Familiar Friend

by Cristina Sumners

  “Did they take your badge away from you?”

  “No.”

  “No problem, then. How are these car rental agencies going to know what your status is? You go in, you say, ‘I’m looking for a car that was rented by this guy on this date, you show your badge, you say it’s in connection with a homicide investigation, you say you can get a court order if necessary, but it’ll be so much easier if they’ll just check their records, and if the guy rented it from them, great, if not you’ll move on. And if the car is there, you’ll rent it and drive off with it and we’ll take it down to Trenton and let all the scientists go over it because if it carried Mason Blaine’s dead body there’ll be traces. And if God really loves us, this famous blunt instrument will turn out to be the crowbar.”

  “You know, that could work. Even though I’m off the case, my buddy Sid knows all those guys and most of them hate Silverman’s guts. He could probably get them to take a look at the car.”

  “If that doesn’t work, maybe Sid knows where there are private labs where we could get the work done. Maybe not in Trenton, but perhaps in Newark. Certainly in Manhattan. In fact, that’s probably a better idea. We don’t want to get Sid and company in trouble. Furthermore, we don’t want Silverman stepping in and taking the credit for your solution once the labs in Trenton have produced the evidence. Why don’t you get on the horn and ask Sid where we could find a suitable private lab?”

  “Kathryn, I might not be able to afford it.”

  “I told you not to worry about money, remember? I hired you.”

  “Well, things have changed a bit since then.”

  “Not that much, they haven’t. Call Sid.”

  Tom called Sid.

  When Tom had him on the phone, Kathryn insisted he hand the instrument over to her. Sure enough, Sid knew some private labs, and frabjous day! He had a friend who owned one that occupied a brownstone in lower Manhattan. The frabjous thing about it was that the friend lived in an apartment on the top floor of the brownstone, so if they were lucky enough to find the car that afternoon, they could drive it into the city and leave it with the friend that afternoon and he and his staff would start work on it first thing in the morning.

  “But Kathryn,” Sid warned. “This guy is expensive.”

  Kathryn had walked into the kitchen with the telephone, which is why she had taken it away from Tom—in case she needed to discuss money with Sid.

  “Am I going to need to take cash, or will he take my American Express gold card?”

  “The gold card will do fine, but you should pardon me asking, how much are you willing to spend on Tom?”

  “Not much more than a million dollars.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “So am I.”

  “No, really.”

  “Sid, how shall I put this without being vulgar? I am a very wealthy woman. Tom is my dear friend. I would be willing if necessary to sell the house I live in to get him his job back. The house I live in is a three-story five-bedroom pre-Revolutionary on Alexander Street. I mean every word I have just said. Do I make myself clear?”

  Sid whistled. “Very. When do I get to see the house?”

  “The minute this is all over.”

  They hung up.

  Sid said to himself, I don’t care what you think, Tom, old friend, the lady’s in love with you.

  Kathryn went back to the living room and returned Tom’s phone to him and explained to him that they had a lab to take the car to provided they could find it.

  “Does this mean you’re coming with me to Newark?”

  “Try to stop me. But first I should change into clericals. I get a lot more cooperation when I’m in a collar.”

  Kit, who had for some time been waiting patiently for the other two to remember his existence, at this point ventured, “I don’t want to sound insufferable, but if you really want to know about cooperation you should try showing up in a wheelchair.”

  Tom was made slightly uncomfortable by this remark, but Kathryn, who knew Kit better, and knew he was as free of self-pity as it was possible for a man in his situation to be, lit up with pleasure. “You want to go with us?”

  “You’ve just dragged me right way ’cross the Atlantic into the middle of a double homicide investigation; I arrive to find you’re about to solve it, and you want to park me in a hotel while you two run off and have all the fun? Not bloody likely!”

  “Great! Wait here while I change, I won’t be a minute!”

