A Tap on the Window

by Linwood Barclay

  Sal did some more fiddling with the mouse. “Okay. I think this is the part you’re looking for.”

  It happens at 10:24:03. Claire Sanders, looking exactly as she had in my car, emerges from the bathroom—she had to have been perched on a toilet seat, since I’d had a look at the stalls and they’d appeared empty—then stands at the exterior glass door, scanning the parking lot. The driver of the Volvo sees her before she spots the car. The lights come on and the car moves forward, just beyond the Subaru.

  Claire waves and runs toward the vehicle, veers around the far side and opens the passenger door. The car’s interior dome light comes on for two seconds and goes off.

  “Go back,” I said.

  Sal backed up the video a few seconds, hit PLAY again.

  “Stop it when the inside light comes on,” I said.

  It took him two tries to freeze the frame at just the right spot. As best I could tell, the only other person in the car was the driver, but it was impossible to determine anything about him, or her. Nothing more than a grainy smudge.

  “It’s hard to see anything real clear,” Sal said apologetically. “The cops were pissed, too.”

  “I’m not pissed,” I said. “I appreciate it. Is there any way you can blow up that image, get any kind of look at that license plate?”

  “Nope,” he said. “Hopeless.”

  “Let it go ahead. I want to see where the car goes.”

  Once Claire’s in the car, the Volvo turns hard right, does almost a three sixty, and vanishes from the right side of the monitor.

  “You have any other angles that would show it leaving?”

  “Nope,” he said again.

  “What about arriving? If we go back before where you started.”

  He took us back to 9:45:00. There is no car behind his Subaru at that point. He kept moving ahead until 9:49:17, when the car appears from the right side of the monitor, sidles up next to Sal’s car, and stops. The lights go off.

  I had him keep running it right up until ten p.m., just in case whoever was in that car decided to come in for a coffee or a burger. No such luck. Whoever was behind the wheel stayed there.

  “Sal,” I said, drawing his name out slowly.

  “Yes?”

  “Can I have a coffee?”

  “Sure thing.”

  When I went into my pocket for some change, he said, “On the house. Whaddya take?”

  “Two creams,” I said.

  While he was gone, I dropped into his computer chair and stared at the screen. Thinking it through.

  Claire thinks she’s being followed. Gets Hanna to switch places. Now someone’s following Hanna, who’s with me. Hanna gets out and runs. Pitches the wig. Whoever’s been on our tail now knows it’s a trick. Figures out the switch happened at Iggy’s.

  Thinks: Maybe Claire’s still there.

  Sal returned with a take-out cup of coffee for me. “It’s really hot,” he said. “I wouldn’t want you to spill it on yourself and then sue us for millions of dollars.”

  I forced a chuckle.

  “I want you to take me through the rest of the evening,” I said. “Right up to closing time.”

  “Yeah, sure, I guess,” he said. “Same view?”

  I thought about that. “No. At least, not to start. Let’s go to the front counter. Yeah, that view, that shows everyone coming in, looking up at the menu.”

  “If we get held up, we can get a good look at them from here,” he said. “Where do you want me to start from?”

  “Start at ten thirty.” I took the lid off the coffee and blew on it. “Fast-forward through.”

  He did. People shuffled in and out comically. Before long, I spotted someone I recognized.

  “Stop,” I said.

  It was Sean Skilling. He’d said that he’d dropped by here, and Patchett’s, after everything had gone wrong, after the brief, troubling call from Hanna.

  In the video, he bypassed the counter, disappeared into another part of the restaurant.

  “Can you find him on the other cameras?” I asked, taking a sip of coffee. Still hot, but good.

  Sal tapped away. “There he is.”

  Sean had poked his head into the ladies’ restroom, just as I had done, but he hadn’t gone right inside. Finding no one there, he returned to the front of the restaurant. Sal found him on the other camera again, and we both watched him leave. The video continued to roll.

  “Well,” I said.

  “Was that what you wanted?”

  “I don’t really know what I want,” I said. “Mostly I just want to go home and go to bed.”

  “I should have got you a decaf,” Sal said.

  “I don’t think it’ll matter,” I said. “I could be injecting it straight into my veins. When my head hits the pillow tonight I’m— Hello, what’s this?”

  The monitor was still displaying the front counter. The time was 10:58:02 and counting.

  A heavyset man with brown hair and a moustache had come in. Not in a suit, but nicely dressed in black slacks, a white collared shirt with the cuffs rolled up.

  “Pause that,” I said.

  Sal clicked. “You know that guy?” he asked.

  “Yeah, but I only met him recently,” I said.

  Just this evening, in fact. It was Adam Skilling, Sean’s father.

  TWENTY-SIX

  When I came out of Iggy’s there was a Griffon police cruiser parked behind my Honda, blocking it in. Officer Ricky Haines, along with his partner in crime prevention, Officer Hank Brindle, were leaning against their car, presumably waiting for me to show up.

  “Mr. Weaver,” Brindle said, pushing himself upright. Haines followed suit.

  “Evening, Officers,” I said.

  “You kind of slipped away from the scene in a hurry.”

