“Yeah, that Drew,” I said, thinking suddenly that maybe it wasn’t such a good idea. Derek might have qualms about pairing up with someone who was capable of that, even if the man’s actions had saved his parents’ lives.
But Derek said, “Cool. Sure.”
I called Randy. “Here’s the deal,” I said. “You can have me for a few weeks, till I’ve paid off Natalie. So I’m already putting in my notice. That should give you enough time to find someone else you can live with for the long term.”
“I knew you’d say yes,” he said. “You know why?”
I had to ask. “Why, Randy?”
“Because when you’re with me, you’re always being reminded of how much better a person you are.”
The son of a bitch was generally a stranger to the truth, but he seemed to be onto something there.
Derek spoke briefly on the phone with Penny, but her parents cut the call short. I gave them the benefit of the doubt and concluded they didn’t still believe our son was guilty of murder. They just didn’t want their daughter hanging out with a boy who’d figured out how to secure a makeout pad for a week.
We had ice cream around ten, and then Derek said he wanted to go to bed. He’d hardly slept since his arrest. He’d told us only a little about what it was like living in the Promise Falls jail. Those days were clearly not something he wanted to relive at the moment. Maybe some other time.
When we turned out the lights that night, we felt as though we might be seeing some light at the end of the proverbial tunnel.
Funny how wrong you can be about these things.
THIRTY-TWO
TECHNICALLY SPEAKING,” I told Derek before we headed out Monday—we’d spent Sunday catching our breath and doing as little as possible—to pick up Drew, “you’re the boss. It’s your dad’s truck and equipment, you’re the boss’s son. But don’t go telling Drew what to do or anything. You’re a kid—a smart kid, getting smarter every day—but you’re a kid, and ordering an older guy like that around, it gets kind of awkward. Do you get what I’m saying?”
“Yeah,” said Derek. “Don’t be an asshole.”
“Bingo,” I said. “Mom and I will take the car, you follow us in the truck, once we’ve got Drew and I’ve introduced you, your mom’s going to drop me off down at city hall.”
“I can’t believe you’re really going back to work for him,” Derek said. “I mean, I’m not saying whether you should or not, I’m just surprised.”
“Me too,” I said. “But you do what you have to do.”
“I can pay you back,” Derek said. “I’ll work for free, that’ll save some money. It was my fault. Being in the house. That’s what got me into trouble. You and Mom shouldn’t have to pay for my stupidity.”
“Get in the truck,” I said.
Ellen and I got in her Mazda, Ellen behind the wheel, and I gave her directions that led us to Drew, standing on the curb in his usual spot. Ellen pulled over, I got out and waited for Derek to pull over, get out and join us.
“My son,” I said. “Drew, this is Derek; Derek, this is Drew.”
They shook hands.
“I’d have called and explained, but I realized I didn’t even have your number,” I said.
“And I don’t have a cell,” Drew said. “Not really money for it in my budget at the moment.” To Derek, he said, “So, you’re out. Congratulations.”
“I’m going to spend the next few weeks working for the mayor’s office.” I couldn’t bring myself to actually say Randy’s name, not after Drew’s judgmental comments the day before. “Derek’s going to fill in for me in the meantime. He knows the drill, the customers, all that stuff.”
“Okay,” Drew said.
“So, I’ve gotta take off,” I said. “Talk to you at the end of the day,” I said to Derek, gave him a hug he wasn’t too embarrassed to receive, then walked back to the car. Ellen slipped out, gave Derek a hug of her own, then settled back in behind the wheel.
The last thing I heard was Derek saying to Drew, “So, like, my dad says you robbed a bank.”
Maybe I should have given him just a little more advice.
I WAS DRESSED a little differently for work today. Black dress slacks, black shoes, off-white dress shirt, gray sports jacket. I had a tie rolled up and tucked into my pocket for emergencies, but given that the heat was still with us, I was going to try to get away with an open collar.
I had forgotten that there’s a lot of sitting around in this job, and that was how I spent most of my morning. I got caught up on news with some of the office staff, who were both sympathetic and congratulatory about our home situation.
Shortly after lunch, Randy said we had just a few items on the agenda for the afternoon. He was trying to keep his schedule light, since tomorrow was his news conference, where he intended to officially announce that he was running for Congress.
The first thing on today’s schedule was a car dealership opening, where the mayor cut a ribbon and ate some cake and glad-handed and had his picture taken pretending to close a door on his hand. I hung out by the Grand Marquis, preferring to keep as far away from this sort of stuff as possible, although I did score a free barbecued hot dog.
After that, we were off to the Swanson House, the place where single mothers and their babies could find support and a place to live. This was the mayor’s second stop here since barging in unannounced that night the week before. He’d already cleaned the rug he threw up on, but now he was there to present the home’s manager, Gillian Metcalfe, with a check for five thousand dollars. I was pretty sure the city came up with more than five thousand a year for Swanson House—it was probably more in the range of fifty or a hundred grand—but if you handed it all over at once, that tended to limit the number of photo ops. Better ten to twenty stops with a five-thousand-dollar check each time.
