The Accident (28 page)

“So far, so good. How much money?”

“There should be … there should be sixty-two thousand in it.” She sniffed. She was crying.

I had counted it late last night, and she had it right. “Okay. Next question. What was it for?”

“It was to pay for some merchandise. Some purses. A lot of purses.”

“What else?”

“Just …”

“Belinda, I’m going to start a little fire in the trash can here. And every time you don’t answer my question, I’m going to drop a thousand bucks in.”

“Glen, no! Don’t do that!”

“What else other than purses?”

“Okay, okay, purses, and also some vitamins and—”

“I’m just getting out my lighter.”

“Okay! Not vitamins, exactly. More like pharmaceuticals. Prescription drugs. Discount prescription drugs. Not, like, you know, crack or heroin or anything like that. The kind of drugs that help people. At better prices.”

“What else?”

“That’s mostly it. A few other things, but mostly purses and prescriptions.”

“And where does all this stuff come from?” The receiver felt hot in my hand.

“You know, from purse makers and drug companies.”

“I’ve got a better idea. Instead of setting fire to the money, I’ll just hang on to all of it myself.”

“Damn it, Glen, what do you want me to tell you?”

“Everything!” I shouted. “I want to know where you get this stuff, what you’re doing with it, how Sheila was involved, and why the fuck there’s more than sixty fucking grand in an envelope in my house! I want to know why Sheila had this money, why you gave it to her, what she was supposed to do with it. I want to know what the hell happened that last day! I want to know what Sheila did, where she went, who she saw, right up to the moment she drove her car up that ramp. That’s what I want you to tell me, Belinda. That’s what I want to know.”

Once I was done with my tirade, I could hear her weeping. “I don’t have all those answers, Glen.”

“Tell me the ones you’ve got. I’ve got money to burn here.”

She sniffed. “The Slocums were the ones who first got into it. Darren, he pulled over some guy driving a van up to Boston one night, for speeding or something. And when he checks out the truck, he finds it full of purses. Knockoffs, you know?”

“I know.”

“So instead of giving the guy a ticket, Darren gets asking him about his business, what it’s all about. He’s thinking this would be a good way for Ann to make some money, because she was losing her job about this time, and the police, they were cutting back on overtime. So the guy, he puts Darren onto his suppliers, people out of New York.”

“Okay.” I put my free hand to my forehead. I could feel a massive headache coming on.

“Ann said there was a lot of money to be made, and not just in purses. She said there was watches and jewelry and DVDs and building supplies—she had a couple of customers for some of that stuff. But she was finding that running the purse parties kept her busy enough. She didn’t want me selling the bags, then we’d be competing with each other, but if I wanted to take on some of the other stuff—and, well, real estate’s kind of been slow lately, so I said okay, I’d try the prescriptions.”

“Drugs,” I said.

“I told you, it’s not like that. It’s not like I’m running a crystal meth
lab. These are legitimate prescription drugs, made overseas. A lot of it comes through Chinatown—you ever been down around Canal Street?”

“How’d Sheila get involved? How’d she end up with all this money? Why was she doing this delivery?”

“She knew how bad things were going for you, Glen. She was taking the course to help you, but then there was the fire, and hardly any jobs on the horizon, and she wanted to do her part. She’d only just gotten into the prescription thing, she’d only made a couple of sales, enough to buy Kelly some new clothes.”

Oh, Sheila
, I thought.
You didn’t have to do this
.

“The money, Belinda.”

“Ann and Darren, they had a payment to be made. That was the sixty-two thousand. Sometimes, I’d get it to them. They liked their money delivered in person.”

“They?”

“The suppliers. I don’t think Ann or Darren had ever really met them, but there was a contact person. I don’t know his name for sure, but—”

“Sommer? Tall guy, black hair? Nice shoes? Fake Rolex?”

“That could be him. But the thing was, I’d go into the city, and usually I’d just drop the money off in a mail slot or something, although sometimes, when Ann went in, she’d hand deliver it to the guy. But the day before I was to do the delivery, I had two or three calls from people, wanting to see properties the next day that I had listed, so I asked Sheila, since she was getting interested, and it was already the day she was going to be out for her class, whether she could do the delivery for me.”

