Tonight I Said Goodbye lp-1

by Michael Koryta

  Joe rubbed his temples gently with his thumb and index finger. “So Hubbard’s so impressed by the work Weston did, he wants to hire him personally, even though the guy screwed up his marriage and likely ended his affair?”

  “Why not? Hubbard didn’t make millions by being petty; he made them by being smart as hell, and ruthless. If he needed an investigator and he liked what he saw of Weston’s abilities, I think he might pursue him. Maybe he wanted to get him off the wife’s team to keep future affairs quiet.”

  “That’s possible. I definitely don’t believe Weston continued to work for the wife. She’s having her husband’s attorneys write the guy checks? No way.”

  I got off the couch and went into the kitchen to make some coffee. I put a good Guatemalan blend in to brew and then returned to the living room with a glass of water for Joe.

  “When was the last time you dusted in this dump?” he asked, tracing the edge of the coffee table with his fingertip. He lifted it up and showed the gray grime it had gathered.

  “Take off your apron and leave it at the door when you come in my apartment,” I said.

  “You find out anything on the Russians?”

  The coffee was percolating now, clicking and clacking coming from the kitchen, the rich scent drifting into the living room.

  “Dainius Belov,” I said. “That name mean anything to you?”

  “Of course it does.”

  I frowned. “Am I the only person who hasn’t heard of this guy?”

  “You don’t know Dainius? You’ve got to be kidding me, LP. How the hell did you do two years as my partner and stay this stupid?”

  “Who is he?”

  “Dainius is the closest thing to a don this city has. Of course, he’s not a don, that’s the Italian Mafia, but he’s the Russians’ answer to one. He’s been here for fifteen years now, maybe more. Don’t you even remember the Chester Avenue auto bust?”

  “Nope.”

  He groaned and rolled his eyes to the ceiling as if searching the heavens for help in dealing with his moronic partner. “LP, I’m ashamed of you. The Chester Avenue bust was the biggest car-theft success the department had in the last decade.”

  “I didn’t work on car thefts, I worked narcotics,” I said.

  “So did I, but I’m not completely clueless. They found an old warehouse out on the east side, off Chester Avenue, with about twenty stolen cars inside. Arrested two of Dainius’s soldiers, but they couldn’t touch him, because no one would testify against him. Still, it was a big find, headline news, made our detectives look good.”

  I vaguely remembered the recovery of quite a few stolen vehicles, but I certainly hadn’t connected it to Belov. That had happened in my early years on the force, when I was working nights and didn’t know many of the detectives.

  “Is he still involved with car theft?”

  “As far as I know he is, but he certainly isn’t limited to it. He’s got organized muscle and big money, I can tell you that.” He drank some more of the water and stared at the bottom of the glass as if he didn’t like what he saw there. “Are you telling me Dainius is connected to those jackasses who smashed up Ambrose’s car?”

  “That’s what I was told.” I explained my conversation with Sellers to him, then went back to the kitchen to pour my coffee. When I came back to the couch he looked grim.

  “I don’t like the way this thing smells,” he said. “Jeremiah Hubbard and Dainius Belov? There’s nothing good coming out of that combination.”

  “Figure they’re linked?”

  He nodded. “Oh, yeah. As far as I’m concerned, they’re linked already.”

  “By?”

  He looked at me. “By Wayne Weston’s corpse.”

  I nodded. “Think the Russians could have the wife and daughter?”

  “Possibly, although I can’t think of any reason they’d have to keep them alive. Of course, right now, I can’t think of any reason for any of it, because we don’t know shit.” He shook his head. “If I remember right—and I always do—several of Belov’s boys used to be with Spetznatz. You know, the Soviet answer to our special forces and covert operations units.”

  “Sounds like a pretty dangerous bunch.”

  “Yeah.” Joe grinned. “But at least we know what we’re up against. They don’t.”

