Too Close to Home (28 page)

THIRTY-TWO

T
ECHNICALLY SPEAKING,” I told Derek before we headed out Monday—we’d spent Sunday catching our breath and doing as little as possible—to pick up Drew, “you’re the boss. It’s your dad’s truck and equipment, you’re the boss’s son. But don’t go telling Drew what to do or anything. You’re a kid—a smart kid, getting smarter every day—but you’re a kid, and ordering an older guy like that around, it gets kind of awkward. Do you get what I’m saying?”

“Yeah,” said Derek. “Don’t be an asshole.”

“Bingo,” I said. “Mom and I will take the car, you follow us in the truck, once we’ve got Drew and I’ve introduced you, your mom’s going to drop me off down at city hall.”

“I can’t believe you’re really going back to work for him,” Derek said. “I mean, I’m not saying whether you should or not, I’m just surprised.”

“Me too,” I said. “But you do what you have to do.”

“I can pay you back,” Derek said. “I’ll work for free, that’ll save some money. It was my fault. Being in the house. That’s what got me into trouble. You and Mom shouldn’t have to pay for my stupidity.”

“Get in the truck,” I said.

Ellen and I got in her Mazda, Ellen behind the wheel, and I gave her directions that led us to Drew, standing on the curb in his usual spot. Ellen pulled over, I got out and waited for Derek to pull over, get out and join us.

“My son,” I said. “Drew, this is Derek; Derek, this is Drew.”

They shook hands.

“I’d have called and explained, but I realized I didn’t even have your number,” I said.

“And I don’t have a cell,” Drew said. “Not really money for it in my budget at the moment.” To Derek, he said, “So, you’re out. Congratulations.”

“I’m going to spend the next few weeks working for the mayor’s office.” I couldn’t bring myself to actually say Randy’s name, not after Drew’s judgmental comments the day before. “Derek’s going to fill in for me in the meantime. He knows the drill, the customers, all that stuff.”

“Okay,” Drew said.

“So, I’ve gotta take off,” I said. “Talk to you at the end of the day,” I said to Derek, gave him a hug he wasn’t too embarrassed to receive, then walked back to the car. Ellen slipped out, gave Derek a hug of her own, then settled back in behind the wheel.

The last thing I heard was Derek saying to Drew, “So, like, my dad says you robbed a bank.”

Maybe I should have given him just a little more advice.

I WAS DRESSED a little differently for work today. Black dress slacks, black shoes, off-white dress shirt, gray sports jacket. I had a tie rolled up and tucked into my pocket for emergencies, but given that the heat was still with us, I was going to try to get away with an open collar.

I had forgotten that there’s a lot of sitting around in this job, and that was how I spent most of my morning. I got caught up on news with some of the office staff, who were both sympathetic and congratulatory about our home situation.

Shortly after lunch, Randy said we had just a few items on the agenda for the afternoon. He was trying to keep his schedule light, since tomorrow was his news conference, where he intended to officially announce that he was running for Congress.

The first thing on today’s schedule was a car dealership opening, where the mayor cut a ribbon and ate some cake and glad-handed and had his picture taken pretending to close a door on his hand. I hung out by the Grand Marquis, preferring to keep as far away from this sort of stuff as possible, although I did score a free barbecued hot dog.

After that, we were off to the Swanson House, the place where single mothers and their babies could find support and a place to live. This was the mayor’s second stop here since barging in unannounced that night the week before. He’d already cleaned the rug he threw up on, but now he was there to present the home’s manager, Gillian Metcalfe, with a check for five thousand dollars. I was pretty sure the city came up with more than five thousand a year for Swanson House—it was probably more in the range of fifty or a hundred grand—but if you handed it all over at once, that tended to limit the number of photo ops. Better ten to twenty stops with a five-thousand-dollar check each time.

Randy was visibly pissed as we walked up the sidewalk to Swanson House. “I don’t see any media,” he said. “You see any fucking media?”

I did not. There were no TV vans, no cars with the logo of the local newspaper plastered to the door. Could it be that the mayor handing over a measly five grand to the single mothers’ residence wasn’t particularly newsworthy?

