“I’m Glen,” I said. “You must be Betsy’s mother.” When she didn’t deny it, I said, “Is she here?”
“Bets!” the woman screamed back into the house. “I swear,” she said to me, “it’s like a goddamn three-ring circus around here.”
Betsy came through the living room and the look on her face said she wasn’t very pleased to see me. “Yeah, Glen, what is it?”
“I’m looking for Doug,” I said, stepping inside, being careful not to squish a cat in the door as I closed it.
“You and fucking T. J. Hooker out there,” she said. “What the hell’s going on?”
“I don’t know,” I said bluntly. “I need to find Doug and talk to him.”
“You talked to him enough yesterday. Accusing him like you did. I thought you were his friend.”
“I am his friend,” I said, although I knew I didn’t have much business saying so. “When did he leave here?”
“Beats me,” she said. “Middle of the night he disappeared, took off in my car.” So far as I knew, Doug’s truck was still at the office, so that made sense. “I got no way to get around. Where the hell is he? What do the cops want with him? They think we don’t have enough problems already? Is this what they do to people who lose their houses? Start treating them like criminals? We’re supposed to go to the bank today to try to get our house back. How the hell are we supposed to do that if he’s out wandering around somewhere?”
I was going to ask her to tell him to call me if he came home, but I figured, what with the cops waiting for him out front, he wasn’t going to have a chance to do that.
“What the hell do they think he did?” Betsy demanded.
“Did Doug say he was going to see Theo?”
“He didn’t say anything to me. You talking about that Greek electrician?”
“Yeah.”
“What about him?”
“He’s dead,” I told her.
“Dead?”
“Someone shot Theo last night. The police need to talk to Doug. If he went out there to see Theo, he might have seen something, heard something, that would help the police catch who killed Theo.”
“So it’s not like the cops think Doug had anything to do with it,” she said. “He’s, like, a witness?”
“They just need to find him, Betsy. That’s all.”
“Well, I hope he’s got my car with him when they do, because I’ve got to go to the bank and try to get our goddamn house back.”
I decided to try the office next. The chain-link gate that seals off Garber Contracting from the street was in place. With no one to watch the office, Ken had locked the place up before heading off to whichever job site he felt had priority. There was no sign of Betsy’s Infiniti, but there was another police car sitting across the street, and I had to go through the same routine again, explaining that I was not Doug Pinder.
I wondered if Doug might have found a way to slip in anyway, and once the cop was done with me I unlocked the place and walked through the office and shed, checking to see whether Doug might be sitting in his truck around back. It was still there, but there was no sign of him.
Once I had the place locked up again, I set off for the house Doug and Betsy had lost the day before. Even though they no longer lived there, I wondered whether Doug might try to break in, grab a few extra things he and Betsy hadn’t been able to drag out onto the lawn with the little time they’d been given yesterday.
As I came around the corner, I saw the Infiniti sitting in the driveway. Doug sat slumped on the front step, his arms resting on his knees, a bottle of beer in his right hand, a cigarette in the other.
“Hey, pardner,” he said, a smile crossing his face. “Can I get you a cold one?” It sounded as though he’d had a few.
I walked toward him. “No, I’m good.”
The lock on the door appeared intact. If Doug had gotten into the house, he’d found some other way to do it.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“This is my house,” he said. “Why the hell shouldn’t I be here?”
“It’s the bank’s now, Doug,” I said.
“Oh yeah, thanks for reminding me,” he said glumly, taking a swig from the bottle. “But I always liked sitting out here havin’ a beer. I can still do that.” He patted the concrete slab next to him. “Pull up a chair.”
I sat down on the concrete step.
“Where’ve you been?” I asked.
“Oh, here and there,” he said, drawing on the cigarette, blowing the smoke out through his nose. “You sure you don’t wanna wet your whistle?” He pointed to the six-pack at his feet. It had one bottle left in it.
“I’m sure. You go out to see Theo last night?”
“Huh?” he said. “How you know about that?”
“He called you.”
“Damn right. Cell going off didn’t wake anybody up but me, though, because I’m sleeping down in the basement on my own.” He blew out more smoke, took another drink.
“What?”
“Yeah, get this. Betsy’s old lady won’t allow me and her sleeping together under her roof. Says it makes her uncomfortable, the idea of people having relations in her house, so I’m in the basement and Betsy’s upstairs. She treats us like we’re a couple of unmarried teenagers or something. Can you believe that? Just between us, I don’t think Betsy’s mom thinks much of me, but I’ll tell you this, she doesn’t have to worry about me and her daughter getting it on. Hasn’t been much of that in a long time. Betsy goes along with these rules, I think, because it means her and her mom can talk about me into the night without me being there.”
“What did Theo want?”
“Said he needed to talk to me, is all. I said, what the fuck is so important you need to talk to me in the middle of the night? And he said, ‘Get your ass up to my place and I’ll tell ya.’ Or something like that.”
“So you went.”
“Is there some sort of problem here, Glenny?” he said.
“Just tell me what you did.”
“I took a drive up. He gave me some directions and I went up there. You know what I think?”
“Tell me.”
“I think he was playing some sort of joke on me.”
“What do you mean?”
“I went all the way up there and the Greek son of a bitch wasn’t even there.”
“He wasn’t?”
“Nope.” He shook his head.
“You looked around?”
“His truck was there, but I couldn’t find him around anyplace. I looked in his trailer-he lives in a trailer, did you know that?”
“Yeah.”
“I went inside, looked around, stupid bastard wasn’t no place to be found.”
“What did you do then?”
“Drove around.” He finished off the beer and tossed the bottle onto the grass. “You sure you don’t want that last one?”
“Positive. Maybe it would be better if-”
“Don’t worry about me,” he said, grabbed the beer and twisted off the cap. “This one’s a bit warm. But what the hell.”
“So you just drove around.”
“Well, I was already up, and I didn’t much want to go back to Betsy and her mom. No fun up there. And the Infiniti, it’s nice to drive, and God knows how much longer we’ll have it before it’s repoed. Parked down by the beach for a while, must have had a little nap, because before I knew it, it was after ten.”
“Then what?”
“Picked myself up some beer and decided to sit here for a while and contemplate my future.” He grinned. “It’s
