Five Minutes Alone (4 page)

CHAPTER FIVE

Our trip out to the railway line is reversed. Everything we saw on our way out we see on our way back, only from the other side of the road and heading the other way. There are some differences. The flow of traffic has increased a little, but not a lot. The sun has climbed a little, but not a lot. The temperature has raised another degree. There are more guys out in the fields raising sheep and cattle and turning seeds into vegetables. I couldn’t do it. I figure I could work on a farm for five days at the most before catching the same train Smith caught.

Neither of us talk. We’re both thinking our own things. Kent is motionless, staring straight ahead, her hands barely doing any work as we cruise at seventy miles an hour in a straight line.

Are we on the same page here?

Hutton’s words keep coming back to me. Yes, I’m a cop again, yes I’m back on the force, yes I’m one of the team. But for the last three years, after killing the man who took my daughter away from me, I’ve been off the team. In that time I’ve developed some habits as a private investigator that don’t mesh well with being on the same page. That’s what Hutton is questioning. He’s asking if my loyalty is to the job, or to doing the right thing. Or at least what I think the right thing is.

The service station Dwight Smith worked at is on the corner of a busy intersection with two separate entrances and two separate exits, one of each on a separate road, the intersection on this side of town, right where the farms end and the houses begin. There are a dozen pumps and half a dozen staff and a building in the middle of the forecourt that’s like a small air-traffic tower overlooking it all, the building and signage painted the same yellows and blues
Dwight Smith was wearing, only the yellows and blues here aren’t splashed with red and streaked with black. We park next to the building and lock the car because recently two police cars have been stolen, which caused a memo to go around at work reminding us to use some of that common sense we were all raised with.

The forecourt feels a few degrees hotter than the rest of the city. There are bags of charcoal for barbecues stacked up against one of the walls of the traffic tower, twenty-four packs of soft drink stacked next to them, and next to those are blackboards with special prices written on them, offering drink and chocolate bars for what I imagine is twice the price of a supermarket. We go inside. The guy behind the counter is between customers and is wiping up a coffee cup that’s been knocked over. His hands are full of paper towels. We ask him for the manager. He picks up the phone and a minute later the manager comes out and we all shake hands. His name badge tells the world his name is Andrew Andrews, which suggests his parents were lazy. Andrew Andrews is clean-shaven but has missed a patch beneath his chin, and has busy eyebrows that would look more appropriate on a Muppet.

“Let me guess,” he says. “You’re here about Dwight Smith. That’s why he’s not at work, right? He’s in custody for something, right?”

“You don’t seem surprised,” I tell him.

“Hey,” he says, sounding cheerful, “every year we take on a couple of parolees, and every year they stop showing up for work, and every year somebody like you will come here and tell me why. But somebody has to hire these guys, right?” he says, still sounding cheerful, like hiring these guys can save the world. “What else you gonna do, just throw them into the streets and hope for the best?”

“Does Smith have a locker here?” I ask.

“Yeah. It’s this way.”

He leads us through a door and into a corridor with more of the company colors. On the walls are large photographs of the service station from over the years, starting with black-and-white images from fifty years ago, old cars and men in old-fashioned overalls, everybody smoking around the service bay, a guy sitting on a wooden
crate drinking soda while squinting at the sun, a small boy playing beneath a jacked-up car. People weren’t as much into health and safety back then, but the weather sure as hell was better. The air-traffic control building in the center of the forecourt only appears in the more recent pictures. I remember coming here with my dad, occasionally sipping a cola while somebody would wash the windshield and pump the gas, which was what, a quarter of the price back then?

“Dwight Smith worked here for two weeks,” I tell him. “You must have gotten some impression of the man. What can you tell us about him?”

Andrew Andrews, the man who hires these men out of the goodness of his heart—and no doubt some tax breaks that come along with it—shrugs. “I don’t know. He came in to work on time. He pumped gas. He kept himself to himself. Didn’t make any waves. Didn’t steal anything that I know of. What is it you’re trying to get at? If you just tell me I might be able to help you a little more.”

“He make any friends?” Kent asks.

