Dead Silence

by Norah McClintock

  Sal had gone over to Vin’s house right after that weekend. Then Vin’s knife had disappeared.

  “Did he say if anything was bothering him?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. But I wished I did. “Did he say if anyone was bullying him or giving him a hard time, anything like that?”

  “No.”

  “He didn’t say if he was having problems with anyone?”

  She shook her head, and I got discouraged. He hadn’t said anything to Imogen, either, which made me think that there was nothing to say.

  “Why?” Imogen said. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing, I guess.”

  Bailey must be right. Alex had done it, and then he’d lied about seeing a man run out of the alley. As for the knife, it was a complete mystery what Sal had been doing with it.

  “What’s going on, Mike?” Imogen said. “Why are you asking me all these questions?”

  “I …” I looked at her. Was I going to sound crazy to her? “I was just wondering if there was any reason Sal felt like he had to protect himself or anything like that, if something happened to him that weekend.”

  “We had a good time at the picnic,” Imogen said. “Then he called me up the next day and asked me if I wanted to see a movie …” She frowned.

  “What?” I said.

  She shook her head.

  “What, Imogen?”

  “It’s probably nothing,” she said.

  “What’s probably nothing?”

  “We went to see a movie down at the Paramount,” she said. “After the movie was over, we got on the escalator. I was talking to him, and all of a sudden Sal got this look on his face.”

  “Look? What look?”

  “Like he’d seen a ghost or something.”

  I remembered how he had looked when we came out of school together the day before he died.

  “And?”

  “And I asked him what was the matter. He was looking down at the bottom of the escalator. There were lots of people down there because we had gone to the early show. So there were all these people buying tickets for the next show. And there was this guy down there—just standing there. He really stuck out because everyone else was moving around. But he just seemed to be looking at Sal.”

  “What do you mean, seemed to be?”

  “Well, that’s what I thought at first. But when I turned my head to ask Sal if he knew that man, he didn’t look scared anymore. I looked at the bottom of the escalator again, and the guy who had been looking at him—if that’s what he was really doing—was gone. And Sal kind of laughed. He said he must have been seeing things.”

  “Did you ask him about the guy?”

  “Well, no, because he put his arm around me and …” She frowned again. “But I remember thinking that we got out of there pretty fast after that and that Sal seemed in a big hurry to get to the subway. Why? What does that have to do with what happened to Sal? I heard they arrested a kid from your school.”

  “Do you remember what this guy looked like, Imogen?”

  “It was months ago, Mike. And I just glanced at him.”

  “Do you remember anything at all?”

  She thought for a minute. “Just that he had black hair. He seemed tall, but we were pretty far away. I mean, we were at the top of the escalator and he was at the bottom.”

  I told myself that a lot of people have dark hair. A whole lot of people.

  “Thanks, Imogen,” I said. I turned to go.

  “Mike?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Sal said he wanted to tell you that we were back together. He said it didn’t feel right keeping something like that from his best friend. But he knew how you felt about me, and he was afraid you’d get mad if he told you.”

  Imogen was pretty, but, if you ask me, she was nowhere near as pretty as Rebecca. She talked about people a lot more than Rebecca did, too, and from what I’d been able to tell, she liked to repeat things about people that weren’t very nice. But I guess she must have had some good qualities, too. Otherwise, why would Sal have gotten back together with her? This was the first time that I had talked to her without thinking she was snotty and stuck-up. And that made me feel even worse about what had happened.

  I hurried back to school. It was still lunchtime, and because it was a nice day, there were a lot of kids outside. I scanned the sidewalk on both sides of the street until I found Teddy and his friends.

  “Hey, Mike,” Teddy said when I approached him. “I heard what happened. I heard it was Alex.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Teddy, you know the day Sal died—did you notice a man who might have been watching Sal? A tall man with black hair?” I tried to remember what else Alex had told me. “He might have been wearing a dark jacket.”

  Teddy shook his head. “Pretty much the only thing I was paying attention to that day was Staci.”

  I looked at the rest of his friends—Matt and Steven, Sarah B.—everyone. I asked them all the same question.

  Sara D. was the one who surprised me. “I remember seeing a guy like that,” she said.

  “You do?”

  “Black hair. Tall guy. Dark jacket. It had a red stripe across it.” That was exactly what Alex had said. “He was staring at me. I thought he was kind of creepy.”

  “You’re sure?” I said. “You saw this guy?”

  “Like I said,” she said.

  “Where did you see him?”

  “The first time, he was over there, in front of the travel agency.”

  The travel agency was a couple of stores away, past the entrance to the alley. What if it was the same guy Imogen had seen at the movie theater? And what if Sal had been afraid of him for some reason? What if he’d seen that guy that day? What if he had ducked into the alley to avoid him?

  “Did you see the guy go into the alley?”

  “No,” she said.

  Wait a minute. What had she just said?

  “What do you mean, Sara, the first time? Did you see him again after that?”

  “Like I said, the first time I saw him, I thought he was some kind of creep. The way he was staring, he looked like he could be a serial killer or something. Then, when I saw him again and found out who he was, I figured he was hanging around because he wanted to talk to kids.”