I squeezed my eyes shut. “And she said yes.” Sheila always said yes when a friend asked for help.

“She did. So I gave her the envelope, with a phone number to call if there was a problem.”

“Sommer,” I said. “Sheila called the number once. To say something had come up. The money never left the house. Why didn’t she do the delivery?”

“I don’t know, I swear. Glen, they’re telling me, if I don’t come up with the money soon, they’re going to do something! We’ve managed to pay some of it back. I’ve maxed out my line of credit and gave seventeen thousand to Darren and Ann, and they put in another eight, for a total of
twenty-five. But that still leaves thirty-seven thousand, and if we don’t pay soon, there’s going to be crazy interest on it. Ann told me, before she died of course, that she’d gotten a life insurance policy, but that could take months to pay out, and these people, they don’t want to wait.”

“Maybe you should call the police,” I said coldly.

“No! No, listen, if I can get the money to them, it’ll all be over. I don’t want the police involved. George, he doesn’t even know I’ve been doing this. He’d go crazy if he knew I’d gotten involved in all this.”

“So what the hell happened?” I said, as much to myself as Belinda. “She didn’t make the trip into Manhattan, or if she did, she went without the money. And she didn’t make it to her class or—”

“That class,” Belinda said. “She was liking it so much at first, but that instructor—she was getting kind of fed up with him.”

“You talking about Allan Butterfield? Was he calling her a lot?”

“Yeah. I don’t think it was about homework. Sheila would look at her phone, see it was him, and ignore it.”

All those missed calls on Sheila’s cell. The ones she either didn’t hear or chose not to pick up. “Maybe that’s why she didn’t go to the class,” I said. “But where did she go instead?”

“I guess … I guess she went somewhere to drink,” Belinda said, gently. “I mean, that is kind of what happened. Maybe everything that was going on, she was so stressed out, she just needed to take the edge off, you know? God, I feel like I’m there.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Glen, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry about everything that’s happened. I’m sorry I involved her in any of this. But we don’t know that it has anything to do with what happened later. Maybe … maybe she got scared. She had second thoughts about selling the prescriptions and maybe she went to a bar and—”

“Shut up, Belinda. I’ve heard all I want to hear. You’re a hell of a friend. First you get Sheila involved in this, and then you help the Wilkinsons. You’re the best.”

“Glen,” she whimpered. “I answered your questions. I’ve told you everything I know. I … I have to get that money.”

“I’ll pop it in the mail for you,” I said, and ended the call.

THIRTY-THREE

I drove past Belinda’s house on the way to the thruway. There was no one home, so I stuffed the envelope through the mail slot in the door and heard it drop on the other side. I’d considered, briefly, slapping some stamps on it and letting Belinda take her chances on the U.S. postal system to get her money back. I was pissed off enough with her to do it, but in the end, common sense prevailed.

Maybe, considering my circumstances, and a pending lawsuit that could wipe me out financially, I should have kept the cash and said nothing. Every little bit helps. But it wasn’t mine, and I believed Belinda when she said Sheila had been delivering it for her. The cash was tainted. I didn’t want it, and I didn’t want any more visits from Sommer.

In one way, the cash had served its purpose. It had leveraged information out of Belinda.

I now knew what Sheila had been up to, what her plan had been to make some extra cash. Whatever Sheila was starting to get mixed up in, she’d been in way over her head. She wouldn’t knowingly have gotten involved with someone like Sommer. She’d probably never even met him. She’d had good instincts, and if she’d met this guy, she’d have had nothing further to do with him.

I believed that in my heart.

The more I learned about Sheila’s last day, the more convinced I was becoming that she had not gone somewhere to drown her sorrows, then
gotten in her car and killed two people and herself, despite how things looked.

There had to be more to it than that. And I was wondering who knew what that was. Sommer? Slocum?

I had more than a few things to talk about with Detective Wedmore next time I saw her.

On the way to Darien, Kelly asked, “How long do I have to go away for?”

“Not long, I hope.”

