“Great,” I said. “Perfect. Because I’m in need of some information that they have.”
He leaned back in his chair and studied me. He might’ve been good looking if he didn’t dress like he was going as a hoodrat for Halloween—oversized T-shirt, baggy jeans, flat-billed New Orleans Saints cap, a tangle of fake-looking gold chains around his neck. That he was from the richest, Waspiest family in the southern half of the Columbus metro area was evident only in the fact that he’d been running this business for several years despite having only the one client.
Kenny said, “Information?”
“There’s a young lady who matched with someone from Missed the Bus. She’s missing.”
“Shit.”
I nodded, solemnly. I knew it would make Kenny keep talking and it did.
He said, “And you think—the app—you’re saying you think she met someone through the app who … missing-ed her?”
“Yes.”
“Aw, man.” He took off his hat and ran his hands over his buzzed hair. “That is not good news.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“So you want, what? You want to know who she matched with?”
I nodded. “It might help me find her.”
“Are the police involved?”
“They don’t have to be,” I said, which didn’t answer the question, but he appeared to accept it.
“Okay, because I think it’s safe to say that we’d def prefer they aren’t. You know?”
“Sure.”
“I mean, maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with the app at all.”
“Maybe not. But maybe so, Kenny.”
He sighed and put his hat back on, adjusting it in his reflection on the glass surface of his nearly empty desk. “Okay. I’ll see what I can find out for you. I just need the email she signed up with. Just, please, keep this on the DL.”
“Def,” I said.
As I walked back to the car, it started snowing, sloppy, silver-dollar-sized flakes. The sky was grey-white and thick-looking; it was probably going to snow all day, and it was probably going to stick. I got into the driver’s seat, brushing snow from my hair, just as my phone rang.
Catherine.
I’d wanted her to call so bad that I almost refused to answer it on principle, but then I answered anyway. “Hi, stranger,” I said.
She made an impatient sound. “You know, you can call me whenever you want.”
“I seem to remember you making a big deal about how you’d call me—”
“Are we seriously discussing who’s supposed to call whom?”
I felt my eyebrows pressing together and I rubbed the spot between them, a prickly headache zinging to life. “Well, you’re calling now. What’s going on?”
“What’s going on,” Catherine said, “is my flight’s canceled.”
I looked at the dashboard clock—it was just after ten. Her flight home wasn’t for another several hours. “Already?”
“There’s this storm. They’re closing the airport. It’s that bad.”
“It’s just starting to snow here, too.”
“Great.”
Silence vibrated through the connection.
“Have you had a good trip?”
“Yes, it’s been very interesting.”
More silence.
Finally, she said, “Well, I just wanted to let you know that I won’t be making it back today. Hopefully tomorrow, but I don’t know.”
“Okay, well, keep me posted.”
“Roxane?”
“Yeah?”
Catherine sighed. “I’m sorry. I’m just stressed out by the uncertainty.”
“It’s okay. You’ll be home soon. To me.”
“Good,” she said.
I tossed the phone onto the seat beside me. I still had no idea what the hell had caused her mood to tank on the way to the airport. She’d been herself after dinner, in the car as we drove back to her place. They might have oysters, but they don’t have you, she’d said, her head on my shoulder. But by morning, something was different. Maybe everything was. I hadn’t given myself much space to think about it since, and I realized that some part of me was relieved she wasn’t coming home today. I was too caught up in what was going on with my brother to have the emotional bandwidth to figure out what was going on with Catherine. With us.
Did that mean something?
* * *
Despite the snow blanketing the roadway, everything was still business as usual at the courthouse, where one of three weekly arraignment sessions was taking place in room 5C of the Franklin County Court of Common Pleas.
Thanks to the luck of the alphabet, my brother came nearly last.
I stood in the back of the courtroom and watched as Julia Raymund stood next to my brother—rumpled and exhausted looking—and argued for him to be released on bail. She’d made it sound like a done deal, but it turned out to be far from it.
The arraignment judge remanded him to the county jail because he was in violation of his probation.
My mouth went dry.
Andrew had failed to mention any ongoing legal trouble to me, and so had Julia for that matter. The entire thing was over almost as soon as it began, and a uniformed bailiff was leading my brother back out of the courtroom before I even had a chance to talk to him.
When Julia saw that I was there, she frowned. For an attorney, she didn’t have a very good poker face. That, or she wanted me to know that she hated me.
I guessed it could have been either.
“Julia, what the hell?” I said, steering her by the arm over to the windows when it appeared she was going to make a break for the elevator.
She removed my hand from her sleeve. “I told you he didn’t want you to come.”
“No, you told me I didn’t have to come, but I thought that I did. Why didn’t you mention this probation the other day?”
“I’m not in the business of sharing my clients’ privileged information.”
“This is different.”
“Is it? If Andrew wanted you to know about it, perhaps he would have told you. I have to get to a meeting. Excuse me.”
This woman was infuriating. “What was the probation even for?”
The elevator doors opened and she escaped.