I could recall times in my previous stint with Randall Finley when, if he showed up at a scheduled event that was clearly going to have less of a publicity payoff than anticipated, he walked. He’d been invited one time to a high school graduation ceremony, but when he arrived and learned from school officials that he wasn’t sitting on the stage as the students came up to receive their diplomas, but instead in the front row, where he would not be on view 100 percent of the time by the parents in attendance, he bolted.

“I gave up two other events that would give me better exposure than this one, now that you’ve got me sitting down with the regular people,” he told the astonished head of student services. “If you’re not putting me on the stage here, I can probably still catch one of them.”

At the time, I sidled up to him and whispered, “People will never forget this if you blow them off.”

And he’d said to me, “And where were you mayor, exactly?”

But Randy wasn’t going to pull any of that kind of shit with Gillian Metcalfe. She had media savvy. Dumping the Swanson House’s soiled carpet on the steps of town hall was evidence of that. So even if no one from the press showed, Randy was going to make sure she was happy, or at least as happy as he was likely to make her with a five-thousand-dollar check. If Gillian was smart, and she was, she’d give that check a limited-enough look of approval to guarantee there’d be another one before too long.

While the mayor was shaking her hand and trying to make small talk as she smiled under duress, I wandered down to the house kitchen, which was about twice the size of one in a standard home. There were two stoves, two oversized fridges, a couple of microwaves, loads of counter space, as well as half a dozen high chairs and plastic bibs scattered about. I could hear one, possibly two, small babies crying upstairs, but the child sitting in one of the high chairs in the kitchen was looking very content as his mother fed him a gooey white mixture I took to be pablum.

“Hey,” I said, trying not to intrude, but not wanting to be rude, either.

The baby’s mother glanced at me, flashed me a smile, but she had to focus on getting the tiny plastic spoon into the mouth of her baby, who looked about ten months old, I guessed.

There was something about the mother that made me look at her more closely. Twenty years old, maybe, but there was still a chance she was in her teens. Dirty blond hair that hung to her shoulders, brown eyes, a stud so small I almost missed it in her nose. A couple of forehead zits, pale skin, no lipstick, a sharp cleft in her chin.

I was trying to place her, almost certain I’d seen her before somewhere. Her outfit—track pants and sweatshirt—was wrong. This wasn’t the getup I’d seen her in before.

“Your baby’s beautiful,” I said, moving closer.

The young woman beamed. “Thank you. His name is Sean.”

“Hey, Sean,” I said. Pablum squirted back out of his mouth and dropped onto the high chair tray. He glanced down, stuck his hand in it.

“And I’m Linda,” the mother said.

“Linda, hi,” I said. I extended a hand. “I’m Jim. Jim Cutter.”

We shook hands. Bits of baby food stuck to my palm.

“Hi, Jim,” she said. “So, you work for the mayor?”

On her way into the kitchen with the baby, she’d seen Randy chatting up Metcalfe.

“I drive him around,” I said. “Actually, this is my first day in a couple of years, working for him. I’m sort of filling in. His other driver, he’s kind of unavailable.”

“He came in here last week and threw up,” Linda said. “Not the driver, the mayor.”

“So I heard. It’s kind of his specialty.”

“Throwing up?”

“Well, making an ass of himself. He has a wide repertoire of techniques at his disposal.”

Linda smiled, got some more pablum on the spoon. “Yeah, no kidding.”

The way she said it suggested she had some familiarity with the mayor’s leadership style.

“You look like you want to ask me something,” Linda said. “You want to know why I’m here, why I haven’t got a husband.”

It was true, I was about to ask her something. But not that. “I don’t think that would be any of my business,” I said.

“It’s okay,” she said. “This guy, Eric, he got me pregnant, and I think maybe he would have married me, but he got sent to Iraq, and I was thinking that when he got back, he’d be a father to this boy, even if he didn’t actually want to marry me, but then he got killed.”

“I’m sorry.”

“He was in a helicopter, and it went down.”

“I’m sorry,” I said again.

“It’s a stupid war,” Linda said.

“That’s what a lot of people think,” I said.

“So I didn’t have a job or any money, and they’re letting me and my baby stay here until I get myself back on my feet, you know?”