  “What do you mean? You know who he is?”

  “Sure,” she said. “He’s a reporter.” She was looking at me funny now. “It was that guy who crashed into you that day when you were coming out of school carrying a box. You and that guy collided. I was outside, remember?”

  I did. She had laughed at me.

  “The guy said he was a reporter, remember?”

  “That’s the guy you saw staring at you that day?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Why?”

  “Would you tell the police that if they asked you?”

  “What’s going on, Mike?” Teddy said.

  “I’m not sure. But it could be important. Would you tell them, Sara?”

  “Yeah, she will,” Teddy said. Sara didn’t argue with him.

  I knew I should have found a phone and called Riel right away. But the community newspaper office was right down the street, and something pulled me toward it. I wanted to see the guy. I wanted to make sure he was still there.

  The newspaper office was mostly one big room filled with desks and computers. There was a long counter just inside the door. A woman was sitting behind it. She looked up at me.

  “Can I help you?” she said.

  I was already scanning the room, but I didn’t see him.

  “Gil Anderson,” I said. “Is he here?”

  She glanced over her shoulder.

  “Hey, Gil,” she called. “Someone here to see you.”

  I scanned the room again. I still didn’t see him.

  A short, balding man came up to the counter and looked expectantly at me. “I’m Gil Anderson,” he said. “You wanted to see me?”

  I went
straight to the school office and called Riel from the phone that students can use when they need to call home. I told him I had something important to talk to him about. I said it had to do with Sal. He said he’d pick me up right after school, and sure enough, his car was waiting outside when the final bell rang. I got in and told him everything that Imogen and Sara D. had said. I reminded him what Alex had said he saw when he went into the alley. Then I told him about my visit to the newspaper office.

  “You say this guy gave you his business card?” Riel said. I nodded. “Where is it?”

  “At home.”

  Riel drove us home, and I ran up to my room to look for the card. It was in the box of stuff that I had brought home from Sal’s locker, right under the love letter in the pink envelope from Imogen. I took it down to Riel and he examined it.

  “I went there,” I told him. “I talked to Gil Anderson. It wasn’t the same guy.”

  “What’s this phone number?” Riel said, turning the card over.

  “The guy I talked to said it was his cell phone number.”

  Riel called the number. He listened, frowning, and hung up. “I just got a generic voice mail message. No name.” He made another call, this one to Dave Jones. When he finished that call, he said, “Dave wants to talk to you in person. Come on.”

  Half an hour later I was explaining it all to Dave.

  “Sal was afraid of something back in July,” I said. “He took Vin’s knife right after that. Imogen saw a man who matched the description of the man Sara D. said she saw hanging around the school that day. Sara described the guy to me. It sounds like the same guy Alex saw. He was wearing the same jacket. And I bumped right into him a few days after Sal was killed. I got a good look at him. So did Sara.”

  I was afraid Dave wouldn’t take me seriously, but then Riel added, “This guy was asking Mike a lot of questions. And he went to the school and tried to get more information about Mike.”

  “Exactly what did he say when he spoke to you, Mike?”

  “Just that he was writing an article on youth violence and that he wanted to interview me. He said he saw me on the news.”

  “Okay,” Dave said. “You sit tight. I’ll get someone to go the newspaper office and speak to Gil Anderson. In the meantime, let’s see if we can put together a composite of this guy and figure out who he is.”

  I hesitated. “So you believe me?” I said.

  “I believe you saw the guy. And I want to talk to Sara again. And to Imogen.”

  I spent a long time looking at pictures on a computer to see if the man I had seen had a police record. If he did, I didn’t see him. So then I had to try to come up with a description for a computerized picture of what he looked like. I’m not that good at describing people—usually I don’t pay that much attention to whether someone has a long nose or a thin nose, how close together their eyes are, how thick their eyebrows are, that kind of thing. So mostly I was thinking, no, that’s not right, and that’s not right, either. Nobody was more surprised than me when I finally found myself staring at a pretty good likeness of the guy. By the time I had finished, Dave had found out that although the business card belonged to Gil Anderson, who really was the man I had met in the newspaper office, the cell phone number on the back wasn’t his. Gil Anderson said that he gave out a lot of business cards. He said he couldn’t begin to guess how many people had one. Dave said he was going to show the composite to Imogen and Sara D. to see if we were all talking about the same person. Then he thanked me for coming in, and Riel and I left.

  “Now what?” I said.

  “Now we wait,” Riel said.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “Are you okay, Mike?” Riel said. We were sitting at the kitchen table, eating supper. Susan wasn’t home. It turned out that as an emergency room doctor, her shifts were even crazier than Riel’s. Some weeks it seemed like she didn’t even live with us, because she’d be sleeping when I left for school and she’d be at work when I got home, and she wouldn’t get out of the hospital again until after I was in bed.

  “I was just thinking,” I said.

  “About Sal?”

  “About the guy Alex said he saw in the alley. I don’t get it. Why would he want to hurt Sal? Why was Sal so afraid of him?”