Randy was visibly pissed as we walked up the sidewalk to Swanson House. “I don’t see any media,” he said. “You see any fucking media?”
I did not. There were no TV vans, no cars with the logo of the local newspaper plastered to the door. Could it be that the mayor handing over a measly five grand to the single mothers’ residence wasn’t particularly newsworthy?
I could recall times in my previous stint with Randall Finley when, if he showed up at a scheduled event that was clearly going to have less of a publicity payoff than anticipated, he walked. He’d been invited one time to a high school graduation ceremony, but when he arrived and learned from school officials that he wasn’t sitting on the stage as the students came up to receive their diplomas, but instead in the front row, where he would not be on view 100 percent of the time by the parents in attendance, he bolted.
“I gave up two other events that would give me better exposure than this one, now that you’ve got me sitting down with the regular people,” he told the astonished head of student services. “If you’re not putting me on the stage here, I can probably still catch one of them.”
At the time, I sidled up to him and whispered, “People will never forget this if you blow them off.”
And he’d said to me, “And where were you mayor, exactly?”
But Randy wasn’t going to pull any of that kind of shit with Gillian Metcalfe. She had media savvy. Dumping the Swanson House’s soiled carpet on the steps of town hall was evidence of that. So even if no one from the press showed, Randy was going to make sure she was happy, or at least as happy as he was likely to make her with a five-thousand-dollar check. If Gillian was smart, and she was, she’d give that check a limited-enough look of approval to guarantee there’d be another one before too long.
While the mayor was shaking her hand and trying to make small talk as she smiled under duress, I wandered down to the house kitchen, which was about twice the size of one in a standard home. There were two stoves, two oversized fridges, a couple of microwaves, loads of counter space, as well as half a dozen high chairs and plastic bibs scattered about. I could hear one, possibly two, small babies cryi
ng upstairs, but the child sitting in one of the high chairs in the kitchen was looking very content as his mother fed him a gooey white mixture I took to be pablum.
“Hey,” I said, trying not to intrude, but not wanting to be rude, either.
The baby’s mother glanced at me, flashed me a smile, but she had to focus on getting the tiny plastic spoon into the mouth of her baby, who looked about ten months old, I guessed.
There was something about the mother that made me look at her more closely. Twenty years old, maybe, but there was still a chance she was in her teens. Dirty blond hair that hung to her shoulders, brown eyes, a stud so small I almost missed it in her nose. A couple of forehead zits, pale skin, no lipstick, a sharp cleft in her chin.
I was trying to place her, almost certain I’d seen her before somewhere. Her outfit—track pants and sweatshirt—was wrong. This wasn’t the getup I’d seen her in before.
“Your baby’s beautiful,” I said, moving closer.
The young woman beamed. “Thank you. His name is Sean.”
“Hey, Sean,” I said. Pablum squirted back out of his mouth and dropped onto the high chair tray. He glanced down, stuck his hand in it.
“And I’m Linda,” the mother said.
“Linda, hi,” I said. I extended a hand. “I’m Jim. Jim Cutter.”
We shook hands. Bits of baby food stuck to my palm.
“Hi, Jim,” she said. “So, you work for the mayor?”
On her way into the kitchen with the baby, she’d seen Randy chatting up Metcalfe.
“I drive him around,” I said. “Actually, this is my first day in a couple of years, working for him. I’m sort of filling in. His other driver, he’s kind of unavailable.”
“He came in here last week and threw up,” Linda said. “Not the driver, the mayor.”
“So I heard. It’s kind of his specialty.”
“Throwing up?”
“Well, making an ass of himself. He has a wide repertoire of techniques at his disposal.”
Linda smiled, got some more pablum on the spoon. “Yeah, no kidding.”
The way she said it suggested she had some familiarity with the mayor’s leadership style.
“You look like you want to ask me something,” Linda said. “You want to know why I’m here, why I haven’t got a husband.”
It was true, I was about to ask her something. But not that. “I don’t think that would be any of my business,” I said.
“It’s okay,” she said. “This guy, Eric, he got me pregnant, and I think maybe he would have married me, but he got sent to Iraq, and I was thinking that when he got back, he’d be a father to this boy, even if he didn’t actually want to marry me, but then he got killed.”
“I’m sorry.”
“He was in a helicopter, and it went down.”
“I’m sorry,” I said again.
“It’s a stupid war,” Linda said.
“That’s what a lot of people think,” I said.
“So I didn’t have a job or any money, and they’re letting me and my baby stay here until I get myself back on my feet, you know?”
“Sure.” I paused. “You’re right, I was going to ask you something, though, but not that. Something else.”
“Oh yeah?”
“You look familiar to me. I feel as though we’ve met before somewhere.”
She looked away from Sean long enough to study my face, then went back to the feeding. “Yeah, I might have met you once,” she said. “It’s possible. I’ve met a lot of people.” She hesitated. “A lot of men.”
Then I remembered. She was the girl standing outside the room, in the hallway, the night I found Randall Finley with the underage hooker. Linda, I’d assumed, was earning her money the same way as Sherry Underwood, at least that was what the tight top, short skirt, and heels had suggested to me at the time.
“You used to . . . I mean, I seem to remember that you . . .” How did one put this to a young mother feeding her baby?
