The Boyfriend (29 page)

“I’m not sure. Maybe one of my clients set me up to cover something dishonest he’s doing. But I’ve got to go someplace safe and find out.”

“Where?” she asked.

“California. They’ll be looking for you too, now. People know you went to Springfield with Gabe. We’ll just have to lay low for a while.”

“I’ll do whatever you think is best,” she said. “Want me to drive for a couple of hours?”

“Okay.” He pulled off the interstate at the next exit, got out, walked to her side, and opened the door for her. When she got out, he wrapped his arms around her. She seemed to burrow into him. He could feel her sobbing. He waited patiently, holding her and patting her back gently.

Finally she said, “I’m sorry, Michael,” freed herself from his arms, and stepped toward the driver’s seat. He stopped her.

“Wait,” he said. “If you’re not ready, let’s stop for a while.”

“No,” she said. “I’m ready to do whatever you want. I’m not going to hold you up and make things harder.”

He got into the back and lay down on the seat. She got in, adjusted the seat and the mirrors to fit her smaller body, and drove down the entrance ramp onto the interstate.

Till was willing to be satisfied, but he wasn’t satisfied just yet. The photographs he had received from Mullaney, the Boston homicide detective on the Salazar case, had not looked quite right. Nobody looked the same dead as alive, and alive was always better. But he had seen this transformation enough times to be familiar with it. The man who had been shot to death outside the bank in Springfield didn’t seem to Till to be the one he had seen in the parking garage in Boston or driving Kyra’s car in Phoenix. He had come to Carbondale to find out.

Till rented a car and drove it to the address that was on Gabriel Tolliver’s driver’s license. It occurred to him that the pictures he’d seen were likely to get shown on television a lot in this part of the country during the next few days. He stopped the car and sat for a few minutes looking at the house. There didn’t seem to be much life. The curtains on the windows were closed, and there wasn’t any motion near the house. At least there weren’t any cop cars around right now.

He got out, walked to the front door, knocked, rang the bell, and knocked again. He listened for the sound of footsteps. He rang the bell again, and then he heard the thud of feet taking big strides. The door opened, and inside was a man only a little older than the one in the photograph, but related to him. “What do you want?”

“My name is Jack Till. I’m a private detective. I’m here because I don’t think that Gabriel Tolliver did anything wrong.”

The man glared at him for a couple of seconds. At first he seemed to be assessing what would happen if he hit Till. He seemed to decide that trying to hit Till would be foolish and painful. That thought held him long enough to make him realize that Till had said he was on his side.

“I’m his brother, Dave. Come on in.” He stepped aside and let Till in. He stood on the porch looking up and down the street for someone else—reporters, probably. Then he stepped in after Till.

“I assume the police have been here already?” said Till.

“They drove over and took me to the station. While I was there they went through the whole house looking for things. They found our father’s old shotgun locked in a cabinet and took it away. That’s about all. The thing hasn’t been fired since hunting season the year he died, like six years ago.”

“Did they take anything that belonged to your brother?”

“Nothing of his was here.”

“He didn’t live here?”

“No. He had a place across town near the university that he lived in with his girlfriend.”

“Did they interview her too?”

“No. She was up in Springfield with Gabe. Now some of the cops seem to think he and she were trying to rob banks together, and others think Gabe kidnapped her and took her to Springfield to use her as a shield or something. All I know is it’s got to do with that guy.”

“What guy?”

“Gabe and Sharon met a guy named Michael in Denny’s three days ago. He said he had business up in Springfield. When they said they were going up for the state fair, he offered to give them a ride up and back.”

“Did you see him?”

“No. Gabe told me about him.”

“What can you tell me about Gabe?”

“He was a great kid. He worked in the mechanic shop where I work during the day, and did the night shift at the big gas station on the edge of town four or five nights a week. He and Sharon were saving up to get married and then put together a down payment on a house.”

“Did he get a day off to go up to Springfield?”

“He got two days. They were going to stay overnight and come back today.”

“When was his last day off?”

“Hell, I don’t even remember. He was sick one day last winter. I guess that was the last one.”

