We took my car to Shelby’s father’s house. It was less conspicuous than his Mustang. Her father lived in an upscale house in a gated subdivision in Odessa, a suburb to the northwest of Tampa.
“Shelby’s father was borderline abusive to her, the stereotypical sports parent. He washed out of a golf scholarship at Florida State back in the seventies. She was his chance to hit it big. So, of course, he’s been an overbearing pain in the ass. As soon as she turned 21, Shelby fired him. Gave him a bunch of money and told him to go away.”
“How come we’re here?”
“He said he’d make her regret the day she fired him.”
It was dusk and we were in a dead end a couple hundred yards up the road. The car was idling and the AC was running and I was remembering why I prefer to do stakeouts alone.
“Wouldn’t the FBI be all over him if he were really a suspect?”
“They interviewed him for six hours yesterday and told him not to go anyplace.”
I glanced over to him. He hadn’t shifted his gaze from the subdivision’s entry gate since we pulled in.
“I know this because I have friends on the Tampa PD and they hear things,” he said. “That’s what you were going to ask, right?”
“Sure.”
Nothing happened and both of us watched it not happen until nine.
“You think he’s going anywhere?”
“Eventually,” he said.
“Why do you think he has Shelby?”
“He’s the most likely person, as far as I can see.”
At ten after ten, a black Hummer H3 emerged from behind the gate.
“That’s him,” Carl said. He’d been slumped in his seat, but was now sitting up, pointing toward the car.
I waited for it to pass us, then pulled out after it. It drove south on Hutchison to Ehrlich Road, crossed it, went into the supermarket and came out with a gallon of milk. Then we followed him back to his community and watched him go in the gate.
“That was exciting,” I said.
“Maybe he’s seeing if someone’s watching him.”
“Maybe he needed a gallon of milk.”
Twenty minutes later, I took Carl home, then went home myself.
Jeff Spangler went to college with me. Then he became a sportswriter for the Albany Times-Union about the time I started working as an investigator. He moved up to the New York Daily News before covering womens’ sports for Sports Illustrated. When he got the job at SI, Jeff thought it was ironic to cover womens’ sports, considering how many women he’d uncovered in bedrooms and hotel rooms across the land. Jeff was a horndog, and some common friends had wondered if he’d had to agree to be castrated to cover womens’ sports.
Jeff could be rude and borderline sexist, but he had a way of cultivating sources. Even people who thought he was a knuckle-dragger did things for him. If something was going on in womens’ sports, Jeff Spangler knew about it. If didn’t know about it, he knew who did. He was a natural to call about Shelby and her father.
“Sorry I’m calling so late,” I said when he answered.
“Afraid you’d wake me up?”
“No, afraid I’d catch you in bed,” I said.
“Gotta work in the morning. I’m interviewing the Williams sisters tomorrow. After that, I think I'll play ice cream sandwich with them.”
“They'd kick your scrawny ass all over the hotel room."
He laughed. “When’s the last time you had sex?”
“Who’s president now?”
He laughed more. “I could set you up with Diane Tate.” Diane Tate was a professional golfer about my age who grew up in Saratoga. She'd recently been divorced by her husband, a club pro in Myrtle Beach.
“I think I can manage,” I said. “I need to know about Shelby Moore’s father.”
“I heard you saw her get snatched.” His voice lost its jauntiness. He was working now.
“Anything you can tell me on the record?”
The FBI was clear on my not talking to the media. They'd looked into me and knew I used the media when I felt the need.
“I can tell you what’s already in the paper. I’ve been on the outside of this one.”
“Except that you want to know about the father,” he said. “Were you working on this?”
“I happened to see it.”
Jeff was smart enough to pick up on my evasion, but he didn’t push the point. “Her father's an asshole. He cost her a lot of money with his bullshit. No one wanted to deal with him. She probably lost a couple million in endorsements because of it. And he treated her like his golf slave.”
“Physically abusive?”
“Just rumors. When Shelby was in high school, she broke her arm. Said she fell off a horse. But it happened right after she got caught skipping practice to go boozing one night. One of the teachers saw her. She got suspended from the team the next day, the--boom--she falls off a horse. The suspension didn't matter. She missed the rest of the year with the injury.
“Meanwhile, her dad gets tagged with a couple sexual harrassment suits and a battery charge. The second she turned 21, she emancipated herself and threw him out. He sued, so she gave him a lump sum and one percent of her tour earnings to go away. She made seven million last year, so his cut was seventy grand, give or take.”
“That’s not much.”
“You hinting at something?” he said.
“Wondering. He drives a Hummer and lives in a gated community in a pretty nice house. He’s not doing that on seventy grand.”
“He made a boatload of money as a day trader. He’s set."
"A lot of day traders lost money when the market went down."
"Not him. He diversified while he was doing it. Houses, property. Owns a couple restaurants. If he took her, it's to prove he owns her, not for money."
"What about her mom?"
"Not in the picture. Died when she was six."
“She a party girl?”
He laughed. “Until the thing with her arm. After that, she wanted to know everything about the business. By the time she was 21, she was capable. Day after her birthday, she fired her father and hired Crosetti.”
“He’s not much of an improvement,” I said.
“He’s the right guy for her. He'll bust your balls if he needs to, but he does it for her. He knows where his bread's buttered and because he's the hardass, she gets to be the nice Shelby everyone goes gaga over.”
We fell into silence. I tried to figure out what question to ask next. Jeff used his quiet time to jump to conclusions.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “You wouldn’t know about Crosetti’s temper unless you’d pissed him—you were working security for her.”
“I promise you I wasn’t,” I said.
“Then what?”
“I’m just interested in this working out right.”
“The security guy’s name is Carl Clayton,” he said. “I talked to Crosetti today. He said Clayton got fired. Said the only reason she got taken was because of his incompetence."
“They blind-sided him. Jumped out of a van and tasered them both. Clayton told them walking on the beach wasn’t wise. Nothing he can do.”
He said nothing.
“You might want to talk to him about it,” I said.
“Been trying. Could you set it up?” he said.
“I can try. You got any thoughts on who might have done this?”
“Crime’s not my venue, unless it’s steroids, doping, or trying to cut your ex-wife’s head off , then running away in a Ford Bronco. You, on the other had, seem to attract it. I know a mortician sennding his kid to college because of all the people you killed up here last year."
He was joking, but I still had nightmares about killing those people. I let it pass.
"Seriously, I like Shelby a lot. She's a great kid. If there's anything I can do to help, let me know."
And with that, we were done. I was done, too. The FBI was handling this and I had no skin in the game. For the second time, I walked away.
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Finding Shelby Moore, Part III
In the old days, you could find out where someone lived by having a friend at the phone company. Now, it’s easier. If you know a little about someone, you can find the rest without breaking a sweat. It was great if you were looking for someone, not so good if you were hiding. Carl Clayton had been out of the house for six weeks, so it wasn’t hard to find him.
He lived in an apartment off Hillsborough Avenue a couple blocks north of Raymond James Stadium where the Bucs play. The website even gave me his apartment number. And they say customer service is dead.
I went home, took a cold shower, and was sitting in my car mostly out of sight when Carl left his apartment the next morning.
Driving a vintage Mustang is great. Spenser drove one on TV. Carl Clayton drove one, too. I drove a green Honda Accord that I picked up used just before I moved. It only had about seventy thousand miles on it, and the previous owner, the state trooper who’d been murdered, had taken great care of it.
I followed Carl to his office, in the second floor of a second-rate, office building a block south of the stadium. He got out and walked next door to 7-Eleven to get coffee, then went to his office. I had my Dunkin Donuts coffee, which I drank slowly. I’d feel like a terrible idiot to lose him because I had to take a leak from drinking too much coffee.
He sat inside his office and did something. I sat in my car and listened to a Brian Freeman book on CD. His main character, Jonathan Stride, had a dead wife, too. What is it with detective novelists and dead wives? Dave Robicheaux, John Francis Cuddy, Jonathan Stride. Even Magnum, P.I. Maybe I should have thought of that before I took up this line of work. Anyway, Stride, a conflicted cop from Duluth, wound up in Las Vegas with a sexy cop named Serena Dial and they fought crime together.
I’d moved to Tampa to be near a sexy woman named Lynne Deane to maybe fight crime together, and I hadn’t seen her in three weeks. I sipped my coffee and made peace with the realization that I was working this case to keep me from getting drunk in my apartment.
At lunchtime, Carl came out and got in his car, drove to Sweetbay to get a sub, then drove back to his office. The book ended and I had nothing to do. The Devil Rays, Tampa’s attempt at Major League Baseball, weren’t on until evening.
I sat in the car and gave into the feelings of regret about Lindsey and all that had happened since her murder. I allowed these feelings out periodically, but for short periods of time. If I gave them free reign, I’d be laying at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, my body providing food and shelter for a family of crabs or something.
I took a bathroom break at the 7-Eleven a little after two and almost missed the FBI guys who came to his office. They walked up, knocked on the door, then entered. When they left two hours later, he got in his car and drove west, opposite the direction they went.
The Courtney Campbell Causeway extends about seven miles across the northern part of Tampa bay to Clearwater. Without it, the trip would take twice as long as it does, which would cause issues with beach-goers and Scientologists.
Instead of crossing the causeway, he turned right at its beginning and drove behind an abandoned hotel to a place called Bahama Breeze. He got out of his car and went in. Bahama Breeze looks like a giant Key West-style house with a massive porch. Lynne liked it there. We’d talked about eating there, before she dropped off the face of the earth.
I hadn’t eaten since breakfast and my stomach was growling as I watched Carl walk up to the porch. He stopped with his foot on the first step, then walked back toward me. He’d discovered me and it didn’t see useful to deny it or run.
I opened the door and stood up. The nice thing about watching from inside the car was the air conditioning. A wave of heat hit me when I opened the door. It was mid-afternoon, but the sky to the east looked like apocalypse. Unlike the rest of the country storms, in Florida storms can move eastward or westward. Today’s were moving westward.
“I picked you up when we went around the airport,” he said. “How long were you following me?”
“I showed up at your office about an hour ago.”
“You’re lying,” he said.
“So are you.”
He told me I might as well come inside, and I did. We sat inside at the bar. A youngish guy in a pale yellow and gray Hawaiian shirt took our order. Carl ordered the fish tacos and a Scotch. I ordered a burger, side salad, and a club soda. I wanted beer but the club soda was better for me.
“What made you change your mind about working this?” he said.
“Something your wife said while she was sitting on my lap shoving her tongue down my throat.”
