A Tap on the Window (30 page)

FIFTY-SEVEN

He’s
driving so quickly, when he has to make a turn from a gravel road to pavement, the truck skitters on its back wheels, nearly flips over. But he wrenches the wheel, manages to right the vehicle, and once he hits blacktop he floors it.

Now, driving in a straight line, he can manage the phone. He grabs it with his right, places a call, puts the phone to his ear.

“Hello?” his mother says urgently.

“It’s me,” he says.

“What’s happened, Richard? Did you find them?”

“I found them,” Ricky Haines says.

“And?”

“I got them.”

“You did?”

“I got Mullavey. And I’m pretty sure I got the girl, too.”

“Pretty sure?” Phyllis Pearce likes to deal in absolutes. “What do you mean, pretty sure?”

“I saw her go down. I couldn’t exactly check her pulse, with Weaver shooting at me.”

“What about him? What did you do with him?”

“I told you. He was shooting at me. I had to get out of there. I couldn’t get a good shot at him.”

“What about the notebook?”

“I don’t have it.”

“God, you’re hopeless! Where are you now?”

“On the road. I’m coming home.”

“No!” she says. “You have to go back! You have to finish this!”

“No, listen. I waited, a little while, at the end of the road, the only way out, figuring Weaver’d drive out eventually. I hid the truck and I was in the woods. When they didn’t show up, I drove back past the place, saw that the boat was gone. Decided then I better get out of there.”

“Boat? What are you talking about, a boat?”

“I followed them to a cottage on Cayuga Lake. Weaver must have took off in a boat.”

“Did he see you?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. And I don’t know what Mullavey and the girl told him before I got there.”

“My God, what a mess,” Phyllis says.

“It’s not that bad, Mom. The only one left who might know anything is Weaver.”

“And he’s probably got the book, too.” She can’t hold back any longer: “You should have gotten Mullavey that first day! That’s what you should have done!”

Ricky thinks she’s losing it. But he knows his mom. He knows she freaks out at first, but then she calms down, thinks things through. Mom usually has a plan. When he hears nothing from her for several seconds, he’s pretty sure that’s what is going on.

“I know all that,” he says. “I know I’ve made some mistakes. But some things I got right, you know that.”

“Shut up,” Phyllis says. “Just shut up and let me think.”

He waits. He feels tears coming on, blinks a few times to clear his vision. He thinks of all the things that could have been done better, the different decisions that could have been made. And not just by him. She deserves plenty of the blame, too, but she gets so angry when he reminds her of that.

Finally she says, “You come home. I’ll see what I can do.”

Ricky tosses the phone onto the seat next to him. He’s not relieved, but he feels slightly better.

Mom will figure something out.

FIFTY-EIGHT

Ricky
Haines.

Tumblers fell into place.

If it was Ricky who’d followed us to Cayuga Lake, it was most likely Ricky who’d planted the tracking device in my car. It had to have been Ricky’s idea to seize my car. To avoid suspicion, he’d said that he’d been told to do it by Quinn, who in turn had been told to do it by Augie.

Once the car’d been brought in, Ricky could have had access to it and planted the trackers. And since no one had actually given an order to have the car searched, no one was going to find them before the car was returned to me.

Brindle, I was guessing, wasn’t in on it with his partner. If he had been, he wouldn’t have been so pissed when I got sprung by the chief on the Tapscott business. It also explained why Haines had offered to call my lawyer for me. It wasn’t in his interest that I be held in custody. He needed me on the outside, leading him to Claire and Dennis.

What else had Ricky probably done?

I felt I should be calling Augie, but I still had what you might call trust issues. I wanted to hear what Claire had to say before I called anyone with the Griffon police.

She started her story, more or less, from the beginning.

“I had a job for the summer working at Smith’s. The ice cream place? Down by the water?”

I nodded. We used to go down there, Donna and Scott and I, after dinner on a warm summer’s evening.

“That’s kind of close to Hooper’s office, and Dennis would drop by every day after work and get an ice cream. He kept coming so often, I could tell he was kind of into me, and things weren’t going so well between me and Roman anyway. You know Roman?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I don’t know what I was thinking there. He’s kind of a douche, to be honest, but I guess I kind of thought it was cool that he wants to be a movie writer, you know? But he was into some sketchy stuff, like—okay, I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but Roman’s twenty-one and he makes money by buying beer and—”

“I know all about it,” I said. “And that he had Sean and Hanna delivering for him, and they got to keep a share of the profits.”

“Wow, okay. Anyway, I didn’t like the way he’d send Hanna out there to deal with stuff. And there was other stuff with Roman. I mean, he creeped me out sometimes.”

“The texts.”

“God, did you see that on my phone? It wasn’t just the picture. He was always asking me to send pictures of myself and I didn’t want to do it. So, I started going out with Dennis, and Roman was pretty pissed.”

We were booting it down the interstate, cruising at eighty, Buffalo nearly an hour away, Griffon half an hour after that.

“Things between me and Dennis were pretty serious. I mean, we really liked each other, even talking about whether he’d go back home after the end of the summer or what, and then one day he’s just gone.”

“What do you mean?”