“Sure.” I paused. “You’re right, I was going to ask you something, though, but not that. Something else.”

“Oh yeah?”

“You look familiar to me. I feel as though we’ve met before somewhere.”

She looked away from Sean long enough to study my face, then went back to the feeding. “Yeah, I might have met you once,” she said. “It’s possible. I’ve met a lot of people.” She hesitated. “A lot of men.”

Then I remembered. She was the girl standing outside the room, in the hallway, the night I found Randall Finley with the underage hooker. Linda, I’d assumed, was earning her money the same way as Sherry Underwood, at least that was what the tight top, short skirt, and heels had suggested to me at the time.

“You used to . . . I mean, I seem to remember that you . . .” How did one put this to a young mother feeding her baby?

“Fucked guys for money? Don’t worry,” she said, nodding at Sean. “He can barely say ‘Mommy’ yet.” She studied me again. “But I don’t think I ever did you.”

“No,” I said. “You didn’t.” I sat down at the table so she wouldn’t have to crane her neck up to look at me. “So you managed to get off the street.”

“Yeah,” she said, then gestured around her. “I moved up to this. A home for knocked-up teens.”

I smiled. “Don’t put yourself down.”

“I’ve been a screwup most of my life,” she said. “But I really want to get it together, especially now.” Her cheeks swelled with pride as she looked at her baby. “I’d like to finish high school and go to college.”

“What would you like to do?” I asked.

“I’d kind of like to get into journalism,” she said. “I’ve seen a lot of shit, ways people live that they shouldn’t have to, that people should be writing more about. I don’t think most people really care about street kids or what happens to them. Believe me, I know what I’m talking about. I’d like to try and change that.”

“Good for you,” I said, trying hard not to sound patronizing, because I meant it. For a moment neither of us said anything. Finally, I said, “You knew a girl named Sherry, didn’t you?”

“Sherry?”

“Sherry Underwood,” I said. “Back then, when you were, what do you call it, a working girl?”

“Hooker,” Linda said.

I smiled. “Hooker. Back then, you hung out with her? Worked together?”

She thought back. “Yeah. Sherry. Shit, haven’t thought of her in a while. She was a couple of years younger than me. Kind of young to be out there, but what are you going to do, right? You need to eat.”

“So you knew her.”

“A little.”

“Do you know what ever happened to her?” I asked.

“Why?” Linda asked.

I hesitated. How to explain. “Well,” I said, “I was around one night, when she was in a bit of trouble. She should have gone to a hospital. She’d gotten kicked in the nose. I tried to talk her into going to see a doctor but she wouldn’t do it.”

“Oh yeah,” said Linda. “I remember that. You were there.” She glanced out the kitchen door. “So was that guy out there handing over the check.”

My eyebrows went up. “You remember him?”

“You’d be surprised how many people I remember. Some more important than him. Anyway, I can tell you why she wouldn’t have gone to the hospital. You sit there all night, you lose a lot of money, plus it’s not like we had any kind of health plan, you know?”

“Sure. She still around? Is Sherry still working the street?”

“I don’t know,” Linda said. “I got out of that before she did. So our paths didn’t cross that much. But I saw her one time, not long after I got knocked up, downtown, in Kelly’s?” Another downtown diner. “She didn’t look so good.”

“What do you mean?’

“I don’t know,” Linda said. “She was looking really rough. She was, like, sixteen or seventeen, looked like a hundred. Some kids, they handle the street okay, but others, it wears them down, they get into drugs, meth sometimes. Or they get AIDS or something like that.” She said it very matter-of-factly.

“So things weren’t going that well for her,” I said. “You think she still hangs out down there?”

Linda was using a damp cloth to clean Sean’s face. “Like, I kind of doubt it,” she said. “Given how she looked last time I saw her, unless someone got to her and helped her get her life back on track, she’s a goner.”

“Dead? You think she’s dead?”

Linda shrugged. “Shit, who knows? Unless she managed to turn her life around on her own, which is not very likely. I mean, come on, what are the odds anyone else is going to take the time to help some dumb street kid get her life back in order? It’s like I said, most people, they really don’t want to deal with people like us.”