He stopped arranging his napkin on his lap and looked up at me. I expected anger, but instead there was bewilderment, then resignation.
“She give you the e-ticket ride?” he said. There was bitterness, but no anger in his voice.
I shook my head. “Decided I didn't want to ride the rides today.”
“You’re nuts,” he said. “Even when things weren’t going well with us, the sex was always incredible.”
“Maybe it’s not about the sex.”
He froze at those words and sadness coated his eyes.
“Your wife told me about your feelings for Shelby,” I said. “Shelby give you the e-ticket ride?”
Anger flashed through his eyes, but I was just re-using the phrase he’d used. “No. No rides. I—she doesn’t see things that way.”
I nodded.
He took a long pull on the scotch, then avoided my gaze. “Why would she? She’s 23, rich, beautiful. She could have anyone she wants, so why go for a 53-year-old has-been?”
“You have a woman of about fifty at home who’s pretty well-to-do and an absolute knock-out. Why go for a kid?” I knew the question was incendiary, but I asked it with a soft edge in my voice. I wanted the answer.
He closed his eyes, smiled, and leaned his head back. “My wife's a beautiful woman. But she didn’t move around with me while I was in the service, and we both…it was a long time apart. When I retired, we talked about whether to divorce and we decided to give it a shot. She’s just not cut out to be a cop’s wife.”
“You think Shelby is?”
He shook his head. “I’d quit for her, if that’s what it took.”
“You’re messed up.”
“I love her, though,” he said. “And I want to find her. And you’re gonna help or you wouldn’t be here.”
The bartender brought our meals and brought me another club soda. Carl nursed his Scotch.
“How come?” he said.
I shook my head. “Doesn’t matter.”
The bartender asked me if I wanted something else. I opened my mouth to ask for a draft, but said, "Nothing" instead.
He lived in an apartment off Hillsborough Avenue a couple blocks north of Raymond James Stadium where the Bucs play. The website even gave me his apartment number. And they say customer service is dead.
I went home, took a cold shower, and was sitting in my car mostly out of sight when Carl left his apartment the next morning.
Driving a vintage Mustang is great. Spenser drove one on TV. Carl Clayton drove one, too. I drove a green Honda Accord that I picked up used just before I moved. It only had about seventy thousand miles on it, and the previous owner, the state trooper who’d been murdered, had taken great care of it.
I followed Carl to his office, in the second floor of a second-rate, office building a block south of the stadium. He got out and walked next door to 7-Eleven to get coffee, then went to his office. I had my Dunkin Donuts coffee, which I drank slowly. I’d feel like a terrible idiot to lose him because I had to take a leak from drinking too much coffee.
He sat inside his office and did something. I sat in my car and listened to a Brian Freeman book on CD. His main character, Jonathan Stride, had a dead wife, too. What is it with detective novelists and dead wives? Dave Robicheaux, John Francis Cuddy, Jonathan Stride. Even Magnum, P.I. Maybe I should have thought of that before I took up this line of work. Anyway, Stride, a conflicted cop from Duluth, wound up in Las Vegas with a sexy cop named Serena Dial and they fought crime together.
I’d moved to Tampa to be near a sexy woman named Lynne Deane to maybe fight crime together, and I hadn’t seen her in three weeks. I sipped my coffee and made peace with the realization that I was working this case to keep me from getting drunk in my apartment.
At lunchtime, Carl came out and got in his car, drove to Sweetbay to get a sub, then drove back to his office. The book ended and I had nothing to do. The Devil Rays, Tampa’s attempt at Major League Baseball, weren’t on until evening.
I sat in the car and gave into the feelings of regret about Lindsey and all that had happened since her murder. I allowed these feelings out periodically, but for short periods of time. If I gave them free reign, I’d be laying at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, my body providing food and shelter for a family of crabs or something.
I took a bathroom break at the 7-Eleven a little after two and almost missed the FBI guys who came to his office. They walked up, knocked on the door, then entered. When they left two hours later, he got in his car and drove west, opposite the direction they went.
The Courtney Campbell Causeway extends about seven miles across the northern part of Tampa bay to Clearwater. Without it, the trip would take twice as long as it does, which would cause issues with beach-goers and Scientologists.
Instead of crossing the causeway, he turned right at its beginning and drove behind an abandoned hotel to a place called Bahama Breeze. He got out of his car and went in. Bahama Breeze looks like a giant Key West-style house with a massive porch. Lynne liked it there. We’d talked about eating there, before she dropped off the face of the earth.
I hadn’t eaten since breakfast and my stomach was growling as I watched Carl walk up to the porch. He stopped with his foot on the first step, then walked back toward me. He’d discovered me and it didn’t see useful to deny it or run.
I opened the door and stood up. The nice thing about watching from inside the car was the air conditioning. A wave of heat hit me when I opened the door. It was mid-afternoon, but the sky to the east looked like apocalypse. Unlike the rest of the country storms, in Florida storms can move eastward or westward. Today’s were moving westward.
“I picked you up when we went around the airport,” he said. “How long were you following me?”
“I showed up at your office about an hour ago.”
“You’re lying,” he said.
“So are you.”
He told me I might as well come inside, and I did. We sat inside at the bar. A youngish guy in a pale yellow and gray Hawaiian shirt took our order. Carl ordered the fish tacos and a Scotch. I ordered a burger, side salad, and a club soda. I wanted beer but the club soda was better for me.
“What made you change your mind about working this?” he said.
“Something your wife said while she was sitting on my lap shoving her tongue down my throat.”
He stopped arranging his napkin on his lap and looked up at me. I expected anger, but instead there was bewilderment, then resignation.
“She give you the e-ticket ride?” he said. There was bitterness, but no anger in his voice.
I shook my head. “Decided I didn't want to ride the rides today.”
“You’re nuts,” he said. “Even when things weren’t going well with us, the sex was always incredible.”
“Maybe it’s not about the sex.”
He froze at those words and sadness coated his eyes.
“Your wife told me about your feelings for Shelby,” I said. “Shelby give you the e-ticket ride?”
Anger flashed through his eyes, but I was just re-using the phrase he’d used. “No. No rides. I—she doesn’t see things that way.”
I nodded.
He took a long pull on the scotch, then avoided my gaze. “Why would she? She’s 23, rich, beautiful. She could have anyone she wants, so why go for a 53-year-old has-been?”
“You have a woman of about fifty at home who’s pretty well-to-do and an absolute knock-out. Why go for a kid?” I knew the question was incendiary, but I asked it with a soft edge in my voice. I wanted the answer.
He closed his eyes, smiled, and leaned his head back. “My wife's a beautiful woman. But she didn’t move around with me while I was in the service, and we both…it was a long time apart. When I retired, we talked about whether to divorce and we decided to give it a shot. She’s just not cut out to be a cop’s wife.”
“You think Shelby is?”
He shook his head. “I’d quit for her, if that’s what it took.”
“You’re messed up.”
“I love her, though,” he said. “And I want to find her. And you’re gonna help or you wouldn’t be here.”
The bartender brought our meals and brought me another club soda. Carl nursed his Scotch.
“How come?” he said.
I shook my head. “Doesn’t matter.”
The bartender asked me if I wanted something else. I opened my mouth to ask for a draft, but said, "Nothing" instead.
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Finding Shelby Moore, Part II
After my wife was murdered, I took a case in Tampa to get away from the memories and my inability to get access to the information to investigate. Eventually, I figured out who shot her to death and who had it done. In the process, a lot of people had died, including a couple friends. In response, I moved to Florida to get away from all of it. Unfortunately, memories and guilt aren’t confined to a physical location.
Now, I lived in an apartment on the causeway in Dunedin, Florida. The tourism brochure told me that Florida’s the happiest place in the world. I’d never been in Florida in August and wasn’t enjoying the heat. Instead of going outside and watching bikinis, I unpacked and drank a beer.
I was interrupted by a knock on the door. It was Carl Clayton.
“Oh it’s you,” I said in a one stream monotone intended to show my lack of enthusiasm.
He walked past me into the apartment. “What did you see?” he said.
“Come in”
“When I got tased. What did you see?”
I took a deep breath and assumed the posture Lindsey said I always took when I was angry. “I gave all this to the FBI.”
“Now you’ll give it to me.”
“I could throw you out.”
He stepped close and sneered at me. “I don’t think you can.” He was probably right.
My heart wasn’t into the fight. Besides, if I talked to him, maybe he’d leave. “I saw a white van, no markings, no rust, black trim. Like a fleet van. Two men got out. A third drove. The two guys wore work clothes and ski masks. The little one got out the back and tased Shelby. The bigger one tased you. They threw her in the back and left you. The van had a Florida plate.” I told him the number. “It turned right on the main drag in Clearwater Beach. I ran to the curb, but it was gone.”
He nodded and stepped away from me, which reduced my irritation level marginally. I walked past him to my beer.
“Can I have a beer?” he said.
“No.”
He nodded again and sat down. “Crosetti’s a prick. They’re going to sue me. I told him—and Shelby—that I wasn’t enough and that she shouldn’t be walking the beach like that. He told me to give her what she wants and quit being a pussy.”
“Nice mouth,” I said.
“He’s a prick, but he helps Shelby make a lot of money.”
“Why would she need more than you for security?” I pulled some books out of a box and put them on a shelf. They were Beverly Lewis, Lindsey’s favorite.
“Sorry?” My question took him by surprise.
“I called around on you. You’re pretty formidable, based on what I’ve heard. Why does she need more than you? What’s the threat against her?”
He looked up from the couch and smiled. “I did my homework, too, didn’t think you were that good. Someone with a little more skill would wouldn’t have killed half of upstate New York.”
Any good will I felt for him vanished. “Don’t be an asshole.”
He didn’t move except thumbing the arm of the couch. It was the couch Lindsey and I made love in the day I proposed to her.
“Help me find her,” he said.
I shook my head. “Nope.”
His look hardened. “It’s important.”
I opened the door for him. “A lot of my love for humanity died with my wife.”
He walked at me, then stopped and glared again. I managed to not wet my pants as I waited for him to leave and closed the door behind him.
****
After Carl left, I sat on the couch looking at a picture of Shelby in Sports Illustrated. She didn’t look like Lindsey and yet in her face, I could see my wife. I fingered my ring as I studied the picture.
My research showed Carl’s resume was rock solid. He was tough, thorough, and experienced. A few people hinted might be too eager to mix it up, maybe not the worst thing when you’re guarding a rich, 23-year-old hottie.
