would hang out with us. He was older than everybody else, but he was kind of cool, and plus he could buy beer for us.”
“Isn’t that great,” I said.
“Yeah,” Jeff said. “He’s a pretty good guy.”
“So, Andy just told all of you how to make a little extra money?”
“No,” Jeff said. “Just me. I mean, the only one I know that he told was me. I got to talking to him alone once about trying to find a job, and he said he had a number for a guy he’d run into a couple of times, that he could fix me up with something.”
“Really,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“Did you tell Andy what happened?”
“Like I said, I didn’t want anybody to know, so no, I didn’t tell him. My dad said I couldn’t ever tell anybody. I never even told Andy I got in touch with the guy in the first place.”
I did my best to concentrate on the traffic ahead of me. I could feel the blood pulsing in my temples. I very much wanted to have a chat with Andy Hertz.
“You okay, Mr. Blake?” Jeff asked.
“I’m fine,” I said.
“You’re not going to mention to Andy that I told you this, are you?” he asked worriedly.
I glanced over and said nothing.
Despite his size, he seemed to sink in his chair. In the fishbowl-like interior of the Beetle, he still had plenty of headroom. Jeff was quiet for another moment, then said, “I wonder if I did something to piss Patty off. She usually calls me back.”
I DROPPED JEFF OFF-his mother was standing at the door and had been there the whole time for all we knew-and as I was backing out of the driveway, intending to head straight over to Riverside Honda and have a few words with Andy Hertz, my cell went off.
“Hello?”
“Mr. Blake? Detective Jennings. Where are you?”
“Driving to work.”
“I need you to come in to police headquarters.”
“Can it wait? I need to go to the dealership and talk to-”
“You need to come in now.”
Panic washed over me. “What’s happened? Is it Sydney? Have you found Sydney?”
“I’d just like you to come in,” she said.
I wanted to tell her I might have a lead on finding Eric, whose real name might be Gary, but decided to wait until I got to the station.
“I’ll be there in a few minutes,” I said.
She met me at the door of the police building. “I appreciate you coming right away,” she said.
“What’s happened?” I asked. “Have you found Syd?”
“Come with me,” Jennings said, and I followed her down a tiled hallway, around a corner, and into a simple, unadorned room with a table and chairs. “Have a seat,” she directed me.
I took a seat.
She left the door open, and a couple of seconds later we were joined by a barrel-chested man in his fifties with a military-style brush cut.
“This is Detective Adam Marjorie,” Jennings said. He didn’t look like the kind of guy who took much ribbing about his last name. “He’s… now involved in the investigation.” Her tone suggested he was higher up the department food chain, and was stepping in to show how things were done.
“What’s this about?” I asked.
“Detective Marjorie and I would like to review the incidents of a couple nights ago,” she said.
Not last night, when someone took a shot at me?
“What do you want to know?” I asked.
“We want to ask you about Patty Swain,” Marjorie said. His voice was low and gravelly.
I was starting to get an inkling of what was going on here. I was in an interrogation room. This was going to be an interrogation. And this Marjorie character, he was going to be the bad cop.
“I told Detective Jennings everything I could,” I said. Looking at her, I pleaded, “Didn’t I?”
If Marjorie was going to be the bad cop, surely it only followed what Jennings’s role was supposed to be?
“Tell us again about the phone call you got from her,” she said.
I told my story again. Patty calling for a ride, how she’d hurt her knee falling on some cut glass. I also gave them some details about the boy who was bothering her, holding on to her arm. Jennings made a couple of notes about that, but Marjorie didn’t appear to care.
“What sort of shape would you say she was in when you got her to your house?” he asked, moving around the side of the table, only a couple of feet from me.
“What do you mean?”
“Was she aware of what was going on? Was she lucid? Was she conscious?”
“Yes. Yes to all those things.”
“Are you sure?” he asked.
“Of course I’m sure. What the hell?” I looked back and forth between the two of them.
Jennings sat down across from me. “Didn’t you have to practically carry her into your house?” she asked.
“She was limping,” I said. “Because of her knee.”
“So you were in physical contact with her,” she said.
“Huh? Yes, I had to be, to help her into the house, so she wouldn’t fall over. She’d also been drinking.”
“Where’d she get the booze?” Detective Marjorie asked. “You give it to her?”
“That’s right,” I said. “It’s so hard for teenagers to get booze, they need me to buy it for them.”
“Don’t get smart, asshole,” Detective Marjorie said.
I looked at Jennings, stupefied. “Who is this guy?”
Marjorie didn’t like that. He leaned in close enough that I could feel his hot breath on my face. “I’m the guy who thinks it’s odd that a man as old as you takes a young, drunk girl into his house late at night supposedly to help her out. What did you do with her when you got her inside?”
“I don’t believe this,” I said. I turned again to Jennings, thinking naively that maybe I’d find an ally in her, but there was nothing in her expression to suggest she was on my side.
“I think you should answer the question,” Jennings said.
“She hardly needed me to get her booze,” I said. “She’d been at a party down on the beach strip. She could gave gotten it from anyone. In fact, by the time I got Patty to my place, she was sobering up. Still a bit drunk, but relatively coherent.”
“There was a fair bit of blood on those towels,” Marjorie said.
“Her knee was bleeding,” I said. “Most of the cuts were pretty superficial, but one or two of them were deeper and they bled quite a bit. Come on, what are you suggesting? That I did something to Patty, and then left bloody towels on the bathroom floor where you could just walk in and find them?”
Jennings leaned back in her chair and folded her arms. “We spoke to Ms. Wood.”
“Okay,” I said.
“She said you called her the next morning about what she saw.”
“She drove past the house when Patty and I were going inside. I think she might have been intending to stop, but when she saw I wasn’t alone, she drove on. So the next day, I gave her a call.”
“Why?” Jennings asked. “You’re not still seeing Ms. Wood, are you?”