Another shrug. “I don’t think so. He seemed to fit in okay. He chatted to people if they chatted to him, but he hasn’t been here long enough to build any friendships. Like I said, he kept himself to himself. So you going to tell me what he did?”

“He’s dead,” Kent says.

Andrew slowly nods. “So guess there’s no need to fire him,” he says, and he’s still using the cheery voice, and I can’t tell if he’s being serious or if it’s a bad joke.

We reach the lockers. There are a dozen of them, all with a range of padlocks, including Dwight Smith’s, who has locker number ten. Smith’s padlock is smaller than most of the others, as if he has less to hide.

“You were going to fire him for not showing up?” I ask.

“Listen,” he says, turning his back to the lockers so he can face us. “We try to help these guys out, okay? But if they’re not going to show up, what would you have me do? There are a hundred other guys coming out of jail who’d love to have his job.”

“Do you know what he did?” Kent asks.

“What? You mean that got him arrested?”

She nods.

He shakes his head. “No. I mean, they send us people who don’t have thieving on their rap sheet, but other than that we can’t know. They don’t tell us, and if they did, then we couldn’t work with them. You know what I’m saying? If we all learned our new workmate was into hurting kids . . . Well, people don’t get second chances in life if they’re sharing their baggage with you.”

“You think being in jail for rape or murder is baggage?” Kent asks.

Andrews shakes his head. “You know what I mean,” he says, “and that’s not it. It’s just the way it has to be. What’s the alternative? Let these guys live on the street? Then what? At least if they’re working, they’re not out there doing other stuff. So what happened? Somebody kill him? Or he kill himself?”

“Why? Do you think he’d kill himself?” Kent asks.

“I’m not thinking anything,” Andrews says. “Just being curious. So you going to tell me?”

“We’re not at liberty to say,” I tell him. “You got a key for this?” I ask, pointing at the padlock.

“Yeah. All employees have to leave spares with us. Wait here a minute.”

He leaves us alone. The lockers are part of a room that is attached to a couple of showers and bathrooms, none of which are currently in use. There’s a bench running the length of the room in front of the lockers. It reminds me of the gym back when I was at school. There’s a couple of car magazines sitting on the bench and somebody has left out a bag of sandwiches. Andrews makes it back. He hands us a key with a tag on it that says
Dwight Smith, #10.

“Did he say or do anything out of character yesterday?” I ask. “Or did anybody come to see him?”

“Yesterday was my day off,” Andrews says, “but I can find out for you.”

“Okay, you do that,” I say.

Andrews seems like he wants to stay to see what we find in the locker, but manages to last only a few seconds of me and Kent staring at him until he wanders off. We open the locker. There’s a jacket hanging in there, it’s brown and made from leather and looks beaten up and old—could be he bought it secondhand, could be it belongs to his brother, could be it’s his from before he went to jail. Was last night warm? Not real warm. I wouldn’t have gone out without a jacket. There’s a cell phone that looks out of date. It’s still on, the battery sitting at fifteen percent. There’s no passcode required to switch it on. I check his call logs, his text messages, his address book. There’s work, his brother, his parents, the Preacher from the halfway house.

Smith’s wallet is here. There’s a driver’s license and two twenty-dollar notes and a photograph of a naked woman that, when I pull it out, shows it was torn from a magazine. There are no bank cards. There are no receipts. There’s nothing else in the locker. I go through the jacket pockets. Empty.

“It’s like he just decided to up and leave,” Kent says. “Except for his keys.”

“His keys he kept on him,” I tell her. “This spare locker key looks identical to the one hanging out of the ignition of his car. He needed them to gain access to this stuff.”

“Then why didn’t he use it last night to gain access?” Kent asks. “Where would he go without needing his jacket, his wallet, or his phone?”

“You don’t need any of that stuff if you’re catching the front end of a train,” I tell her, which is one of two logical explanations. The other one being he saw something that made him leave in a hurry. We put everything into evidence bags. We close up the locker and put the lock back into place.

My cell phone rings. It’s Hutton. “How are you getting on there?” he asks.

I tell him about the cell phone, the jacket, and the wallet.