The Claytons lived in a comfortable house in Brandon. I pulled up in front of Clayton’s house a little after seven, but didn’t see his ’68 black Mustang in the driveway. I rang the bell anyway.
A woman about my age answered the door wearing a tight-fitting gold, one-piece bathing suit and holding a tumbler of amber liquid with ice. From the smell that wafted from her drink, the beverage wasn’t suitable for children. “Can I help you?”
“Carl here?”
She chuckled. “No. Would you like to come in?”
I shrugged and stepped in. She closed the door behind me.
“Did I say something funny?”
“Not intentionally,” she said. Her body was lithe and nearly perfect. The bathing suit fit like a second skin over her sleek hips and torso and firm-looking breasts. Her face lacked make-up but looked pretty anyway. Her hair was a little spiky in the middle, then tapered out to the side in a modified page-boy cut of some sort.
As she padded away from me, she wiggled her hips a more than necessary. “Want a drink?”
“Got coffee?”
She laughed. “No, I meant a drink.”
“Beer would be nice.” I really wanted coffee.
She came back with a bottle of Heineken, not my favorite, but it was free. She walked to the living room and sat down on a leather couch. She crossed her leg and took a drag on her drink, which she’d filled while she got my beer.
“Can help you with something?”
I sipped the beer. The first time I had a Heineken, I didn’t like it. I could tolerate it now, especially if it was cold. This beer was very cold.
“You can give me the fridge this beer came from,” I said. “Cold.”
She chuckled as if I were a child who’d just said something adorable.
“I need to talk to Carl about Shelby Moore.”
Her lips tightened for an instant, then she caught herself.
“Is there a problem with that?” I said.
She shook her head and anger flashed. “No problem. I threw him out six weeks ago.”
She tipped the glass back and drained it. Then she closed her eyes and let the booze flow through her. Within a couple seconds, she opened her eyes again, the anger apparently washed away by the alcohol.
“He said he loves her, after all the shit he’s put me through,” she said. “I’ve spent hours working out to stay attractive for him. I was the good military wife and I’ve never caused any problems. And this—this girl—is what he wants now. I’m better looking, more fun, and better in bed.”
She thrust her chest forward a little, which wasn’t necessary, given how she filled out the swimsuit.
“I haven’t seen you in body paint.” I wanted to break the moment, but as soon as the words left my lips, I regretted them. She walked over to me, sat on my lap and kissed me on the mouth. The liquor taste in her mouth was nice, an Irish Whiskey by the taste of it. I didn’t move, but I reacted.
“I bet the wonderwhore can’t do this to you,” she said. She was considerably drunker than I thought, not that my body minded.
The last time I was with a woman was six months ago, when Lynne Deane, who might mean something to me or might not, helped me figure out my wife’s murder. We thought we were going to die and found solace in each other. Six months is a long time.
I kissed her back and ran my hand across her flat stomach. A part of me said to stop, but the rest of me didn’t hear it very well. She leaned in and the touch her breasts against my chest as electric. I moaned. I wasn’t going anywhere and somewhere deep down, that disappointed me.
Her suit was low-cut in the back and I snaked my arm around her and under the fabric to reach for her breast. As I passed over her ribs, she stiffened and bit my tongue. Maybe it had been a while for her, too. Our ragged breathing fell into cadence with each other.
“Your husband’s a fool.” My voice sounded surreal.
“I know,” she leaned forward whispered in my ear.
“He’s a cop.”
“He’s an asshole.” She stuck her tongue in my ear, which surprised me by feeling good, then nibbled my ear lobe, then whispered. “Don’t make me beg.”
She ran her hand down my chest and I thought of Lindsey’s friend Amy. After Lindsey died, Amy comforted me. Eventually, we slept together, which turned out to be one of my worst decisions. Amy had nibbled my ear.
“How about you carry me upstairs?”
I closed my eyes in disbelief at my next words. “I can’t.”
Her arm snaked around my back and under my pants. I bit my lip and suppressed a moan as her hand slid down over my ass.
“I can’t. Mrs. Clayton.” My calling her Mrs. Clayton broke the moment. I didn’t know her by any other name.
She stood up stiffly. “I see.”
“It’s not that you aren’t…I mean…holy geez, but—”
“But you can’t sleep with another man’s property,” she said. “Even if she wants to.” Her voice was cold and hard.
“It doesn’t have to do with you being property. You’re drunk and we’ve never spoken before twenty minutes ago.”
“What do you want to do, go on a date?”
I shrugged slightly. “It would do in a pinch.”
“Fuck you,” she said. She pulled her glass back to throw her drink at me, then changed her mind. So she walked away from me, swaying her hips a little extra as she did. She looked really, really good.
Now, I lived in an apartment on the causeway in Dunedin, Florida. The tourism brochure told me that Florida’s the happiest place in the world. I’d never been in Florida in August and wasn’t enjoying the heat. Instead of going outside and watching bikinis, I unpacked and drank a beer.
I was interrupted by a knock on the door. It was Carl Clayton.
“Oh it’s you,” I said in a one stream monotone intended to show my lack of enthusiasm.
He walked past me into the apartment. “What did you see?” he said.
“Come in”
“When I got tased. What did you see?”
I took a deep breath and assumed the posture Lindsey said I always took when I was angry. “I gave all this to the FBI.”
“Now you’ll give it to me.”
“I could throw you out.”
He stepped close and sneered at me. “I don’t think you can.” He was probably right.
My heart wasn’t into the fight. Besides, if I talked to him, maybe he’d leave. “I saw a white van, no markings, no rust, black trim. Like a fleet van. Two men got out. A third drove. The two guys wore work clothes and ski masks. The little one got out the back and tased Shelby. The bigger one tased you. They threw her in the back and left you. The van had a Florida plate.” I told him the number. “It turned right on the main drag in Clearwater Beach. I ran to the curb, but it was gone.”
He nodded and stepped away from me, which reduced my irritation level marginally. I walked past him to my beer.
“Can I have a beer?” he said.
“No.”
He nodded again and sat down. “Crosetti’s a prick. They’re going to sue me. I told him—and Shelby—that I wasn’t enough and that she shouldn’t be walking the beach like that. He told me to give her what she wants and quit being a pussy.”
“Nice mouth,” I said.
“He’s a prick, but he helps Shelby make a lot of money.”
“Why would she need more than you for security?” I pulled some books out of a box and put them on a shelf. They were Beverly Lewis, Lindsey’s favorite.
“Sorry?” My question took him by surprise.
“I called around on you. You’re pretty formidable, based on what I’ve heard. Why does she need more than you? What’s the threat against her?”
He looked up from the couch and smiled. “I did my homework, too, didn’t think you were that good. Someone with a little more skill would wouldn’t have killed half of upstate New York.”
Any good will I felt for him vanished. “Don’t be an asshole.”
He didn’t move except thumbing the arm of the couch. It was the couch Lindsey and I made love in the day I proposed to her.
“Help me find her,” he said.
I shook my head. “Nope.”
His look hardened. “It’s important.”
I opened the door for him. “A lot of my love for humanity died with my wife.”
He walked at me, then stopped and glared again. I managed to not wet my pants as I waited for him to leave and closed the door behind him.
****
After Carl left, I sat on the couch looking at a picture of Shelby in Sports Illustrated. She didn’t look like Lindsey and yet in her face, I could see my wife. I fingered my ring as I studied the picture.
My research showed Carl’s resume was rock solid. He was tough, thorough, and experienced. A few people hinted might be too eager to mix it up, maybe not the worst thing when you’re guarding a rich, 23-year-old hottie.
The Claytons lived in a comfortable house in Brandon. I pulled up in front of Clayton’s house a little after seven, but didn’t see his ’68 black Mustang in the driveway. I rang the bell anyway.
A woman about my age answered the door wearing a tight-fitting gold, one-piece bathing suit and holding a tumbler of amber liquid with ice. From the smell that wafted from her drink, the beverage wasn’t suitable for children. “Can I help you?”
“Carl here?”
She chuckled. “No. Would you like to come in?”
I shrugged and stepped in. She closed the door behind me.
“Did I say something funny?”
“Not intentionally,” she said. Her body was lithe and nearly perfect. The bathing suit fit like a second skin over her sleek hips and torso and firm-looking breasts. Her face lacked make-up but looked pretty anyway. Her hair was a little spiky in the middle, then tapered out to the side in a modified page-boy cut of some sort.
As she padded away from me, she wiggled her hips a more than necessary. “Want a drink?”
“Got coffee?”
She laughed. “No, I meant a drink.”
“Beer would be nice.” I really wanted coffee.
She came back with a bottle of Heineken, not my favorite, but it was free. She walked to the living room and sat down on a leather couch. She crossed her leg and took a drag on her drink, which she’d filled while she got my beer.
“Can help you with something?”
I sipped the beer. The first time I had a Heineken, I didn’t like it. I could tolerate it now, especially if it was cold. This beer was very cold.
“You can give me the fridge this beer came from,” I said. “Cold.”
She chuckled as if I were a child who’d just said something adorable.
“I need to talk to Carl about Shelby Moore.”
Her lips tightened for an instant, then she caught herself.
“Is there a problem with that?” I said.
She shook her head and anger flashed. “No problem. I threw him out six weeks ago.”
She tipped the glass back and drained it. Then she closed her eyes and let the booze flow through her. Within a couple seconds, she opened her eyes again, the anger apparently washed away by the alcohol.
“He said he loves her, after all the shit he’s put me through,” she said. “I’ve spent hours working out to stay attractive for him. I was the good military wife and I’ve never caused any problems. And this—this girl—is what he wants now. I’m better looking, more fun, and better in bed.”
She thrust her chest forward a little, which wasn’t necessary, given how she filled out the swimsuit.
“I haven’t seen you in body paint.” I wanted to break the moment, but as soon as the words left my lips, I regretted them. She walked over to me, sat on my lap and kissed me on the mouth. The liquor taste in her mouth was nice, an Irish Whiskey by the taste of it. I didn’t move, but I reacted.
“I bet the wonderwhore can’t do this to you,” she said. She was considerably drunker than I thought, not that my body minded.
The last time I was with a woman was six months ago, when Lynne Deane, who might mean something to me or might not, helped me figure out my wife’s murder. We thought we were going to die and found solace in each other. Six months is a long time.
I kissed her back and ran my hand across her flat stomach. A part of me said to stop, but the rest of me didn’t hear it very well. She leaned in and the touch her breasts against my chest as electric. I moaned. I wasn’t going anywhere and somewhere deep down, that disappointed me.