THIRTY-THREE

M
AYOR FINLEY popped his head into the kitchen, looking for me. “Hey, let’s roll,” he said, without so much as a glance at Linda and her baby, just like when I had Drew standing next to me outside of Lance’s place. If Randy didn’t need to speak to you, didn’t need to know who you were, he didn’t see any need to acknowledge your existence.

Back in the car, he said, “Okay, so we might as well go back to the office. I got a committee meeting at two, then at three-thirty I got this tree planting at a school.”

“Sounds nice,” I said.

“Fucking pain in the ass,” he said. “Every goddamn school in the city is on this green kick, you know? They make the kids stop bringing plastic bags to school, they think they’ve solved global warming. Then their mommies come pick them up after school in their fucking Hummers.”

Once in a while, Randy actually had an insight that was valid.

He said, “So, who you think did it?”

I had been thinking about Derek and Drew, wondering how their first day working together was shaping up, how Derek’s second day out of jail was going. “Huh?” I said.

“Lance. Who offed Lance?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“I’m thinking, jealous husband? Dope dealer? Some pimp he tried to get out of paying? Gambling debts, maybe? Or what about this?” He leaned forward in his seat, all conspiratorial, like there was someone else in the car with us. “Maybe a gay lover.”

“I don’t know,” I said again.

Finley settled back in his seat. “The thing is, despite all the time we spent together, I didn’t really know all that much about him.”

“Why do you think that is?” I asked.

In my rearview mirror, I saw him shrug. “I guess I really didn’t give a shit,” he said. “To be honest with you, Cutter, other people’s lives, they don’t really interest me that much.”

There was a campaign slogan in there somewhere, I thought. My cell rang.

“It’s Barry,” the police detective said. “You want to grab a coffee?”

“I’ve got a bit of a window this afternoon. Mayor doesn’t have to go out till about three to plant a tree.” I’d been thinking about Kelly’s, where Linda said she’d last seen Sherry Underwood. It was close to city hall. I mentioned it to Barry.

“Half an hour,” he said.

By the time I’d dropped Randy off and parked the car in the underground garage, it was time to meet with Barry. He was already in a booth, and there were coffees and slices of cherry pie on both sides of the table. He hadn’t touched his pie yet.

I sat down.

“What’s this?” I said, looking at the pie.

“Peace offering,” Barry said.

“There’s no whipped cream,” I said.

Barry raised his hand, snapped his fingers. The waitress came over and Barry said, “Could you bury this in Cool Whip or something, please?”

She took the plate away and was back in under thirty seconds, the pie now largely obscured by white fluffiness.

“How’s that?” Barry said.

“Better.”

“I’m sorry about your son. It made sense at the time. He was in the house, he lied about being there, and I don’t know what, but there was something funny going on between your boy and Mrs. Langley.”

I said nothing.

“But that earring,” he said. “They never managed to get a DNA trace off it. That, and those guys coming to your place, the gun. The case fell apart. I was doing my job, Jim. But I called it wrong.”

He was looking me square in the eye.

“If it had been me you tossed in jail by mistake,” I said, “I’d forgive you immediately. But it was my son. It’s going to take longer.”

Barry nodded. “I accept that.” He paused. “So you’re back working for Randy. I didn’t see that coming. What, does he want his nose broken again?”

“I never actually broke it,” I said.

“Ha! So, you admit it.”

I rolled my eyes. “I have legal bills to pay, Barry. That’s why I’m working for him.”

Barry had the decency to blush. “Okay.”

“I’ve promised him a month or so. That’s it.”

Barry nodded, and said, “Tell me again, this thing about the book and Conrad.”

I laid it all out for him, slowly. How the guys who’d attacked me and Ellen wanted the copy of the disc Derek had found. So I’d thought it only made sense that they were the ones who’d come to the Langley house, to take away the computer Derek was given by Agnes Stockwell.

Except I’d since learned that the day the Langleys were killed, Albert Langley had given the computer to Conrad Chase. At least, I was thinking, that was what Conrad had told Ellen. Albert knew that what was on its hard drive would be of interest to Conrad, and he should have sole possession of it.

“So maybe the Langleys weren’t killed because of the computer,” Barry said. “It wasn’t there.”