  By the time Kathryn got back downstairs sporting a navy wool suit with a light blue shirt and a white dog collar (she owned clerical suits in charcoal and dark rose but she had deliberately chosen the blue to match what Kit was wearing) the men had come up with a strategy. They would travel to Newark in two cars. Tom would take his badge and his official tactics to the likelier agencies, that is, the less expensive ones. Kathryn and Kit would go to Hertz and Avis, the long shots, as ordinary customers with some tale they could concoct along the way.

  “He’s too polite to tell us in so many words,” Kit said to Kathryn, “but basically I think he’s afraid we’d cramp his style.”

  Tom opened his mouth to protest but Kathryn agreed that certainly a cop would look more convincing without a couple of civilians trailing along. She then exchanged cell phone numbers with Tom so they could keep in touch, and announced that she for one was ready to go. “Except, of course, that it’s teatime and here we are dashing off without it.”

  Enter Mrs. Warburton, on cue, from the kitchen. “Tom, this bag’s for you. Earl Grey, of course, and sandwiches. Kathryn, this one’s for you and Kit, the blue thermos is for you, that’s Earl Grey, and the green thermos is for Kit, that’s Lapsang Souchong. And Kit, the roast beef is very rare.”

  Mrs. Warburton sailed back into the kitchen, and Kathryn turned to Kit and whispered, “What did I tell you?”

  Kit whispered back, “Awesome!”

  Kit got himself into Kathryn’s car with agility, leaned out, folded up his chair, picked it up, pulled it into the car, passed it over his left shoulder and dropped it into the backseat. Kathryn reflected that as long as you didn’t present him with a flight of stairs, he did pretty well for himself. She knew he had tremendous upper-body strength. Not only had she felt the iron muscles in his arms during the nights she’d spent in his bed the previous summer; she’d also seen him in the room in his vast Tudor mansion that he’d had converted to a gym. There he exercised daily every muscle in his body that still worked in order to compensate for his useless legs. He always swore he would never use a motor-driven wheelchair. “That way lies death. I’ll spin my own wheels, thank you.”

  As they pulled away from the curb, Kathryn said, “You realize, don’t you, that our end of this little jaunt is completely useless? Tom’s going to be the only one that actually accomplishes something.”

  “If you think it’s that bad then why are we going?”

  “I don’t know. For the merry hell of it, I guess. And maybe because if we didn’t go, Tom might feel like he’d cut me out of it and then maybe he’d feel bad. I’m not really sure. Why did you guys arrange it the way you did? Two separate parties? We could have all driven together, and Tom could have gone into each office alone.”

  “It was Tom who suggested it. I got the impression he was gallantly allowing us time to be alone together.”

  “Oh. Well, that was nice of him.”

  “I thought so.”

  There was a brief silence while Kathryn threaded her way out of Harton.

  “Shall we work on this story of ours, then?” Kit suggested.

  They did that, and when they were satisfied with it, they dropped it for conversation of a more personal nature.

  When they approached the vicinity of Newark Airport, Kathryn followed the signs for car rentals and then for Hertz. As she pulled to a stop outside the office, Kit was already hauling his chair out of the backseat and opening his door; she knew better than to offer him any assistance. She merely linge
red a moment to give him time to unfold the chair and get himself into it, but he accomplished this maneuver so rapidly, she didn’t have to wait more than a few seconds. She looked at him, and said, “Are you sure you’re up for this charade?”

  He smiled and shrugged. “What’s there to lose? All they can do is say no. Besides, as you pointed out, Tom has the likely places. Let’s do it.”

  So they did it. And, precisely as they expected, they did not get the information they wanted.

  Back in the car, Kathryn said to Kit, “I say, you’re quite an actor! That was very impressive. I didn’t know you could do that.”

  “Oh, I have all sorts of talents you have yet to learn about. You have a lifetime to get acquainted with them.”

  This was so extraordinarily similar to Patrick’s remark on the night of the fateful party that Kathryn’s heart skipped a beat.

  “What’s the matter?” Kit asked, concerned. “Did I say something wrong?”

  “No,” said Kathryn. “It’s all right. A touch of déjà vu. Forget it. Let’s move on, if you’re willing to go through it again.”