  CHAPTER 6

  WAYNE WESTON’S home in Brecksville had an air of modest elegance. The large brick ranch was impressive, and clearly expensive, but not overly extravagant. A blacktop driveway led past a row of spruce trees. Traces of snow remained in the shadows under the trees, where the sun hadn’t been able to reach. There was a detached two-car garage set slightly behind the house. Everything about the home and yard gave an impression of serenity and safety. The police had searched every inch of the property, but Joe and I agreed that we wanted to see it, to try to absorb a little more of who Wayne Weston was, and how he and his family had lived. As the sun came up that morning and people with normal jobs made their commute to the office, Joe and I arrived at a dead man’s house to soak in the ambience. It was a hell of a way to start the day.

  John Weston’s Buick was parked in front of the garage, and I pulled in beside it. Behind the house was a deck with a propane grill and a picnic table. We found John Weston sitting on the picnic table, staring at the remains of a snowman in the backyard.

  “My granddaughter made it,” Weston said, his voice thick, as we joined him on the deck. “The day before she . . . before she went missing.”

  The snowman had melted slowly, and was hardly two feet high. The carrot nose had slipped as the snow melted and loosened, and now it sat in the grass. There was a pink ski cap perched on the snowman’s head, and the two rock eyes were still in place, staring back at John Weston, seemingly taunting him. I’m still here, the snowman seemed to say, but she’s not.

  Weston took his eyes away from it with an effort and handed us a key. “That’s for the front door. You go in, take all the time you need. Look at whatever you want, I don’t care. But I can’t go in that place.”

  That place. Like a small child afraid to go down the cellar steps. A child would be afraid of what he might find in the cellar, though. John Weston was afraid of what he knew he would not find in the house.

  Joe took the key, and we left the deck and walked back to the front of the house and let ourselves in. The front door opened into an entryway with hardwood floors. A hallway led away to the left, and a small sitting room with a couch, a wooden rocking chair, and an antique sewing machine was on the right. There were a few pictures on the walls, and a small table with back issues of Time, but the room appeared to have been more for show than use. We went right.

  Behind the sitting room was the kitchen. We rifled through the cupboards and drawers. The refrigerator was full of food; the freezer had two New York strip steaks and an unopened box of Popsicles. Everything was neat and well organized and gave the impression that the residents had every intention of returning home to their normal lives and routines.

  Next to the kitchen was a dining room with an oak table that would probably seat twenty. Past the dining room was a sunken living room with comfortable, well-worn furniture and a high-end entertainment system. This was the room where Weston’s body had been found, but you’d never be able to guess it now. We went over it carefully, turning the cushions upside down and opening the videotape boxes, but it was a formality. The police wouldn’t have missed anything. It was the only way Joe and I knew to search a room, though, and it beat standing around and feeling the emptiness. We finished the living room, returned to our starting point, and went left, down the hall. We had not spoken since entering the house. The silence was a heavy thing. The house seemed to hold a sense of a family; it made you feel as if at any second the door might swing open and a mother’s voice and a child’s laughter would fill the home.

  Four doors opened off the hall. The first was to a bathroom, the second to an office with a flat desk, a file cabinet, and two bookshel
ves. There was a large empty space on the desk, and several electrical cords lay coiled on the floor. Weston’s computer had likely sat there until the police removed it. The bookshelves held some family pictures, a framed program from the ’53 World Series, and some John Grisham and Dean Koontz novels. We started on the desk drawers and the file cabinet.

  I took the file cabinet and found two of the drawers completely empty. Others held files containing warranty information on various household appliances, insurance records, old high school yearbooks, equipment catalogs, and numerous other items that bore no relation to Weston’s work. The only file of interest I found held his military papers. His discharge sheet included the specialist’s training he had received, and there was plenty to list. Weston had certification as a combat diver, airborne specialist, long-range reconnaissance specialist, and demolitions specialist. He was qualified as an expert in both handgun and rifle marksmanship. It was a hell of a résumé. My father had frequently boasted about his Marine Expeditionary Unit training, but it couldn’t touch Weston’s.