Her suit was low-cut in the back and I snaked my arm around her and under the fabric to reach for her breast. As I passed over her ribs, she stiffened and bit my tongue. Maybe it had been a while for her, too. Our ragged breathing fell into cadence with each other.
“Your husband’s a fool.” My voice sounded surreal.
“I know,” she leaned forward whispered in my ear.
“He’s a cop.”
“He’s an asshole.” She stuck her tongue in my ear, which surprised me by feeling good, then nibbled my ear lobe, then whispered. “Don’t make me beg.”
She ran her hand down my chest and I thought of Lindsey’s friend Amy. After Lindsey died, Amy comforted me. Eventually, we slept together, which turned out to be one of my worst decisions. Amy had nibbled my ear.
“How about you carry me upstairs?”
I closed my eyes in disbelief at my next words. “I can’t.”
Her arm snaked around my back and under my pants. I bit my lip and suppressed a moan as her hand slid down over my ass.
“I can’t. Mrs. Clayton.” My calling her Mrs. Clayton broke the moment. I didn’t know her by any other name.
She stood up stiffly. “I see.”
“It’s not that you aren’t…I mean…holy geez, but—”
“But you can’t sleep with another man’s property,” she said. “Even if she wants to.” Her voice was cold and hard.
“It doesn’t have to do with you being property. You’re drunk and we’ve never spoken before twenty minutes ago.”
“What do you want to do, go on a date?”
I shrugged slightly. “It would do in a pinch.”
“Fuck you,” she said. She pulled her glass back to throw her drink at me, then changed her mind. So she walked away from me, swaying her hips a little extra as she did. She looked really, really good.
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Finding Shelby Moore, Part I
It happened faster than I could react. A van pulled up in the parking lot where the man and woman walked side by side. The panel door slid open and a smallish guy thrust his right hand toward the woman. She fell, hitting her head on the door then didn’t move. A larger guy jumped out and did the same to the guy. He fell, but his shriek of pain and despair was unmistakable from my perch more than a hundred yards away.
They guy who fell managed to spastically tried to get up, but couldn’t. The big guy and the little guy picked her up and got back in the van. As they picked her up, I saw a faux smile on her face, a grimace from the pain. It drove off, while the guy who was with her tried to stand, but couldn’t. A taser does that to you.
They guy who fell managed to spastically tried to get up, but couldn’t. The big guy and the little guy picked her up and got back in the van. As they picked her up, I saw a faux smile on her face, a grimace from the pain. It drove off, while the guy who was with her tried to stand, but couldn’t. A taser does that to you.
* * *
When the FBI finished with me, I was summoned to Dom Crosetti’s office. Crosetti was my client, the business manager for Shelby Moore, the 23-year-old golf wunderkind who got kidnapped while I watched. Carl Clayton, her 51-year-old bodyguard was there, too. He was the man Crosetti hired me to observe. Crosetti seemed to think Carl wasn’t doing his job well. Maybe Crosetti was right.
“This is total fucking bullshit,” Crosetti yelled as he paced across the floor between us. If Patton had been an overweight, third-generation Italian who wore a suit in August in Tampa, Florida, he’d have been Dom Crosetti. “There was fucking two of you there. And a little guy and a fat guy in a fucking van snatched her from under your fucking noses.”
You can tell someone’s angry when they annunciate the final G on the end of the f-bomb. Crosetti annunciated four of them.
“I was a hundred yards away and I can’t run an 8-second hundred-yard dash.”
Crosetti turned and glared at me. He opened mouth, then closed it, then opened it again. “Why the fucking fuck were you that far away?”
If they didn’t hear him in Cuba, they weren’t paying attention.
“You paid me to be that far away. I was keeping an eye on Carl, remember?” Once, I’d have responded with at least as much volume and rage as Crosetti. But you didn’t affect guys like that by out-yelling them. You did it by refusing their invitation to escalate. My words were matter-of-fact and Crosetti looked like he just ate a lemon. He turned away from me.
“Carl,” he said. “The fucking security genius. Nice how you put up a fight, you goddamned pussy.”
Carl didn’t say much, which didn’t surprise me. According to my research on him, he was a pro’s pro. He spent twenty years as an MP, retiring with a full pension before he was forty. Then he was a Tampa cop for eight more years before he went private. Now, he handled person security for some of Tampa’s biggest names, at least according to his website.
A year ago, Suncoast Management Consultants hire him to provide security for Shelby, the second most successful golfer on the LPGA. In her short career, she’d amassed a fortune in endorsements, including a clothing line sold at Target, a line of Callaway golf clubs, and nearly as many commercials as Tiger Woods. Unlike Tiger, she looked incredible in body paint in the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition. She’d played a bit role as a woman who got taken by the smoke monster in the first season of Lost and was rumored to be taking acting lessons during the off-season.
To have the world’s biggest female sports star snatched from him would forever make Carl Clayton’s name infamous and invalidate a three-decade career.
“You told me to give her what she wanted. She wanted to walk along the beach. I told her not to, Dom. But we did anyway.”
“Don’t fucking blame this on me,” Dom said. “There was a guy with a video camera and he got the whole thing. All you did was lay there. You didn’t even fucking fight back.”
Carl stood and took a step toward Crosetti, then turned away from him.
“What?” Crosetti said. “You want to take a pop at me? It would be a hell of a lot more than you fucking did when they took Shelby.”
Carl paced away, then stopped, closing his eyes and looking down at his feet.
“You ever been tased?” I said.
“You aren’t part of this. Shut the fuck up,” Crosetti said.
I stood. “Your muscles don’t work. You tell yourself to get up and deal with it, but you can’t. You certainly can’t—”
Crosetti took a step toward me. He wasn’t a large man, and he was overweight, and I could dump him on his ass without breaking a sweat, but he was intimidating—even if I didn’t feel threatened by him. I’d be intimidating, too, if someone stole my meal ticket and I was terrified about it.
“I said shut the fuck up,” he yelled, like a poor parent unable to control a precocious toddler. Spittle sprayed on me and he purposely crowded my space. Guys like Crosetti, in my experience, want you to react. I didn’t.
“The FBI is working it now,” he said. “You’re fired. You’re a mouthy fucking son of a bitch anyway.”
He turned to Carl. “You,” he said, saying the word as a curse. “I’m not done with you yet.”
Crosetti turned to me. “I told you you’re fired; get the fuck out of my office.”
I stood and walked past him. “I’ll have my invoice to you by close of business tomorrow.” To my surprise, he didn’t object.
Thursday, November 27, 2008
The Star Quarterback
“My girlfriend is missing,” he said. He was less than half my age, a senior at Shenendehowa High School in the Albany suburb of Clifton Park. He was the quarterback of the high school football team, a good-looking kid with an easy smile and a build, a face, and a manor that could melt any girl’s heart.
As a junior, Gil Harmon had signed a letter of intent to play at Syracuse. When they went 1-10-1 and fired their coach, he tore up the letter and enrolled at the University of Southern California, a perennial contender. The high school All-America status USA Today had bestowed on him hadn’t hurt matters any in that regard. The local media covered him as if he were a rock star, which he might eventually be.
Now, he was sitting in my client chair, angry, but poised. And he was showing the demeanor I suspected he used when he marched his team down the field for a score.
“No offense, but girls in high school are notoriously fickle. She might have decided her true love was a member of the A-V club or the math league.”
Gil looked like an All-American. He wore perfectly tailored Levis and a white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up. A pair of sunglasses dangled from the button hole in the pocket. His sneakers probably cost more than my entire wardrobe. His hair was jet black, close cropped, and perfect. If I were twenty years younger and gay, I’d be stammering. If he made it to the NFL, he’d make more in endorsement than he would playing.
“I’m not some idiot kid who won’t acknowledge a broken heart. She’s missing.”
“Talk to the cops.”
He held my eyes in a long stare without saying anything. From his age, I’d have expected an eye roll and more overt anger and a dismissive attitude. Instead he nodded
“They won’t listen. Her mom and step-dad don’t seem to think there’s a problem.”
“Why?”
For the first time since he entered my office, Gil’s veneer of confident assurance turned transparent. He looked away from me and slid his palms up and down the thighs of his perfect jeans.
“She’s pregnant.”
Not exactly a surprise. Aside from the thrill of victory and the allure of lots of money in a professional future, young men play sports to gain the attention of young women. And when they get that attention, it’s no mystery what comes next.
“You the daddy?”
He nodded, but still didn’t meet my gaze.
“Parents pissed off about it?”
“Yeah.” His voice was small now and he snorted a humorless laugh. “Her mom’s a little absolute, religiously. Rebecca likes the oldies station and when they played Only the Good Die Young, she went on and on about how much her mom hates that song because it demeans Catholics.”
“Mom’s a Catholic.”
“Her mom’s more Catholic than the Virgin Mary.” He looked me in the eye again, but without any hint of bravado. This was important to him, and though his emotions were strong, he held them in check.
I liked him. If he didn’t listen to people tell him how God-like he was, he might do well. I glanced at the picture he gave me. Rebecca McGraw—that was her name—was a pretty girl with full lips, eyes the size of a bushel basket, a healthy smattering of freckles, and red hair that seemed radiant. I could see what he saw in her. She wasn’t especially pretty or hot, but she was attractive. Her smile and the mischief in her eyes made her that way. He told me she was seventeen.
“You understand you absolutely no legal standing here,” I said. “Even if I find her, you can’t bring her home. I can’t even guarantee that you’ll be able talk to her.”
He nodded. “My dad’s lawyer told me as much. He thinks it’s a waste of money to hire you.”
I didn’t know his dad’s attorney, but I didn’t think much of someone who would dismiss me out of hand that way, even if he was right.
“Speaking of money.”
He pulled a check from his wallet and set it on the front of my desk. His name was at the top of the check, which was number 2862. My name was already entered, as was the date and Gil’s signature. The only thing missing was the amount. Usually I bill ahead of time for five days. If I can take care of my client in less than that, I return the difference.
He didn’t blink when I told him the amount. He wrote it in the right spots, then tore the check out and slid the check across the table to me.
“No offense, but we need to be sure your father and his attorney aren’t going to stop payment on the check.”
“I drove here in a blue BMW convertible that I hold the title to. I have about three-quarters of a million dollars in the various investments that I manage. If I never pay a down of professional football, I’ll be a millionaire before I graduate college.”
I smiled back at him and slid the check into the top drawer of my desk. “I’m still going to check.”