“Well, Ellen and I were nearly killed because of the disc, and we didn’t have it,” I pointed out.

Barry put some pie into his mouth. “So if those guys had it wrong thinking you had the disc, they could have been wrong thinking the Langleys had the computer.”

“Maybe.”

“How do you know Albert Langley gave Conrad the computer?”

“Conrad told Ellen. When she gave him the disc.”

Barry chewed his pie very slowly. “But Conrad could have been lying. Maybe he actually acquired the computer
after
the Langleys were murdered. Or”—he swallowed his pie—“Ellen is lying when she says Conrad told her he already had the computer.”

“You think Ellen lied to me?”

“I’m not saying I think that, I’m merely raising it as a possibility. Listen, I love your wife. Her French toast is amazing. If I could get my wife to leave, get Ellen to come live with me, I’d be a happy man.”

“I thought you loved your wife.”

“I do. But she can’t make French toast worth shit.”

“Jeez, Barry, I think you’re off base here, about Ellen lying to me.”

“I’m just thinking out loud. Okay, let’s assume Conrad told her. But he didn’t have to have told her the truth. Let me ask you this: Who knew there was a copy of this so-called book on a disc?”

“Me, Ellen, and Derek, of course. Maybe his girlfriend Penny. Maybe her parents. Conrad figured it out, and there’s Illeana.”

“The onetime actress. Did you ever see her in
Messed Up
?”

“No,” I said.

“Only thing she ever made during her short career that got her any attention, and that was mostly because she showed her tits. You can rent it at Blockbuster.”

“I’ll pass,” I said, eating through the whipped cream so that I could find my pie.

“What do you make of this Illeana?” Barry asked.

“A wolverine,” I said.

“Only met her once or twice, at things out at Thackeray. But she and her husband don’t want to talk to me. Too far down the food chain.”

“Cut grass for a living and see what happens.”

“Yeah, okay. So the reason I ask about her is, we got an ID off the dead guy in your shed, who your new buddy Drew put down, and his name was Morton DeLuca. From New York. And while we haven’t found his partner yet, we suspect he might be a guy named Lester Tiffin. They work together a lot, or so the NYPD tell us.”

“Tiffin?” I said.

“Yeah.”

“Illeana’s last name is Tiff.”

“Yeah, I know that. She shortened it.”

“This guy, is he related to her?” I asked. “An ex-husband, a brother, or something?” I tried to put it together. “She brought in hired help—family—to get the disc back? Didn’t know Conrad already had it?”

“You’re getting ahead of me here. I’m going out there today to talk to them, to Conrad and Illeana. Not a word about this Tiffin guy to anyone, hear me? I probably shouldn’t even have mentioned it, but I’ve kind of fucked you around of late.”

“No shit. That’ll be fun, interviewing the college president and his wife.”

“That’s why I get the big bucks,” Barry said, washing his pie down with coffee. He reached for a napkin from the chrome dispenser, but there were so many jammed in there it shredded when he took it out. “Shit,” he said, and pulled out a handful. He dabbed at the corners of his mouth.

“I looked up the Brett Stockwell thing,” he said. “That kid who went over the falls. Like you asked.”

“Okay.” I was surprised he remembered.

“Not that much in it. He fell, hit his head on the rocks below, snapped his neck, would have died instantly.”

“But it was ruled a suicide.”

“There was no note, if that’s what you’re asking. But there were no obvious signs of foul play, either. No one saw anything or heard anything. They think it happened in the evening, maybe not that many people around here, although the walkway over the falls is a pretty popular spot for joggers and cyclists and what have you. A lot of interviews were conducted, with his mother, teachers, even Chase, and it seemed like maybe he was a bit of a troubled kid. Intense, moody. And creative. That doesn’t necessarily mean suicide, but some of the indicators were there.”

“Was there anything in the report that says he couldn’t have been thrown over the railing, pushed over?”

“No. I suppose it could have happened that way, but there’s nothing that specifically rules out aliens coming down and tossing him over, either.”

“So that’s it,” I said.

“Pretty much.”

“What? There was something else?”

“There were fibers, just a few, on the railing. There are these concrete pillars spaced out along the bridge over the falls, then metal railings between them. On one of the concrete pillars, there were a few threads.”

