The Accident

FORTY-FOUR

I watched them take Doug Pinder away in one car while the other cop staked himself out by the Infiniti, seemingly guarding it. I had a feeling Betsy wasn’t going to get her car back anytime soon. It was headed for the lab, along with the gun that had been found inside.

What a mess.

I wondered whether to give Betsy a heads-up, but figured she’d be up to speed in very short order. That cop posted at her mother’s house was about to get word that Pinder had been found, Betsy’s car impounded. Which would upset her more? I wondered. That her husband was being questioned in a murder investigation, or that she’d lost her expensive wheels?

Their entire world had fallen apart in the last twenty-four hours, on every goddamn level. I felt sick about it for a host of reasons, not least of which because I didn’t believe Doug had it in him to kill someone. I’d allowed myself to believe he’d try to make a buck by using shitty electrical parts, but it was another thing altogether to believe he was a murderer.

But the problem there was, Doug had been up to see Theo. He had reason to be angry with him. And there was a gun in the car. Maybe he had done it, and gotten so drunk after that he didn’t remember. Or was even drunk when he pulled the trigger.

Three times.

You had to be pretty sober to nail someone in the dark-in the woods-three times.

I didn’t know what to think. So I got in my truck and drove back to Garber Contracting. I opened the gate that led onto the property, then unlocked the office. It felt like a weekend. No one around, the place quiet.

The light on the phone was flashing. I picked up and logged into the voicemail. Seventeen messages. I grabbed a pen and a pad of paper and started taking them down, one by one.

“We’re here with the drywall, Glen. Where the hell are you guys? Nobody working today? Was there a holiday no one told me about?”

“I called last week? You put a Florida room on the back of our house last summer? And we’re getting bees in the room, we think they’re getting in someplace and wonder if you could come out and have a look?”

“My name’s Ryan and I wondered if I could drop off a resume? My mom says if I don’t get a job she’s going to kick me out.”

They went on from there. I noticed, just as Sally had the other day, that none of them were prospects for future jobs. Everything really was turning to shit.

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.