The Accident (38 page)

Once I’d made a note of all seventeen, I started calling people back. I was there until nearly five, dealing with subcontractors, suppliers, past customers. It didn’t make me forget my litany of problems, but it at least distracted me from them for a period of time and let me focus on something I was good at.

When I’d dealt with as many calls as I could, I sat back in the chair and let out a long, exhausted sigh.

I looked at the picture of Sheila on my desk and said, “What the hell am I doing?”

My mind went back to the day I was supposed to clean out my father’s garage after he’d passed away. I suddenly found a number of projects that had to be done around my own house. I’d nailed down some loose shingles, fixed a broken screen, replaced a porch step that was starting to rot.

Sheila’d stood there, watching me cut the board to size. When the saw stopped its buzzing, she said, “If you run out of projects here to keep you from dealing with your dad’s stuff, you could try the neighbors. The Jacksons’ chimney’s kind of crumbling.”

She always knew when I was avoiding something. And that’s what I was doing now. I was doing more than avoiding an unpleasant task.

I was avoiding the truth.

The time I’d spent here, catching up on work, writing down phone
messages—there was a much bigger problem I wasn’t addressing. I was sweeping leaves off the driveway when the funnel cloud was only a block away.

I’d had no trouble harping at anyone who’d listen that Sheila wasn’t the type to drink and drive. But once I’d gotten the notion that Sheila’d been forced to do what she did, all these horrific images starting coming into my head. Images as bad as those in my nightmare. Flashing before my eyes during every waking moment.

I believed someone had done something horrible to Sheila.

Someone was behind her death. Set it up somehow.

“Someone murdered her,” I said.

Out loud.

“Someone killed Sheila.”

I had nothing concrete. I had no evidence. What I had was a gut feeling born out of the swirling vortex that involved Ann Slocum, her husband, this thug Sommer, Belinda and that sixty-two thousand dollars she wanted Sheila to deliver for her.

It all added up to something.

I believed it added up to murder. Someone put my wife into that car, drunk, and let her die.

And killed two other people at the same time.

I was as sure of it as I’d ever been of anything.

I picked up the phone, called the Milford police, and asked for Detective Rona Wedmore.

“Your wife’s accident didn’t happen in my jurisdiction,” Wedmore reminded me over coffee. She’d agreed to meet me at the McDonald’s out on Bridgeport Avenue an hour after I put the call in to her. She thought I’d called wanting to know whether the police had learned who’d shot at my house. I’d said if she knew, I’d like to know, but if she didn’t, I wanted to talk about something else.

“You don’t strike me as the kind of person who’d use that as an excuse not to look into something,” I said.

“It’s not an excuse,” she said. “It’s a reality. I start sniffing around in another department’s case, they don’t take kindly to that.”

“What if it’s related to a case that’s local?”

“Like?”

“Ann Slocum.”

“Go on.”

“I don’t think my wife’s death was an accident. Which has got me wondering if maybe Ann’s death isn’t exactly what it seems. They were friends, our daughters played together, they were both involved in the same sideline, although to varying degrees. There are just a hell of a lot of coincidences here. And you know Darren’s been on edge about that call Kelly heard. I’m no cop, okay, but it’s kind of like houses. You walk into a place, it might look okay to most people, but I go in, I see things other people don’t see. Maybe the plaster’s wavy in one place, like it’s been patched over in a hurry to cover up where water’s getting in, or you feel the way the boards move beneath your work boots, and you know there’s no subflooring. You just know something’s not right. That’s how I feel about my wife’s accident. And Ann’s, too.”

“Do you have any evidence, Mr. Garber, that Ann Slocum’s death was not an accident?” she asked.

“Like what?”

“Something you’ve seen, or heard? Anything definitive that supports what you have to say?”

“Definitive?” I repeated. “I’m telling you what I
believe
. I’m telling you what I believe to be the
truth.
”

“I need more than that,” Wedmore insisted.

“You don’t ever go on hunches?” I asked her.

“When they’re
mine
,” she said, and half smiled.

