The Accident

TWENTY

“It’s interesting, that’s for sure,” said Edwin Campbell, sitting in his legal office. He took off his wire-rimmed reading glasses and set them next to the papers I’d been delivered a couple of hours earlier. He shook his head. “A bit of a stretch, I think, but very interesting.”

“So you’re saying, what, I don’t have to worry about it?” I said, leaning forward in the leather padded chair. Edwin had been my father’s lawyer for years, and I’d kept going to him not only out of family tradition and loyalty, but because he knew his stuff. I’d called him about the lawsuit right after the papers had been served, and he’d agreed to get me in to his office right away.

“Well, now, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that,” Campbell replied. “There’s plenty of nuisance cases that have taken years to work their way through the system and needlessly cost people a considerable sum to defend themselves. So we’re going to have to respond to this. They’ll have to produce evidence you knew Sheila had a drinking problem and that it was very likely you knew she would get behind the wheel of a car in an inebriated condition.”

“I’ve told you I never noticed any-”

Edwin waved a hand at me. “I know what you’ve said. And I believe you. But I think-and I’m sure you’ve done this already-but I think you need to go over everything about Sheila in your head one more time. Is there something you’ve overlooked, something maybe you’ve ignored because you haven’t wanted to acknowledge it? Something you don’t want to admit to yourself? This is the time you need to be honest with yourself, painfully so, because if there’s something out there, some small shred of evidence that suggests you could have reasonably assumed that Sheila was capable of doing what she did, we need to confront that and deal with it.”

“I told you, there’s nothing.”

“You never saw your wife under the influence?”

“What, never?”

“That’s what I asked you.”

“Well, shit, of course, there were times when she’d had enough to feel it. Who hasn’t?”

“Describe these circumstances.”

“I don’t know-Christmas, family gatherings, an anniversary maybe, if we’d been out to dinner. Parties.”

“So Sheila had a habit of drinking too much at all those kinds of events?”

I blinked. “Jesus Christ, Edwin!”

“I’m just playing devil’s advocate, Glen. But you see how these things can turn bad in a hurry. I know and you know there’s a huge gulf between having a couple of drinks at Christmas and getting behind the wheel when you shouldn’t. But all Bonnie Wilkinson needs is a handful of witnesses from those types of occasions, where you might have been present, to start building a case.”

“Well, she’s going to have a hard time doing that,” I said.

“What about Belinda Morton?”

“Huh? Belinda was a friend of Sheila’s. What about her?”

“I made a couple of calls before you came over, one to Barnicke and Trundle, the firm that’s handling this for Mrs. Wilkinson, and they weren’t afraid to tip their hand to me, suggesting that we might want to settle this thing before we even get to court.”

“What are you talking about?”

“They already have a statement from Ms. Morton that when she and Sheila and another woman would go out for lunch, they’d get pretty looped.”

“So maybe they had a few drinks. Sheila always took a cab home from those. She usually took a cab to those, since she knew she might be having a few.”

“Really?” Edwin said. “So she’d go to lunch knowing full well she’d be having a lot to drink?”

“It’s not like they got drunk. They just had a good time at lunch. You’re making too much out of it.”

“It won’t be me who does it.” He paused. “There’s also this thing about marijuana.”

“About what?”

“Belinda has apparently said she and Sheila smoked it.”

“ Belinda said that?” This woman, who was supposedly my wife’s friend?

“So they say. They are, I understand, only alleging a single incident. A year ago, at the Morton home, in the backyard. Apparently the husband arrived and became quite perturbed.”

I was shaking my head in disbelief. “What’s she trying to do to us? To Kelly and me?”

“I don’t know. To give her the benefit of the doubt, she may not have appreciated the implications of her comments when she was making them. My understanding is it was her husband, George, who felt she had an obligation to be forthcoming.”

I slumped down in the chair. “That guy’s got a pole up his ass. Even if they could prove Sheila liked to have a glass of wine or a Cosmo at lunch, how do they go from there to proving that it’s my fault that she might have gotten behind the wheel drunk the night of the accident?”

“Like I said, it’s a stretch. But anything can happen where a case like this is concerned, so we have to take this seriously. Leave it with me for now. I’ll draft a response and run it by you.”

I felt my world unraveling. Just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse. “God, what a week.”

Edwin looked up from the note he was making. “What?”

“I still don’t know what’s going to happen with the insurance on that house that burned down. I got a guy working for me who’s going into financial ruin and keeps hitting me up for pay advances. Kids are calling my daughter Boozer at school because of Sheila’s accident, plus her friend’s mother died in an accident a couple of nights ago, and the woman’s husband is bugging me because of some phone call Kelly heard when she was over there for a sleepover. On top of all that, the Wilkinsons want to sue my ass off.”

