The Accident

by Linwood Barclay

  “Bets,” I said.

  Betsy was a tiny thing, barely an inch over five feet, but often wore killer heels to compensate. With them, she wore a super-short black skirt, tight white blouse, and jacket. She had a handbag hooked over her elbow, the word PRADA emblazoned on the side. I figured she got it the night Ann Slocum used our house to hawk her fake designer bags. If I were Doug, I wouldn’t feel good, my wife heading out of the house looking like, if not quite a hooker, at least like someone who was on the prowl.

  “How long you gonna be?” Doug asked her.

  “I’ll be back when I’m back,” she said.

  “Just don’t …” Doug’s voice trailed off. Then, “Just take it easy.”

  “Don’t worry, I won’t do anything crazy,” she said. She flashed me a smile. “Doug thinks I’m a shopaholic.” She shook her head. “An alcoholic, maybe.” She laughed and then, just as quickly, adopted a look of horror. “Oh my God, Glen, I’m so sorry I said that!”

  “It’s okay.”

  “I just didn’t think.” She reached out and touched my arm.

  “That’s your whole problem,” Doug said.

  “Fuck you,” she said to him, her tone no different than as if she’d blessed him after a sneeze. Her hand still on my arm, she asked, “How you holding up, anyway? How’s poor Kelly?”

  “We’re managing.”

  She gave my arm a squeeze. “If we had a dollar for every time I put my foot in my mouth, we’d be living at the Hilton. Give that little girl of yours a hug from me. I gotta go.”

  “Glenny and me are gonna chill out a bit,” Doug said, even though I thought I’d made it clear I didn’t have a lot of time. I was relieved Betsy was leaving. I didn’t want to say the things I had to say to Doug in front of his wife.

  I didn’t expect Betsy to give her husband a kiss goodbye, and I was right. She just turned on her killer heels and left. When the front door closed, Doug grinned nervously and said, “Storm front’s moving out.”

  “Everything okay?”

  “Oh yeah, sure! Everything’s peachy.”

  “Betsy’s looking good,” I said.

  “Oh, she’s not one to let herself go, you can take that to the bank.” He didn’t say it proudly. “If there was anything in the bank.” Now it was his turn to force a laugh. “I swear, sometimes, the way that woman shops, you’d think she had a printing press in the basement. She must have a secret stash someplace.”

  His eyes landed on the stack of unopened bills by the phone. He stood in front of them, opened a drawer and swept them into it. There were more envelopes already in there.

  “Need to keep the place tidy,” he said.

  “Let’s go sit outside,” I said.

  We took our beers out onto the deck. Beyond the trees, I could hear traffic rushing by on 95. Doug brought a pack of smokes with him, tapped one out, and stuck it between his lips. He was a heavy smoker when he joined the company, but quit a few years later. He’d picked up the habit again in the last six months. He lit up, drew in smoke, blew it out through his nostrils. “Gorgeous day,” he said.

  “Beautiful.”

  “Cool, but they’re still out there golfing.”

  “Sally dropped by today,” I said.

  He shot me a look. “Yeah?”

  “With Theo.”

  “Jesus, Theo. You think she’s really going to marry him? It’s not that I don’t like the guy, but I think she could do better, you know what I mean?”

  “Theo wanted to know why I haven’t been using him.”

  “Whadja tell him?”

  “The truth. That his work isn’t up to par, and that electrical panel he wired in’s probably why the Wilson house burned down.”

  “Ouch.” A drink of beer, another puff. “So, that was it?”

  “Sally ratted you out, Doug.”

  “Huh?”

  “She’s sorry she had to do it, but you didn’t leave her any choice.”

  “I’m not sure I get where you’re going, Glenny.”

  “Don’t play dumb. We’ve known each other too long.”

  His eyes met mine, then he looked down. “I’m sorry.”

  “If you need an advance, you ask me.”

  “I did, and you said no. This last time.”