  “I am an Englishman, and therefore nothing if not bloody-minded.”

  They drove to Avis.

  Inside the Avis office, Kathryn did a quick assessment of the people behind the counter. It was instantly clear to her that they must avoid the young black woman with the golden cornrows and the big smile. That one had brains; she would see through them in a second. There was a teenage boy with microscopically short hair and a faint smattering of acne. Much more promising. Kathryn stepped into his line and Kit rolled up beside her.

  When they got to the head of the line they launched into their routine. As rehearsed, Kathryn went first. “Hello, I hope you can help us. A friend of ours who lives in Harton rented a car here on Thursday of last week—”

  “Darling,” Kit interrupted, “we only think he rented it Thursday, he may have rented it a day or so earlier.”

  “That’s right,” Kathryn acknowledged. “We know he had it Thursday night because that’s when he took us out to dinner.”

  “The point is, you see,” Kit continued, “is that I am missing a ring, a very small gold ring.” He held up his hands and with the fingers of his right hand encircled the fourth finger of his left. “I have racked my brain and searched the house and the last time I can be absolutely sure I had it was that Thursday, so the only thing I can think of is that it must have slipped off in that car. We’ve been to the restaurant and nobody turned it in and we searched all around the booth where we ate and we couldn’t find it. So—”

  “Would you like to look in our lost and found box, sir?”

  “Of course,” said Kit promptly.

  As the boy disappeared through a door into the back premises, Kathryn opened her purse and extracted a piece of paper. The boy came back with a cardboard box about eighteen inches square and nine inches deep, which he handed over the counter into Kit’s outstretched hands.

  Kathryn’s full attention was on her part, now. “Frankly I think the chances of the ring being in that box are pretty slim because it’s a tiny thing and I don’t think your clean-up crew will have spotted it. This is what we’d like to do. We want to rent the car our friend rented and go over it ourselves. This is his name and address. Can you look in your records and find which car it was?”

  The boy hesitated. Kathryn held her breath.

  “I dunno. Maybe I’d better ask the manager.”

  The boy went over to whisper into the ear of the young black woman. Kathryn was not in the least bit surprised. She turned to see how Kit was doing with his rummage through the lost and found box. In order to facilitate his search for his fictional tiny ring, he had tossed onto the countertop a large, ugly knitted scarf in outdated shades of avocado and orange. Kathryn glanced at it and then executed a classic double take. She stared at it transfixed for a good four seconds, her mouth hanging open, before seizing it to examine it more carefully.

  Kit looked up from the lost and found box. “What is it?” he asked.

  The young black woman approached them and said, “I’m Loreen Sanchez. I’m the manager. I understand you’ve lost a ring. Have you found it?”

  Kathryn said urgently, “Forget the ring. It’s not important. This scarf. Do you keep a record of the cars that lost items come out of?”

  Kathryn knew immediately that she had not been wrong in her estimate of Loreen Sanchez’s intelligence. In response to Kathryn’s intensity, Loreen’s eyes narrowed shrewdly. “No. But I remember this one. Now, Charlie here tells me you want to know which car you lost a ring in. Hadn’t you people better make up your minds?”

  Kathryn took a deep breath. “Ms. Sanchez, I apologize. We weren’t really looking for a ring, we were looking for a killer. But we are only the B team. The A team is going to the budget rental agencies, because that’s where the killer probably rented the car. Forget the ring, there was never a ring, we made it up. But this scarf is very real, and it belongs to the wife of the Chief of Police of Harton, and she has been missing since Sunday afternoon, and if you’ll excuse me for a moment, I’m going to make a phone call.” She pulled her cell phone out of her purse, punched in Tom’s number, and waited with bated breath for him to answer. “Tom? Drive to Avis. Now. Do not pause for breath. Step on it. No, just come. Now.” She hung up.

  Loreen Sanchez looked at her. “You’re sure about this? You sure you recognize it?”