  “Find anything?” Joe asked, looking over my shoulder.

  “Just this.” I handed him the file, and we went through it together. Weston had earned some service ribbons, but there were no details about the missions. That’s how it goes with special operations soldiers. He’d received an honorable discharge.

  “Pretty impressive,” Joe said. “But it doesn’t help us much. Nothing worthwhile in the desk, either, unless you need Scotch tape or pencils. This card was on the desk, though. Check out the initials.”

  He passed me a plain white envelope with Weston’s address on it. The postmark was from early February, just a few weeks before Weston died. There was no return address. Inside was a simple but elegant piece of stationery with a gold border. Someone had written an inscription with a black fountain pen: “Many thanks on yet another job well done. It had the intended effect.” There was no explanation of what the “it” was, nor what effect the “it” had created. The note was signed with the initials J.E.H.

  “Hubbard?” I said.

  Joe shrugged. “I have no idea what his middle initial is, but it’s possible. Let’s hang on to the note. Maybe we can check the handwriting out.”

  “And if it’s Hubbard’s writing?”

  “Then it’s still worthless, but at least we know who to blame.”

  We moved on to the next rooms. Joe took the master bedroom, and I went into Elizabeth Weston’s bedroom. It was a bright room with pink walls and lots of stuffed animals. The bedspread had kittens on it. A large plastic dollhouse stood in the corner of the room. Everything about it was happy and innocent. The window looked out on the backyard, and I could see John Weston, still sitting on the picnic table staring at the snowman his granddaughter had made. The sun was out now, and the snowman was glistening as it continued to melt. Weston watched it, and I thought that he could at least have the satisfaction of watching it disappear slowly. To him, that probably meant something right now.

  A piece of fishing line was tied to the curtain rod, and from it a small, heart-shaped crystal prism hung in the window, reflecting the sun and distorting the light, bathing the white curtains with rainbows. I took it in my hand and ran my thumb over the chiseled surface, then removed the fishing line from the curtain rod and put it in my pocket. It was a spontaneous decision, and I wasn’t sure what had provoked it. I just wanted to be sure I never forgot this room and this little girl.

  I went through the closets and the drawers, moving quickly, pushing past clothing, board games, and toys. I slammed the last drawer shut without finding anything and sat on the edge of the bed, exhaling heavily. I hadn’t realized I’d been holding my breath. I didn’t want to breathe in this little girl’s room. Maybe, if I didn’t breathe, I could walk back out and tell myself that I’d never been inside, it had never been real, a five-year-old was not missing, her father was not dead.

  As I sat on the bed, feeling a weariness that came not from fatigue or stress but from the realization that I lived in a world where children could vanish from happy, innocent rooms like this, I reached out and began to sort through the stuffed animals. There were dozens of them on the floor, ranging from bears to rabbits, with a special emphasis on kittens.

  I turned a few of them over, squeezed them, felt their softness, and looked into their unblinking plastic eyes as if they could tell me something. Several of the animals were wearing outfits; some made noises when you squeezed them; others had movable limbs. One scholarly bear was wearing glasses and had a plastic piece of chalk in one paw and a plastic chalkboard tucked under his arm. I pulled the bear closer and saw that the chalkboard was the cover for a small booklet that closed with a snap. I slid the booklet out from where it was tucked under the bear’s paw, opened it, and discovered the little book was a diary. The first entry, in a woman’s writing, read: “Merry Christmas, Betsy! Love, Mom and Dad.”

  I flipped through the rest of it. The pages were filled with a child’s drawings and writing. There were quite a few stick figures, lots of hearts, and the name Betsy, all done with various colors of crayon. Every now and then she wrote a few crudely constructed sentences. “Mom made me soop and greeled cheese,” read one entry. There were maybe five or six entries for each month. On every page she’d used, the girl had carefully written the date. Her spelling of “April” was perfect, but “February” had given her fits. I continued turning pages until I reached the last entry. It had been made on March fourth, the day before Weston’s body was found and the search for Betsy Weston and her mother became the city’s hottest news story.