  “Then that should have been it. If I can do it, I will. If I can’t, I won’t. And we’re going through some tough times now. The jobs are drying up, and if the Wilson place isn’t covered by insurance we’re really gonna be behind the eight ball. So don’t ever, ever, do an end run around me and ask Sally to do it for you.”

  “I was in kind of a bind,” he said.

  “I don’t like to tell people what to do, Doug. I figure how other people live their lives is none of my business. But in your case I’m going to make an exception. I see what’s going on. The requests for pay advances. The unopened bills. Betsy off to the mall when you’re up to your eyeballs in debt.”

  He wouldn’t look at me. Suddenly his shoes were of tremendous interest.

  “You need to get a handle on things, and you need to do it now. You’ll probably have to lose the house, get rid of a car, sell off some things. You may have to start over. But you’re going to have to do it. The one thing you can count on is your job with me. Just so long as you don’t pull any fast ones.”

  He put down his beer, tossed the cigarette, and put his hands over his eyes. He didn’t want me to see him crying.

  “I’m so fucked,” he said. “I am so totally, totally fucked. They sold us this bill of goods, you know.”

  “They?”

  “Everyone. Said we could have it all. The house, the cars, the Blu-ray players, big flat-screen TVs, anything we wanted. Even while we were sinking, we’d get more credit cards in the mail. Betsy, she grabs them like they’re lifesavers, but they’re just more anchors dragging us down to the bottom.”

  He sniffed, rubbed his eyes, finally looked at me. “She won’t listen. I keep telling her we have to change things, and she says not to worry, we’ll be okay. She doesn’t get it.”

  “Neither do you,” I said. “Because you’re letting it go on.”

  “You know what we’re doing? We’ve got, like, twenty credit cards now. We use one to pay off the balance on another. I can’t even keep track of it anymore. I can’t bring myself to open the bills. I don’t want to know.”

  “There are people,” I said. “People who can help you get through these things.”

  “Sometimes I think it’d be easier to just blow my brains out.”

  “Doug, don’t think that way. But you need to get hold of the problem. It’s going to take you a long time to dig yourself out of this hole, but if you start now, you’ll be coming out sooner. You can’t count on me for money every time you’re short, but you can talk to me. I’ll help you where I can.” I stood up. “Thanks for the beer.”

  He couldn’t stand. He was back to looking at the ground.

  “Yeah, thanks,” he said, but his tone lacked sincerity. “I guess with some people, gratitude only lasts so long.”

  I weighed whether to respond or walk out. After a few seconds, I said, “I know I owe my life to you, Doug. I might never have found my way out of that smoke-filled basement. But you can’t play that card every time. That’s separate from this.”

  “Yeah, sure,” he said, looking out over his yard. “And I guess, I guess you wouldn’t want me making any calls.”

  That stopped me. “Calls about what?”

  “I’ve known you a long time, Glenny. Long enough to know that not every job’s on the books. Long enough to know you’ve got a secret or two yourself.”

  I stared at him.

  “Tell me you don’t have something tucked away for a rainy day.” His voice was gaining confidence.

  “Don’t do this, Doug. It’s beneath you.”

  “One anonymous phone call and you’d have the IRS so far up your ass they could count your cavities. But no—you can’t help out a guy when he’s having
a few problems. Think about that, why don’t ya, Glenny.”

  SEVENTEEN

  Darren Slocum, standing out back of his house with cell phone in hand, made another call.

  “Yes,” said the man who answered.

  “It’s me. It’s Slocum.”

  “I know who it is.”

  “Have you heard?”

  “Have I heard what?”

  “About my wife.”

  “Suppose you tell me.”

  “She’s dead. She died last night. She went off the pier.” Slocum waited for the man to say something. When he didn’t, Slocum said, “You don’t have anything to say? You’re not curious about this? You don’t have a single fucking question?”

  “Where should I send flowers?”

  “I know you saw Belinda last night. Put the fear of God into her. Did you call Ann? Did you ask her to meet you? Was it you? Did you fucking kill my wife, you fucking son of a bitch?”

  “No.” A pause. Then the man asked, “Did you?”

