“You said you cared about Amy.”
“That’s why I’m doing it. I’m not compromising her life by going in there and getting everyone upset.” Not to mention getting myself killed.
He coughed. A spasm of pain crossed his face. “Amy is the only one in there.”
“Come again?”
“You heard me. Don’t act so surprised. You knew I was conning you back there. I could see it.”
I was surprised, though, surprised he’d been able to read my reactions. If I were in his condition, I wouldn’t be doing character readings. Of course if I were in his condition, I’d be unconscious. “But now you’re going to tell me the truth?”
“Yes.”
“I’m listening.” I got a cigarette out of my backpack, lit it, and waited.
Toon Town began. His voice was so low I had to move forward to hear. “Amy was in the basement looking for a clean towel when he came in.”
“At the house you said ‘they.’ Which is it: he or they?”
“He.”
“Does he have a name?”
“You want to hear this or not?”
I told him yes and shut up. I’d ask my questions when he was through.
“Amy must have heard what was going on upstairs and snuck out the back door.”
“How can you be so sure he didn’t grab her?”
“I could hear him as he went through the rooms. He was looking for her. She wasn’t there.” He closed his eyes and opened them again. His face was beaded with sweat. “I knew she’d come here. She gabbed about it all the time, about how cool it was that her family owned a building like this. But I couldn’t remember the address. I figured once I saw the list, I’d know which one it was. And I was right. I did. All you have to do is get Amy. Just tell her I’m waiting for her. She’ll come right out.”
I studied his face. He was leaning against the door. His will was the only thing keeping him going. I didn’t think he had the energy to lie. “Then what?”
“Then you drive me to my mother’s house and drop me off. I keep the diamonds and you keep Amy.”
“You really have this planned.” I rolled down my window and flicked my half-smoked Camel into the street. “And she’s just going to go with me?”
Toon Town coughed. His face looked more swollen than it had earlier. His chin was covered with dried blood. “I’m sure you’ll find a way to make her.”
“I don’t think so.” I activated the phone.
“Wait,” Toon Town cried. “I think she’s got some stuff she was gonna sell to Justin on her. I don’t think she ever got rid of it.”
I clicked the off switch. I’d forgotten about that. “How much?”
“Enough that if the cops come, they’re going to put her away. Ten hits of acid can get you a five-year minimum.”
“She’ll walk. She’s only fifteen.”
“They could still put her in juvie. You never know what’s going to happen these days,” Toon Town whispered. He was fading fast.
What Toon Town said was true. You never did know. I rubbed my temples. And then there was the fact that if I called the cops and Amy saw them, she’d probably run—something she was very good at—and then things could go bad real fast. She was just stupid enough to keep going when they told her to stop and get herself shot for her pains. If I went in myself, I’d collect Amy, drive Toon Town to a hospital, call my lawyer, then call the police. It was time everything got straightened out—it was past time. I was tired of chasing Amy. Tired of the Richmond family in general. I wanted my life back. Such as it was. Which is why I told Toon Town I’d do what he asked.
“Good. This way everyone’s happy.” He closed his good eye again. It seemed to me his breathing had gotten shallower. Or maybe it was my imagination.
I wanted to get as close to the building as possible, so I made a U-turn and parked behind a grey Plymouth. When I told Toon Town I was going, he moved his head slightly to acknowledge he’d heard me.
As I closed the door, I wondered if he’d be conscious when I returned. I was actually hoping he wouldn’t be, because it would make things easier if he were out cold. I moved around to the back of the cab, opened the trunk, and got out a flashlight and my baseball bat. Of course I already had my box cutter. If I’d had an Uzi, I’d have taken that too. Then I trotted down the alley to the back of the building. It turned out to be your basic, run-down, rubble-strewn, bad neighborhood, who-gives-a-shit back lot. I tried to avoid the broken beer bottles, fast-food wrappers, crack vials, and used condoms, as I walked to the service entrance. Fast sex. Fast drugs. Fast food. Welcome to the mid-nineties. The triumph of form over content.
The back door was locked, but since five out of eight bottom windows were broken, it didn’t make a whole lot of difference. As I knocked the remaining shards of glass out of the second window to the left with the end of my flashlight, I tried to suppress my growing sense of unease. I mean, why should I be nervous? Could it be because the last time I’d gone into a deserted building looking for Amy, I’d almost gotten blown into tiny little pieces? Or maybe it was because I was about to voluntarily walk into a place where you learned how to embalm people? If this were a movie and I were in the audience, I’d be telling my character, “Don’t go. Turn back.” And when my character went in, I’d turn to my friend and say, “how can she be such a moron?”
Simple. My impatience was getting the better of me.
I just wanted to wrap this up.
Besides, I thought I had everything covered.
Fat chance. The truth is, no one ever does—unless you’re God. And even he has trouble on some days.
Oh well.
I took a deep breath and climbed through the window. Welcome to the fun house. I turned on the flashlight the moment my feet hit the floor and moved it in a semicircle. I was in a large room. It smelled musty. And something else. Something acrid, something chemical. My light caught chairs over by one wall. A large blackboard took up another wall. Wooden shelves laden with large jars full of dark liquids—that I had a feeling I didn’t want to know about—lined a third. Four stainless steel tables sat in the room’s center. I heard a rustling noise. Mice, I told myself, but I shivered anyway.