  The chief had sent me home, but I didn’t see why I had to explain myself to these two, so I said nothing.

  “Thing is, we still had some questions for you,” Brindle said, tipping his hat up half an inch as if to get the full measure of me. So far, Haines was letting his senior partner take the lead here.

  “Ask away,” I said.

  “I suppose,” Brindle said, “you may think you enjoy some kind of special status, being married to the chief’s sister and all, but Officer Haines and I have to follow our investigation where it leads us, even if that might make our boss unhappy. But ultimately, I believe Chief Perry will understand.”

  “I’m waiting.”

  “What exactly did you and Miss Rodomski talk about before you kicked her out of your car in the middle of nowhere?” Brindle asked.

  “I didn’t kick her out,” I said. “She demanded to get out of the car.”

  Brindle smiled. “All right, then. What did you and the girl talk about before she demanded to get out of the car?”

  “I figured out right away she wasn’t Claire, and called her on it. Asked her what was going on.”

  “And what’d she tell you?”

  “Not much. She said it was nothing for me to worry about. I told you this before, and I’ve told Augie.”

  “Augie,” Brindle said, smiling and nodding. “We don’t call him that. We call him Chief. Or Sir. And sometimes, behind his back, a few other choice words, but I’m sure I can count on you not to pass that along.” That grin. “As you say, Mr. Weaver, you told me and Ricky this before, but that was before we knew the girl was dead. So that makes whatever you two had to say to each other more relevant.”

  “But it hasn’t changed what we said,” I told him.

  “I guess what I’m wondering is why you really picked up the mayor’s kid in the first place. I mean, a man your age, giving a ride late at night to a teenage girl, that’s not the smartest thing a fella can do. And I’d think, given your line of work, you’d be smarter
than that.”

  I took in a long breath through my nose and let it out slowly. I’d met cops before who tried to rattle you, make you do something stupid. It’s just possible I might have done it myself a time or two back when I wore a uniform. I knew the drill, and the importance of keeping my cool.

  “Claire said she knew my son. I couldn’t say no at that point.”

  “Were you hoping maybe she wouldn’t say no, too?” The grin morphed into a schoolboy sneer.

  “You got something to say, say it.”

  Brindle took a step closer. “You know what my take is on this?”

  “I’m sure whatever it is, it’ll be brilliant.”

  “Looks to me like you picked up one girl, thinking you could have a little fun, and then when a different girl got into the car, you thought ‘Hey, what the hell’s this? These girls trying to mess with me? Play some kind of trick on me?’ Did that piss you off? You were thinking of getting it on with the first girl, that she was just your type, and then the Rodomski girl gets in the car and you’re all, ‘Shit, that’s not what I wanted. I wanted some of that other stuff.’”

  Brindle stopped, waiting for a response. Maybe he wanted me to hit him. The satisfaction would have been too short-lived. When I had no reply, he said, “You want to hear the rest of this?”

  “Knock yourself out.”

  “You got angry with this Hanna girl, and she wanted to get out of the car, like you said, but when she ran, you went after her. Ripped the wig off her head. I can see it right there in your car.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “All my training and years working as a cop, and then a detective, have taught me the best place to hide incriminating evidence is on the backseat of your own car.”

  I sighed. This very long night was catching up with me, and I still had, as the wise poet once said, miles to go before I slept.

  “You’re going to have to find another way home, Mr. Weaver,” Brindle said. “Officer Haines has informed me that we’re to seize your car and search it and I think that’s a pretty good idea.”

  “For Christ’s sake,” I said under my breath. I said to Haines, “You telling me Augie actually asked that my car be taken in?”

  So, no more Mr. Nice Guy. My brother-in-law was through cutting me some slack.

  Haines turned his hands palms up in a what-can-I-tell-you gesture. “I didn’t actually hear it from him directly.”

  “Who then?”

  “I got the message through Marv. Uh, Officer Quinn.”

  So Augie told Quinn, and Quinn told Haines, and Haines told Brindle, who was clearly enjoying himself.

  He said, “The way it looks to me, you’re the last one who saw that girl alive. You’re the one who had the opportunity. The other thing I figure, given the personal tragedy you’ve had lately, things are probably pretty bad on the home front, and chances are you’re not getting any. So—”

  “Come on, man,” Haines said to Brindle.

  Brindle shot him a look and kept going. “So, a nice ripe thing like that, it’d be hard to pass up.”

  It took everything I had.

  “But then,” Brindle continued, “you had to shut her up, right? She couldn’t go around telling people what you’d done to her.”

  I got out my phone.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Calling a cab,” I said. “You said I needed to find another way home, so I take it you’re not arresting me.”

  Not yet, anyway.

  Neither of them said anything. I could see the disappointment in Brindle’s eyes, that I hadn’t taken the bait, that he’d missed out on a chance to slap some cuffs on me for assaulting an officer. He would never know how close he’d come.

  I put the phone to my ear. “Yeah, hi, I’m at Iggy’s out on Danbury and need a lift home. Five minutes? No problem. Name’s Weaver.” I ended the call and slipped the phone back into my jacket. “On their way,” I said, digging out my keys. “Don’t want you having to smash the windshield or anything.” I got my house key off the ring, then tossed the car keys at Brindle. He didn’t react in time, fumbled them comically, and they landed at his feet.