“I expect you to.” He got up and walked to the door, then turned back toward me. “I bank at HSBC. I’ll call the branch manager and have him call you to verify everything.”
“The bank manager’s name wouldn’t be Abe Frohman, would it?”
“Huh?”
“Old-person joke. I’ll call you later today.”
He pulled out a Blackberry and wiggled it between us. “Call on the cell, if you would.”
“Of course.”
The little bastard checked out, so the romantic four-day weekend I had planned with Lindsey was off. She hid her disappointment well.
“We just got married,” she said. “We spent a week on a cruise during which we had more sex than I had in my entire first marriage. I think I’ll get missing the weekend. Besides, I have to write thank you notes, and so do you.”
I growled a little and she laughed. Lindsey Martin Black was a five-foot-ten-inch woman with light brown hair, blue eyes, small breasts, and hips that were a bit wider than they’d been almost a decade earlier when she turned thirty—or so she said. To me, she was the sexiest, most attractive woman ever born. She was a narcotic to me, an addiction so strong I wanted to immerse myself in it every time I saw her. Even if she was wearing baggy, amorphous sweats and an oversized t-shirt.
“We could go in the other room for—you know—a mini-vacation.”
“Yeah, mini is right,” she said. She got up from the kitchen table, where she’d made a small dent in the list of people she had to thank. “But, I suppose if you have to work, I could give you something to sustain you through the difficult days ahead.”
If I’d died the second I saw her smile, I’d have lived enough, as dopey as that sounds.
When we finished, I set to work.
Any attempts to talk to Rebecca’s friends would be wasted. Gil had agreed on that. If they would talk, they’d talk to him, not to some creepy old detective guy. She went to youth group on Wednesday nights, which happened to be tonight, so I drove to her church and sat across the street with a pair of binoculars.
I put the Mets on the radio and sipped at the decaf I picked up on the way and watched the building while the teens sat inside and learned about Jesus. I wondered if it felt odd to learn about Jesus while you were a pregnant seventeen-year-old.
When youth group let out, she walked out with a group of other girls. She was nearly six feet tall. The style among the high school girls evolved to jeans and layers of muted colored shirts that hugged their upper bodies at least as tight as their boyfriends did. When I went to high school, they didn’t make girls with bodies like hers.
“Geez,” I said to myself. She had all the right curves in all the right places and in spite of myself, I pictured what she might look like without clothes on. “Perverted bastard.”
Most of the girls she came out with got into their own cars or cars with waiting parents and drove away. Rebecca didn’t. She stood apart from the other girls and waited. Eventually, she was the only one left. She toed the curb and glanced at her watch a couple times. No one else came out.
I decided to drive across the street and introduce myself. When I got out of the car, two spots away from her, she barely noticed me.
“Rebecca?”
She looked up and fear exploded in her eyes. She took two giant steps toward the church door.
“My name is Shane Black. I’m a private investigator.”
She took two more steps and reached for the handle. When she turned, I could see she was starting to show, even with the loose-fitting shirt.
“Gil hired me.”
She brought her hands to her mouth and stepped back half a step, then forward. Even in the gathering darkness, her eyes grew with curiosity and concern. “Gil?” she said. “How…how is he?”
“He hired me to find out what’s going on. He hasn’t seen you or heard from you and he’s worried.”
She dropped her hands about six inches and bit her lower lip. “What about the baby?”
“He wants the baby. He wants you to go with him to California with him.”
She stepped back and her head jerked rapidly right to left. “No, no, that’s not going to work. I can’t go with him. I just can’t. I’m…tell him I’m sorry.”
“I think he’d like to hear it from you.”
“No. I need to go. Inside. I need to go inside. Please.” She didn’t turn as she stepped backwards, but when her back hit the glass panel next to the door, she spun around and ran inside.
“So much for plan A.”
“You must not have told her right,” Gil said.
We met at Friendly’s ice cream. He ate a Jim Dandy sundae. I had a cup of coffee. I remembered Jim Dandy sundaes well from when I was his age. They’re fishbowls full of ice cream with a banana added for nutritional purposes. I salivated the entire time and had to restrain myself from asking him what it tasted like.
“I told her everything you said. I’ve been doing this for a while.”
He took a bite and stared of into the infinite space just beyond my left shoulder. Behind the counter was a waitress who filled out her Friendly’s outfit very nicely. I noticed it when I came in, part of my efforts to be ever vigilant. He didn’t glance at her once.
“Did she tell you why she was saying no?”
I shrugged. “That’s just it. She didn’t actually say no. She said she had to go in. She seemed very fearful.”
He shook his head and squinted slightly, as if he were working on a difficult trig problem that just wouldn’t come. “I don’t get it.”
I held back my urge to tell him to get used to it. Living beyond childhood means you don’t get a lot of things. The world is too big and complex to get it all.
“I hate to ask you this, but what if she doesn’t love you?”
“I thought of that. If that’s the case, that’s how it is. I can’t make her love me. But before I give up on it, I want her to tell me, or at least tell you that she doesn’t love me.”
I nodded and drained my coffee. “That seems reasonable.”
Lindsey wanted me to pick up some ground turkey, which she’d taken to using for hamburgers, wheat rolls, and some fresh asparagus from Price Chopper on the way home. When I called her I moaned about having to drink coffee while Gil attacked a giant bowl of ice cream, only to have to go home to eat stuff that’s good for me.
“Was it decaf?”
“Yes, dear,” I said.
“You yes dear me again, and there’ll be no dessert.”
Dessert, in Lindsey-speak, could be anything from a big Boston Cream pie, to a trip back to Friendly’s, to some quality together time, depending on her mood.
“Yes, dear.” Being a smart ass is greater than any of those things, and I might get dessert anyway.
I got everything she wanted at the store, plus a six-pack of Cherry Coke Zero, and found a surprise waiting for me when I got back to my car.
Three guys stood there, looking like linebackers—linebackers who’d been away from the game for a couple decades.
“Hi guys.”
“What you’re working on, stop,” the lead guy said. He was maybe forty and probably twenty-five pounds north of scary looking. He was probably a construction worker or something, someone used to seeming tough. And with two of his tough buddies with him, he should have no problems. Or so he figured.
“I’m working on bringing home groceries for dinner right now. I’d stop, but my wife hinted I might have sex if I brought them straightaway. You know how that is,” I said. “Or, looking at you, maybe you don’t.”
He bared his teeth and his friends stepped forward but stood behind him. Normally, I don’t like to draw my weapon in the parking lot of a Price Chopper, but as out of shape as these guys were, there were three of them and they could get lucky.
I opened my jacket and let them see my gun. “I don’t know who you are, or what you’re talking about. If you try to screw with me, I will shoot your kneecaps off.”
The two guys behind the leader stepped back, but he didn’t budge. Then they turned and started to walk away. “Dwight, are you coming?”
Dwight shook his head. But now he was alone. And people were starting to notice the two of us standing in the parking lot staring at each other like a couple idiots.
“What is it I’m working on that you want me to stay away from?” It was an honest question. The only thing I was working on was Gil’s thing and I didn’t figure to get mini-thugs warning me about it.
“Stay away from Rebecca. You’ve been warned.”
“Okay.”
He stood still for a few seconds, then turned and left. I watched him walk directly to his car, a white Ford F150 with a vanity plate, and drive off.
“Frigging amateur.”
While Lindsey made dinner, I found out that Dwight’s last name was McGraw and he owned a general contracting firm. The last name seemed like a clue, so I dug some more. His brother’s name was Andy McGraw. I called Gil.
“What’s Rebecca’s dad’s name?”
“Geez, I don’t know,” he said.
“You love her and want her to follow you to California, but you don’t know her dad’s name?”
He didn’t answer immediately. “It’s…complicated. She’s not connected with her father. She lives with her mom and her new husband.”
“Come on, Gil, dig deep here. I need the help.”
“I dunno. Andy, I think.”
I smiled broadly, then as the implications of the connection sunk in, my smile faded. “Her father’s brother threatened me, told me to stay away from her. What aren’t you telling me, Gil?”
He said nothing.
“Come on, dude. Whatever it is, it’s going to come out anyway.”
“The baby’s not mine,” he said.
“What?”
“It’s not mine. The timing is wrong.”
I rubbed my forehead. People are messy, and that’s good, or I wouldn’t have a means to make money. On the other hand, people are messy, and it can drive you nuts to try to keep up. Either he was lying to me, in which case, he wasn’t what he seemed. Or he was telling the truth, in which case, he wanted a woman who’d cheated on him to move to California with him.
“You understand this makes no sense.”
“Yeah. What can I say? I love her.”
“She cheated on you. She diddled some guy and got pregnant.”
“No,” he said, almost before I finished my sentence. His voice had force and carried the conviction you hear when someone’s trying to convince themselves of something. “It’s not that way. She told me she didn’t cheat.”
“If she didn’t cheat and it’s not yours…is the Holy Spirit the father?”
“I don’t know. She won’t talk to me about it.”
“Dude, she cheated on you. I know that’s hard, but it happens.”
He waited a couple seconds before answering. “No. She didn’t cheat. She’s not screwing some other guy.”
“Why won’t she see you, then?”
“I don’t know.”
Andy McGraw was an accountant who works out of a converted house on route 9 about three miles north of the intersection with route 146. The next morning, I sat in the Hess Mart across the street, enjoying caffeinated coffee and a whole-wheat bagel, while he got out of his Hummer H2 and entered the building. Another car, a late-model Accord with rust around the back wheel well, was already there when he pulled up at twenty after nine. Probably his secretary. Definitely not hired security. I slid on my jacket over my shoulder rig and pulled across the road to park next to the Accord.
I walked in and past the fifty-something woman behind the desk in what used to be a living room. She yelled something about my not being able to do that as I walked past her into the former bedroom that looked like the largest office, the one that had a laptop on the desk, and pushed the door shut. Andy entered from what used to be the master bathroom. He was a small man, maybe five-six and about as imposing as a bundle of pipe-cleaners.
“Can I help you?” His voice contained an edge that could be either anger or fear.
I flopped down in one of the client chairs in front of his large mahogany desk—a far cry from the Sam’s Club particle-board special in the reception area. My jacket fell open and the butt of my gun came into view. I hate when that happens.
“Tell your brother Dwight that if he ever tries to scare me again, I’ll give him a nine-millimeter castration.” I’ve always wanted to say something like that and make it sound arrogant and scary. My presentation rather pleased me and I let it show.
Andy walked past me and closed the door.
“Is anything wrong, Mr. McGraw?” the woman asked through the door.
