Bad Move (14 page)

8. Buy new tube of caulking.

I put down the pencil and poured boiling hot water into the coffeemaker. If Trixie was true to her word, she'd be over in about twenty minutes. Since that didn't give me enough time to tackle any of the items on my list, I went into my study and started working on my model of the Seaview submarine from Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. I was having trouble getting the rear fins to stay on properly, and was applying some liquid cement to the underside of the left one when the doorbell rang.

"Hang on!" I shouted. This was probably Trixie, but I was still in the habit of locking the door behind me every time I came in, so I couldn't invite her to walk in on her own. I tried to set the fin in place, but I was going to need to hold it for several seconds, so I abandoned the project and ran to the door.

I was surprised to see that my visitor was not Trixie, but a rugged-looking man in his late twenties, early thirties, wearing a jean jacket and pants flecked with paint and drywall compound and other building materials. In one hand he held an oversized toolbox, and the other was shoved into the front pocket of his pants, only the thumb sticking out. His face was long, lean, and unshaven, at least for a day or so, and his short brown hair was slightly spiked with gel. He was chewing on a toothpick.

"Yes?" I said.

"This is 1481 Greenway?" he said.

"Yes," I said hesitantly.

"I'm here about the shower. Mr. Greenway sent me over. I'm Rick."

Thank you, Detective Flint, for not ratting me out!

"Oh!" I said. "Yes! Come in!"

His boots, I noticed, were dappled with dried mud. He made no effort to remove them as he stepped inside and advanced across the broadloom.

"Up there?" he said, standing at the foot of the stairs, looking up, his back to me.

"Yes," I said. I followed him up and into the bathroom. It was a bit warm up there, and he slipped off his jean jacket and tossed it casually on the vanity, knocking down a little display of small round soaps carved to look like roses, which Sarah likes to put out for guests but which no one has ever dared use to wash their hands. I put them back in their dish and slid them into the corner, next to a single brass antique candlestick holding a single white candle. Rick set down his toolbox and opened it, revealing an assortment of tools and rolls of tape and tubes of caulking. He opened the glass door to the shower, looked down, sat on the bottom of the shower door opening, and ran his hand along the seams where the floor met the wall.

"You see where the grouting is cracked and coming apart?" I said, trying to be helpful. Rick said nothing.

"The water got in there," I said, "and must have been dripping down to one place in the kitchen, and that's where the drywall fell away."

Rick picked away at some of the loose grouting and threw it out onto the bathroom floor, some of it landing on my shoe. He reached not into his toolbox but his back pocket and pulled out what appeared to be a Swiss Army knife, but when he pressed a button I couldn't see and the blade swung out in a fraction of a second, I gathered this was an implement without a corkscrew, bottle opener, nail file, or screwdriver.

He picked away at more of the loose grout with the knife. I felt a responsibility to make conversation.

"So you work for Valley Forest?" I said.

Rick slowly turned so he could look at me over his shoulder. "You figured that out, huh?"

I went downstairs. I saw Trixie approaching the front door and opened it before she had a chance to knock.

"Hey," she said.

"I've got one of Valley Forest's finest upstairs looking at the shower. I'm hoping he won't run off with Sarah's flowered soap collection."

We went into the kitchen and I got out two cups.

"Sorry I dropped by unexpectedly," I said. "I would have called, but I didn't have your number, and I'm embarrassed to admit this, but I don't even know your last name."

Trixie smiled. "Snelling."

I tried to recall all the names I'd scanned under accountants in the phone book. I couldn't recall seeing Snelling. So I mentioned it.

"I'm not in the book yet," Trixie said. "Should be in the next one."

I put Trixie's coffee in front of her, then some more of those Peek Freans. "I guess your next appointment showed up just as I was leaving."

"Yeah, he was a bit early."

"I was trying to think whether I knew him from anywhere," I said. "Or whether he knew me."

"Oh yeah?"

"Because he looked at me and winked."

Trixie blew on her coffee, grabbed a cookie. "Really."

"It just struck me as odd."

Trixie seemed not to care. She chewed on her cookie. "So what were you coming over for? Unless it was to invite me over for coffee, which is a good enough reason."

"First of all, I was going to ask you, officially, if you'd do my tax stuff. Figure out my deductions, file my return, you know."

"Sure. No problem."

"But not for free. I don't want to take advantage. Just charge me whatever your going rate is." I paused. "What is the going rate?"

And there was that twinkle in Trixie's eye again. "Don't worry about that," she said. "I can probably do it in no time, I've got the program on my computer."

"If you're not going to charge me, I'll find someone else."

She took a sip of her coffee. "Fine. I'll bill you. Will that make you happy?"

I sat down across from her and grabbed a cookie. "The neighborhood's been kind of funny lately, don't you think?" I said.

Trixie cocked her head slightly. "What do you mean?"

"Odd things going on. Like what happened down at the creek. That guy, who wanted to preserve Willow Creek, who got killed?"

"I heard about that. A real shame."

I told her my role.

"God," she said. "I never found a dead person."

"I saw him a few days earlier, at the sales office. He got in this big argument with Greenway, you know, the hot shit who's in charge of the development."

Trixie nodded knowingly, like maybe she knew this Greenway character. I didn't ask.

"I had been over there, asking about getting someone to fix that hole." I pointed up by the pot lights. "And fix the shower, where the water was leaking from, and this Spender comes in and they start yelling at each other." I gave Trixie a few more details, how Spender said he couldn't be bought, about Greenway ordering him out.

"And then there's Earl," I said. I waited to see whether Trixie would pick up on my opening.