“Fucked guys for money? Don’t worry,” she said, nodding at Sean. “He can barely say ‘Mommy’ yet.” She studied me again. “But I don’t think I ever did you.”
“No,” I said. “You didn’t.” I sat down at the table so she wouldn’t have to crane her neck up to look at me. “So you managed to get off the street.”
“Yeah,” she said, then gestured around her. “I moved up to this. A home for knocked-up teens.”
I smiled. “Don’t put yourself down.”
“I’ve been a screwup most of my life,” she said. “But I really want to get it together, especially now.” Her cheeks swelled with pride as she looked at her baby. “I’d like to finish high school and go to college.”
“What would you like to do?” I asked.
“I’d kind of like to get into journalism,” she said. “I’ve seen a lot of shit, ways people live that they shouldn’t have to, that people should be writing more about. I don’t think most people really care about street kids or what happens to them. Believe me, I know what I’m talking about. I’d like to try and change that.”
“Good for you,” I said, trying hard not to sound patronizing, because I meant it. For a moment neither of us said anything. Finally, I said, “You knew a girl named Sherry, didn’t you?”
“Sherry?”
“Sherry Underwood,” I said. “Back then, when you were, what do you call it, a working girl?”
“Hooker,” Linda said.
I smiled. “Hooker. Back then, you hung out with her? Worked together?”
She thought back. “Yeah. Sherry. Shit, haven’t thought of her in a while. She was a couple of years younger than me. Kind of young to be out there, but what are you going to do, right? You need to eat.”
“So you knew her.”
“A little.”
“Do you know what ever happened to her?” I asked.
“Why?” Linda asked.
I hesitated. How to explain. “Well,” I said, “I was around one night, when she was in a bit of trouble. She should have gone to a hospital. She’d gotten kicked in the nose. I tried to talk her into going to see a doctor but she wouldn’t do it.”
“Oh yeah,” said Linda. “I remember that. You were there.” She glanced out the kitchen door. “So was that guy out there handing over the check.”
My eyebrows went up. “You remember him?”
“You’d be surprised how many people I remember. Some more important than him. Anyway, I can tell you why she wouldn’t have gone to the hospital. You sit there all night, you lose a lot of money, plus it’s not like we had any kind of health plan, you know?”
“Sure. She still around? Is Sherry still working the street?”
“I don’t know,” Linda said. “I got out of that before she did. So our paths didn’t cross that much. But I saw her one time, not long after I got knocked up, downtown, in Kelly’s?” Another downtown diner. “She didn’t look so good.”
“What do you mean?’
“I don’t know,” Linda said. “She was looking really rough. She was, like, sixteen or seventeen, looked like a hundred. Some kids, they handle the street okay, but others, it wears them down, they get into drugs, meth sometimes. Or they get AIDS or something like that.” She said it very matter-of-factly.
“So things weren’t going that well for her,” I said. “You think she still hangs out down there?”
Linda was using a damp cloth to clean Sean’s face. “Like, I kind of doubt it,” she said. “Given how she looked last time I saw her, unless someone got to her and helped her get her life back on track, she’s a goner.”
“Dead? You think she’s dead?”
Linda shrugged. “Shit, who knows? Unless she managed to turn her life around on her own, which is not very likely. I mean, come on, what are the odds anyone else is going to take the time to help some dumb street kid get her life back in order? It’s like I said, most people, they really don’t want to deal with people like us.”
THIRTY-THREE
Back in the car, he said, “Okay, so we might as well go back to the office. I got a committee meeting at two, then at three-thirty I got this tree planting at a school.”
“Sounds nice,” I said.
“Fucking pain in the ass,” he said. “Every goddamn school in the city is on this green kick, you know? They make the kids stop bringing plastic bags to school, they think they’ve solved global warming. Then their mommies come pick them up after school in their fucking Hummers.”
Once in a while, Randy actually had an insight that was valid.
He said, “So, who you think did it?”
I had been thinking about Derek and Drew, wondering how their first day working together was shaping up, how Derek’s second day out of jail was going. “Huh?” I said.
“Lance. Who offed Lance?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“I’m thinking, jealous husband? Dope dealer? Some pimp he tried to get out of paying? Gambling debts, maybe? Or what about this?” He leaned forward in his seat, all conspiratorial, like there was someone else in the car with us. “Maybe a gay lover.”
“I don’t know,” I said again.
Finley settled back in his seat. “The thing is, despite all the time we spent together, I didn’t really know all that much about him.”
“Why do you think that is?” I asked.
In my rearview mirror, I saw him shrug. “I guess I really didn’t give a shit,” he said. “To be honest with you, Cutter, other people’s lives, they don’t really interest me that much.”
There was a campaign slogan in there somewhere, I thought. My cell rang.
“It’s Barry,” the police detective said. “You want to grab a coffee?”
“I’ve got a bit of a window this afternoon. Mayor doesn’t have to go out till about three to plant a tree.” I’d been thinking about Kelly’s, where Linda said she’d last seen Sherry Underwood. It was close to city hall. I mentioned it to Barry.
Too Close to Home Page 29