“No, Helen, it’s fine.”
When Andy McGraw sat down behind his desk, he looked pale. He stared at me without saying anything, then bolted from his chair. I thought he might be fleeing, but he ducked into the master bathroom and vomited. I glanced in to make sure there wasn’t another exit to the room. There wasn’t. This was the master’s bathroom, dammit, and no one else should use it.
When he returned, flushed and gasping, I held out a tin of Altoids. He shook his head.
“Thanks anyway,” he said.
He fell into his chair behind the desk and we stared at each other. I had time to wait for him to say or do something. Several possibilities swirled in my head, but I wanted him to take the first step.
“What do you want?”
“I want to know why your daughter can’t be with the man she loves.”
“Maybe she doesn’t love him,” he said.
I shook my head. “I talked to her last night. I saw it in her eyes when she asked how he was.”
Andy said nothing.
“Gil says he doesn’t think she cheated on him,” I said. “She’s pregnant and he says it’s not his. What do you think?”
He’d been staring at his desk while I spoke, and now he looked up and I saw hope in his eyes. “I think he’s a liar.”
“’Course a paternity test can confirm that. Or we could ask your daughter who the daddy is.”
He nodded and the hope drained from his face. “I have an appointment,” he said. “It’s at ten and I need to get ready for it.”
I smiled at him. “Then you need to come to terms with this first, because I’m not leaving. And I expect the State Accounting Board, or whatever you call it, would be interested in accountants who hire muscle to threaten people.”
He nodded. “You aren’t going to give me a way out of this, are you?”
“Without knowing what this is, I don’t see how I can.”
For a string-bean of an accountant, he was quick. Before I could react, he had the drawer open. At the flash of steel, I reached under my armpit, knowing I was too late. I didn’t expect him to reach into his desk for a gun, and now I’d pay for it. Everything slowed down and the world diminished to him and me and this room. For some reason, I noticed a rusty swingset in the backyard, framed perfectly by the window behind him.
I was doing okay reaching for and grabbing my gun, but the change of direction to pull it out seemed to take years. It was halfway out, pointed at the side wall a little more than halfway between us when I realized I needn’t worry. He put the gun to his temple.
“No!”
I was still screaming when the side of his head exploded, spraying what used to be his brain on the wall. He slumped over the side of his chair and the gun made a dull thud as it fell to the ground.
When Helen entered, she had a gun drawn on me. “Don’t move,” she said. Expertly, she disarmed me—not that I was going to put up a fight—and checked my gun to see if it had been fired.
“Son of a bitch,” she said and she kicked the desk.
“He killed himself.”
“I know,” she said. She didn’t seem happy about it.
Andy McGraw didn’t impregnate Rebecca. What he did was worse. He took her to Lake Placid, where three men from New York City had sex with her. Andy didn’t get any money out of it. He didn’t even get the payment he was promised.
Andy trafficked in pornography for adults who preferred Hillary Duff to Angelina Jolie. Apparently, he was prolific, but not very careful. Helen turned out to be a state investigator, a woman who knew Lindsey from work. She was working undercover as his secretary.
Andy was getting ready for a meeting with the guy who’d blackmailed him into providing his daughter for the meeting. Only it turned out, she wasn’t really his daughter. She was born to a man his then-wife—the really Catholic one—had an affair with.
I was figuring out whether I really wanted to cash Gil’s check when he walked into my office. He didn’t knock, but then he hadn’t the first time. Even in jeans and a Yankees t-shirt, he strode across the office floor with the self-assurance of a quarterback assessing the opposing defense. It wasn’t confidence born of bravado. He’d done it hundreds of time before and would do it hundreds of times again. He glanced around my office, then sat in one of the client chairs.
“How’s Rebecca?”
He shrugged. “Not pregnant any more. Not speaking to her mom any more.”
“Her Catholic mom?”
He shrugged again. “It’s hard.”
I figured he was talking about the mom, or maybe about everything.
“Rebecca’s different, you know. It’s like she needs to learn to trust me all over again.”
“She was raped and the man she thought was her father set it up. Then she got pregnant.”
He nodded. “He’d done it before, you know…rented her out. When she was smaller and she’d go over for the weekend. Her mom never knew. She told me last week. Her mother was kind of promiscuous as a kid and when she found Jesus…she overcorrected.”
We fell into silence.
“Gonna be hard to rebuild her trust from California,” I said.
“Yeah, well…” He shook his head. “I don’t know if I’ll wind up going to SC. They’re going to red shirt me this year, and we’ll see how it goes. If she’s still having problems—if she wants me around, I’ll transfer to Syracuse. If I time it right, I won’t have to sit out a year.”
“SC is a rocket-sled to the pros. Syracuse isn’t.”
“Did you see the car I drive?” he said.
I’d seen it. It cost more than my last four cars put together, most likely. But when he spoke of it, his words didn’t carry an aftertaste of arrogance or privilege.
“I’d love to play pro football. I think it would be fun. But it’s not like getting to the pros is assured, and it’s not like I need to make the pros to get out of a bad situation. I’d rather have her.”
I nodded. “You think she can handle your giving up pro football for her?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. She’s got a lot of work to do. Her father…he didn’t even stick around for her to get angry at him for what he did.”
The room fell silent. Periodically, we looked up at each other.
“I blew it, you know,” I said. “He was the key to a lot of very bad people. That cop working as his secretary was taking down names. When he shot himself, that turned everything off.”
For the first time, I saw him lose him composure. He bolted from his seat, his fists balled. The façade of control melted. This wasn’t a defense he had to drive against with two minutes and no time outs. It wasn’t a calculus problem to solve or a scout to impress. He couldn’t fix this. He had to let it be fixed, or not. And it was driving him to places I suspected he hadn’t been.
“He treated my…Rebecca like a whore. She’s everything. She’s all I want. And he might have wrecked her.”
He paced around the office for a couple minutes. I watched him and didn’t say anything.
Eventually, he capped his anger and sat down again in the chair.
I nodded. “Why’d you come see me?”
“To give you this,” he said. He dropped a bullet on the desk in front of me. It was shiny and unused, a golden .22 round. “She gave it to me last night. Before we…before we were intimate for the first time since…you know.”
“What is it?”
“It’s the bullet she was going to kill herself with. She’d been carrying it around with her. Her father—if that’s what you want to call him—told her I wouldn’t want anything to do with her once I found out. Her mom—her mom’s a mess and she just didn’t know what to do with this.”
I picked it up and cradled it in my hand.
“She was going to kill herself. She was going to leave school and drive up to Lake George. There’s a place we used to go and it looks out over the lake. She was going to get drunk and shoot herself in the head. And then she found out what you did and she changed her mind.”
I looked up from the bullet to the man sitting in my client chair, the one I’d thought was an over-privileged boy.
“We’re engaged. There’s no date. She has to deal with this first, but I’ll be there for her and we’ll get married.”
I thought about my forty years, and the time I’d wasted trying to deal with death and disappointment. And here stood a seventeen-year-old who seemed to have it all together. No doubt he’d screw some important things up; we all do. But I’d seen seventy-year-olds who didn’t understand what he did.
He chuckled. “Pete Carroll was pissed. Just pissed. Told me I was throwing away the most important opportunity in my life.”
“What did you say?”
He smiled broadly and looked down at the bullet on my desk. “I showed him that bullet and told him he was wrong.”
And then he left.
If Gil Harmon ever played professional football, even if it was with the hated Miami Dolphins, his team would be my team. I looked at the bullet some more, then opened my drawer and put it in. I’d save it there for a time when I couldn’t remember why I bothered to do this job.
Then I locked the office and called Lindsey and asked to meet her after work for a picnic.
Life is good when you’ve done something right.
As a junior, Gil Harmon had signed a letter of intent to play at Syracuse. When they went 1-10-1 and fired their coach, he tore up the letter and enrolled at the University of Southern California, a perennial contender. The high school All-America status USA Today had bestowed on him hadn’t hurt matters any in that regard. The local media covered him as if he were a rock star, which he might eventually be.
Now, he was sitting in my client chair, angry, but poised. And he was showing the demeanor I suspected he used when he marched his team down the field for a score.
“No offense, but girls in high school are notoriously fickle. She might have decided her true love was a member of the A-V club or the math league.”
Gil looked like an All-American. He wore perfectly tailored Levis and a white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up. A pair of sunglasses dangled from the button hole in the pocket. His sneakers probably cost more than my entire wardrobe. His hair was jet black, close cropped, and perfect. If I were twenty years younger and gay, I’d be stammering. If he made it to the NFL, he’d make more in endorsement than he would playing.
“I’m not some idiot kid who won’t acknowledge a broken heart. She’s missing.”
“Talk to the cops.”
He held my eyes in a long stare without saying anything. From his age, I’d have expected an eye roll and more overt anger and a dismissive attitude. Instead he nodded
“They won’t listen. Her mom and step-dad don’t seem to think there’s a problem.”
“Why?”
For the first time since he entered my office, Gil’s veneer of confident assurance turned transparent. He looked away from me and slid his palms up and down the thighs of his perfect jeans.
“She’s pregnant.”
Not exactly a surprise. Aside from the thrill of victory and the allure of lots of money in a professional future, young men play sports to gain the attention of young women. And when they get that attention, it’s no mystery what comes next.
“You the daddy?”
He nodded, but still didn’t meet my gaze.
“Parents pissed off about it?”
“Yeah.” His voice was small now and he snorted a humorless laugh. “Her mom’s a little absolute, religiously. Rebecca likes the oldies station and when they played Only the Good Die Young, she went on and on about how much her mom hates that song because it demeans Catholics.”
“Mom’s a Catholic.”
“Her mom’s more Catholic than the Virgin Mary.” He looked me in the eye again, but without any hint of bravado. This was important to him, and though his emotions were strong, he held them in check.
I liked him. If he didn’t listen to people tell him how God-like he was, he might do well. I glanced at the picture he gave me. Rebecca McGraw—that was her name—was a pretty girl with full lips, eyes the size of a bushel basket, a healthy smattering of freckles, and red hair that seemed radiant. I could see what he saw in her. She wasn’t especially pretty or hot, but she was attractive. Her smile and the mischief in her eyes made her that way. He told me she was seventeen.
“You understand you absolutely no legal standing here,” I said. “Even if I find her, you can’t bring her home. I can’t even guarantee that you’ll be able talk to her.”
He nodded. “My dad’s lawyer told me as much. He thinks it’s a waste of money to hire you.”