I leaned my forehead against the cold windowpane. The street below was a snowy parking lot. All I could think of was my mother.
* * *
Rather than dealing with the snow, I decided to wait for visitation hours at six on the off-chance that Andrew would be booked in already at the adjacent courthouse and I’d be allowed to see him. One of the benefits of the storm was that the line was shorter than usual, but I’d still only get fifteen minutes.
It seemed like a lot of ground to cover in fifteen minutes.
When he filed into the visitation booth in a khaki-colored prison get-up, I had to blink hard to keep frustrated tears from falling and making everything worse.
“Hey you,” I said into the grimy phone.
Andrew sighed. Through the handset, it made a hissing sound.
“Are you okay?”
“I need a fucking drink,” he said.
I wanted to press my palm against the glass but worried it was too much like a Lifetime movie.
“You’ve been here for hours,” he added.
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“You wouldn’t want to see me, if our roles were reversed?”
Andrew was barely looking at me. “Of course I would.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t want to bother you with it.”
“Since when? When did it even happen?”
“Back in July,” Andrew said.
“What happened?”
“It was just a misdemeanor. I had a baggie of Darvocet in my cup holder when I got pulled over. Speeding.”
I rubbed the place between my eyebrows. “I don’t get why you wouldn’t tell me. If not at the t
ime, then the other day. When we were talking about going to the police.”
“I mean, because I didn’t want you to know. What if it somehow got you jammed up in this? Jules told me last year, the less anyone knows, the better.”
“Jules,” I said.
Andrew breathed noisily instead of answering.
“How long has that been going on?”
“For it’s none of your damn business long.”
“Come on. I’m not Matt. I’m the one you’re supposed to tell this stuff to.”
“Like how you told me you’re sleeping with Tom Heitker, of all people?”
“I’m not!”
Andrew shook his head.
“Okay, fine. I’m not anymore. But I was.”
“I fucking knew it.”
“I didn’t tell you because I knew you’d be like this.”
“Like what?”
“I know you don’t like him.”
“Just because I personally don’t want to spend time with the guy doesn’t mean I don’t want you to,” Andrew said. “I mean, I know you’re friends.”
“I believe we were talking about you and Jules though.”
Andrew sighed.
“I’m pretty sure she hates me, so that’s going to be a problem.”
“She doesn’t hate you.”
“Oh, maybe what I meant is that I hate her.”
“Well, we’re even then. You have Catherine, I have Jules, and literally nobody’s happy.”
Now it was my turn to sigh. We looked at each other through the dirty glass. “Andrew, I’m so sorry about how this went down.”
He shook his head. “What went down is half me being a dumbass and half the world not being fair. I don’t know where they got this idea that Addison never made it out of my place. I mean, this would all be pretty fucking elaborate. Me calling you to pretend to look for her? They kept showing me this picture, some douche in a skull shirt.”
“They showed it to me too.”
“Who is it?”
“No idea. But the picture had the icon of that dating app, BusPass, which Addison also used.”
“Why are they showing me that?”
“I don’t know,” I said. Our fifteen minutes was almost up. “But I’m going to find out.”
TWENTY-ONE
The phone woke me up around five o’clock. This was getting to be a bit of a habit, and one I didn’t like. “Morning, doll,” Peter Novotny said. “Good news and bad news.”
“Let’s hear the bad news first,” I said. I dragged myself down the hall and perched on the edge of my desk, nudging my laptop awake. The fruits of my research into Mickey’s cousin Rick were still up on the screen, though they didn’t amount to much: he’d had the same job at Best Buy for eleven years, lived at the same address his entire life, no record, not even a speeding ticket. I didn’t have any emails from Kenny Brayfield, either. I closed the lid.
Novotny said, “Okay, the bad news is your guy must have gone into the gym at some point during the night and I missed it.”
“You missed it, or your reinforcement missed it?”
“Something like that,” he said, not answering the question. “But that brings me to the good news.”
“Okay?”
“I got him leaving this morning, and I’m currently on his tail.”
I was already pulling on my jeans. “Where?”
“On 71 now, headed towards downtown.”
By the time I got myself out of the house and onto the snow-covered freeway, Wyatt and Novotny had exited onto Main Street, driven east a while, and pulled into a motel.
A familiar motel.
“Right in there is where he went,” Novotny said once I had joined him in his car, a plush maroon Caddy that made me miss my old Mercedes, may she rest in peace. He pointed at the door at the end of the building. The room where I’d talked to Shane last week. “He took two grocery bags in. So what’s the approach?”
“Approach?” I said. “I figured I’d wait till somebody came out. Wyatt knows what I look like, Shane knows what I look like, so the element of surprise is out. Not to mention I don’t know who else is in there.”
Novotny clapped his hands together. “I know, isn’t it exciting? Here’s what we should do.”
Ten minutes later, I watched as Novotny shuffled up to the room, hunched over in an exaggerated old-man posture. He knocked tentatively on the door.
Wyatt opened it. “Can I help you?”
