My mood began to darken as I weighed these issues in my mind, but before I could resolve anything, I looked out the window and saw a police car pulling into the driveway.
Deputy Dan had returned, and this time he wasn’t alone. He’d brought his boss with him. Sheriff Joseph Sullivan was right out of central casting, a short, barrel-chested man about fifty years old, with a mottled, fleshy complexion and thin, precise lips. Apparently, he was from the school of thought that as long as you could pull a few measly strands of hair over your gleaming dome of a head you could avoid being legally classified as bald. Sullivan had pale blue eyes that radiated a patient intelligence, a pot belly, and a warrant to search Alison’s house. He handed the papers over to Alison while standing on the front porch, content to let her thoroughly examine them before he made a move to enter the house.
“I don’t understand,” Alison said, her brow furrowed in concentration as she reviewed the document. “On what grounds did you apply for this?”
“We have our reasons,” Deputy Dan informed her with a sneer from his perch behind Sullivan’s left shoulder.
The sheriff frowned at his deputy, a loaded, keep-your-mouth-shut frown and turned back to Alison. “I’m sure that on his visit here yesterday Deputy Pike told you that we’re in the midst of a rather sensitive investigation.”
“To be honest, Sheriff,” I said, joining them on the porch, “we couldn’t make much sense of what Deputy Dan—” I quickly corrected myself, “Deputy Pike, was saying at all. I think you do owe us a bit more of an explanation than this.”
“Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” the sheriff said with a crafty smile. “What I’d like to do is first have Ms. Scholling here take me on a quick tour of the house. Nothing disruptive, just a quick peek into each room. After that, we can all sit down and have a nice chat, turn over our cards, so to speak.”
“Can they do that?” I asked Alison. “Can they just storm into your house like that, with no just cause?”
“We’ve got plenty of just cause,” Deputy Dan said.
“No one’s talking to you, asshole,” I said.
“Hey!” Deputy Dan began, taking a step toward me, but Sullivan cut him off.
“Pipe down, son,” he said to me. “You’re not behaving like an innocent man.”
“What, only criminals think he’s an asshole?” I asked. The sheriff actually smiled at that one, for just an instant, but Deputy Dan’s hand suddenly move to clutch the top of the hardwood baton clipped to his belt. “Little shit!” he muttered.
“Okay!” Sullivan said, this time with authority. “That’s enough! Now this is what’s going to happen. The three of you,” he indicated Chuck, Lindsey, and me, “are going to sit on this porch with Deputy Pike. You’re all going to get along famously. In the meantime, Ms. Scholling and I are going to take a short walk through the house. If everything’s in order, I promise you that I’ll sit right down and explain to you what it is that’s going on. If it’s not,” he fixed me with a dour expression, “then you’ll all be the ones doing the explaining.”
He beckoned to Alison, who flashed us a helpless look and pulled open the front door. Sullivan followed her inside, closing the door behind him. The three of us sat on the top stair while Deputy Dan stood fuming over us on the porch. Chuck, whose face had been drained of all color the moment Sullivan had produced the warrant, stared straight ahead with wide eyes. Lindsey, sitting between us, leaned against me and I sat back against the stair post keeping my eyes on Deputy Dan. To my surprise, I wasn’t terribly dismayed by this turn of events. There seemed to be a surreal inevitability to everything, as if I’d subconsciously known all along that we’d end up in this situation. Besides, I truly felt that Jack would never press charges against us. We’d come up here to help him, it was too crazy to think we could end up in jail for that.
I was so certain of all this, so convinced that everything would turn out fine, that it took an extra few seconds to register when Sheriff Sullivan reappeared with an expressionless Alison and asked us if we all wouldn’t terribly mind climbing into the back of his car for a ride down to the Sheriff’s Office.