  “You’re assuming he was,” Riel said.

  “Imogen said Sal looked scared that time she saw the guy. And you should have seen the look on his face when we came out of school the day before he died. He was definitely scared of something. I thought it was Alex. But what if he saw that guy out there on the street and I just didn’t notice? There were a lot of people out on the street. There always are at lunchtime.”

  “I hope you’re not blaming yourself, Mike,” Riel said.

  Boy, if he only knew.

  “If Sal saw this guy in July—”

  “Assuming it’s the same man,” Riel said.

  “If he saw him in July, and he saw him again the day before he died, and if he was afraid of him, then that means he must have known the guy, right?” I said. “Otherwise why would he be afraid of him? But how would Sal get to know someone who scared him so much?”

  “Sal dealt with the public a lot in his job,” Riel said. “Maybe it has to do with something that happened at work.”

  “But then why didn’t someone at work say something to the police? I mean, if someone he worked with saw him in a fight or something like that … ” Then I remembered what Tulla had told me. “There’s been a lot of turnover at the restaurant,” I said. “And if Sal was scared of that guy in July, then whatever happened to scare him must have happened before that.” I remembered that Dave had come to our school and that the police had put out an appeal to parents of kids who went to our school and to the other schools in the area, kids who hung around down on Gerrard Street at lunchtime. The police had done exactly what I had done. They had focused on kids who went to school near where it had happened.

  “I’m sure Dave is taking all the right steps, Mike,” Riel said.

  I was sure he was, too. But that didn’t stop a whole bunch of questions from eating at me.

  “Why didn’t Sal say something?” I said. Especially to me, I thought. I was his best friend. Well, I was supposed to have been his best friend. But I had let him down. “You know what Sal was like. If he was so scared, why didn’t he go to the police? Why did he steal Vin’s knife instead?”

  All Riel could do was shake his head. He didn’t have any more answers than I did.

  I’m not stupid. At least, I’m not stupid when it comes to cops. I know that things take a lot longer in real life than they do on TV. So I didn’t really expect anything to have changed between the time I went to bed Thursday night and the time I got up again on Friday morning. But that didn’t stop me from hoping. I went downstairs to see if Riel was still home and whether he had had any news. But he wasn’t there. Susan was. She was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and reading the newspaper. She looked nice and relaxed, and she smiled at me.

  “Good morning, Mike. Can I get you something?”

  “No, I’m good,” I said. Riel was very big on my looking after myself and not expecting Susan to do everything just because now she was married to him. I got myself some cereal and juice and sat down at the table with her.

  “Did you see John this morning?” I said.

  Susan gave me a funny look. Her smile got even brighter. Duh! Of course she’d seen him. I could feel myself turning red in the face.

  “What I mean is, did he say anything—about Sal, I mean?”

  “He told me what you told Dave,” she said. “But that’s all.”

  I tried not to feel disappointed. It was too soon for anything to have happened. But just because you know something probably hasn’t happened yet, that doesn’t stop you from wishing that it had.

  I went to school. Then I went home and got ready to go to work. Riel pulled up just as I was leaving the house.

  “I’ll give you a lift,” he said.
I got into the car. “You know that guy you saw?” he said. “It looks like maybe you were onto something.”

  “Really?”

  “Dave tracked down some of Sal’s former coworkers, people who worked at the restaurant before the summer. Somebody recognized the guy. They’d seen him in the place a few times. They think he’s the boyfriend of someone who used to work there.”

  “So they know who he is?”

  “They have a first name. They’re trying to track him down. They definitely want to talk to him. It’s a good lead, Mike.” The way he said it, it sounded like he was proud of me. I kind of wished he wasn’t.

  When he dropped me at work, he said, “Susan’s going to a baby shower tonight, so she probably won’t be home when you get home. And I’m probably going to be out, too. I thought I’d go watch a game with some of the guys.”

  Cop guys, he meant. Mostly Riel was home in the evenings. But sometimes, especially if Susan was busy or working, he hung out with guys from work. Well, why not?

  It was quiet at work. Alex wasn’t there, which meant that nothing got dropped and there was no one for Mr. Geordi to yell at. You would have thought that would put a smile on his face, but it didn’t. He grumbled at everyone. One time he stood behind me while I was putting canned fish on the shelf, and when I was finished, he turned a couple of the cans a few millimeters so that they were exactly straight on the shelf, and then he scowled at me as if to tell me, How come you couldn’t do it right? But it didn’t matter to me. I had other things to think about.

  The house was dark when I got home, and neither Susan’s car nor Riel’s car was in the driveway. I unlocked the front door and pushed it open. I was in the front hall, wondering if there was anything good to eat in the fridge, when I saw a light at the top of the stairs. I was glad that I’d gotten home first. Riel was fanatical about turning off the lights whenever you left a room. I forgot a lot, which meant that I got called back to whatever room it was where I’d left a light on. Riel never shut off the light for me. He always said that if he made me come back and do it myself, maybe I would remember the next time. But I’d forgotten again.