A Tap on the Window (3 page)

THREE

Used
to be, when I’d get home after something crazy like that, the first thing I’d have said would have been “You’re not going to believe what just happened.”

But that was then, and this was now.

It was nearly half past ten when I came in, and even though Donna would almost always be upstairs in bed by now, there was a time when she’d have come down to meet me the moment she heard the front door open and close.

At the very least, she would have shouted down, “Hey!”

And I would have said, “Hey!”

But now, there was no “Hey!” Not from her, and not from me.

I dropped my coat on the bench by the front door and ambled into the kitchen. I’d missed dinner, as I often did, but I hadn’t had much of an appetite the last couple of months. I’d gone in two notches on my belt to keep my pants up, and on those rare occasions when I wore a tie, I could get a couple of fingers inside a buttoned collar.

Last time I’d had anything to eat was around six, sitting in the car, watching the back door of a butcher shop in Tonawanda. A bag of Wise potato chips. The owner suspected someone on his staff was stealing from him. Product, not cash. He was running out of pot roasts and T-bones sooner than anticipated, and figured either his supplier was cheating him or someone under his nose was ripping him off.

I asked him for the hours when he left the shop in charge of his employees, and those were the periods when I staked out the back entry, positioning my Accord down an alley that still afforded a good view of comings and goings.

Didn’t take long.

Late this afternoon, around dusk, the wife of one of the butchers drove up to the back, sent a text. Then seconds later the door opened and her husband ran up to her window with a garbage bag wound tightly at the top. She took the bag, threw it onto the passenger seat, and drove off like she’d just robbed a liquor store.

I took pictures using the telephoto, then followed her home. Watched her take the bag into the house. Would have been even better if I could have crept up to a window and snapped some shots of her putting a pork roast into the oven, but there are limits to what I can do. I am called upon, in my line of work, to be something of a Peeping Tom at times, but it didn’t seem necessary in this circumstance. I didn’t have to prove she’d slept with dinner.

So maybe I wasn’t on the trail of the Maltese Falcon or some missing plutonium. In the real world of private investigation, it was food, or building materials, or gas, or cars, or trucks that got ripped off. A while back, I cracked the case of some stolen cedar shrubs that kept going missing every time the homeowner replanted.

When someone stole from you, you not only wanted your stuff back—you wanted to know who did it. Police are too busy and shorthanded to solve crimes like these. A random theft, a one-shot kind of thing, well, that was pretty hard for me to solve, too, but if there was a pattern, if you were the victim of a serial pain-in-the-ass offender, chances were I could help you out, because I had the time to wait until the son of a bitch who was preying on you did it again.

It wasn’t rocket science. It was sitting around and staying awake.

Finding people wasn’t all that much different. Husbands and wives and sons and daughters went missing as often as steak and lumber and fuel and Toyotas, although it had been my experience
things
were often more missed than
people
. Someone stole your truck, there was no question you wanted it recovered. But if your two-timing, fist-swinging, scotch-drinking husband failed to come home one night, you had to ask yourself whether good fortune had smiled upon you.

It hadn’t been smiling much on us lately.

I opened the fridge, took out a beer, then went into the family room, where I dropped myself like a bag of sand into a leather recliner. On the coffee table lay several sheets of paper torn from an art pad, each one a sketch of Scott. One profile, a three-quarter, and a third, straight on, like a passport shot. Alongside the sketches, half a dozen sharpened charcoal pencils, some soft, some hard, and a small container of fixative spray, about the size of a shaving cream dispenser you’d toss into your travel bag. When Donna had taken a sketch as far as she could—she never really finished one because she always found something wrong with it—she sprayed it to keep the charcoal from smearing. Even drawings she felt failed to capture our son she kept for reference, to copy those parts she believed she’d gotten right. There was a chemical whiff in the room, which told me she’d been using the fixative earlier. The stuff could take your breath away.

This was Donna’s coping strategy. Drawing pictures of our son, some from memory, others copied from photos. I found them all over the house. Here, in the kitchen, next to her bed, in her car. There was one taped to the bathroom mirror for a couple of days that she kept looking at as she put on her makeup. I thought it was a near-perfect likeness, and she must have been thinking the same, but finally she took it down and tucked it in the folder with her other rejects.