Contrary to what I’d expected, the Sheriff’s Office was not in the center of town, but stood by itself just beyond the Sunoco station on Route 57. It was a solitary, square, one-story building situated in the center of a concrete lot, with a slatted, wood facade on the front, but raw bricks and cinder blocks on the other three sides. Sullivan led us in through a small waiting room comprised of a couch, a low end table with an ashtray, a red plastic ‘no smoking’ sign right next to it, and some People magazines. The top magazine had a picture of Jack on it, and across the picture, printed in boldfaced block letters was the word “MISSING.” Above the table was a window that looked into the dispatcher’s office. One of the dispatchers, a matronly, older woman who wore a beige cardigan that was definitely not standard Sheriff’s Department issue, smiled at Sullivan and pressed a button on the underside of her desk to buzz us through the locked wooden door. “Hey, Rhoda,” Sullivan greeted her.
The other woman, ten years younger with industrial strength blond hair, was speaking into her headset while typing into a computer screen. “Well, don’t you think it’s a bit early to be drunk already, Earl?” she was saying. “I know that, but she’s locked you out of the house because you’re drunk, and you remember what happened the last time you got drunk.” She put her hand over the mouthpiece and turned to Sullivan. “Earl Pender’s drunk again and Millie locked him out of the house.” Sullivan sighed and turned to Deputy Dan. “Why don’t you get him, Dan. I’ll take this from here.”
“But we’re in the middle of—”
“I got it covered, Dan,” Sullivan said, with just the slightest edge in his voice. “You go get him and drop him off at his brother’s place, okay?” Deputy Dan glared at him, but nodded in submission, then glared at us for good measure. I smiled my best fuck-off-little-man smile and he marched off in disgust. Sullivan led us back through a bank of empty desks and past his office into a small conference room that, judging from the condiments stacked on the counter, also doubled as a lunch room. “Debra,” he called before he closed the door. “tell Millie we’re dropping him off at Ray’s.” He closed the door, tossed his hat onto the table, sat down at the head and motioned to the rest of us to take seats as well.
We sat around the table, the four of us and Sheriff Sullivan, each of us trying to decide where to look. He looked at us and we looked at him. He looked at his watch and we looked at each other. This went on for a long enough time to make us all uncomfortable. I thought of the interrogation rooms on NYPD Blue and looked for a two-way mirror but there were no mirrors at all in the room. Sullivan scratched his chins thoughtfully, the tips of his fingers disappearing into the folds of flesh above his neck. Finally he cleared his throat and said, “Jack Shaw.”
Even Jack’s name could make a dramatic entrance. Sullivan’s utterance created an instantly tangible change in the air, as if the temperature had just fallen ten degrees. He looked at all of us, gauging our reactions, and his eyes finally settled on me, waiting expectantly.
“The movie star?” I asked.
He smiled, or at least his mouth smiled, but his eyes hadn’t gotten the memo, and they continued to bore into me with a cold stare. “Son,” he said to me. “Don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining.” He turned away from me to look at everyone else. “I think you’re all smart enough to realize that I know quite a bit more already than you first supposed. What we have here is a famous movie star who has disappeared under suspicious circumstances, and four people connected with him staying together, for no apparent reason, in a house where one room was clearly used as a cell of some kind. Two of you look like you got the shit beat out of you, one apparently from a car accident and one from who the hell knows what.”
“Are you accusing us of kidnapping Jack Shaw?” Alison asked.
“Oh, I know you kidnapped him,” the sheriff sa
id with a grin. “I’m just wondering where he is now, and if maybe you killed him, too.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Lindsey declared. “We’re all good friends of Jack’s. Why would we want to hurt him?”
“That’s what I’m working on,” Sullivan responded, scratching his neck again.
“Something’s missing,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“There’s something you’re not telling us. You obviously have a reason to think we’re involved with Jack’s disappearance, and I’m hoping, for your sake, that it was more than just a paranoid call from Seward.” Sullivan’s eyes darted away when I mentioned Seward, and I knew we’d been right.
“Now how would you know about that?” Sullivan asked.
