A Penny for Your Thoughts

by Mindy Starns Clark

  Forty-Five

  We flew along the Northeast Extension at well over 80 miles per hour, Marion and Nick in my car with me, Derek and Sidra following along in their Jaguar. By the time we reached the exit, it wasn’t hard to figure out where the cops had found the Mercedes—there were already at least five police cars surrounding it in the nearby parking lot of a small shopping center. Judith was facing a uniformed policeman, yelling, while another cop seemed to be inspecting the car. A small crowd had gathered along the sidewalk, watching.

  “I want a lawyer!” Judith was hollering as we parked and ran up to the scene. Her eyes were wide and furious, and when she saw us she gasped. “What are you doing here? Mother, tell these people that I don’t know what they’re talking about! I haven’t seen Carlos all day! I’m not saying another thing until I’m allowed to call an attorney!”

  We all just stared at her, stunned that Carlos was nowhere to be found.

  “He’s not here?” Derek yelled in horror.

  “I’m afraid not,” answered one of the policemen.

  “Where’s my son, you monster?” Sidra screamed, and before we could stop her, she had flown at Judith and knocked her to the ground. She pounded on Judith’s face while Judith howled in pain. The officers stepped in to pull Sidra off of Judith, but it took nearly a minute of wrestling to get her loose.

  Everything was chaos with everyone shouting at everyone else. Judith was sitting on the ground now, yelling loudly. The police had herded Sidra and Derek to a nearby police car where they were trying to calm Sidra down. Nick supported Marion, who stood on the fringes of the crowd looking as though she was about to faint.

  “Looks like the backseat latch was broken through from the trunk,” one of the officers called out from the car. “The kid must’ve kicked it out himself, and then climbed from the trunk into the backseat.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Judith screamed. “Carlos was never in my backseat!”

  “Excuse me,” I said finally, stepping over to the officer in charge. “I’m an attorney. May I speak with her privately for a moment?”

  “We just wanna find the kid,” the cop said, his expression pained.

  “Is she under arrest?” I asked.

  “Not yet. Right now, we’re just trying to ask her some questions.”

  “I’m very familiar with the situation,” I said. “Please. Let me speak with her. Just five minutes.”

  He looked at me intently for a moment, then down at Judith.

  “Five minutes,” he said.

  He turned and walked away, joining the other cops examining her car. I walked to Judith and held out a hand to help her up. She took it, brushing the dust from her slacks, picking the rocks from her hair.

  “Callie, what is going on?” she whispered furiously. “I’m just sitting in there in the coffee shop, minding my own business, when suddenly every cop in Pennsylvania is surrounding my car. Sirens and lights are going, and they’re screaming at me to come out of the restaurant with my hands up. I did like they said, and the next thing you know, they’re asking things about Carlos and a kidnapping! I don’t know what they’re talking about. I haven’t even seen Carlos all day.”

  I studied her face, looking into her eyes. The skin around the right eye was swollen and already starting to turn a mottled blue. Whether Judith was being truthful about not seeing Carlos or not, I just wasn’t sure.

  In a steady voice, I explained that Carlos hadn’t shown up at school today.

  “We found a note he left behind,” I said, “telling us that he was going to hide in your trunk. He thought you were up to something, and he was going to spy on you.”

  “In my trunk? Of the Benz?”

  “That’s right, Judith. You say you haven’t seen him, but I don’t understand how that’s possible, and neither do the cops. Carlos obviously isn’t in the trunk now. And yet there are signs that he was at one point. So when would he have gotten out?”

  Judith looked wildly around at the scene.

  “A cigarette,” she said, patting the pocket of her blazer. “I’ve got to have a cigarette.”

  She found the pack in her pocket and pulled one out, slipping it between two dry lips. With trembling fingers, she lit it and then took a deep drag, pulling it out of her mouth to exhale.

  “I was just going out in the country for a drive,” she said, “I never—”

  “Don’t bother lying to me, Judith,” I said tiredly, holding up one hand. “I know everything. I know about your affair with Alan Bennet. I know you’ve been terrorizing your sister-in-law and attempting to destroy your brother’s marriage. I know you’ve been raiding the accounts of Feed the Need and pulling the funds into Smythe Incorporated. So don’t lie to me any more—I know too much. Now, where’s Carlos?”

  She was speechless, her mouth literally hanging open. After a long pause, she closed her mouth, swallowed hard, then looked at me imploringly, lowering her voice to a whisper.

  “Okay,” she said. “Alan and I did those things to Derek and Sidra. And maybe I did have a hand in the money issues with Feed the Need. But I would never, ever in a million years have done anything to harm Carlos. He’s my nephew.”

  “Why the vandalism?” I asked. “Why the black roses and the cut up coat and the ruined car paint?”

  She hesitated, sucking fiercely on her cigarette. Finally, she blew out a thick stream of smoke and lowered her voice to just above a whisper.

  “To distract attention,” she said. “It was Alan’s idea. He said Derek would be less likely to find out about the accounts at work if he were distracted at home. Once we started, it worked so well, we just kept it going. Derek has been, like, in la-la land for two months. He never noticed a thing.”