“Have you talked to his girlfriend?”

“She wasn’t with him when they shot him, and she hasn’t come home. The cops are trying to find her.”

“What was Gabe doing in that bank?”

“I don’t know. Maybe that Michael guy put a gun to Sharon’s head and told Gabe he had to rob the bank to keep her alive.”

“Can you tell me anything about Sharon?”

“I think she’s probably been good for Gabe. She’s pretty and has a kind of cheerful way to her. They’ve been together since, like, eighth grade. She’s a little loud and flirty sometimes, but I think she means well.”

“Can you tell me where they were living?”

“Over on Washington. 6363. Top floor is their apartment.”

“Thanks. Have you told the cops all of this?”

“Yeah. Like three times.”

“Then they already know your brother wasn’t the bad guy. They’ll be devoting all their time to finding Sharon now.”

“How do you know?”

“I was a cop once, and that’s what I’d be doing,” said Till. “The guy they were expecting at the bank doesn’t work nine or ten shifts a week, and he was in Boston a week or two ago.” He stood up. “I’m sorry for your loss.” He walked toward the door. “Was it regular cops who interviewed you?”

“No. There were a couple of Carbondale cops, but there was another guy in a suit who said he was FBI and another guy who had a Spanish accent. He never said who he was.”

“Do you happen to have a picture of Sharon?”

“Quite a few of them. She and Gabe always came to family celebrations together. Hold on a minute.” He went to another room and came back with a shoe box. He set it on the dining room table and began to finger through the photographs stored in it. Now and then he would pull one out and toss it onto the table. “This is her.”

There was a picture of his brother and a short blond girl about twenty years old with blue eyes and a bright smile. Next to Gabe’s tanned skin, hers looked like white makeup. The two held up beer bottles in a toast. In another shot, they were sitting at a picnic table with paper plates full of food. There was one of her alone in front of a cake.

“Do you think I could borrow one of these?”

“These three are copies.” He picked them up and handed them to Till.

“Thanks. I’ll try to find the guy who did this to your brother.”

“I hope you do.”

Till walked out and went to his car. He set the three photographs on the seat beside him. This girl was in trouble. He hoped when the cops found her, it wasn’t the usual way with a bullet through the back of her head.

Joey Moreland drove for three hours and then slept while Sharon drove for the next three hours. For two days they went on this way, never stopping for more than a few minutes to use the restrooms in gas stations and at truck stops, or to buy take-our hamburgers or tacos to go. Most of the time Joey was the one to show his face, because the police would be looking for Sharon.

As they got into the car in Albuquerque, Sharon stopped him in the parking lot and held his arm. He looked down at her and she stood on her toes to kiss him. Then she got into the car again.

He took a moment to look around in the lot to see if anyone had noticed. An old truck driver sitting in his rig at the end of the lot smiled at him and gave him a thumbs-up sign. Joey waved and got into the driver’s seat.

“You’ve got to be a little more careful,” he said gently. “That trucker saw.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I figured everybody was so far away it didn’t matter. Some girl gave a guy a peck on the lips in a dark parking lot, and a driver who’s going to be in God Knows, Arkansas, tomorrow saw it. Not sure what the cops will do with that.”

He started the car. “You’re right, of course. But what keeps people safe is safe habits.” He drove along the ramp to the highway entrance.

“Safe habits?”

“I’ve had a couple of people in my law practice who had to travel without being noticed, and that’s what they told me. You have to just automatically behave in all the least risky ways. You act like you’re being watched even if you think you’re not. You only stop as long as you have to. You use cash whenever you can. Pretty soon you do all that without thinking about it. And you don’t do anything that makes people think about you.”

“We’ve been doing that like crazy,” she said. “We’re not in Illinois anymore. This doesn’t even seem like the same planet. It’s like Mars. There’s, like, nothing and nobody out here but rocks.”

“I know,” he said. “It’s a good place to get comfortable with the right habits, before we’re in crowds of people and it matters.” He paused. “You should probably get some sleep instead of listening to me nagging you.”