“How else would you have come to us?” Chuck asked. “Who are you, Columbo? We know Seward thinks we’re involved. He called us, too.”
Sullivan frowned and I could tell that Seward had neglected to mention that small detail. “Mr. Seward did call us,” Sullivan admitted. “Which is why I sent my deputy to check it out.”
“But something happened after that,” Alison said, thinking out loud. “Something happened that gave you enough to go for a warrant.”
Sullivan didn’t answer her. Instead, he leaned his chair onto the two back legs, his belly pressing insistently against his uniform shirt, and opened up the door a crack. “Rhoda, you want to get me the paper bag on my desk,” he called. He closed the door and for a second it looked like he was teetering, like he might actually fall over backwards, but then he threw his weight forward and came down with a solid thud. A few seconds later, Rhoda stuck her head in, smiling kindly at us as if we’d come over to have milk and cookies with the sheriff, and handed him a white paper bag, the kind they give you when you buy a greeting card. “Some kids were playing over by Horn’s Creek and they found this in the water.” He reached into the bag and pulled out a dark, square object. “Their parents made them turn it in.” He tossed the object onto the table and it landed with soft, slapping noise. It was a wallet. More specifically, it was Jack Shaw’s wallet.
Of course, we didn’t instantly recognize it as Jack’s. I mean how well do you examine your friend’s wallet? But why else would Sullivan be showing it to us? Still, Chuck had to open it and pull out Jack’s waterlogged driver’s license, still New York, probably the only state that persists in not laminating them, and a couple of credit cards before we could all accept it as such. It seemed strange that Jack should even own a wallet. Didn’t his people handle things like cash and spending? Did movie stars really pull out their own wallets to get the check for dinner?
Alison held onto the wallet, rubbing the damp leather between her thumb and forefinger, her lower lip visibly quivering. Lindsey quickly put a hand on her lap and said, “It doesn’t mean anything.”
“Oh, it means a few things,” Sullivan said. “I don’t know all of them yet, but I know a bunch.”
“What’s Horn’s Creek?” I asked.
“It’s a small tributary off the Delaware that runs through a good part of the north woods here,” Sullivan said. “I take it,” he added skeptically, “none of you has ever been there?”
“I have,” Alison said, her voice admirably steady. “We used to go hunting for salamanders there when I was little. It runs through the woods on the opposite side of the road from my folks’ place, about a mile down.”
“That’s right,” the sheriff said. “Now listen. I’ve been extremely forthright with you all. Now it’s time for you to tell me what’s going on.” We all looked at each other. “Look,” he said, his voice softer now. “I can tell you’re all good people, and that maybe something was going on here that may have gotten a little out of control. But it’s clear that Jack Shaw is, or was in these parts, and you all have something to do with that. Right now I’m thinking worst case scenarios, like kidnapping and murder. Why don’t you tell me your side of this, and let’s see if we can’t get this whole mess straightened out.”
Alison suddenly stood up, the metal legs of her chair screeching against the floor. “Are we under arrest, sheriff?” she asked.
He considered her briefly. “Not yet,” he admitted.
“So you don’t have enough to formally charge us,” Alison said. “Which makes everything you just said nothing more than a theory. We have been worried about our friend for some time now. He has been battling a drug addiction and we offered him some help. As far as I know, he may have been on his way to see us when something happened to him.” Her voice wavered a little as she said that, no doubt wondering what had happened to Jack. “So instead of sitting here spinning theories, I’d recommend that you do your job. You’ve got a missing person here,” she held up Jack’s wallet for a second and then tossed it back onto the desk, in front of Sullivan. “Find him.”
There was a palpable silence when Alison finished her speech. None of us had ever seen her assert herself like that. We all looked over to the sheriff, waiting to see his reaction. He continued to look at Alison with a knowing smile, which I now realized was an affectation and not an indication that he actually knew anything worth smiling about. He picked up the wallet and considered it for a second before placing it back into the paper bag. “And how do you explain that room in your house?”