“One day he just disappears. Sends me a message that it’s not working out between us, that whole thing about it not being me but him, right?” She sniffs, looks in the glove box for tissues, but the Subaru is clean. The glove box, the ashtrays, the console, everything is empty.

“I grabbed some napkins. Look in the bag.”

Claire finds them, blows her nose and wipes away tears.

“That must have hurt, him breaking it off with you all of a sudden, no apparent reason,” I said.

“Yeah. I thought, what’d I do? I thought everything was great. I was kinda destroyed by it, bummed out, everything. And then, a couple of weeks go by, and I hear from him.”

“He texted you,” I said.

“Yeah. He said he had to explain, that he had to leave Griffon because of the cops, that something happened. I had no idea what he was talking about, but I really wanted to see him, at least to find out why he dumped me all of a sudden. This was during all that stuff between my dad and your brother-in-law. We had cop cars watching our house a lot, and Dad figured it was Chief Perry trying to screw with us, you know? Scare us, let us know he and his people were watching us all the time. I figured that’s what it was about, too, until Dennis said in his texts that the cops were probably just watching me.”

“Because they thought, since you two had been an item, you might lead them to him.”

“Item?” she said.

“A thing. A couple.”

“Oh yeah, exactly.” She paused a moment. “So he said if we were going to get together, I had to be sure the cops weren’t watching me. That was when I got the idea to do the switch with Hanna.”

“Sean was supposed to pick you up, and when he couldn’t come, you hitched a ride with me.”

Claire nodded. “I didn’t mean to pick on you, honestly. I’d have gotten a lift with anyone. But when I saw it was you, that you were Scott’s dad, that you’d be a safe person to go with . . .” She paused. “Even if you have been going around scaring the shit out of everybody.”

“That’s over,” I said.

“So, you found out who gave Scott drugs?” she asked.

“No. Go on with your story.”

“There’s not much more about that night. I mean, the switch worked, at least from my point of view.” She looked out the window, not wanting me to see her face. “Hanna . . . went out and got in your car, I slipped out the back and went off with Dennis. We drove straight to the cottage.”

“So who was following you in the pickup that night? Ricky?”

Claire nodded. “I got a look at him a couple of times. Once, when he was in a Griffon cruiser, watching our house, I went right up to the car and looked in the window and said, like, ‘Fuck off and leave my father alone.’ Because then, I figured that was why we were being watched, that it was about my dad, and the chief had probably told everyone on the force to give us a hard time. And then, another time, instead of being in a cruiser, he was in a pickup, and it was Ricky again. But even that time, I just figured he was doing off-duty stuff for the chief. It was him that night you gave me a ride. For a cop, he’s not the greatest at not being seen.”

He got smarter with me. But Claire didn’t have a car.

So it’s Ricky who gets played when Hanna gets into my car. Ricky who stays on my tail.

Ricky who sees Hanna jump out of my car.

Ricky who sees Hanna tear the wig off her head and toss it.

Ricky realizes he’s been tricked, that Claire has gotten away, most likely with Dennis.

Ricky goes after Hanna to find out where Claire has gone.

More tumblers falling into position.

I had an immediate question for Claire. “Did Hanna have any idea where you were going with Dennis?”

“No,” Claire said. “He said it was better that nobody knew.”

Ricky grabs Hanna, tries to get her to tell, but Hanna hasn’t a clue. Ricky gets angry, frustrated. Ends up choking the life out of her. But he has the presence of mind to strip her from the waist down, plant the notion of sexual assault, put the clothes in Sean Skilling’s car.

Claire continued. “It wasn’t till Dennis filled me in that I realized that Haines was just watching me, not me and my dad. In fact, I never noticed any other Griffon cop watching me.”

“Tell me about Dennis.”“

She nodded. “Okay, Dennis, he just didn’t know what to do. He’d been hiding out ever since he’d left Griffon, at the cottage. He saw his dad once, just popped in. He lives up around Rochester.”

“We’ve met,” I said. “He seems like a good man.”

Claire’s eyes widened. “Wow, like, you’ve really talked to everybody. But, yeah, Mr. Mullavey is really nice.” Again she looked away. “It’s going to kill him when he finds out about Dennis.”

I didn’t have anything to say to that.

“He told his dad he was in trouble, but that he hadn’t done anything wrong, and that when the police came around looking for him, he had to remember that. He said he needed time to figure out what to do, and he wanted to talk to me about it.”

“What happened, Claire?”

“So, one day, Dennis is cutting grass at the Pearce place.”

“Phyllis Pearce.”

“That’s right. The lady that owns and runs Patchett’s.”

“Right.”

“So Hooper usually sends out a crew, right? Like, there’ll be two of them, but this day, the guy who usually went out with Dennis was sick, so Dennis said he could handle it on his own. And he gets to the Pearce house, and he can tell no one is home because there are no cars there. He’s cutting the grass when he notices what looks like smoke coming out around one of the basement windows.”

She opened one of the water bottles and took a long drink, kept the bottle in her hand.