  His face turned red with fury and embarrassment. He glared at me, then at the keys on the pavement, then at me again.

  He’d have to shoot me before I picked them up.

  “I got it,” Haines said, leaning over, snatching them up, and dropping them in Brindle’s open palm.

  It would have been, I had to admit, a stupid thing to die over.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  As promised, a cab was there in five minutes. Haines and Brindle were still standing by their cruiser, babysitting my car until a truck came to tow it away. I gave them a friendly wave as we pulled out of the parking lot.

  “Wonder what the cops are up to,” the woman behind the wheel said as I got buckled into the backseat.

  “Hard to say.”

  “You know what I bet?”

  “What?”

  “Bet that car’s full of drugs.”

  “You never know,” I said, and suddenly had a dark thought. I knew the car had no drugs in it now. I hoped that was still the case when the tow truck arrived.

  “So where we off to?”

  I gave her Bert Sanders’ address.

  “The mayor’s place?” my driver said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Driven him home a couple of times when he wasn’t exactly fit to get behind the wheel. Not that I’m passing judgment. That happens to all of us once in a while. I’m just glad the mayor’s got the sense not to drive home pissed, you know? I like that in my elected officials.”

  We pulled up in front of the house five minutes later. “I might be a while,” I said. There was already seven bucks on the meter, so I handed her a twenty to ensure that she’d hang in.

  “Take your time,” she said. “I might catch a couple winks. Just don’t scare the bejesus out of me when you get back if I’m asleep.”

  There was a five-year-old black Buick in the driveway this time and what looked like one light on, upstairs. Aside from Sanders’ expensive suits, that car and this modest house spoke to an unassuming, middle-class lifestyle. There’s a perception among some that all mayors live in mansions, that they’re chauffeured about in Lincoln Town Cars. Some actually do. An old friend of mine from Promise Falls used to drive that town’s former mayor around in one. But the reality is, in America small towns are more often than not run by regular people. They sit on school boards, town councils, water commissions. These are our neighbors, the folks we run into at Walmart and the DMV and the Exxon station.

  As small-town mayors went, Sanders was undoubtedly more intellectual than most. A former college professor, an author. But he’d persuaded voters he was one of them, still enough of a regular guy to be viewed as one of their own, although tonight’s town hall meeting suggested fewer of them thought of him that way than used to. I hadn’t voted for him, but I hadn’t voted for anyone, in any election, in years. After a while, you stop wanting to reward liars.

  They’re all liars.

  Sanders hadn’t won me over in our face-to-face meeting, either. I wasn’t expecting our second encounter to go any better.

  I jammed my thumb onto the doorbell and kept it there. The chimes just inside the door rang incessantly. Ding-dong. Ding-dong. Ding-dong. Ding-dong.

  Peering through the window, I saw a man come down the stairs, silhouetted by the light filtering down from the second floor. He was tying the sash of a bathrobe and shouting, “Okay! Okay!”

  The front porch light came on over my head, and a second later I heard a bolt being turned and the door swung open.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said, a lock of his hair sticking out sideways. He’d clearly been in bed. “You again. You have any idea what the hell time it is?”

  I placed my pa
lm on the door as he attempted to shut it. “We need to talk again.”

  “Get off my porch.”

  I pushed harder until I had the door open wide enough to step in.

  “I told you, get out,” he said.

  “I guess you haven’t heard,” I said. “There’s been what you might call a development in this little switcheroo Claire and Hanna pulled last night.”

  “I told you I have nothing to say to you about this.”

  “Hanna’s dead.”

  It was like I’d hit him in the head with a two-by-four.

  Stunned silence at first, then, “What?”

  “Hanna Rodomski’s been murdered. I found her body under a bridge. Someone put their hands around her neck and choked the life out of her.”

  Still dumbfounded, he reached for the banister to steady himself. “That’s not—my God, that’s not possible.”

  “I can take you there if you don’t believe me. I doubt they’ll be moving the body for a while yet.”

  “This is . . . this is horrible.” To himself, more than me, he said, “Doesn’t make any sense, just doesn’t . . .”

  “Of course it doesn’t. Why the hell would it make sense?”

  “I just can’t . . . There’s no way they’d go this far.”

  “Who?” I asked. “Who are you talking about?”

  “A drink,” he said, pushing himself away from the stairs and heading off to the kitchen. “I need a drink.”

  He opened the cupboard and took out a small glass and a bottle of scotch, poured himself three fingers and downed it in one gulp. He went to pour another, but I grabbed his hand and forced the bottle back onto the counter.

  “Tell me what the hell’s going on, Sanders.”

  “I don’t know who killed Hanna,” he said. “I swear I don’t.”

  “What about Claire? Where is she?”

  He placed his hand over his forehead, as though all this was giving him a nuclear-grade migraine. But then, almost instantly, he got over it, and gave me a devilish smile.

  “Oh, I get it. I get what’s going on here.” The grin turned into a short laugh. “Very good. You almost had me.”