“I want to talk just a little bit first, okay?”

“Sure. What about?”

“You know that I can’t go back to Carbondale, right?” she said. “My parents already kicked me out, so I was living with Gabe. When the police find out you and I slept together, my family is not going to be interested in knowing me. Once the police think you’re a bad person, anything can happen. Gabe has a huge family. They all think he’s the best little boy, and I’m just the skank that snagged him because he was too shy to go after anyone better. There’s nobody left for me. I can’t live there anymore. I’ve used up that life.” She looked at him out of the corner of her eye. “Seems to me you’ve used up yours too.”

“I certainly can’t go back to Texas without getting in a terrible mess. I’m beginning to think my client did something really bad, and the police were just waiting for him to come in and claim that bank account.”

“We’re both in trouble,” she said. “We’re going to have to be everything to each other.” She waited, listening to be sure she caught every syllable of his answer, but then too many seconds passed for the kind of answer she wanted. She rapidly changed her hope to a hope that he wouldn’t contradict and deny her. She pulled her feet off the floor and curled up on the rear seat to sleep through his shift. At least he hadn’t rejected her or pushed her away. All he had been was silent. She took that with her into sleep.

Late the next night they crossed over into California. She saw the place on the road where the painted lines changed from white to yellow with raised blue reflectors, and soon there was a sign about not bringing fruits and vegetables. She said, “I’m waking up. I’m about ready to drive. We’re in California, aren’t we?”

“Yes.”

“Thank God. I’m getting a little tired of travel. When I take over, where do you want me to drive to?”

“I think I’ll keep driving for a while. I have a place I want to check on while it’s dark.”

The night was amazingly huge in the eastern California desert, but the roads were not empty. They were in the Mojave, on the route between Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Every twenty or twenty-five miles a sign announced how far away Los Angeles was. And there were lots of trucks sharing the road with them, grinding along at a steady speed, while dozens of cars swarmed up behind them and shot past like projectiles. It didn’t matter that it was long after midnight. The traffic in both directions was constant.

Near dawn they were northeast of Los Angeles. The land was still desert, but there were clusters of houses that looked identical from a distance and sat on their own grids of streets. Some of the developments had brick fences and metal letters that said something oddly out of place: Estancia de la Playa, Rancho del Mar, Villas di Firenze.

“What do people way out here do for a living?” she asked.

“They commute. Houses got so expensive around LA that people kept building new, cheaper houses farther and farther out. People were willing to drive a couple of hours to work—a hundred miles, sometimes.”

They came to an exit onto a road leading straight into the desert. A hundred yards along the road a metal sign reading WELCOME TO SIERRA LOMA reflected their headlights, but the blue on the sign was faded and weathered. Sharon could see that most of the dirt along the road was the same as the desert. It was tan, not the black moist dirt under people’s lawns back in Illinois. This dirt was a mixture of sand, pebbles, and hard cake with cracks in it like a dried-up pond bed.

When the road ended in a network of residential streets, she began to feel a bit more hopeful. Most of the houses were twice as big as the one where she had grown up. They had roofs made of pink tiles that looked like drainpipe split down the middle. They were just about all stucco, but some of them had facades of flagstone or brick. Nearly all had a two-story section in front, and double wooden doors the size of the church door at home. Above the door was always an oddly shaped window—an octagon, a fan, or a circle. There were often a few gables to make the houses’ silhouettes look more complicated. Nearly every house had, on its dried-up lawn, a sign on a pair of thick, sturdy posts.

“Are they all for sale?” she asked.

“They’re way beyond that,” he said. “Most of the houses in this development got foreclosed on three or four years ago.”

“Why?”

“For a long time the price of houses anywhere near Los Angeles went way up. It had been about twenty years since the last price drop. People got bigger and bigger loans to buy them. Houses were selling, so the developers built them farther and farther out. This was probably one of the last developments built. The houses are big and flashy, but they’re in the middle of nowhere. All of a sudden one day, the whole world realized that houses couldn’t keep going up forever. And then they realized a lot of people had borrowed a whole lot more to buy them than the houses were worth.”