“So Dennis runs up and goes banging on the door, even though he knows no one is there, right? But just in case, because he doesn’t want to barge in, you know? But when no one comes, he figures he better do something, so he kicks in the door, and he can see that the smoke is coming up from the basement. He runs down, and there’s this fire coming from around the dryer.”

“Go on.”

“There’s actually a fire extinguisher on the wall, so Dennis, he grabs it, and pulls that little pin or whatever they have on them.”

“Okay.”

“And he squirts out all this foamy stuff and he puts out the fire pretty fast.”

“Smart thinking,” I said. “Although it might have been smarter for him to stay out and just call the fire department.”

“Yeah, well, he sure wishes he’d done that.” Claire realized she’d spoken of him in the present tense, and bit her lip. Tears welled up in her eyes almost instantly. I wanted to keep her focused on the story, so I asked her what happened next.

“That was when Dennis heard someone coughing.”

I turned and looked at her. “So someone
was
home?”

“Yeah.”

“Phyllis Pearce?”

“No,” Claire said. “It was a guy. An old man. I mean, Dennis didn’t know he was an old man at first. All Dennis heard was the coughing. It was coming from the basement, just down this hall from the laundry room.”

She took another sip of her water.

“So Dennis goes to this door, but it’s got a lock on it. Like, with a key? Kind of like what you have on your locker at school, but not a combination. There’s someone behind the door, locked in. He’s coughing and shouting, ‘Fire,’ but he can’t shout very loud because it’s all smoky and the man is really old and sick.”

“What’d Dennis do?”

“He figures he should get the guy out right away, get him some fresh air, and he looks around for a key, and it’s right there, sitting on a windowsill, so it’s really easy to find, and he takes off the lock and opens the door and he’s, like, totally freaked out by what he finds.”

Claire stops her story. She seems almost afraid to continue it.

“What did Dennis find, Claire?”

She swallowed. “First of all, Dennis said, forget the smoke. It was the other smells that just took his breath away. Like, shit and piss and stuff like that. So there’s this guy in there, he’s, like, seventy or eighty years old or something, and there’s a wheelchair in the room, and this guy’s sitting up in bed, he can’t walk or anything and he wants Dennis to get him out of there if the place is on fire. And Dennis calms him down, says the fire is out, but he’s, like, what the fuck, right? Who is this guy and what’s he doing down there?”

I got out my phone and handed it to Claire. “Open up Safari,” I said. “Google ‘Harry Pearce, Griffon, Niagara Falls’ and see what you get. While we’re waiting, keep talking.”

She tapped the app, typed the words into the search field. “It’s taking a while.”

“That’s okay.”

“So anyway, when the old man realizes he’s not going to burn up, he tells Dennis he has to get him out of there. That he has to do it fast before his wife gets back because she’ll get really mad. But then Dennis hears this noise from upstairs. Someone racing into the house. See, what Dennis figured was, the house had, like, an alarm system, but instead of going to a security company, it just sent a message to a couple of people.”

“Phyllis Pearce, and Ricky Haines,” I said.

“Yeah. The old man knows someone’s coming, so he throws this thing to Dennis. That notebook I was going to show you.”

I tapped my chest. “I got it.”

“Okay. So Dennis picks up the book and stuffs it in his pocket just before Ricky shows up, yelling ‘Dad, Dad, Dad!’ And he comes into the room, and he finds Dennis standing there. Ricky’s all, like, who the hell are you, and Dennis says there was a fire, and by the way, what the fuck is this? You got an old guy prisoner in your basement?”

She looked down at her phone. “Okay, some stuff’s coming in. There’s a story here about Niagara Falls tragedies.”

“See what it says about Harry Pearce.”

Claire moved the story up the screen with her thumb. “Okay, so it says here he went out in a boat one night, didn’t have oars with him and the motor didn’t work, and he went over.”

“What else?”

“Okay, it was, like, seven years ago and—”

“What’s it say about a body?”

“A body?”

“Did they find him?”

“Hang on.” She continued reading. “Okay, they found the boat, but his body was never found.” Claire looked up from the screen. “So, that’s him? In the basement?”

“Evidently,” I said.

“That’s messed up,” she said.

“So Ricky finds Dennis with Harry Pearce. Then what?”

“Ricky says something like, ‘You’re a dead man,’ to Dennis, and starts to go for him, except Dennis is still holding the little fire extinguisher, right? And he aims it up and shoots shit right into Ricky’s face. It buys Dennis enough time to get past him and get the hell out of there.”

“Why doesn’t Dennis go straight to the cops?” I asked.

Claire looked at me like I was an idiot. “How many reasons do you want? First, Dennis tells me, when you’re black, you don’t
ever
go to the cops. Not for anything, not ever. Second, Ricky
is
the cops. Then Ricky shouts out to Dennis as he’s leaving, ‘You go to the police and you’re dead. Totally dead.’ That if he goes to the cops, Ricky’ll know.”

I wasn’t convinced. If Dennis didn’t feel it was safe to go to the Griffon cops, he could have gone to the state police.

“And there was one more thing,” Claire said. “Ricky says to Dennis, he says, ‘You tell anyone, and I’ll find your girlfriend, that fucking mayor’s kid’—that’s what Dennis says he said—‘and slice her goddamn tits off.’”