“I thought that was a good one,” I said.

“Ears were wrong,” she said.

It was, for us these days, an extended conversation.

I had doubts whether this obsession of hers to capture the perfect image of our boy was healthy. For her, or for me. I suppose that if she’d been so inclined to sit at the computer and work through her grief writing poems and recollections, I might not have felt the same. That method of coming to grips with what had happened to us would have been more private, would not have drawn me in, unless she invited me to read what she’d written. But the sketches involved me. I couldn’t avoid them. They might have been therapeutic for her, but for me they were a constant reminder of our loss, and of our failure. And the fact that so many were unfinished, and imperfect, underscored how troubled Scott had been.

Of course, Donna wasn’t that crazy about how I was dealing with things, either.

I found the remote under a drawing of Scott with one eye unfinished, turned on the flat-screen, kept the volume low and my thumb on the channel changer. So many of them now. Channels with nothing but food, or golf, or decades-old sitcoms. Even one for poker. People sitting around, playing cards. That was a channel. What would be next? The Parcheesi Channel? I clicked through a couple of hundred of them in under five minutes, then did them all again.

I found it increasingly difficult to concentrate. I had diagnosed myself with something I’d coined PT-ADD. Post-traumatic attention deficit disorder. I couldn’t focus because there was always just one thing on my mind. I managed to do my job, more or less, but it was always there, white noise in the background.

Finally, I settled on some news out of one of the Buffalo stations.

Three people were mugged outside a liquor store in Kenmore. A West Seneca man ordered his pit bull to attack a woman, who’d required thirty stitches. The dog’s owner told police she had “looked at him funny.” There was a “pedal-by” shooting in Cheektowaga. A man on a bicycle fired three times at a house, hitting the shoulder of a man who’d been sitting on his couch watching an old episode of
Everybody Loves Raymond
. Two men were rushed to Erie County Medical Center after getting shot coming out of a bar. A credit union on Main Street was robbed by a man who’d handed the teller a note saying he had a gun, although none was seen. As if all that weren’t enough, Buffalo police were looking for three teens who, after stabbing a fourteen-year-old boy behind a house on LaSalle Avenue, poured gasoline on him and then tossed a match. The kid was in the hospital, still alive, but no one expected him to last long.

And that was just tonight.

I turned off the set and scanned that day’s
Buffalo News
, which had been tucked into the wicker magazine holder next to the chair, the thin sections already pulled apart by Donna earlier in the day. On the page dedicated to smaller towns outside the city, there was a piece on whether our local police had overreacted at the Griffon Jazz Festival in August. When half a dozen young thugs from out of town crashed the event and started stealing refreshments from the beer tent, it was alleged that some of Griffon’s finest, rather than arresting and charging them, tossed them into a couple of cars, took them out past the town’s water tower, and liberated them from enough of their own teeth to make a nice necklace.

The mayor, a guy by the name of Bert Sanders, had made bringing the cops in line his number one issue, but he wasn’t getting much support from the rest of the council, or the good people of Griffon, who didn’t care how many teeth out-of-town troublemakers lost so long as this town didn’t turn into Buffalo.

That city was less than an hour away, but it was another planet compared to Griffon, a town of some eight thousand that ballooned to three or four times that in the summer when tourists came here to launch their boats and fish in the Niagara River, attend the various weekend festivals like that jazz event, or shop in the quaint gift shops downtown that struggled to hold on to customers who were being lured away to the Costcos and Walmarts and Targets of western New York.

It was late October now, so Griffon was back to its generally sleepy self. There wasn’t that much crime to worry about here. People locked their doors—we weren’t stupid—but there were no parts of town you feared going into after dark. Shopkeepers didn’t draw metal doors down over their storefronts at the close of business. We didn’t have helicopters with searchlights hovering over the neighborhood at three in the morning. But there remained a sense of unease, given our proximity to Buffalo, where the violent crime rate was roughly three times the national average, a city that regularly placed in the top twenty most dangerous American cities. There was a fear that at any moment, unruly hordes would surge northward like marauding zombies, putting an end to our more or less tranquil lifestyle.