“From what?”

“A shirt, a blouse, something. But it didn’t match anything the Stockwell boy was wearing. But those fibers could have been there awhile. Nothing to suggest there’s anything connecting the two.”

I thought a moment, then said, “Here’s how it looks to me, Barry. Conrad Chase read that kid’s book. Was really impressed with it. Realized the kid was a literary genius in the making. So maybe he offered to buy it off him, so he could pass it off as his own. Or maybe he decided to steal it outright. Either way, the Stockwell kid must have objected, or if he didn’t even know what Conrad had done, he was going to be pissed when the book came out and he saw that it was his. So Conrad had to deal with that situation. He had to kill Brett Stockwell. I think he threw that kid over the falls. I think he killed him. I don’t know what he had to do with the Langleys, but it seems pretty likely that this all has something to do with those two goons coming to our house the other night. But the thing I’m most sure of is, he killed Brett.”

“Be nearly impossible to prove,” Barry said. “Even if you’re right, that he ripped off the kid’s book, and that could be proven somehow, it wouldn’t be evidence that he threw Brett over the falls. The best you could hope for is that, if the business with the book came out, he’d be ruined professionally.”

That would be something, at least.

“Hey,” I said, switching gears again. “If I was trying to find some sad-case kid from a couple of years ago, she’d have been around fifteen at the time, working the street, where would I go?”

“You got a name?”

“Sherry Underwood.”

Barry wrote it down in his notebook. “What’s she to you?”

I pondered a moment. “That’s hard to say. She’s someone I think I let down.” Barry looked at me. “Getting Derek back, getting him out of jail, I don’t know. I feel like we came so close to losing him, got him back from the brink. I wonder if it’s too late to do that for someone else.”

Barry studied me a moment longer, then said, “I’ll check the name out later if I get a chance. I love doing all this legwork for you. In the meantime, you could try the Willows.” I’d heard the name, but wasn’t sure what it was. Barry said, “A drop-in shelter for kids, on Lambton. There’s a guy there, Art, ask for him, tell him I sent you. What’s this about, really?”

I gave Barry half a smile. “It’s about how the mayor got punched in the nose.”

LAMBTON STREET wasn’t that far a walk from the diner, so I decided to hoof it. The Willows was settled in between a store that sold T-shirts and posters to the younger crowd, and a shop run by a Korean woman that sold thousands of different kinds of beads for people who wanted to make their own jewelry.

Half a dozen kids were milling around on the sidewalk outside the Willows. A couple of them were dressed all in black, their dark hair streaked with flashes of pink and purple, their lips and eyebrows adorned with silver studs and loops. The others didn’t appear to have adopted any actual uniform. It looked more as if they’d left home with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Ripped jeans, T-shirts, sneakers. One of the girls was standing on the sidewalk in bare feet. The one thing they seemed to have in common was an air of abandonment, that they were here because no one else wanted to take them in.

I went inside. There were about ten cafeteria-style tables set up, a couple of pinball machines, a video game, a bulletin board plastered with notes about places where one could sleep for the night or find short-term work. There was an opening in the back wall where kitchen workers could hand food through.

There was also a raised counter to one side, a kind of rundown hotel check-in, and it was there that I spotted a man probably in his forties leaning over some paperwork. He had almost no hair on his head, but at least two days’ worth of growth on his face, and even before he spoke there seemed a sense of weariness about him.

“Excuse me,” I said. He looked at me, still hunched over, resting on his elbows. “I’m looking for Art.”

“You found him,” he said. “What’s the matter? Kids blocking the sidewalk?”

“No. Barry Duckworth said you might be able to help me.”

He sat up straight. “You a cop?”

“No. I’m trying to find out what happened to a young girl. She might have come to a place like this.”

Art said, “Let me guess. You’re trying to find your daughter.”

I shook my head. “No. Not mine. Somebody else’s.”

“You a detective? Trying to find somebody’s kid?”

“No,” I said, getting annoyed. “It’s not that at all. This is someone I ran into a couple of years ago, someone I tried to help, but maybe I didn’t try hard enough.”

“You got a name?”