“Come on, are you telling me you don’t believe it, too? Ann Slocum goes out in the middle of the night after that crazy phone call and ends up falling into the harbor? And her husband accepts the whole thing without question?”

“He’s a Milford police officer,” Wedmore said. Was she really standing up for him, or playing devil’s advocate?

“Please,”
I said. “I’ve heard about the allegations against him. And you must know he and his wife, they were running this knockoff purse business on the side. You don’t buy that stuff wholesale from Walmart, and you don’t get your start-up money from Citibank. You have to deal with some very shady people. The Slocums had other people involved in selling knockoff stuff, and not just purses. Prescription drugs, for one thing. And stuff for construction.”

It occurred to me then, for the first time, that the Slocums could easily have been the suppliers of the breaker panel parts that burned down that house of mine. I vaguely recalled Sally saying Theo had done some work for the Slocums once. And if the parts had actually come through Doug, there was a connection there, too. Betsy had met Ann at the purse party she’d thrown at our house. And it was likely they’d known each other before that.

“The day Sheila died,” I said, “she was doing a favor for Belinda. She was delivering cash for her to a man named Sommer. The money was to pay for all these goods. But it never got delivered. Sheila had her accident. And this Sommer guy, he’s a menacing son of a bitch. He came to see me the other day, and Arthur Twain says he’s a suspect in a triple homicide in New York.”

“What?” Wedmore had taken her notepad out and was scribbling away, but had looked up when I got to Twain and the triple homicide. “Who the hell is Arthur Twain and what triple homicide?”

I told her about my visit from the detective and what he’d told me.

“And then Sommer came to see you? Did he threaten you?”

“He thought I might have the money. That maybe it didn’t burn up in the accident.”

“Did it burn up in the accident?”

“No. I found it. In the house. Sheila’d never taken it with her.”

“Christ,” she breathed. “How much money are we talking here?” I told her. Her eyes widened. “And you
gave
it to him?”

“Belinda had already called me, hinting around, asking if there was a package with some cash in it, because I think Sommer had been leaning on her pretty hard to make good on the payment. So when I found the money, I gave it to Belinda to pay the guy off. I didn’t want any part of that money.”

Wedmore put down her pen. “Maybe that’s what the call was about.”

“The one Kelly heard?”

“No, the one Darren admitted to. Just before Ms. Slocum went out, Belinda Morton called her. But she never said that was what it was about.”

“You’ve talked to her?”

Wedmore nodded. “I was out to her house.”

I debated with myself whether to tell her the messy truth about George Morton’s relationship with Ann Slocum, and how she’d been
blackmailing him. At the moment, withholding that information was my leverage with Morton to get Belinda to back off her story about Sheila. I weighed being totally open with Wedmore against the financial future of my daughter and myself, and decided, at least for now, to look out for my own. But if and when I found out Morton’s handcuff games had anything to do with Sheila’s situation—I didn’t see how they could, unless Sheila really did know about them and that knowledge had gotten her into trouble—then I’d tell Wedmore everything I knew.

“Were you about to say something?” she prodded.

“No. That’s it for the moment.”

Wedmore made a couple more notes, then looked up.

“Mr. Garber,” she said, adopting the same tone my doctor used when telling me not to worry while I awaited test results, “I think the best thing for you to do is go home. Let me look into this. I’ll make some calls.”

“Find this Sommer guy,” I said. “Bring in Darren Slocum and ask him some tough questions.”

“I’m asking you to be patient and let me do my job,” she said.

“What are you going to do now? When you leave here?”

“I’m going to go home and make some dinner for myself and my husband,” Wedmore said. She glanced over at the McDonald’s counter. “Or maybe just take something with me. And then, tomorrow, I’m going to give your concerns all the attention they deserve.”

“You think I’m nuts,” I said.

“No,” she said, looking me right in the eye. “I do not.” Even though I believed she was taking me seriously, her comment that she’d wait until tomorrow to look into this wasn’t good enough. So I’d have to start doing something tonight.

She said she’d be in touch, got up, and joined the line to place an order. I watched her a moment, and then did something of a double take.