My sense of foreboding grew.
I couldn’t imagine Amy voluntarily hiding out here.
In the dark.
Alone.
I couldn’t even imagine doing it with a friend.
This made no sense.
None at all. And in the past couple of years, I’ve grown not to like things that don’t make sense.
I grasped the flashlight and bat with my knees, cupped my hands, and yelled out for Amy.
Her name echoed in the dark, as if I were in a canyon in some unnameable country.
I stood there with my head cocked, listening for an answer.
From far away, I heard the unmistakable sound of a door slamming shut.
The front door.
It had to be.
I cursed and started to run.
The door to the next room was slightly ajar. I crashed through it. And that was the last thing I remember.
Chapter 29
The first thing I did, when I came to, was sit up. Which was a mistake. My head started pounding, the room started spinning, and I threw up. Great. I have a concussion, I thought, while I puked. By now I recognized the symptoms. I should, I’ve had enough experience—not that this was an area I’d ever wanted to acquire expertise in. When I was done, I gingerly explored the back of my head. It was very tender, I could feel a bump, but my fingers came away dry. No blood. For a change. I wondered who had hit me. Amy? Then who had I heard down at the other end of the building. Who else had been here?
I groaned, as I picked up my flashlight—thank God I’d put in new batteries. Otherwise it would have probably gone out-by now—and started to get up. I was moving my hands to give myself better leverage, when I felt something hard under my fingers. I brought the light around. It was a brick. Then I noticed two more l
ying on the floor close by. I had an idea. I got up and dragged a chair that was standing nearby over to the door. I had to wait for a second for the new wave of dizziness to pass, but when it did, I climbed up and shined my light on the top of the door. It was dusty, except for three clearly defined spaces—spaces I was positive the bricks had occupied.
I climbed back down before I fell off. Cute. No one had been waiting. I’d walked into a booby trap. And I was pretty sure I knew who’d set it: Amy. It was the kind of thing she’d do. Amateurish, but effective. Just like the mousetrap she’d put in her desk drawer. I wondered if she’d ever read the Hardy Boys when she was growing up. Another wave of dizziness hit me, and I leaned against the wall and closed my eyes. Knowing Amy, she hadn’t meant to kill anyone or even injure them that badly, just to slow them down. Which she’d certainly done. When I could, I opened my eyes and shined my flashlight on my watch face. Twenty minutes had passed since I’d first come in. Amy was long gone by now. I wondered if Toon Town had known about Amy’s little surprise when he’d sent me in. Or was this something she’d thought up on her own?
I promised myself I’d ask her, if I ever got the chance. Which was seeming less and less likely.
I followed the same route going out of the building I had coming in.
I’d had my share of surprises for the evening. I wasn’t anxious for any more.
I’d taken five steps, when I groaned. God, I couldn’t believe it. I’d left my keys in the ignition. I’d been so fixated on getting Amy that I’d turned the motor off and just walked away. I checked my pockets anyway and then, just to be sure, I checked them again. The only things I found were some pennies and a stick of gum.
As I climbed out the window, I told myself maybe Toon Town and Amy hadn’t taken off.
Maybe Amy had just run away and left Toon Town collapsed in the cab. But I didn’t think so.
And then I thought about Amy driving. She had to be. Toon Town certainly couldn’t.
The thought hurt worse than my head did.
I started to pray that I was wrong.
But I wasn’t.
The spot where my cab had sat was empty. It was gone. Along with my backpack and my phone. And the worst part of the whole thing was that I couldn’t blame anyone but myself.
I started looking for a phone booth. All the stores were shuttered for the night. There were no houses and, even if there were, I would have hesitated to knock. This was the sort of neighborhood where people were apt to answer with a knife in one hand and a gun in the other. I kept going. The rain was lighter now, but it was cold, the drops numbing my skin. I turned up my collar, hunched my shoulders, put my hands in my pockets, and tried to keep to the wall as much as possible. A dog yipped off in the distance. The humming of the streetlights kept time with my steps. Half a block later I spotted an AM-PM Mini-Mart and headed towards it.
A pay phone sat off to one side of the parking lot, well out of the way of the two gas pumps. I accidentally kicked a Snapple bottle as I walked towards it. It rolled down the tarmac, stopping just short of the street. I sneezed, as I dug some quarters out of my jacket pocket. I called my house first. No one answered. I called Tim’s house next, hoping he’d gone back there. But he hadn’t. Which left me with one choice.
I took a deep breath and dialed George’s number. I’d been going to call him anyway. This just wasn’t the way I wanted to do it. He picked up immediately—he’d probably been studying or working on his paper.
“I’m glad you phoned,” he began. “I’ve been thinking about the other night. I was out of line.”
“So was I.” I was surprised at how happy I was to hear his voice. “I had no call to say what I did.”
“You want me to come over? I’m about ready to take a study break.”
“Good.” I gave him an extremely abbreviated version of what had happened.