“Whoa,” said Edwin.

“Yeah, no shit.”

“No, go back a bit.”

“Which thing?”

“Your daughter’s friend’s mother died and what?”

I told him about Ann Slocum’s death, and how Darren Slocum had come over demanding to know what Kelly had heard at the sleepover.

“Ann would have been that other woman at the lunches,” I added glumly.

“Well, this is interesting,” Edwin said.

“Yeah.”

“Did you say Darren Slocum?”

“That’s right.”

“Milford cop?”

“Right again. You know him?”

“I know of him.”

“That sounds ominous,” I said.

“There’ve been at least two internal investigations concerning him, that I know of. Broke one guy’s arm during an arrest following a bar fight. In the other incident, he was being looked into for some missing drug money, but I’m pretty sure that one was dismissed. There were half a dozen cops who had access to the evidence, so there was no way they could pin it on him.”

“How do you know this?”

“You think I just sit here all day and work on my stamp collection?”

“So he’s a bad cop.”

Edwin paused a moment before answering, as if there might be others in the room and he didn’t want to get sued for slander.

“Let’s say he’s got a cloud over him.”

“Sheila was a friend of his wife’s.”

“I don’t know that much about his wife. Other than that she wasn’t his first.”

“I never knew he was married before,” I said.

“Yeah. When someone was telling me about his troubles, it came up that he was married years ago.”

“Divorced?”

“She died.”

“Of?”

“No idea.”

I thought about that, then, “Maybe this all starts to fit. Him being a sketchy cop, his wife selling knockoff designer purses out of their house. I think they were bringing in good money with the purses.” I didn’t mention that it was probably all off the books. People in glass houses and all that.

Edwin’s lips puckered. “The force might take a dim view of a cop and his wife selling knockoff merchandise. It’s illegal. Not owning a knockoff bag, but making them and selling them.”

“When Slocum came to see me, Saturday morning, he was pretty rattled. There seemed to be, in his mind, some connection between the phone call his wife took and the accident that killed her.”

“Explain.”

“I guess if she hadn’t been going out to meet whoever called her, she might have had that flat tire some other time, in a safer place, and never would have fallen into the water and died.”

Edwin’s lips did some more puckering.

“What are you thinking?” I asked.

“Do you know whether the police are treating Ann Slocum’s death as suspicious?”

“I have no idea.”

Edwin moved his tongue across the front of his teeth. I’d seen him do this before when he was deep in thought.

“Glen,” he said tentatively.

“I’m right here.”

“Do you believe in coincidences?”

“Not so much,” I said. I had a pretty good idea where he was going.

“Your wife loses her life in an accident that is, I think we would concur, difficult to reconcile. About two weeks later, her friend is killed in another accident, the circumstances of which are curious, if not equally so. I’m sure this has not escaped your attention.”

“No,” I said, and felt myself roiling inside. “It hasn’t. But, Edwin, beyond that observation, I don’t know what to make of it. Look, you know that trying to make sense of what Sheila did, how she died-it’s all I’ve been thinking about. What did I miss? How could I not have known she had some kind of problem? Christ, Edwin, she didn’t even like vodka, so far as I knew, and yet there was an empty bottle of it in her car.”

Edwin strummed the fingers of his left hand on his desk. He cast an eye toward his bookshelf. “You know I’ve always been an Arthur Conan Doyle admirer. A fan, I suppose.”

I followed his eye. I stood, took a step closer to the shelves, and tilted my head slightly to read the words on the spines. A Study in Scarlet. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. The Sign of the Four.

“They look really old,” I said. “May I?”

Edwin nodded and I pulled out one of the books, opened it delicately. “Are these all first editions?”

“No. Although I do have some, sealed and safely put away. One that’s actually signed by the author. Are you familiar with the works?”

“I can’t say that I-maybe the one about the hound. The Baskervilles, isn’t it? When I was a kid. And Sheila and I saw that movie, the one with the guy who also played Iron Man.”

Edwin closed his eyes briefly. “An abomination,” he said. “Not Iron Man. I liked that.” He looked disappointed, possibly at the gaps in my literary education. There were many.

“Glen, let me ask you this, a straightforward question. Do you believe it is at all possible-even remotely so-that Sheila would willfully consume a bottle of vodka and bring about the accident that took her life and the lives of two others? Knowing what you do about her?”

I swallowed. “No. It’s impossible. But yet-”

“In The Sign of the Four, Holmes says, and I think I have this right, ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’ You know the phrase?”

“I think I’ve heard it. So you’re saying, if it’s impossible that Sheila would do such a thing, then there must be some other explanation for what happened, even if it seems… really out there.”

Edwin nodded. “In a nutshell.”

“What other explanations could there be?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. But in light of these recent developments, I really think you need to be considering them.”