you were trying to track down Sheila’s movements the day of the … well, I know you were extremely concerned. Have you gotten some answers to your questions? Achieved some sort of closure?”

“Closure,” I repeated. The word tasted like sour milk in my mouth. “No, no closure.”

“I’m so sorry to hear that.”

No sense beating around the bush. “Why are there so many calls from you to my wife’s cell phone before she died?”

He opened his mouth but nothing came out. Not for a good second or two. I could see he was trying to think of something, but the best he could come up with on short notice was “I’m sorry—I—what?”

“There’s a slew of calls from you to my wife. Missed calls. It looks to me like she was receiving them, but didn’t want to take them.”

“I’m sorry, but I don’t know what you’re talking about. I mean, I’m sure, occasionally, I may have had reason to call your wife about the course she was taking, she had questions related to the assignments, but—”

“I think that’s bullshit, Allan.”

“Honestly, Glen, I—”

“You need to know that I’m having a very, very bad day, which happens to be part of a very, very bad month. So when I tell you I’m not in the mood for bullshit, you need to believe me. Why all the calls?”