“Come on, man! This is the worst day of my life, and now you’re, what-firing me? Is that what you’re doing? What the fuck?”
I got in the truck, slammed the door and locked it. Through the closed window I could still hear Doug shouting at me.
“You’re supposed to be my friend, you son of a bitch! Why are you doing this to me? Huh? Your old man would never treat me like this!” A pause to catch his breath, then, “I should have let you burn!”
I hit the gas and was on New Haven Avenue when I had to pull off into a service station parking lot. I threw the truck into park, rested my elbows on the steering wheel, and pressed the heels of my hands into my forehead, taking deep breaths all the while.
“Damn it, Doug,” I said under my breath. I’d never felt more let down, more betrayed.
You think you know people.
“I don’t know anybody anymore,” I said to myself.
When I got home, it was dusk.
I didn’t like coming back to an empty place. I knew sending Kelly away was the best thing to do, but right now, I wished she was here. I needed someone. And while I wouldn’t have poured my heart out to Kelly the way I would have to Sheila-I was hardly going to burden her with my disappointment in Doug-I would have hugged her, and felt her arms around me in return, and maybe that would have been enough.
With all the spring in my step of a dead man walking, I went to the front door, and as I was about to slip the key into it, I noticed it was slightly ajar.
I knew that when I’d left I’d closed and locked this door.
I pushed, ever so gently, against it, just far enough to slip inside. I thought I heard some kind of jostling in the kitchen.
It looked as though I was going to get my wish after all. There was someone in the house.
THIRTY-NINE
Slocum was coming out of the Connecticut Post Mall, where he’d gone to buy a few things for Emily to try to cheer her up-some markers, a pad, a stuffed dog, and a couple of books by someone named Beverly Cleary that he had no idea whether Emily would like but the lady in the store said they were good for an eight-year-old-when the man called out to him, saying, “Officer Slocum? Do you have a minute?”
He stopped just as he was about to head out into the parking lot and whirled around.
“My name’s Arthur Twain,” he said. “I wonder if you have a moment.”
“No, I don’t.”
“First of all, I’m very sorry to hear about your wife, Mr. Slocum. I need to ask you some questions about her business, the parties she held, where she sold handbags. The company I work for has been engaged to investigate trademark infringement. I suspect you know what I’m talking about.”
Slocum shook his head. “I got nothing to say to you.” He scanned the lot, looking for his pickup. He spotted it and started walking.
Twain followed. “What I’d like to know, Officer, is where you were getting the merchandise. I believe you know a man who goes by the name Sommer?”
Slocum kept on walking.
“Did you know, sir, that Sommer is a suspect in a triple homicide in Manhattan? Are you aware that you and your wife have been doing business with a man with significant criminal connections?”
Slocum hit the button on his remote and opened his door.
“I think it might be in your interest to help me,” Twain said, speaking more quickly now. “You let yourself get in too deep, there’ll be no coming back. If you’d like to talk to me, I’m staying at the Just Inn Time for the next-”
Slocum settled in behind the wheel, closed the door, and keyed the ignition. Twain stood there and watched as he drove away.
Detective Rona Wedmore waited until it was dark before she returned to the harbor for the third time. The temperature had dropped sharply since the sun had gone down. Had to be in the high forties, she figured. Should have worn a scarf and some gloves. As she got out of her unmarked car she pulled her jacket together in front, zipped it up to her neck, stuffed her hands into the pockets.
Not as many boats in the harbor now as there were even a week ago. Many owners had taken them out of the water and put them into storage. It seemed so dead down here this time of year. The place was so full of activity in the summer; now these boats seemed mournful in their abandonment.
The car Ann Slocum had been driving was no longer here, of course. It remained, on Wedmore’s orders, in a police garage.
Those scratches on the trunk lid bothered her a lot. And she’d just learned something else. The flat tire was caused by someone sticking a knife blade into the sidewall, right at the rim’s edge. Ann hadn’t driven over a nail, and it didn’t appear that the tire had been driven on flat. The air had gone out of it after the car had been stopped.
This so-called accident was looking less like one with each new development.
She’d caught Slocum in a lie. He’d denied knowing that Ann had been on the phone prior to the call from Belinda Morton. Wedmore knew, after her talk with Glen Garber, that Slocum was covering up something.
His story about how his wife liked to take a drive in the evening to clear her head was pure fiction. Wedmore wanted to know why a cop, who should be smart enough to spot inconsistencies at a crime scene, was willing to accept his wife died in an accident when so many clues pointed to suspicious circumstances.
Of course, Darren Slocum’s attitude made perfect sense if he was the one who’d killed her.
Wedmore knew the stories about Officer Darren Slocum. The allegations that he’d helped himself to some drug money. Stories of extreme force during arrests. The guy was a loose cannon. Everyone knew his wife ran an off-the-books business, and that he helped her with it.
He could have done it. He had no solid alibi. He could have slipped out of the house while his daughter slept. But suspecting it and proving it were two entirely different things. There were the life insurance policies the two had taken out on each other. That provided a decent motive, especially when they were having financial problems, but it wasn’t enough to nail the guy.
As for Slocum’s first wife, Wedmore had confirmed that she really had died of cancer. Rona kicked herself for that one. She should have known the facts before raising the issue. Felt like a bit of a shit, too.
She stood there in the cold night air, looking out over the Sound, as though the answers to her questions might magically wash ashore. She sighed and was walking back toward her car when she noticed the light.
It was coming from a moored cabin cruiser. She could see shadows moving back and forth behind the windows.
Wedmore strode out onto the dock, the heels of her boots echoing off the wood planks. As she came up alongside the boat she could hear muffled talking inside. She leaned out over the water, rapped on the hull, and called out, “Hello? Hello?”
The talking stopped, and then the door to the cabin opened. A thin man in his late sixties or early seventies, with a neatly trimmed gray beard and reading glasses, emerged.
“Yeah?”
“Hi!” Wedmore called out. She identified herself as a detective with the Milford department. She thought, What’s the phrase? “Permission to come aboard?”
He waved her on, extended a hand to help her but she managed on her own. He invited her into the cabin, where a white-haired woman was seated at a table, sipping on a cup of hot chocolate. The smell of cocoa filled the cabin.
“This is a police detective,” the man said, and the woman brightened, as though this was the most interesting thing that had happened in quite some time.
They introduced themselves as Elliot and Gwyn Teale. When they retired, they sold their house in Stratford and decided to live on their boat full-time.