"What about Earl?" she asked.

"Have you noticed anything, I don't know, out of the ordinary at Earl's place?"

Trixie studied me, bit softly into her lower lip. She seemed to be sizing me up, deciding what I might or might not know, and what she might be willing to let on that she knew. Finally, she said, "You mean the fact that Earl has a huge pot business in his basement? Is that what you're referring to?"

"Yeah," I said. "That would be it."

"Look," Trixie said. "You know me. I don't judge. Live and let live. Take what I do." She paused. "People tell me their secrets, their financial secrets, and it takes a lot for people to open up enough, to trust you enough, to tell you what's going on with their lives. So you learn to be accepting. Earl's never caused me any trouble. Take you, for example. When you moved in here, and I found out you were a writer, I thought, I'm okay with that."

I was taken aback. "Why wouldn't you be?"

"Well, writers can be kind of weird, but like I said, I try not to judge."

Trixie finished her coffee. "You said you wanted my phone number."

I handed her my list, said she could write it on there. But first she read what I had written.

"If you get around to sticking that dynamite up Greenway's ass, give me a call before you light the fuse. That would be something to see."

I blushed. "I guess I better throw that out. Write your number at the bottom and I'll tear it off."

When Trixie left, I slipped the sheet of paper with the phone number on it into the front cover of my address book. Then I heard Rick coming down the stairs.

"All fixed?" I said cheerily.

"I dug out the grouting," he said, buttoning up his jacket.

"And regrouted?"

"Nope. I'll have to come back to do that."

"You don't have that stuff with you?"

"Like I said, I'll be back."

"Like, later today?"

"No. Sometime."

"Tomorrow? Because, you know, we can't take a shower there the way it is now."

"You got other bathrooms, right? Use a bathtub."

And he left without saying anything else.

I went up to the bathroom to see what he'd accomplished. Crumbs of grouting were littered across the floor of the shower and the bathroom, mixed in with small chunks of mud that had come off Rick's boots. I shook my head, was about to go look for the vacuum, and something caught my eye.

Actually, it was the absence of something that caught my eye. The brass candlestick that should have been on the vanity was gone.

o o o

The theft left me rattled. At first I thought maybe I'd been mistaken, that I hadn't seen the candlestick only moments before in the bathroom. But I knew it had been there. It wasn't as though someone had broken in and made off with all our appliances. The candlestick was a small thing, something Sarah had picked up at a flea market for under twenty bucks, but that didn't make me feel any less angry. It was the gall, the nerve, that shook me. That Rick the Grout Flinger, that useless son of a bitch, would think he could just pick up something of ours and walk out of the house with it, it seemed unthinkable.

I wanted to get on the phone, get Don Greenway on the line, and tell him he better send Rick right back here, not just to fix our fucking shower, but to return our fucking candlestick. But I knew how that would go. The last part, anyway. Assuming Greenway even bothered to ask Rick about it, Rick would deny it. And then where would I be? Would Detective Flint put aside his murder investigation to find the notorious Walker residence candlestick thief?

So this was life in the middle of the boring burbs. Our developer was sending thieves to deal with our leaky shower, there was a basement marijuana farm across the street, and I'd found a murdered environmentalist in the creek.

Maybe that lovely house on Driftwood Drive with the fountain out front was the new headquarters for the Mob? Were the Hells Angels opening their latest chapter on Lilac Lane? Were Al Qaeda terrorists planning their next attack from that new house on Coventry Garden Circle where sod was being laid yesterday?

When Paul came home from school, and later Angie, I told them I wanted to talk to them, with their mother, that evening. When Sarah arrived, I told her there was something I'd been waiting to discuss with the entire family. I gathered everyone in the kitchen. Sarah took a seat, Paul leaned up against the fridge, Angie stood in the doorway so she could make a fast getaway. I took up a position by the dishwasher.

"Okay," I said. "I've tried to ease up a bit lately on the safety stuff. Not hound people about keys and locking doors and all that kind of thing, but I'm just a bit worried that people are going to become complacent without some friendly reminders."

No one said anything.

"There are bad things going on in this neighborhood. Just because this isn't the city doesn't mean people out here can't be up to no good. I mean, it was good, moving out here, and while there've been the odd rough spots, that you" - I spoke to Angie - "don't care much for your school, and I know there's a bit of a commute for your mom" - Sarah just stared at me - "and if anyone seems to be adjusting out here, it's Paul, but the point I'm trying to make is, we have to be on guard, we have to be watching over our shoulder, we have to keep our eyes peeled for anything unusual."

Still no one said anything, although I noticed the three of them exchanging glances.

"So we're agreed? We remain on alert, we watch ourselves, we don't do anything foolish? No purses left on the front seat of the car, no keys in the front door, no leaving the door unlocked when we go to bed at night. Just general commonsense rules is all I'm asking for here."

Angie cleared her throat. It appeared that she was going to be the first to weigh in with some useful suggestions as to how we could live our lives more safely.

"Is anyone else concerned about the fact that Dad has turned into this paranoid freakout crazy person?"

Chapter
10

This might be a good time to revisit what I would call the Asshole Issue.

Maybe you've already reached a conclusion. Let's say you've voted in the yes column. Zack Walker is an asshole. No doubt about it. Made up your mind during The Backpack Incident, haven't looked back. If that's how you feel now, I don't see you changing your mind anytime soon.

But maybe you've been less quick to judge. Maybe you're on the fence. You understand how a man's concern for his family could lead him to behave a bit irrationally at times. You've been there. Well, we're coming to the part that will reinforce your convictions, one way or the other.