I didn’t know his dad’s attorney, but I didn’t think much of someone who would dismiss me out of hand that way, even if he was right.
“Speaking of money.”
He pulled a check from his wallet and set it on the front of my desk. His name was at the top of the check, which was number 2862. My name was already entered, as was the date and Gil’s signature. The only thing missing was the amount. Usually I bill ahead of time for five days. If I can take care of my client in less than that, I return the difference.
He didn’t blink when I told him the amount. He wrote it in the right spots, then tore the check out and slid the check across the table to me.
“No offense, but we need to be sure your father and his attorney aren’t going to stop payment on the check.”
“I drove here in a blue BMW convertible that I hold the title to. I have about three-quarters of a million dollars in the various investments that I manage. If I never pay a down of professional football, I’ll be a millionaire before I graduate college.”
I smiled back at him and slid the check into the top drawer of my desk. “I’m still going to check.”
“I expect you to.” He got up and walked to the door, then turned back toward me. “I bank at HSBC. I’ll call the branch manager and have him call you to verify everything.”
“The bank manager’s name wouldn’t be Abe Frohman, would it?”
“Huh?”
“Old-person joke. I’ll call you later today.”
He pulled out a Blackberry and wiggled it between us. “Call on the cell, if you would.”
“Of course.”
The little bastard checked out, so the romantic four-day weekend I had planned with Lindsey was off. She hid her disappointment well.
“We just got married,” she said. “We spent a week on a cruise during which we had more sex than I had in my entire first marriage. I think I’ll get missing the weekend. Besides, I have to write thank you notes, and so do you.”
I growled a little and she laughed. Lindsey Martin Black was a five-foot-ten-inch woman with light brown hair, blue eyes, small breasts, and hips that were a bit wider than they’d been almost a decade earlier when she turned thirty—or so she said. To me, she was the sexiest, most attractive woman ever born. She was a narcotic to me, an addiction so strong I wanted to immerse myself in it every time I saw her. Even if she was wearing baggy, amorphous sweats and an oversized t-shirt.
“We could go in the other room for—you know—a mini-vacation.”
“Yeah, mini is right,” she said. She got up from the kitchen table, where she’d made a small dent in the list of people she had to thank. “But, I suppose if you have to work, I could give you something to sustain you through the difficult days ahead.”
If I’d died the second I saw her smile, I’d have lived enough, as dopey as that sounds.
When we finished, I set to work.
Any attempts to talk to Rebecca’s friends would be wasted. Gil had agreed on that. If they would talk, they’d talk to him, not to some creepy old detective guy. She went to youth group on Wednesday nights, which happened to be tonight, so I drove to her church and sat across the street with a pair of binoculars.
I put the Mets on the radio and sipped at the decaf I picked up on the way and watched the building while the teens sat inside and learned about Jesus. I wondered if it felt odd to learn about Jesus while you were a pregnant seventeen-year-old.
When youth group let out, she walked out with a group of other girls. She was nearly six feet tall. The style among the high school girls evolved to jeans and layers of muted colored shirts that hugged their upper bodies at least as tight as their boyfriends did. When I went to high school, they didn’t make girls with bodies like hers.
“Geez,” I said to myself. She had all the right curves in all the right places and in spite of myself, I pictured what she might look like without clothes on. “Perverted bastard.”
Most of the girls she came out with got into their own cars or cars with waiting parents and drove away. Rebecca didn’t. She stood apart from the other girls and waited. Eventually, she was the only one left. She toed the curb and glanced at her watch a couple times. No one else came out.
I decided to drive across the street and introduce myself. When I got out of the car, two spots away from her, she barely noticed me.
“Rebecca?”
She looked up and fear exploded in her eyes. She took two giant steps toward the church door.
“My name is Shane Black. I’m a private investigator.”
She took two more steps and reached for the handle. When she turned, I could see she was starting to show, even with the loose-fitting shirt.
“Gil hired me.”
She brought her hands to her mouth and stepped back half a step, then forward. Even in the gathering darkness, her eyes grew with curiosity and concern. “Gil?” she said. “How…how is he?”
“He hired me to find out what’s going on. He hasn’t seen you or heard from you and he’s worried.”
She dropped her hands about six inches and bit her lower lip. “What about the baby?”
“He wants the baby. He wants you to go with him to California with him.”
She stepped back and her head jerked rapidly right to left. “No, no, that’s not going to work. I can’t go with him. I just can’t. I’m…tell him I’m sorry.”
“I think he’d like to hear it from you.”
“No. I need to go. Inside. I need to go inside. Please.” She didn’t turn as she stepped backwards, but when her back hit the glass panel next to the door, she spun around and ran inside.
“So much for plan A.”
“You must not have told her right,” Gil said.
We met at Friendly’s ice cream. He ate a Jim Dandy sundae. I had a cup of coffee. I remembered Jim Dandy sundaes well from when I was his age. They’re fishbowls full of ice cream with a banana added for nutritional purposes. I salivated the entire time and had to restrain myself from asking him what it tasted like.
“I told her everything you said. I’ve been doing this for a while.”
He took a bite and stared of into the infinite space just beyond my left shoulder. Behind the counter was a waitress who filled out her Friendly’s outfit very nicely. I noticed it when I came in, part of my efforts to be ever vigilant. He didn’t glance at her once.
“Did she tell you why she was saying no?”
I shrugged. “That’s just it. She didn’t actually say no. She said she had to go in. She seemed very fearful.”
He shook his head and squinted slightly, as if he were working on a difficult trig problem that just wouldn’t come. “I don’t get it.”
I held back my urge to tell him to get used to it. Living beyond childhood means you don’t get a lot of things. The world is too big and complex to get it all.
“I hate to ask you this, but what if she doesn’t love you?”
“I thought of that. If that’s the case, that’s how it is. I can’t make her love me. But before I give up on it, I want her to tell me, or at least tell you that she doesn’t love me.”
I nodded and drained my coffee. “That seems reasonable.”
Lindsey wanted me to pick up some ground turkey, which she’d taken to using for hamburgers, wheat rolls, and some fresh asparagus from Price Chopper on the way home. When I called her I moaned about having to drink coffee while Gil attacked a giant bowl of ice cream, only to have to go home to eat stuff that’s good for me.
“Was it decaf?”
“Yes, dear,” I said.
“You yes dear me again, and there’ll be no dessert.”
Dessert, in Lindsey-speak, could be anything from a big Boston Cream pie, to a trip back to Friendly’s, to some quality together time, depending on her mood.
“Yes, dear.” Being a smart ass is greater than any of those things, and I might get dessert anyway.
I got everything she wanted at the store, plus a six-pack of Cherry Coke Zero, and found a surprise waiting for me when I got back to my car.
Three guys stood there, looking like linebackers—linebackers who’d been away from the game for a couple decades.
“Hi guys.”
“What you’re working on, stop,” the lead guy said. He was maybe forty and probably twenty-five pounds north of scary looking. He was probably a construction worker or something, someone used to seeming tough. And with two of his tough buddies with him, he should have no problems. Or so he figured.
“I’m working on bringing home groceries for dinner right now. I’d stop, but my wife hinted I might have sex if I brought them straightaway. You know how that is,” I said. “Or, looking at you, maybe you don’t.”
He bared his teeth and his friends stepped forward but stood behind him. Normally, I don’t like to draw my weapon in the parking lot of a Price Chopper, but as out of shape as these guys were, there were three of them and they could get lucky.
I opened my jacket and let them see my gun. “I don’t know who you are, or what you’re talking about. If you try to screw with me, I will shoot your kneecaps off.”
The two guys behind the leader stepped back, but he didn’t budge. Then they turned and started to walk away. “Dwight, are you coming?”
Dwight shook his head. But now he was alone. And people were starting to notice the two of us standing in the parking lot staring at each other like a couple idiots.
“What is it I’m working on that you want me to stay away from?” It was an honest question. The only thing I was working on was Gil’s thing and I didn’t figure to get mini-thugs warning me about it.
“Stay away from Rebecca. You’ve been warned.”
“Okay.”
He stood still for a few seconds, then turned and left. I watched him walk directly to his car, a white Ford F150 with a vanity plate, and drive off.
“Frigging amateur.”
While Lindsey made dinner, I found out that Dwight’s last name was McGraw and he owned a general contracting firm. The last name seemed like a clue, so I dug some more. His brother’s name was Andy McGraw. I called Gil.
“What’s Rebecca’s dad’s name?”
“Geez, I don’t know,” he said.
“You love her and want her to follow you to California, but you don’t know her dad’s name?”
He didn’t answer immediately. “It’s…complicated. She’s not connected with her father. She lives with her mom and her new husband.”
“Come on, Gil, dig deep here. I need the help.”
“I dunno. Andy, I think.”
I smiled broadly, then as the implications of the connection sunk in, my smile faded. “Her father’s brother threatened me, told me to stay away from her. What aren’t you telling me, Gil?”
He said nothing.
“Come on, dude. Whatever it is, it’s going to come out anyway.”
“The baby’s not mine,” he said.
“What?”
“It’s not mine. The timing is wrong.”
I rubbed my forehead. People are messy, and that’s good, or I wouldn’t have a means to make money. On the other hand, people are messy, and it can drive you nuts to try to keep up. Either he was lying to me, in which case, he wasn’t what he seemed. Or he was telling the truth, in which case, he wanted a woman who’d cheated on him to move to California with him.
“You understand this makes no sense.”
“Yeah. What can I say? I love her.”
“She cheated on you. She diddled some guy and got pregnant.”
“No,” he said, almost before I finished my sentence. His voice had force and carried the conviction you hear when someone’s trying to convince themselves of something. “It’s not that way. She told me she didn’t cheat.”
“If she didn’t cheat and it’s not yours…is the Holy Spirit the father?”
“I don’t know. She won’t talk to me about it.”
“Dude, she cheated on you. I know that’s hard, but it happens.”
He waited a couple seconds before answering. “No. She didn’t cheat. She’s not screwing some other guy.”
“Why won’t she see you, then?”
“I don’t know.”
Andy McGraw was an accountant who works out of a converted house on route 9 about three miles north of the intersection with route 146. The next morning, I sat in the Hess Mart across the street, enjoying caffeinated coffee and a whole-wheat bagel, while he got out of his Hummer H2 and entered the building. Another car, a late-model Accord with rust around the back wheel well, was already there when he pulled up at twenty after nine. Probably his secretary. Definitely not hired security. I slid on my jacket over my shoulder rig and pulled across the road to park next to the Accord.
