A Tap on the Window

Sixty-one

Augie was waiting for me on the corner, a few hundred yards down the street from the Pearce house, sitting high in his white Suburban. I pulled up alongside him and powered down the passenger window. Augie, who probably remembers what everyone in Griffon drives, looked at the Subaru and said, “With all the shit that’s going on, you had time to get a new car?”

“Noticed whether anyone’s home?” I asked, pointing down the street.

“No one’s come or gone, but there’s no car there, so I’d say nobody’s at the house.” He paused. “Except, of course, Harry in the basement.” Augie looked at me skeptically, and who could blame him, really?

“There’s something else I need to talk to you about,” I said. “About Scott.”

“This got anything to do with what you think is going on in that house?”

“Not exactly,” I said.

Augie’s expression turned slightly sympathetic. “Nobody cares more about Scott than me, Cal, but could we tackle one thing at a time?”

I was churning inside about Ricky Haines, but I took his point. We were here to find Harry Pearce.

Instead of answering him, I drove the hundred yards up the street and parked in front of Phyllis Pearce’s house. Augie followed and pulled into the driveway, coming to a stop close to the front porch. Walking up to join him, I noticed again how long the grass was. After Dennis quit, Hooper’s hadn’t had enough staff to meet all their customers’ needs.

We mounted the porch steps together. Given that Augie was the chief of police, I let him go first and be the one to ring the bell.

“You said no one was here,” I said.

“Just in case,” he replied.

Twenty seconds passed with no one opening the door. Augie tried it, but it was locked. I wasn’t naive enough to ask Augie whether he needed a warrant. I wouldn’t have wanted to wait around for one, anyway.

“Let’s take a walk around,” he said. “Before I go busting down a door I might as well see if one’s been left open.”

We went around to the back and tried that door, but it was locked, too. Nor did we find any reachable windows that could be forced open. There were several basement windows at ground level, but Augie had no interest in smashing any of them. “I’m too old to get into a house that way.”

So we went back to the front door.

“Here goes,” Augie said, reared back, and drove the heel of his boot into the door just below the knob. The door didn’t open.

“Shit,” he said. “Nearly broke my knee.”

“Let me give it a shot.” I hit the door hard enough for the jamb to start splitting. Then Augie took another turn, and the door swung open.

“Probably going to get a bill from Phyllis for that,” he said.

We entered the house. Augie called out, “Hello? Police! Anyone home?” We heard nothing back.

We opened several doors. A couple opened onto closets, another onto a bathroom. The fourth door, just as you stepped inside the kitchen, opened onto a set of stairs that led down.

“After you,” Augie said.

I flicked on a light. The basement was low-ceilinged and unfinished. Bare bulbs instead of light fixtures. Cement-block walls instead of paneling. There were half a dozen rooms. One was a workshop, with tools hanging on the wall. A couple of them held old furniture. Another was jammed with metal filing cabinets. Augie opened the top drawer of one of them, glanced in.

“Business stuff for Patchett’s,” he said.

Another room contained a washer and dryer and rack. A shelf, grungy with spilled fabric softener and liquid detergent, was heavy with cleaners and chemicals.

“This is where the fire started,” I said.

“Huh?”

“It’s what got Dennis down here. Smoke from the dryer. Lint catching on fire, probably. Look, there’s the fire extinguisher on the wall.” Off the other end of the laundry room was a short hallway, and a door at the end.

“Augie,” I said.

He looked at the door, then at me.

“Guess we should have a look.”

I got ahead of him. There was a lock hanging from the door. I banged on it.

“Mr. Pearce? Are you in there? Mr. Pearce?”

Augie joined in. “It’s Augustus Perry, Mr. Pearce. Chief of police. We’re going to get you out of there.”

There was a shallow basement window by the door that came down a foot from the ceiling, and just as Claire had said, there was a key sitting on the sill. I grabbed it, fitted the key into the lock, twisted it, and the lock opened. I set it on the sill with the key.

I made an effort to keep my hand from shaking.

Augie placed his hand on the door and started to push.

“Whew,” he said, as we both caught a whiff of something unpleasant that someone had tried to mask with Lysol. A mix of mustiness, dead mice, urine, and God knows what else.

The door was wide open. I wasn’t prepared for what I was about to see. It wasn’t what I was expecting at all.

The room was littered with odd bits of furniture, stacks of old magazines, a busted record player with no arm, a box of eight-track tapes. An old metal rollaway bed that was folded up at the middle, a soiled-looking mattress trapped within it, was tucked into a corner behind more cardboard boxes. A junk room, illuminated by a bare bulb in an exposed ceiling receptacle.

That was it.

No Harry Pearce.

Augie turned and looked at me. “When Phyllis sends me the bill for her front door, I’m giving it to you.”