“What about school? Am I going to be in trouble missing school?”

“If you end up being away more than a few days, I’ll get some work from your teacher.”

She frowned. “What’s the point of being away if you have to do work?”

I let that one go. “Look, there’s something very serious I have to discuss with you.” She studied my face carefully. I felt a pang of guilt. There’d been so many serious things to discuss the last few weeks that she must have wondered how many more there could be. “You need to be really, really careful.”

“I’m always careful. Like when I cross the street and stuff?”

“That, sure. But you can’t go off doing stuff on your own. You always stay with Grandma or Marcus. No wandering off. No riding your bike or—”

“My bike’s at home.”

“I’m just saying, you have to stick close to Grandma and Marcus. All the time.”

“Fine. This doesn’t sound like it’s going to be much fun.”

As we were coming off the thruway into Darien, there was a woman standing at the bottom of the ramp. She was probably only in her thirties, but looked twice that. By her feet were a ratty-looking backpack and a red plastic basket, the kind the supermarkets have if you’re only getting half a dozen items. It had a few water bottles in it and what looked like half a loaf of Wonder Bread and a jar of peanut butter.

She was holding a sign that read,
NEED CLOTHES JOB
.

“Jeez,” I said.

“She was there the other day,” Kelly said. “I asked Grandma if we could give her some clothes but she said it’s not our responsibility to solve everybody’s problems.”

That sounded like Fiona. But there was some truth to it. “It’s hard to make things right for everyone.”

“But if everybody helped just one person, lots of people would get helped. Mom used to say that. Grandma has lots of clothes she doesn’t even wear anymore.”

“A couple of walk-in closets’ worth,” I said.

We were stopped at the light and the woman eyed me through the windshield.

“Can I give her something?” Kelly asked.

“Don’t put your window down.” The woman’s eyes seemed dead. She wasn’t expecting me to give her anything. Out of every hundred cars that got stopped at this light, how many offered her anything? Two? One? None? What had brought her to this point? Had her life always been this way? Or had she, at one time, had one like ours? A house, a family, a regular job. A husband, maybe. Kids. And if she had known a life like that, was there one event that started the unraveling? Did she lose her job? Did her husband lose his? Did their car die and they had no money to fix it, and couldn’t get to work? Did they fall behind on their mortgage and lose their house? And once, having lost it, were they so far behind the eight ball that they could never recover? And it had come to this? Standing at the end of the off-ramp, begging for help?

Couldn’t any of us end up this way when one part of our life went horribly wrong, and then the dominoes started to fall?

I fished a five-dollar bill out of my pocket and powered down my window. The woman came around the front of the car, took the bill from my hand without saying a word, and went back to her station.

Kelly said, “You can’t get anything for five bucks.”

“Tell me what’s going on.” Fiona stood in her oversized kitchen, with its skylights and marble countertops and Sub-Zero appliances, as Kelly and Marcus talked in the living room.

I told her about the bullet that had gone through Kelly’s window. “Between that, and this thing with Darren Slocum pestering Kelly, it made sense to get her out of town. Just take her somewhere fun, that’s all I ask.”

“My God, Glen, this is all horrible! And why is Ann’s husband bugging Kelly?”

My cell rang. I really didn’t want to take a call right now, but at the
same time, with all that was going on, I needed to know who was trying to reach me.

“Just a sec,” I said to Fiona, took out the phone and glanced at the caller ID. It was a number without a name but I was pretty sure I recognized it as the Milford fire department. It was probably Alfie getting back to me. I let it go to message.

“It was this conversation Kelly overheard. The one Ann was having. Slocum thinks if he can get Kelly to remember something about it, it’ll help him figure out who she was talking to that night.”

“Do you think she can?”

“I don’t think so. She didn’t hear all that much. The guy’s grasping at straws. He’s desperate.” I paused. “And I kind of get that. It’s pretty much how I’ve been feeling.”

I stopped talking as Marcus and Kelly came into the kitchen.

“We’re going to get some ice cream,” Kelly said happily. “Not to eat there, but to bring home. And we’re going to get chocolate sauce and caramel sauce and marshmallow sauce.”