We were stopped at the light and the woman eyed me through the windshield.
“Can I give her something?” Kelly asked.
“Don’t put your window down.” The woman’s eyes seemed dead. She wasn’t expecting me to give her anything. Out of every hundred cars that got stopped at this light, how many offered her anything? Two? One? None? What had brought her to this point? Had her life always been this way? Or had she, at one time, had one like ours? A house, a family, a regular job. A husband, maybe. Kids. And if she had known a life like that, was there one event that started the unraveling? Did she lose her job? Did her husband lose his? Did their car die and they had no money to fix it, and couldn’t get to work? Did they fall behind on their mortgage and lose their house? And once, having lost it, were they so far behind the eight ball that they could never recover? And it had come to this? Standing at the end of the off-ramp, begging for help?
Couldn’t any of us end up this way when one part of our life went horribly wrong, and then the dominoes started to fall?
I fished a five-dollar bill out of my pocket and powered down my window. The woman came around the front of the car, took the bill from my hand without saying a word, and went back to her station.
Kelly said, “You can’t get anything for five bucks.”
“Tell me what’s going on.” Fiona stood in her oversized kitchen, with its skylights and marble countertops and Sub-Zero appliances, as Kelly and Marcus talked in the living room.
I told her about the bullet that had gone through Kelly’s window. “Between that, and this thing with Darren Slocum pestering Kelly, it made sense to get her out of town. Just take her somewhere fun, that’s all I ask.”
“My God, Glen, this is all horrible! And why is Ann’s husband bugging Kelly?”
My cell rang. I really didn’t want to take a call right now, but at the same time, with all that was going on, I needed to know who was trying to reach me.
“Just a sec,” I said to Fiona, took out the phone and glanced at the caller ID. It was a number without a name but I was pretty sure I recognized it as the Milford fire department. It was probably Alfie getting back to me. I let it go to message.
“It was this conversation Kelly overheard. The one Ann was having. Slocum thinks if he can get Kelly to remember something about it, it’ll help him figure out who she was talking to that night.”
“Do you think she can?”
“I don’t think so. She didn’t hear all that much. The guy’s grasping at straws. He’s desperate.” I paused. “And I kind of get that. It’s pretty much how I’ve been feeling.”
I stopped talking as Marcus and Kelly came into the kitchen.
“We’re going to get some ice cream,” Kelly said happily. “Not to eat there, but to bring home. And we’re going to get chocolate sauce and caramel sauce and marshmallow sauce.”
“We’ll take good care of her,” Marcus said.
I gave Kelly a hug before heading out the door, holding on to her so long she finally had to wriggle free.
Once I was back on the road, heading east back to Connecticut, I checked my message.
“Hey, Glen, Alfie here from Milford Fire. Look, your girl Sally called me, and damned if I wasn’t going to give you a call today anyway. We sent out those parts from the fire for analysis, and we got the report back yesterday afternoon, a little too late to call, but yeah, what you were calling about, you were right. Those parts, they weren’t good enough to keep a pen flashlight going. It was crap. Cheap, knockoff crap. This could put you in a shitload of trouble, my friend.”
I dialed his number.
“Sorry about the shitty news,” Alfie said.
“Give me the details.”
“We sent out the bits and pieces left from that circuit breaker panel for analysis, and it was all rubbish. Wire was so thin, once you applied some current to it, it melted away to nothing. We’re seeing more and more of this. I don’t mean us, here in Milford, although this stuff is around. But across the country, it’s getting bad. Some of the stuff going into new houses, man, I wouldn’t use it in my dog’s house. Listen, Glen, I have to send this on to the insurance company, you know.”
“I know.”
“And once they find out that house had equipment in it that didn’t meet code, they’re not going to pay up. In fact, they might just cancel your entire policy. They’re going to figure, if you put that kind of shit in one house, maybe you’ve put it in any other house you’ve built.”
“I didn’t put that crap in, Alfie.”
“Not you. Glen, I’ve known you long enough to know you wouldn’t knowingly do this, but somebody working for you did.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ve got a good idea who. He’s not working for me anymore.”
“Anybody else that guy is working for, they need to know,” Alfie said. “He wires up enough houses with that knockoff shit, sooner or later someone’s gonna die.”
“Thanks for the heads-up, Alfie.”
I flipped the phone shut and tossed it onto the seat next to me.
I wanted to find Theo Stamos. I wanted to find Theo Stamos and kill the son of a bitch. But, seeing as how I was now going through Bridgeport, Theo was going to have to wait while I paid a visit to someone else.
THIRTY-FOUR
Belinda Morton couldn’t believe it when Glen Garber told her he’d put the money in the mail. An envelope with sixty-two thousand dollars? Surely he wasn’t crazy enough to trust all that cash to the mailman. But maybe that was his way of making a point, of showing how angry he was with her.
Not that she could blame him.
She’d just been about to head out for an appointment to show a condo to a couple in their thirties who’d had enough of living and working in Manhattan, had found jobs in New Haven, and were looking for something with a view of the Sound. She phoned and said she’d had a family emergency and had to race home.
And she was almost out the office door when this guy showed up.
Said his name was Arthur Twain, that he worked for some private investigation or security company or something, and he wanted to talk to her about Ann Slocum, and fake purses, and whether she’d been to any purse parties, and did she know that the money that went to buy knockoff products supported organized crime. She could feel herself sweating right through her clothes, even though it was barely sixty degrees out there today.
“I’m sorry,” she said, probably ten times. “I don’t know anything about this. I really don’t.”
“But you were a friend of Ann’s, weren’t you?” Twain persisted.
“I really have to go, I’m sorry.”
Ran to her car, squealed out of the lot so fast she nearly ran down a woman on a bicycle.
“Calm down calm down calm down calm down,” she kept telling herself. She would have to call Darren, tell him about this Arthur Twain, ask him what she should say if he came to see her again.
She hoped that when Glen said he’d put the money in the mail, he meant the mail slot of her home. She got out of the car so quickly she didn’t even bother to close the door. If she hadn’t needed her keys to get into the house, she’d have probably left the motor running.
She ran to the door, nearly rolling over on a heel, tried three times to get the key into the slot before she was able to turn it. She swung the door open, looked down onto the floor where the mail always fell.
Nothing.
“Shit, shit, shit,” she said. She half stumbled three steps into the house and allowed herself to fall onto the stairs, leaned up against the railing and felt herself starting to shake.
Just because the money wasn’t there didn’t mean it had been lost, she told herself. Maybe Glen still had it. Maybe he was planning to drop it off later. Maybe he was on his way.
And maybe the son of a bitch really had put it into the mail. That would be just like him. If there was one thing she’d learned from being friends with Sheila all those years, Glen did have a bit of a self-righteous streak in-