  “What? No!”

  The man said, “I drove past your place last night, must have been around ten or so. I didn’t see your wife’s car or your truck in the driveway. Maybe you threw her off the pier.”

  Slocum blinked. “I was out for just a couple of minutes. When Ann left I tried to follow her, but I didn’t know which way she’d gone and I came home.”

  Neither of them spoke for a couple of seconds. Finally, the man said, “Is there anything else?”

  “Anything else? Anything else?”

  “Yes. Is there anything else. I’m not a grief counselor. I’m not interested in what happened to your wife. I’m a businessman. You owe me money. When you call me, I expect news on how you’re coming along with that.”

  “You’ll get your money.”

  “I told your friend she had two days. And that was a day ago. I’m willing to give you a similar deadline.”

  “Look, if you could give me some extra time, there’s going to be some money. This wasn’t how I was expecting to pay you back, but Ann … she had life insurance. We just got these policies, so when they pay up, there’ll be more than enough—”

  “You owe me money now.”

  “Look, it’ll come. And right now, I’m planning a funeral, for Christ’s sake.”

  The man at the other end said, “I’m sure your wife told you what she witnessed when she delivered a payment to me down on Canal Street.”

  The dead Chinese merchant. The two women in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  “Yes,” Slocum said.

  “He owed money, too.”

  “Okay, okay,” Slocum said. “The thing is, in the meantime, I think I may know where the money is.”

  “The money?”

  “Garber told Belinda the car didn’t totally burn up. They recovered her purse, and there was no money in it.”

  “Go on.”

  “I mean, I suppose it could have been somewhere else in the car, like the glove compartment, but I’m thinking, it makes the most sense that if she had the envelope with her, she’d have had it in her purse.”

  “Unless,” the man said, “one of the first officers at the scene, one with your sterling ethical code, found it.”

  “I’ve worked a lot of accident scenes, and believe me, a cop, rifling through a dead woman’s purse, I don’t see it. I mean, the most you could expect is a few bucks or some credit cards. No one’s expecting to find an envelope with more than sixty grand in it.”

  “Then, where is it?”

  “Maybe she never intended to deliver it. Maybe she kept it for herself. Her husband’s company’s got financial problems.”

  The man was quiet.

  “You there?”

  “I’m thinking,” the man said. “She called me, earlier that day, left a message. Said she’d run into a problem, was going to be delayed. Maybe the problem was her husband. He saw the money, took it from her.”

  “It’s a possibility,” Slocum said.

  Several seconds of silence. Then: “I’m going to do you a favor. Consider it a bereavement leave. I’ll see Garber.”

  “Okay, but listen, I know you’ll do what you’ve got to do, but just don’t do anything in front of—I mean, the guy’s got a kid.”

  “A kid?”

  “A daughter, same age as mine. They’re friends.”

  “Perfect.”

  EIGHTEEN

  My father was a good man.

  He took pride in his work. He believed in giving 110 percent. He felt that if you treated others with respect, you’d get it in return. He didn’t cut corners. If he bid twenty grand to remodel someone’s kitchen, it was because he believed that’s what the job was worth. For that money, he’d provide quality materials and excellent workmanship. If someone told him they could get someone to do it for fourteen, Dad would say, “If you want a fourteen-thousand-dollar job, then that’s the guy you should go with, and God bless you.” And when those people called him later, wanting him to fix everything the other contractor did wrong, Dad would find a nice way to tell them they’d made their choice, and now they had to live with it.

  You couldn’t do an under-the-table job with Dad. People were always taken aback by that. They thought, if they paid in cash, Dad could cut them some slack on the price because he wouldn’t have to declare the income.

  “I pay my taxes,” Dad used to say. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say I’m always thrilled about it, but it’s the right thing to do, goddamn it. When I call the cops at one in the morning because someone’s trying to break in to my house, I want them to show up. I don’t want to hear I’m on my own because they’ve had to lay off cops because there’s not enough money in the budget to pay ’em. People not paying their taxes, that hurts all of us. It’s bad for the community.”