  I just looked at her.

  “Okay,” she whispered. “I’m not proud of myself. But it was just little things—petty vandalism. Not like kidnapping.”

  “What about the theft from Feed the Need?”

  “We were just restructuring,” she said, but when she saw my face she hesitated then spoke again. “Okay, so we were stripping out funds from Feed the Need. It’s a matter of priorities. We had to find some low-interest—okay, no-interest—money, to bolster up some of our ventures in the clothing business. We didn’t take that much. But Feed the Need is such a monumental waste of money anyway, it didn’t seem like that big of a deal. We would’ve paid it back eventually.”

  “What about the faked records, the closed-down district offices?”

  Judith shrugged.

  “Alan handled all of that. I just gave the authority for the money transfers.”

  “Never mind that by stealing from Feed the Need you stole food from the mouths of starving children all over the world.”

  “Starving children,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Daddy was ready to kiss away his fortune to starving children. Give me a break.”

  I couldn’t even think of a response to that. I wondered what would make a person so totally devoid of conscience.

  “That’s all I can say, Callie,” she told me. “I may have done some dishonest things, but I didn’t do anything to my nephew.”

  “If you’re telling the truth,” I said, “then answer a few questions.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “What were you doing here?”

  She hesitated a moment before speaking.

  “I was meeting Alan. We were going to the Poconos for the weekend.”

  “Here? Why meet here?”

  “This coffee shop is sort of our ‘special’ place,” she said. “First trip away together and all that. It’s right on the way to the Poconos.”

  “Go on.”

  “Not much to tell. I went by Alan’s house this morning to get him, and he said he had some things to take care of first. He wanted me to go on up to the condo, and he would come later, but I hated the thought of that long drive by myself. So he agreed to meet me here, outside of our coffee shop. We were going to leave his car in
this parking lot and pick it up on our way home Sunday.”

  “Tell me every place your car has been today,” I said, wondering where in the chain of events Carlos could’ve gotten out of the car.

  “That’s it. From home, to Alan’s apartment, to here.”

  “No other stops, no getting gas, nothing like that?”

  “No.”

  “Did you open the trunk today at all?”

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “I loaded everything late last night after everybody else was asleep.”

  “Why all the secrecy?”

  “Why do you think?” she replied sharply, inhaling on her cigarette. “I’m Alan’s boss, for goodness’ sake.”

  I had to sigh. The best I could figure, Alan had tricked Judith, sending her off to the Poconos so he could raid her company’s funds while she wasn’t around. It must’ve thrown him a little when she showed up at his house early this morning, ready to drive off together. But then he had offered to meet her here, telling her he had errands to run first.

  A little more fell into place for me then as all that had gone on before began to make sense. Alan had merely used Judith, preying on her competitive urges against her brother to convince her to steal money from Derek’s company and put it into her own. Alan’s ultimate goal wasn’t to drain Feed the Need or to deepen the coffers of Smythe Incorporated. It was to watch the procedure and obtain the codes so that he could eventually move some money himself, this time from Smythe Incorporated into his own hot little hands.

  “How long have you been sitting in the coffee shop, waiting?” I asked finally, my arms folded across my chest.

  Judith’s face colored.

  “A few hours,” she said.

  “Long enough to realize he isn’t coming?”

  She took the last puff of her cigarette and tossed it onto the ground.

  “So he stood me up,” she said, grinding out the cigarette with her toe. “I knew the relationship would burn itself out eventually.”

  “Stood you up?” I asked, thinking about the airplane he had been on, the 1.5 million dollars he almost stole from her company. She didn’t even know yet that he had been running away or that he had been shot. I waved to the cops that we had finished our conversation.

  “Oh, Judith,” I said before walking away. “You don’t know the half of it.”

  Forty-Six

  The police took Judith downtown for questioning by Detectives Sollie and Keegan. The rest of us decided to proceed on the assumption that Judith was telling the truth about Carlos, that the child had had only two opportunities to get out of her car—at Alan’s apartment and here. We split up, with Derek and Sidra and several of the policemen and quite a few helpful onlookers deciding to search the parking lot, the shopping center, and the surrounding area. Marion, Nick, and I decided to head to Alan’s apartment and see if we could turn anything up there.

  Our drive to Alan’s was a little slower than the high-speed chase we had taken to Quakertown. As we drove, I went over and over the day’s events in my mind. I tried to put myself in Carlos’ shoes, tried to think where a boy who fancied himself a spy might have ended up. I hadn’t a clue.

  My greatest fear was that Carlos had somehow slipped out of Judith’s car at Alan’s apartment and been spotted by Alan once Judith was gone. By now, I was convinced that Alan Bennet was capable of almost anything. I didn’t want to imagine what he might do to a little boy who stood in the way of his well-laid plans.

  Once we reached Alan’s part of the suburbs, we followed the police car into a large apartment complex where we found an endless series of three-story block-like structures arranged in and around an irregular parking lot. The apartments seemed bland and impersonal, the kind of place where someone like Alan Bennet could live quietly, unnoticed by anyone, while carrying out his nefarious schemes.