  “Absolutely. I’ve seen it about eighty times. I go to church with the woman. See this funny stripe here? It’s supposed to be her initials, L.H. Are you sure you remember what car it came out of? And was it by any mad chance a stretch limo?”

  Loreen looked at her with respect. “Indeed it was. But if what you say is true, I should be calling the police.”

  “Don’t bother. I just called them for you. That was the lady’s husband, the Police Chief himself, and he is the one who was doing the other car rental agencies looking for this killer I was talking about, so he should be here any second.”

  Kathryn looked down at Kit and made a little grimace of excitement.

  He said with a smile, “I guess we weren’t so useless after all.”

  A few minutes later Tom walked in the door and said to Kathryn, “What’s all this about?”

  “Look what Kit found in the lost and found box.” She held out the scarf.

  Tom stood for a moment staring at it, completely dumbfounded. “What the hell—” he said at last, taking the scarf from Kathryn and turning it over in his hands as though he could scarcely believe his eyes.

  “It’s Louise’s, isn’t it?” Kathryn asked.

  Tom nodded, apparently still too surprised to talk.

  “The manager here,” Kathryn continued, “says she remembers what car it came out of, and it was a stretch limo. I’m sure if you show her your badge, she’ll tell you who rented it.”

  Tom pulled himself together. He stepped up to the counter and pulled out his credentials and said in his most commanding manner, “My name is Holder, I’m Chief of Police of Harton and I’m investigating the disappearance of my wife last Sunday afternoon. According to witnesses she was seen leaving our home in a stretch limo. If you have any information I’d appreciate hearing it.”

  Loreen Sanchez said, “I knew there was something about that man! I knew it! It was the second time he came in here this month. The first time all he wanted was a midsize sedan, nothing special, but I knew the minute I laid eyes on him he was up to no good. He was wired. I don’t mean on drugs. On adrenaline. I made notes on him. And I recognized him when he came in again to rent the stretch limo, and when he brought it back in again, I talked to the clean-up crew when they were through with it, and I looked at that scarf. It’s not the kind of thing that gets left in a stretch limo, you know what I mean?”

  “Yeah,” Tom agreed. “It belongs to my wife, and she’s not a stretch limo type at all. You made notes on the guy? You are my kind of woman. You should be a co
p. So you can tell me who he is?”

  “Just one second.”

  Loreen went into the back room and came out again and handed Tom a photocopied piece of paper on which were some handwritten notes. The photocopy was of a driver’s license and insurance card, and the notes described Loreen’s impression of the “wired” man who had come into the office in early October to rent a midsize sedan. The man’s name was Joel Norton. He lived in Harton.

  “Norton,” Tom said. “Son of a bitch. Clients in Philadelphia, my ass.”

  “Come again?” asked Kathryn.

  “I was in his office in Trenton,” said Tom, disgusted with himself. “T.N.K. Public Relations. His secretary said yeah, he’d rented a stretch limo to pick up some clients who flew in from the West Coast, and the clients wanted to go to Philadelphia for some reason, so that’s where the limo took them. And I said fine and walked out and didn’t even bother to verify it because I was too damned eager to get back to Harton and talk to Patrick Cunningham about effing ice cubes.”

  “Well, you can talk to him now. Or at least, you can talk to him as soon as we find Patrick’s car.”

  “Oh. Don’t worry about that. I found the car.”

  “You found the car?”

  “Found it, got it, rented it. It’s sitting outside the door there.”

  CHAPTER 24

  After a brief round of congratulations they discussed logistics. The original plan had been that if they were successful in finding the car, Tom would drive it to the lab in Manhattan and take a bus back to Newark Airport to pick up his own car. Now, however, it was agreed that Tom really ought to get to Harton to tackle Mr. Joel Norton, whoever he might be, as soon as possible.

  “Look, Tom,” Kathryn said. “Why don’t you drive Kit back to Harton and drop him at his hotel, then go hunt down this Norton guy, and I’ll drive the car to New York?”

  Kit assumed a highly affronted air and asked, “You assume I’m incapable of traveling by public transportation?”