  It was not a commonly held opinion. Not back then, and not now. But I respected him for it. My father was a principled individual, sometimes to the point of driving my mother and me crazy. But he held to his beliefs. He was no hypocrite.

  He would have had a dim view of some of the things I’d done.

  I consider myself a pretty law-abiding individual. I don’t rob banks. When I find a lost wallet, I don’t empty it of cash and then pitch it into the garbage. I make sure it gets returned to its rightful owner. I try, within reason, to keep to the speed limit. I signal my turns.

  I’ve never killed anyone, or even hurt anyone. A couple of bar fights in my youth, sure. I gave as good as I got, and afterward, we all had a few more drinks and forgot about it.

  I’ve never gotten behind the wheel drunk.

  And, every year, I’ve filed my return and paid my taxes. Just not all of them.

  But, I admit, there have been times over the years when things were slow, when I have participated in the so-called “underground economy.” A few hundred here, a couple of grand there. Usually jobs that did not go through the company. Jobs I did on weekends, on my own time—when I was still working for my father, and since I took over running the company. A deck for someone down the street. Finishing off a basement for the neighbors. A new roof for a buddy’s garage. Jobs that might be too small for the company, but were perfect for me.

  Or, if I needed a bit of help, I’d bring in my good friend Doug. And I’d pay him out of the cash I got.

  While I’d had to tap into it during lean times, I’d managed to sock most of it away. I didn’t want a record of the money, so I didn’t bank it. I kept it at home, concealed behind a removable strip of wood paneling in my downstairs office. Sheila and I were the only ones who knew the cash—just under seventeen thousand dollars—was hidden there.

  Although Doug didn’t know how much I’d managed to save, or where I kept it, he knew I’d made money that was never reported. So had he, for that matter. But when he made his threat, he knew I had more at stake. I owned the company.

  I hadn’t ripped off the government for millions. I wasn’t Enron or Wall Street. But I’d hung on to a few thousand the IR
S would have been quite happy to pocket for themselves. If they found out, and could prove I owed them money, I’d find a way, over time, to pay them back.

  But not before they’d turned my life inside out. They’d audit me, and when they were done doing that, they’d audit Garber Contracting. I knew those books were clean as a whistle, but it’d probably cost me several grand in accountants’ fees to prove it.

  I knew what my father would say, if he were alive today. He’d sing me a few of the old standards. “You reap what you sow,” he’d have said. “If you’d kept your nose clean, you wouldn’t be in this mess.”

  And he’d be right.

  Later on Saturday, I grabbed my tools and rang Joan Mueller’s doorbell. She looked delighted to see me. She was in a pair of jean shorts and a man’s white dress shirt, the tails knotted at the front.

  “I almost forgot,” I said. “About the tap.”

  “Come in, come in. Don’t worry about your shoes, keep them on, it’s okay, God knows if I was worried about the carpets I wouldn’t be taking in half a dozen kids every day, would I?” She laughed.

  “No, I guess not,” I said. I’d been in this house before and knew my way to the kitchen. There was half a bottle of Pinot Grigio on the kitchen table, and a nearly empty wineglass not far from it. Between the two, an issue of Cosmopolitan.

  “Can I get you a beer?” Joan asked.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Are you sure?” She opened the fridge. “I’ve got some Bud, a couple of Coors, and a Sam Adams. I seem to remember Sheila saying you liked Sam Adams.”

  “Thanks, but I’m okay.”

  She looked disappointed as she closed the fridge. “I didn’t think there was a man alive who didn’t like a cold beer.”

  “It’s this one?” I asked, setting my toolbox on the counter next to the sink.

  “Yup,” she said.

  The tap wasn’t dripping. “It looks fine.” I turned the cold on, then off, then did the same with the hot.

  “It’s kind of intermittent,” Joan said. “It’ll do it and then it won’t. It won’t do it all day, then I’ll be in bed and I can hear it going drip, drip, drip, just driving me mad till I come down here and turn the taps off harder.”