So folks in Griffon gave their police some leeway. The head of the business association was encouraging everyone to sign their names to a pledge of support for the local police force. Downtown shops were urged to carry a form headlined
OUR GRIFFON COPS ARE TOPS!
and all who put their names to it would not only feel good about themselves but get a five percent discount on their purchases. A little way to say thank you for keeping our town safe.

Not that bad things didn’t happen in Griffon. We had our share of problems. Griffon wasn’t Mayberry.

There were no Mayberrys anymore.

I looked at a framed photo on the bookshelf across the room. Donna and me, Scott in the middle. Taken when he was thirteen. About the time he was entering high school.

Before the storm.

Smiling, but careful not to show his teeth, since he’d had braces put on only a couple of weeks earlier and was feeling self-conscious. Looking awkward, embarrassed maybe, trapped in his parents’ arms. The thing was, at that age, what didn’t make you feel uncomfortable? Parents, school, girls. The need to belong, to fit in, was a much greater driving force than the desire to ace a math test.

He’d always been looking for a way to fit in, yet couldn’t turn himself into somebody he wasn’t to do it.

He was an eccentric kid, more likely to have Beethoven than Bieber on his iPod. Loved almost anything that was deemed classic, in music, in movies, even cars. That aforementioned Maltese Falcon was a poster on his wall, and there was a model of a ’57 Chevy on his bookshelf. He drew the line at classics of literature. He wasn’t one to stick his nose into a four-hundred-page novel, a trait the doctors had said might be linked to attention deficit disorder—a more clinical diagnosis than the one I’d assigned to myself—although I was never sure I bought any of that stuff. But he did have all the graphic novel classics.
Black Hole
, Waltz with Bashir, The Dark Knight Returns, Maus, Watchmen.

With the possible exception of those graphic novels, he shared few interests with other kids his age. He didn’t care about the Bills—something of a religion in these parts—and he’d rather put sticks in his eyes than watch the adventures of Jersey Shore nitwits, spoiled housewives, mentally disturbed hoarders, or any of the other reality shows his friends were addicted to. He did like that comedy about the four nerdy young scientists—even took some comfort in it, I think. It gave him hope that you could be uncool, and cool, at the same time.

So as much as he wanted friends, he wasn’t about to feign interest in things he cared nothing about to acquire them. But then, summer before last, at another Griffon concert, this one featuring several alternative bands, Scott connected with a couple of Cleveland-area kids, vacationing here for the summer, whose contempt for much of popular culture provided an initial bond. These new friends found that mocking the world around them was easier when you softened the edges of it, and they accomplished that with booze and marijuana. They weren’t exactly the first.

No question, Scott’d had opportunities before to try alcohol and drugs—show me a parent who thinks his kid lives in a neighborhood where this stuff isn’t available and I’ll show you a parent with his head up his ass—but up to now he had, as best we could tell, given them a wave. He’d been at that age where pleasing his parents was important, but now was moving out of it. Having friends trumped making Mommy and Daddy happy.

Not exactly an unfamiliar tale.

There were changes in his behavior. Small things at first. An increased fondness for secrecy, but hey, what kid, moving further into his teens, didn’t want privacy? But then came trust issues. We’d give him cash to pick up a few items at Walgreens, and he’d return home with only half the items but no money. He forgot things. His grades started to slip. He’d claim to have no homework, but then we’d get notices from the school that he wasn’t turning in assignments. Or that he’d skipped classes altogether. Values he once held dear—being straight with us, keeping his word, honoring his curfew—no longer seemed to matter.

I never blamed drinking and pot for all of this. I didn’t have a
Reefer Madness
moment, convinced that marijuana had warped our son’s mind, turned him against us. Part of it was his age. Part of it was wanting to belong. Scott had bonded with the kids who made getting drunk and high part of his life, and when they went back to Ohio at the end of that summer, our boy’s new habits were well established.