“Frankly, I don’t know how to explain it,” Alison said. “You’d have to ask my folks. It’s their house.”
“And where could I find your folks?”
“They’re in Europe, but I don’t know how easily you’ll find them.”
The sheriff stood up and walked across the room, so that we all had to turn in our chairs to look at him. “You all probably think I’m a real annoying hick, just some redneck county sheriff who doesn’t know his ass from his elbow.” He looked at us, as if waiting for someone to confirm that yes, that was about the sum of it, but no one said a word. “Well let me tell you what’s going to happen now, what I was hoping wouldn’t have to happen now. I’m going to have to call the FBI about this,” he waved the white bag with the wallet at us, “and the FBI is going to send someone down here to ask a lot of questions. I’m sure they’ll be particularly interested in the four of you.” Sullivan turned and fixed his gaze on Alison, who was still standing. “And young lady, all your due process isn’t worth shit to the FBI, you mark my words. They will have their way with you if they feel like it.” He turned back to the rest of us. “In the meantime, you’ve got two little boys and their mothers who turned in this wallet. You can bet that by morning every farmer and his cow around here is going to know that Jack Shaw’s wallet got fished out of Horn’s Creek, and you know what that means?” He scowled, his eyes turning to slits, as if he’d tasted something particularly vile. “That means media, my friends. Trucks with satellite dishes, obnoxious reporters, and photographers running around this town like they own it.” He leaned against the wall, placing his hands with Jack’s wallet behind his back like a cushion. “Feebies and reporters, and god only knows what other kind of parasites are going to come up here to turn this town upside down, looking for their lost movie star. I need that,” he said, picking his hat up off the table, “like I need a third armpit.”
Sullivan finished his speech and put his hat back on his head in a practiced motion designed not to upset the carefully arranged remnants of his hair. The rest of us just stared at him, somewhat taken aback by the venom in his voice. He was probably sincere in his reluctance to call in the FBI, but not, I guessed, for the reasons he’d stated. Sullivan had wanted to crack the case himself, wanted to be the hero who discovered Jack Shaw’s whereabouts. If he had pulled that off, I don’t think he would have minded a media invasion. He’d be waiting for them with a smile and a freshly pressed uniform, standing so that the cameras caught his better side. If he had one.
“Can we go?” Lindsey asked him, sitting up in her seat.
“You’re free to go,” Sullivan responded bitterly. “But I wouldn’t leave town. Like I said, the FBI’s going t
o want to talk to you.”
“We’re not going anywhere,” I said.
“I’m going to see to that. I’m going to have a deputy watching the house. And I’d appreciate it if you’d all give Rhoda your driver’s licenses on the way out for a quick photocopy so that I can include it in my report. Unless,” he flashed Alison a humorless grin, “your lawyer has a problem with that.”
We emerged a few minutes later to wait for the car service Rhoda had ordered for us. The sun was high overhead, but the air hadn’t warmed up much since that morning. We stood around in the parking lot, a subdued bunch, our thoughts filled with Jack and what possible string of events could have led to his wallet being found in the creek. I came up with a number of scenarios, some more imaginative than others, none very positive.
“Well, that tears it,” Chuck said with a frown. “I guess I’m not going home after all.”
Lindsey put her hands in her pockets and bounced lightly up and down, trying to resist the chill. “What are we going to do?” she asked.
“There’s nothing we can do,” Chuck said. “You know, when you operate on someone, the surgery can go perfectly, or you can have some rough moments. Either way you do the best you can and you sew ’em up, but you never know, not right away, whether you’ve solved the problem or not. There can always be post-op complications. You learn not to pat yourself on the back until you’ve seen the patient come out of it okay.”
We all stared at Chuck, wondering what the hell he was talking about. “And this is related to our situation how?” I said.
“What we did was like surgery. We operated on Jack,” Chuck said. “We did our best. We just don’t know yet if he came out of it okay or not.”
Plan B: A Novel Page 23