I walked in and past the fifty-something woman behind the desk in what used to be a living room. She yelled something about my not being able to do that as I walked past her into the former bedroom that looked like the largest office, the one that had a laptop on the desk, and pushed the door shut. Andy entered from what used to be the master bathroom. He was a small man, maybe five-six and about as imposing as a bundle of pipe-cleaners.
“Can I help you?” His voice contained an edge that could be either anger or fear.
I flopped down in one of the client chairs in front of his large mahogany desk—a far cry from the Sam’s Club particle-board special in the reception area. My jacket fell open and the butt of my gun came into view. I hate when that happens.
“Tell your brother Dwight that if he ever tries to scare me again, I’ll give him a nine-millimeter castration.” I’ve always wanted to say something like that and make it sound arrogant and scary. My presentation rather pleased me and I let it show.
Andy walked past me and closed the door.
“Is anything wrong, Mr. McGraw?” the woman asked through the door.
“No, Helen, it’s fine.”
When Andy McGraw sat down behind his desk, he looked pale. He stared at me without saying anything, then bolted from his chair. I thought he might be fleeing, but he ducked into the master bathroom and vomited. I glanced in to make sure there wasn’t another exit to the room. There wasn’t. This was the master’s bathroom, dammit, and no one else should use it.
When he returned, flushed and gasping, I held out a tin of Altoids. He shook his head.
“Thanks anyway,” he said.
He fell into his chair behind the desk and we stared at each other. I had time to wait for him to say or do something. Several possibilities swirled in my head, but I wanted him to take the first step.
“What do you want?”
“I want to know why your daughter can’t be with the man she loves.”
“Maybe she doesn’t love him,” he said.
I shook my head. “I talked to her last night. I saw it in her eyes when she asked how he was.”
Andy said nothing.
“Gil says he doesn’t think she cheated on him,” I said. “She’s pregnant and he says it’s not his. What do you think?”
He’d been staring at his desk while I spoke, and now he looked up and I saw hope in his eyes. “I think he’s a liar.”
“’Course a paternity test can confirm that. Or we could ask your daughter who the daddy is.”
He nodded and the hope drained from his face. “I have an appointment,” he said. “It’s at ten and I need to get ready for it.”
I smiled at him. “Then you need to come to terms with this first, because I’m not leaving. And I expect the State Accounting Board, or whatever you call it, would be interested in accountants who hire muscle to threaten people.”
He nodded. “You aren’t going to give me a way out of this, are you?”
“Without knowing what this is, I don’t see how I can.”
For a string-bean of an accountant, he was quick. Before I could react, he had the drawer open. At the flash of steel, I reached under my armpit, knowing I was too late. I didn’t expect him to reach into his desk for a gun, and now I’d pay for it. Everything slowed down and the world diminished to him and me and this room. For some reason, I noticed a rusty swingset in the backyard, framed perfectly by the window behind him.
I was doing okay reaching for and grabbing my gun, but the change of direction to pull it out seemed to take years. It was halfway out, pointed at the side wall a little more than halfway between us when I realized I needn’t worry. He put the gun to his temple.
“No!”
I was still screaming when the side of his head exploded, spraying what used to be his brain on the wall. He slumped over the side of his chair and the gun made a dull thud as it fell to the ground.
When Helen entered, she had a gun drawn on me. “Don’t move,” she said. Expertly, she disarmed me—not that I was going to put up a fight—and checked my gun to see if it had been fired.
“Son of a bitch,” she said and she kicked the desk.
“He killed himself.”
“I know,” she said. She didn’t seem happy about it.
Andy McGraw didn’t impregnate Rebecca. What he did was worse. He took her to Lake Placid, where three men from New York City had sex with her. Andy didn’t get any money out of it. He didn’t even get the payment he was promised.
Andy trafficked in pornography for adults who preferred Hillary Duff to Angelina Jolie. Apparently, he was prolific, but not very careful. Helen turned out to be a state investigator, a woman who knew Lindsey from work. She was working undercover as his secretary.
Andy was getting ready for a meeting with the guy who’d blackmailed him into providing his daughter for the meeting. Only it turned out, she wasn’t really his daughter. She was born to a man his then-wife—the really Catholic one—had an affair with.
I was figuring out whether I really wanted to cash Gil’s check when he walked into my office. He didn’t knock, but then he hadn’t the first time. Even in jeans and a Yankees t-shirt, he strode across the office floor with the self-assurance of a quarterback assessing the opposing defense. It wasn’t confidence born of bravado. He’d done it hundreds of time before and would do it hundreds of times again. He glanced around my office, then sat in one of the client chairs.
“How’s Rebecca?”
He shrugged. “Not pregnant any more. Not speaking to her mom any more.”
“Her Catholic mom?”
He shrugged again. “It’s hard.”
I figured he was talking about the mom, or maybe about everything.
“Rebecca’s different, you know. It’s like she needs to learn to trust me all over again.”
“She was raped and the man she thought was her father set it up. Then she got pregnant.”
He nodded. “He’d done it before, you know…rented her out. When she was smaller and she’d go over for the weekend. Her mom never knew. She told me last week. Her mother was kind of promiscuous as a kid and when she found Jesus…she overcorrected.”
We fell into silence.
“Gonna be hard to rebuild her trust from California,” I said.
“Yeah, well…” He shook his head. “I don’t know if I’ll wind up going to SC. They’re going to red shirt me this year, and we’ll see how it goes. If she’s still having problems—if she wants me around, I’ll transfer to Syracuse. If I time it right, I won’t have to sit out a year.”
“SC is a rocket-sled to the pros. Syracuse isn’t.”
“Did you see the car I drive?” he said.
I’d seen it. It cost more than my last four cars put together, most likely. But when he spoke of it, his words didn’t carry an aftertaste of arrogance or privilege.
“I’d love to play pro football. I think it would be fun. But it’s not like getting to the pros is assured, and it’s not like I need to make the pros to get out of a bad situation. I’d rather have her.”
I nodded. “You think she can handle your giving up pro football for her?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. She’s got a lot of work to do. Her father…he didn’t even stick around for her to get angry at him for what he did.”
The room fell silent. Periodically, we looked up at each other.
“I blew it, you know,” I said. “He was the key to a lot of very bad people. That cop working as his secretary was taking down names. When he shot himself, that turned everything off.”
For the first time, I saw him lose him composure. He bolted from his seat, his fists balled. The façade of control melted. This wasn’t a defense he had to drive against with two minutes and no time outs. It wasn’t a calculus problem to solve or a scout to impress. He couldn’t fix this. He had to let it be fixed, or not. And it was driving him to places I suspected he hadn’t been.
“He treated my…Rebecca like a whore. She’s everything. She’s all I want. And he might have wrecked her.”
He paced around the office for a couple minutes. I watched him and didn’t say anything.
Eventually, he capped his anger and sat down again in the chair.
I nodded. “Why’d you come see me?”
“To give you this,” he said. He dropped a bullet on the desk in front of me. It was shiny and unused, a golden .22 round. “She gave it to me last night. Before we…before we were intimate for the first time since…you know.”
“What is it?”
“It’s the bullet she was going to kill herself with. She’d been carrying it around with her. Her father—if that’s what you want to call him—told her I wouldn’t want anything to do with her once I found out. Her mom—her mom’s a mess and she just didn’t know what to do with this.”
I picked it up and cradled it in my hand.
“She was going to kill herself. She was going to leave school and drive up to Lake George. There’s a place we used to go and it looks out over the lake. She was going to get drunk and shoot herself in the head. And then she found out what you did and she changed her mind.”
I looked up from the bullet to the man sitting in my client chair, the one I’d thought was an over-privileged boy.
“We’re engaged. There’s no date. She has to deal with this first, but I’ll be there for her and we’ll get married.”
I thought about my forty years, and the time I’d wasted trying to deal with death and disappointment. And here stood a seventeen-year-old who seemed to have it all together. No doubt he’d screw some important things up; we all do. But I’d seen seventy-year-olds who didn’t understand what he did.
He chuckled. “Pete Carroll was pissed. Just pissed. Told me I was throwing away the most important opportunity in my life.”
“What did you say?”
He smiled broadly and looked down at the bullet on my desk. “I showed him that bullet and told him he was wrong.”
And then he left.
If Gil Harmon ever played professional football, even if it was with the hated Miami Dolphins, his team would be my team. I looked at the bullet some more, then opened my drawer and put it in. I’d save it there for a time when I couldn’t remember why I bothered to do this job.
Then I locked the office and called Lindsey and asked to meet her after work for a picnic.
Life is good when you’ve done something right.
Another Thanksgiving without Lindsey
Lindsey and I had only two Thanksgivings together. The last one was in 2004. She didn't have to work that day, so we got a bottle of wine and rented some sappy chick flick she wanted to see. I built a fire and we settled in to watch the movie. My goal was to have her undressed on the blanket in front of the fireplace before the movie was over. Instead, I fell asleep.
When the movie ended, she woke me up and we did what I had wanted to do anyway.
The next morning, we went to her mother's house. When Lindsey died, her mother Ev wrote me off. At the time, I thought she was family. We ate until we were gorged and then I napped on the recliner while Lindsey and her mom did the dishes.
To pay her back, I had to give her a full-body massage with lilac-scented lotion and watch another chick flick with her. In the end, it was worth the effort, because she was there.
She was shot twice in the chest in the parking lot of a Price Chopper on October 4, 2005. I still miss her.
Today, I'm sitting at a bar within walking distance of my apartment on the Dunedin causeway. My goal was to get loaded and stagger home. But I can't quite bring myself to get drunk. I wish I could.
Maybe tomorrow. Anyway, Happy Thanksgiving. I hope yours is as good as mine used to be.
When the movie ended, she woke me up and we did what I had wanted to do anyway.
The next morning, we went to her mother's house. When Lindsey died, her mother Ev wrote me off. At the time, I thought she was family. We ate until we were gorged and then I napped on the recliner while Lindsey and her mom did the dishes.
To pay her back, I had to give her a full-body massage with lilac-scented lotion and watch another chick flick with her. In the end, it was worth the effort, because she was there.
She was shot twice in the chest in the parking lot of a Price Chopper on October 4, 2005. I still miss her.
Today, I'm sitting at a bar within walking distance of my apartment on the Dunedin causeway. My goal was to get loaded and stagger home. But I can't quite bring myself to get drunk. I wish I could.
Maybe tomorrow. Anyway, Happy Thanksgiving. I hope yours is as good as mine used to be.
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