There were two teenage boys ahead of her, jostling each other playfully, both looking down at an iPhone or some other kind of device one of them was holding. One of the boys I recognized. He’d been with Bonnie Wilkinson when I bumped into her at the grocery store. He’d stood there when she told me that I was going to get what was coming to me. And not long after that came news of the lawsuit.

Corey Wilkinson. The boy whose brother and father were dead because Sheila’s car was blocking that off-ramp.

I didn’t want to be sitting here when they walked past with their food. I couldn’t even look at him.

I was sitting in my truck, about to turn the key, when the two of them came out of the McDonald’s, each holding a brown paper bag and a drink. They walked briskly across the lot, then got into a small silver car. Corey got in on the passenger side while the other kid slid in behind the wheel.

The car was a Volkswagen Golf, a model from the late nineties. Stuck onto the top of the stubby antenna, which angled up from the back of the roof, was a decorative yellow ball, slightly smaller than a tennis ball. As the car drove past, I could see a Happy Face painted on it.

FORTY-FIVE

Arthur Twain was propped up on the bed in his room at the Just Inn Time, his laptop resting on the tops of his thighs, his cell phone next to him on the bedspread. He had definitely stayed in better places than this, but everything else in town was booked.

He wasn’t making much progress. Belinda Morton didn’t want to talk to him. Darren Slocum didn’t want to talk to him. The only one who’d talked to him at all was Glen Garber. But he had other names, other women who’d attended purse parties Ann Slocum had given. Sally Diehl. Pamela Forster. Laura Cantrell. Susanne Janigan. Betsy Pinder. He’d give Milford another day or two, see if he could talk to some of them, get a better idea how many different places the purses that were being sold out here were coming from.

One thing Twain was certain of: Slocum and his dead wife were like the hub of a wheel out here. They’d brought all sorts of merchandise into this part of Connecticut. Ann sold the purses, they had a couple of people taking pharmaceuticals off their hands and reselling them, and they even dabbled in some home construction supplies, at least the goods that were easy to move, like electrical components. No toxic drywall.

It wasn’t that Twain didn’t care about all that other stuff, but it was the fashion companies that were paying his tab. If following a drug trail led him to the bogus purses, terrific, but otherwise he wasn’t being paid to worry about all those other things. One time, tracking down some fake Fendis, he’d stumbled upon a DVD counterfeiting lab in the basement of
a house in Boston. They were stamping out about five thousand copies of movies, some that were still in theaters, every single day. Twain made a call to the authorities who cared about that sort of thing, and the place was raided within the week.

He was composing an email back to the office about how his investigation was unfolding when there was a rapping at the door.

“Second!” he shouted. He set aside the laptop and swung his stocking feet onto the floor. He was over to the door in six steps and peered through the security peephole. There was nothing but black. Twain had never looked through the peephole before. Maybe it was broken, or someone had stuck gum to it on the outside. It was the kind of place where someone might do that, and where the cleaning staff would never notice.

Or maybe someone was holding a finger over it.

“Who is it?” he asked.

“Glen Garber.”

“Mr. Garber?”

He hadn’t remembered telling Garber the name of his hotel. He hadn’t even booked in here yet when he went to visit him. He’d given Garber a card, he was sure of that. So why didn’t the man phone him, instead of tracking him down here?

Unless there was something he wanted to tell Twain that he didn’t feel safe discussing over the phone.

If it was Garber.

“Can you stand a bit back from the door?” Twain asked, putting his eye to the peephole again. “I can’t quite see you.”

“Oh, sure,” the man on the other side said. “How’s that?”

The peephole was still black. Which meant it wasn’t working, or the man was still holding his finger over it.

“Can you give me a minute?” Twain asked. “I just got out of the shower.”

“Yeah, no prob,” the voice said.

Twain’s briefcase was on the desk. He opened it, reached into the pouch on the underside of the lid, took out a short-barreled handgun, felt its reassuring heft in his right hand. He looked at his shoes, on the floor next to the bed, and considered slipping them on, but decided not to take the time. He returned to the door, checked the peephole again.