  “Carlos could be anywhere!” Marion sobbed as we pulled to a stop. The task did seem daunting. Such a big world, such a small boy.

  We got out of the car and followed the police to Alan’s apartment. There were already a few uniformed policemen there going through Alan’s things and packing up any relevant evidence. Marion and Nick both looked bereft as they stood in the middle of it all. One officer assured Marion that they had several officers canvassing the entire complex, looking for the boy, though so far they had no reason to believe he had ever been there.

  After we looked around, I suggested to Marion that they didn’t need our help here and that we might be in their way. She looked ill and exhausted, and I told her that I thought she might do better to go home and talk more with the police there. Dejected, she let Nick lead her back to the car. Then we all got in and headed for the Smythes’ house.

  By the time we got there, it was nearly five in the evening. The house was swarming with cops, but there was no sign of Carlos anywhere. They asked Marion for photos, and I overheard one cop say that if they hadn’t turned anything up in another two hours, they would try bringing in a K-9 unit.

  I found a room that was quiet and empty and pulled out my cell phone to call Detective Keegan. The receptionist wouldn’t let me through to either him or Detective Sollie, so I tracked down Duane Perskie. I thought he would be angry with me for not contacting him again after our early morning phone call, but in the meantime he had heard about all that had happened to me today, which sort of let me off the hook.

  “So do you know anything at all about the information they’re getting from Monty Redburn?” I asked. “I’m so afraid he may have had something to do with Carlos’ disappearance.”

  “Redburn was shot in the leg when they apprehended him,” he said. “But they were able to question him a little bit, post-op.”

  “And?”

  “And Redburn’s been working for Alan Bennet, first as a plant in the Smythes’ home, then lately as a tail on you. But he’s a real piece of work, Callie. He denies trying to kill you this morning—said he was just trying to have a little fun.”

  I felt a surge of anger, remembering the man’s glee as he attempted to run me down on the interstate. Yeah, he was having fun all right.

  “A plant at the Smythes’ home—why?”

  “We’re not sure, but we think it must’ve been to steal some item of value from the house. Unfortunately for him, Redburn made the mistake of copping a number of smaller items as well. The Smythes found out and let him go. Bennet didn’t want anything more to do with him until you showed up and started digging around. Then he needed some muscle, so he called Redburn back in.”

  “At the airport, Redburn kept calling Alan a liar. What was that about?”

  “Apparently, Bennet’s instructions for the day were for Redburn to keep an eye on you at all costs. Redburn knew something big was going down, but in the end, he was supposed to be a part of it. Bennet had promised him that when all was said and done, they would be driving out of town together—but Bennet planned on flying off on his own.”

  “If that’s the case, though, how did Redburn know Alan would be at the airport?”

  “He didn’t. He was waiting in the Smythe parking lot, hoping to spot you again. He finally picked you up as you were leaving and followed you out there. You led him straight to the airport. Then when he realized what was going on, he acted out of anger. His lawyer’s in there right now, talking temporary insanity. But the general consensus is that the rifle he had with him was meant for you. Luckily, he went after Alan first.”

  I swallowed hard. Real danger had come a little too close.

  “What about Carlos?” I asked. “Does Redburn know anything about Carlos?”

  “He swears not. And I’m inclined to believe him, though that’s one of the few things to come out of his mouth tonight that any of us believe.”

  We talked a few minutes more, with the only other surprising information being how Alan Bennet and Monty Redburn had met in the first place. Apparently, the two men had been cellmates at Graterford State Prison a few years ago. Seems the police had
been able to turn up a much more detailed—and truthful—history of Alan Bennet than I had.

  I thanked Duane for his help and hung up the phone. I stared into space for a moment as I continued to piece together the facts in this case.

  Alan Bennet had left two people hanging today—Judith Smythe and Monty Redburn—while he attempted to skip out on both of them. That directed my thoughts toward Angelina, yet another person he’d been stringing along. I wondered, had she been in on all of this, or had he hung her out to dry as well?

  An idea struck me, and I put away my phone and sought out Nick. He seemed quite agitated, and I didn’t blame him. Everyone was concentrating on finding the missing Carlos, but Nick was equally concerned about his missing sister. I told him I had an idea, and I asked him to walk with me to her room.

  When we got there, I headed straight for the mirror, pulling down the sexy photo of her smiling at the camera, her hair loose and blowing in the wind.

  “Who took this picture?” I asked, holding it out to Nick.

  “I do not know,” he replied, glancing at the photo.

  I showed him the back with the scribbled hearts and the words “our special place.” This time, he studied it, frowning.

  “I have no idea,” he said. “‘Our special place’?”

  “Does Angelina have a boyfriend?”

  “No. Not that I know of.”

  He seemed to be telling the truth, which meant he wasn’t aware of his sister’s relationship with Alan.

  “Do you know when this was taken?” I asked. “Or where?”

  He handed back the photo to me.

  “Looks like Valley Forge to me. The big arch monument there.”

  “Oh?”

  “As for when, it would have to have been some time in the last few months, because she has only been that thin for a short while. My sister used to be heavy, you know. Very overweight.”