“That wasn’t what I had in mind.”
“I know.”
He sighed. “All right. Give me the address. I’ll be right there.”
I went into the store after I hung up. It was small, its merchandise shoehorned into several shelves, most of which were filled with snack foods of various kinds. The black-and-white checkered linoleum floor needed to be washed and one of the overhead neon lights flickered in a way that indicated it was going to have to be changed soon. The clerk glanced up when I came in, then went back to reading a book. He was maybe eighteen or nineteen and had the look of a college student. During the time that George took to arrive, which was twenty minutes, he didn’t do anything to indicate he was aware of my presence.
Which was okay with me, because I wasn’t in the mood to make polite chitchat. I wasn’t even in the mood to say hello. I spent the time watching the rain falling, wishing my headache would go away, thumbing through yesterday’s edition of the Herald Journal, and trying to piece together what had happened.
I was still trying to do that when George roared up. As I walked out, he leaned over and opened the Taurus’s door. I got in. The seat was soft. The air smelled faintly of George’s aftershave. I could feel my muscles start to unknot. Why were we always fighting? I wondered. Why couldn’t we just talk things through?
“Let’s go,” I said, and closed the door.
“Not until I know what’s going on.” George turned off the engine and waited.
“Fine.” Since I had a pretty good idea where Amy was going, fifteen minutes really weren’t going to matter much, one way or the other. I settled into my seat and told George about the kidnapping ploy and finding Toon Town and how we went to Gerri Richmond’s and then to the embalming school building. I told him about the booby-trapped door and how I’d gone in one end of the building and Amy had gone out the other and driven off with my car.
“How’d she’d get the cab started?” George asked. He’d been silent until that point.
I was going to say Amy had hot-wired it, but I was too tired to lie, so I told him the truth. George started laughing before I’d even finished. At another time I would have joined in, but not now. Now all I felt was an irrational anger. Anger at George for laughing. Anger at Amy for doing what she’d done—making a fool out of me. But most of all, what I felt was anger at myself. Then, as quickly as it had come, the rage subsided and I began to smile. The situation really was pretty funny. I looked over at George. He’d stopped laughing and had begun making soft popping noises with his lips—a sign that he was thinking.
“Where do you think Toon Town would have gotten his hands on a bugging device like the one you described?” he asked.
“Remember, he installs security systems for a living. He probably has access to lots of stuff.”
George shook his head in disgust at himself. “That’s right. I forget. And even if he didn’t, he could get it through the mail.” He followed a man walking into the mini-mart with his eyes. “It’s amazing what you can get through catalogs.”
“Isn’t it,” I observed, as a car drove down the street, rap music blaring out its window, the sound waves echoing in the night like the wake of a boat.
George waited until it was quiet before he continued talking. “So at the moment,” he said, “as far as you know, Amy and Toon Town have the diamonds.”
“Yes.”
“And Amy took them from her father’s apartment?”
I nodded.
“And someone’s been chasing her ever since.”
I nodded.
“I guess you were right, after all.”
“I wasn’t going to say it.”
“At least not tonight.”
I shrugged and smiled.
George drummed his fingers on the dashboard. “What I’d like to know is, where this guy came from and how come whoever is following Amy knew she’d taken them.”
I could think of three possibilities. I ticked them off. “He either saw her coming out of her father’s apartment, or Amy told someone, or he figured it out.”
“Those three possibilities all depend on
the fact that this person already knew the diamonds were there,” George observed.
“I know.”
George shook his head. “Dennis was a moron. He should have just transferred the money to the Cayman Islands like everyone else. It would have been a hell of a lot easier. On him.”
“Well, his wife said the funeral was nice.”
“Let’s hope he found that thought comforting.” George started drumming his fingers on the dashboard again. “The question is: where did the money come from?”
I thought about Frank and Charlie arguing over the balance sheet. Then I thought back to when my family had run a business and what had happened there. “He was skimming off the family business. He had to be. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”
George nodded his head in agreement and turned the key in the ignition.
“All right,” he said. “Where do you want to go?”
I brushed a strand of hair out of my eyes before I answered. “I figure, given Toon Town’s condition and the fact that Amy’s probably behind the wheel, they’re going to go to the ER room at St. Ann’s, the house on Easton, or Toon Town’s home.”
“Which one do you want to start with?”
“St Ann’s. It’s the closest.”
“What if they’re not in any of those places?”
“I guess I’ll have to call it in.”
George put the Taurus in reverse and backed up onto the street. “Boy, Connelly’s gonna love this when he hears about it.” He took a left.
“Maybe he won’t.”
“And maybe jellybeans won’t melt in the rain.”
We were passing the school when I saw my cab.
It was parked right where I’d left it when I’d gone in the building.
Chapter 30
George raised an eyebrow. “I guess they didn’t get very far,” he observed.
“I guess not.”
George parked a little way down the street, and we got out and started towards the cab. Both of us were silent. Both of us were uneasy. George liked the unexplained even less than I did. When we reached it, I hesitated for a few seconds before opening the door to the driver’s side.
The Scent of Murder Page 21