  Joe poked his head in the door. “The bedroom was a waste. You got anything worth looking at?”

  I didn’t turn around. “They’re alive, Joe.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Betsy Weston wrote this in her diary the night she disappeared,” I said.

  Joe crossed the room and knelt beside me, then read the diary entry, written in a child’s scrawl with a green crayon: Tonite I said goodby.

  CHAPTER 7

  “TONIGHT I said goodbye.” Joe read it aloud and then raised his eyes and looked at me. “What the hell does that mean?”

  “It means she knew she was leaving,” I said.

  “That’s a beautiful thought,” he said. “But you don’t have much evidence to base it on.”

  “She wrote something, or drew something, every day this year, Joe. On the night she and her mother disappear, she writes this, and you don’t think it means anything?”

  He looked at the entry again, then sighed, his eyes thoughtful. “I’m not saying it doesn’t mean anything. I’m just wondering how she possibly could have known to write it. Said goodbye to what? Her house or her dad?”

  “Or both,” I said.

  “Keep the book,” Joe said. “But don’t let the old man see it. The last thing we want is for him to be any more convinced they’re alive.”

  We left the house and checked the garage. A Toyota sport utility vehicle and a Lexus remained, as well as a collection of tools and more toys. Julie Weston and her daughter hadn’t left in one of the family cars. But that didn’t mean they couldn’t have left alive.

  We returned to John Weston and gave him the key.

  “Find anything helpful?” he asked.

  Joe and I exchanged a glance, then Joe said, “Just seeing the home is helpful, Mr. Weston.”

  He looked at Joe blankly and didn’t respond. We left, promising to be in touch. When I pulled out of the driveway he was still sitting on the table. I wondered if he’d be there all day.

  “Well,” Joe said as I drove, “that wasn’t much help. You think they’re alive now, because of one sentence written in a little girl’s diary. And, while I respect that hunch, it still isn’t any help in finding them.”

  “No,” I admitted, “it isn’t.” I pulled onto Brecksville Road and headed north, back toward the city, following roughly the same path the Cuyahoga River takes as it winds its way toward th
e heart of downtown and into the Flats. The sun was out, and the digital thermometer on the rearview mirror said it was forty-seven degrees outside—not warm enough for me, but the warmest it had been in months. The winter was still clinging to us, refusing to give in to the spring. It had been a long, nasty one, with nearly a hundred inches of snowfall and consistently low temperatures that felt even colder with the frigid winds that whipped in off the lake. Around the first of March it had begun to wear at me. I was annoyed by the lingering traces of snow now, irate at each forecast of another storm, frustrated with the way the cold air squeezed my lungs on every run.

  “Next move?” Joe said, interrupting my thoughts. I took my eyes off the van in front of me briefly and glanced at him, not understanding.

  “You spacing out on me?” he said. “What do you think our next move should be?”

  I returned my eyes to the road and shrugged. “I don’t know. We’ve got some possibilities now, but no facts, nothing close to hard evidence. Seems to me we need to shake something up a little, see what we can stir up.”

  “That sounds about right,” Joe said. “You’ve always favored the loose cannon approach in the past.”

  I smiled. “When in doubt, shoot it out.”

  “Brilliant slogan.” He shook his head. “So, who are we going to shake up? You want to find the Russians, take a bat to their car?”

  “Have to save something for tomorrow,” I said. “I figured we’d start with Jeremiah Hubbard.”

  “Take a bat to his car?”

  “Only if he refuses to see us.”

  Joe twisted in the seat, looking to see if I was serious. “You really want to talk to Hubbard today?”

  “Why not? He—or his associates, if we want to be anal about it—were paying Weston to do something recently. That’s about the only thing close to a fact we have. Might as well take it and run with it.”