“Oh my goodness,” Novotny said loudly, “Thank you. I can’t find the room, my daughter—it’s so cold—can I use your phone, young man?”
Wyatt looked out across the parking lot, saw nothing amiss, and motioned for Novotny to come inside.
A few seconds later, my phone rang. “Dad!” I said. “Where are you?”
We put on a brief teleplay wherein he told me that two nice young men were helping him, and I said I would be right down. Then, with a hat pulled low over my brow, I knocked on the door too.
“Dad, it’s me,” I called.
Wyatt opened the door and let me in.
Over his shoulder, I saw Shane Resznik fake-sleeping on one of the room’s double beds.
I took my hat off. “Hi guys,” I said. “Sorry for the trickery.”
“What the—” Shane said, jumping out of bed.
Wyatt, meanwhile, sat down heavily on the other bed.
Shane swatted the back of his head. “What the fuck, man?”
“I thought it was some old dude who couldn’t find his room.”
“Well,” Shane continued, “get the fuck out of here. This is trespassing.”
I picked up a plastic baggie from the desk, a crumbly white substance inside. “This looks like possession.”
“It’s not—no, it’s just—”
“Right, right, it’s just borax,” I said.
Shane was apoplectic. “The fuck is borax? What are you trying to pin on me?”
“Nothing. We’re just going to have a little chat. We got off on the wrong foot the other day, Shane, and Wyatt, we haven’t met personally yet, other than that time you followed me to my house. Your mom sends her regards, though.”
Wyatt slumped even further, something I didn’t think was possible.
“Sit down,” Novotny told Shane.
We all looked at each other for a while.
“So, Shane, you’re what, holed up in here getting high and making Wyatt bring you groceries?” I emptied one of the paper sacks onto the desk. Energy drinks, beef jerky, vodka, crackers, a Maxim magazine, a bottle of multivitamins.
I picked up the vitamins. “Interesting assortment here.”
“You spent my money on vitamins?” Shane snapped.
Wyatt covered his face with his hands. He was wearing a newsboy cap, tweed, and a black V-neck sweater. Of all the people in this room, he looked like he belonged here the least. He said, “You need nutrients, dude.”
I almost laughed, thinking of the soulful macro conversations Boomer claimed he’d had with Wyatt. “Let’s discuss what happened at the club the other night.”
Shane shook his head. “I already told you. The pipes burst.”
“And you’re hiding out in this shitty motel because…?”
“I just … felt like it.”
“And that’s why you’re not going home?” I asked Wyatt.
He nodded unconvincingly.
“Your mother’s worried. Why not let her know what’s going on so she doesn’t worry like that?”
“He told me not to. He’s the boss.”
“So he’s paying you.”
Wyatt froze. Shane cleared his throat loudly, until the younger man nodded.
“He’s not, for example, holding something over your head to make you do it? Just like he does at the club, with whatever funny business he’s trying to pull against Vincent Pomp?”
“You don’t know anything about it, you ugly bitch.”
“Shane,” I said, “I don’t think I was ta
lking to you. Wyatt?”
“Yes,” Wyatt said.
“Yes what?”
“I mean no, he’s not doing that. He’s paying me. I need the money.”
“What all are you making him do for that money, Shane?”
Shane said, “I’m not a fucking homo, if that’s what you’re saying. He is, but I’m not.”
I was sick of him. I backhanded him across the mouth. “Shut up.”
His eyes widened and he touched his lip and then looked down at his fingers as if he expected to see blood. There wasn’t any. Wyatt sighed miserably.
Beside me, Novotny shot me a glance. I put my hands in my pockets, my right metacarpals throbbing. Wyatt was looking at the bland motel carpet between his boots.
I said, “Wyatt, what happened the other night?”
He didn’t reply.
“Why were you following me the other day?”
Wyatt muttered something.
“Say again?”
“I wasn’t.” With the blinds drawn it was dark in the room, but I could still make out his face winching up in frightened tears.
Slapping Shane across the mouth had felt good, but so far this wasn’t proving to be especially useful. I said, “Wyatt, how about you let me take you home to your mother’s house. She’s crazy worried about you.”
Wyatt glanced at Shane, then back at me.
I added, “Shane, if you so much as think about making trouble for Wyatt, I’ll tell Vincent Pomp exactly where to find you, okay? I can assure you, he’s fonder of me than he is of you.”
Shane looked genuinely freaked out by that.
“And my associate Mr. Novotny here is going to keep an eye on you to make sure I’m kept informed about where exactly that is. Got it?”
Shane looked like he was processing something. Finally, he said, “You mean he’s not your dad?”
Novotny promised to keep an eye on Shane from the parking lot—no reason to give the man and his Maxim magazine an audience—and to update me if he went anywhere. But I sort of doubted that Shane would be leaving his room for a minute. If his face felt anything like my hand did, he’d probably want to lie around with a bag of ice on his mouth for the next week.
Wyatt didn’t say anything when we got into my car, just buckled his seat belt and sat there with his hands folded in his lap.
The Stories You Tell Page 15