“So either something spooked him,” Hutton says, “or the urge to kill himself came on so strongly he had to leave.”

“There’s a third possibility,” I tell him because, after all, we’re all on the same page here. “He might have seen somebody who fit whatever fantasy he was conjuring up next.”

“The service station will have surveillance. See if they’ll let you take a look at it, and if not we can get a warrant if things lead in that direction. The medical examiner just got here a few minutes ago. We’re getting the body bagged up and she’s hoping she’ll have something for us by the end of the day. The car is getting towed by forensics right now as well, and we’ll know more on that within an hour or two.”

We hang up. Andrew Andrews is waiting for us just outside the locker room.

“Get what you need?” he asks.

“Almost,” I tell him.

“Can I give the locker to somebody else?”

“Not yet,” Kent tells him. “Not until we close the investigation.”

“So what else do you want from me?”

“Surveillance footage from last night,” I tell him. “And we still want to talk to somebody who worked yesterday with Smith.”

“Not a problem on the second part,” he says. “You can use my office.”

“And the first part?”

He thinks about that for a few seconds. I can see the decision process taking place. Technically we need a warrant, and I can see him thinking that, and I hope he’s also thinking that the world is full of technicalities that, if taken away, would make it an easier place to live. So he nods and tells us the video surveillance won’t be a problem either.

He leads us through to his office. It smells of chicken and bacon and makes my stomach rumble. There are photographs of cars on the walls, some more nostalgia photos like those in the corridor. There’s a seat behind his desk and two in front, and we rearrange them before he can come back with who turns out to be a guy by the name of Kevin McKay.

McKay is in his midthirties and, like always, I’m somewhat jealous of anybody younger than me. He looks tired and annoyed to be here and I know the feeling. He sits down in the empty chair. We introduce ourselves. We don’t shake hands. I take out a notebook and a pen.

“How long have you worked here?” I ask him.

“Three years.”

“How often did you work with Smith?” I ask.

“Which Smith? There’s always a Smith.”

“Dwight Smith,” I tell him.

“A bit,” he says. “You know, not all of the time, but some of the time. He’s only been here two weeks, but our days overlapped. Four days a week, for four hours a day. He started at four and finished at midnight. I start at eight at night and finish at four in the morning.”

“It’s one thirty now,” I tell him.

He glances at his watch. “It’s also Saturday. Things are different on the weekend. Dwight was supposed to start at seven this morning, but didn’t show, you know? But coming off a Friday night and getting here early Saturday is the toughest shift. That’s why I’m here, to cover it since Smith didn’t show. It’s Andrew’s fault—but don’t tell him I said that. He just keeps hiring people nobody can rely on. So this morning I got called in to cover Dwight’s shift. Which makes me tired and grumpy, so I’m sorry if it seems like I’m being unhelpful here, but if there’s a point you’re trying to get to, now would be a good time to make it.”

“Did he leave early last night?” I ask.

“That’s what you want to know?” he asks.

“That’s what I want to know.”

He shrugs. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Can you think about it a little bit more?” I ask him. “It’s important.”

He gives it some thought and comes back with a fresh answer. “Yeah, he did leave early. It was annoying. Didn’t even tell anybody. Just up and left.”

“When?” I ask.

Another shrug. “I don’t know exactly.”

“How about not exactly?” Kent asks. “How about taking a guess?”

“I mean, he was there, then suddenly he wasn’t there. I didn’t notice until maybe around eleven, but I’m not sure when he actually left. Could have been nine or ten. I don’t know.”

I jot it down in the notebook. “Did you see him talking to anybody?”

“Yeah. A thousand people. It was a busy day.”

“Anybody other than a customer?” I asked.

He shakes his head. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

“He seem any different yesterday?” Kent asks.

Another sigh, and this time he glances at his watch. “Different? How?”

“Different,” I say. “Was he happier than normal? Was he angry? Was he bitching about something? Was he depressed?”

“Dwight never bitched about anything. He just did his job. Normal for him was to keep his mouth shut and pump gas and never get in the way, and in that respect I guess yesterday didn’t seem any different, except for him disappearing early.”