The Accident

by Linwood Barclay

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Glen, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry about everything that’s happened. I’m sorry I involved her in any of this. But we don’t know that it has anything to do with what happened later. Maybe … maybe she got scared. She had second thoughts about selling the prescriptions and maybe she went to a bar and—”

  “Shut up, Belinda. I’ve heard all I want to hear. You’re a hell of a friend. First you get Sheila involved in this, and then you help the Wilkinsons. You’re the best.”

  “Glen,” she whimpered. “I answered your questions. I’ve told you everything I know. I … I have to get that money.”

  “I’ll pop it in the mail for you,” I said, and ended the call.

  THIRTY-THREE

  I drove past Belinda’s house on the way to the thruway. There was no one home, so I stuffed the envelope through the mail slot in the door and heard it drop on the other side. I’d considered, briefly, slapping some stamps on it and letting Belinda take her chances on the U.S. postal system to get her money back. I was pissed off enough with her to do it, but in the end, common sense prevailed.

  Maybe, considering my circumstances, and a pending lawsuit that could wipe me out financially, I should have kept the cash and said nothing. Every little bit helps. But it wasn’t mine, and I believed Belinda when she said Sheila had been delivering it for her. The cash was tainted. I didn’t want it, and I didn’t want any more visits from Sommer.

  In one way, the cash had served its purpose. It had leveraged information out of Belinda.

  I now knew what Sheila had been up to, what her plan had been to make some extra cash. Whatever Sheila was starting to get mixed up in, she’d been in way over her head. She wouldn’t knowingly have gotten involved with someone like Sommer. She’d probably never even met him. She’d had good instincts, and if she’d met this guy, she’d have had nothing further to do with him.

  I believed that in my heart.

  The more I learned about Sheila’s last day, the more convinced I was becoming that she had not gone somewhere to drown her sorrows, then gotten in her car and killed two people and herself, despite how things looked.

  There had to be more to it than that. And I was wondering who knew what that was. Sommer? Slocum?

  I had more than a few things to talk about with Detective Wedmore next time I saw her.

  On the way to Darien, Kelly asked, “How long do I have to go away for?”

  “Not long, I hope.”

  “What about school? Am I going to be in trouble missing school?”

  “If you end up being away more than a few days, I’ll get some work from your teacher.”

  She frowned. “What’s the point of being away if you have to do work?”

  I let that one go. “Look, there’s something very serious I have to discuss with you.” She studied my face carefully. I felt a pang of guilt. There’d been so many serious things to discuss the last few weeks that she must have wondered how many more there could be. “You need to be really, really careful.”

  “I’m always careful. Like when I cross the street and stuff?”

  “That, sure. But you can’t go off doing stuff on your own. You always stay with Grandma or Marcus. No wandering off. No riding your bike or—”

  “My bike’s at home.”

  “I’m just saying, you have to stick close to Grandma and Marcus. All the time.”

  “Fine. This doesn’t sound like it’s going to be much fun.”

  As we were coming off the thruway into Darien, there was a woman standing at the bottom of the ramp. She was probably only in her thirties, but looked twice that. By her feet were a ratty-looking backpack and a red plastic basket, the kind the supermarkets have if you’re only getting half a dozen items. It had a few water bottles in it and what looked like half a loaf of Wonder Bread and a jar of peanut butter.

  She was holding a sign that read, NEED CLOTHES JOB.

  “Jeez,” I said.

  “She was there the other day,” Kelly said. “I asked Grandma if we could give her some clothes but she said it’s not our responsibility to solve everybody’s problems.”

  That sounded like Fiona. But there was some truth to it. “It’s hard to make things right for everyone.”

  “But if everybody helped just one person, lots of people would get helped. Mom used to say that. Grandma has lots of clothes she doesn’t even wear anymore.”

  “A couple of walk-in closets’ worth,” I said.

  We were stopped at the light and the woman eyed me through the windshield.

  “Can I give her something?” Kelly asked.

  “Don’t put your window down.” The woman’s eyes seemed dead. She wasn’t expecting me to give her anything. Out of every hundred cars that got stopped at this light, how many offered her anything? Two? One? None? What had brought her to this point? Had her life always been this way? Or had she, at one time, had one like ours? A house, a family, a regular job. A husband, maybe. Kids. And if she had known a life like that, was there one event that started the unraveling? Did she lose her job? Did her husband lose his? Did their car die and they had no money to fix it, and couldn’t get to work? Did they fall behind on their mortgage and lose their house? And once, having lost it, were they so far behind the eight ball that they could never recover? And it had come to this? Standing at the end of the off-ramp, begging for help?

  Couldn’t any of us end up this way when one part of our life went horribly wrong, and then the dominoes started to fall?

  I fished a five-dollar bill out of my pocket and powered down my window. The woman came around the front of the car, took the bill from my hand without saying a word, and went back to her station.

  Kelly said, “You can’t get anything for five bucks.”

  “Tell me what’s going on.” Fiona stood in her oversized kitchen, with its skylights and marble countertops and Sub-Zero appliances, as Kelly and Marcus talked in the living room.

  I told her about the bullet that had gone through Kelly’s window. “Between that, and this thing with Darren Slocum pestering Kelly, it made sense to get her out of town. Just take her somewhere fun, that’s all I ask.”

  “My God, Glen, this is all horrible! And why is Ann’s husband bugging Kelly?”

  My cell rang. I really didn’t want to take a call right now, but at the same time, with all that was going on, I needed to know who was trying to reach me.

  “Just a sec,” I said to Fiona, took out the phone and glanced at the caller ID. It was a number without a name but I was pretty sure I recognized it as the Milford fire department. It was probably Alfie getting back to me. I let it go to message.

  “It was this conversation Kelly overheard. The one Ann was having. Slocum thinks if he can get Kelly to remember something about it, it’ll help him figure out who she was talking to that night.”

  “Do you think she can?”

  “I don’t think so. She didn’t hear all that much. The guy’s grasping at straws. He’s desperate.” I paused. “And I kind of get that. It’s pretty much how I’ve been feeling.”

  I stopped talking as Marcus and Kelly came into the kitchen.

  “We’re going to get some ice cream,” Kelly said happily. “Not to eat there, but to bring home. And we’re going to get chocolate sauce and caramel sauce and marshmallow sauce.”

  “We’ll take good care of her,” Marcus said.

  I gave Kelly a hug before heading out the door, holding on to her so long she finally had to wriggle free.

  Once I was back on the road, heading east back to Connecticut, I checked my message.

  “Hey, Glen, Alfie here from Milford Fire. Look, your girl Sally called me, and damned if I wasn’t going to give you a call today anyway. We sent out those parts from the fire for analysis, and we got the report back yesterday afternoon, a little too late to call, but yeah, what you were calling about, you were right. Those parts, they weren’t good enough to keep a pen flashlight going. It was crap.
Cheap, knockoff crap. This could put you in a shitload of trouble, my friend.”

  I dialed his number.

  “Sorry about the shitty news,” Alfie said.

  “Give me the details.”

  “We sent out the bits and pieces left from that circuit breaker panel for analysis, and it was all rubbish. Wire was so thin, once you applied some current to it, it melted away to nothing. We’re seeing more and more of this. I don’t mean us, here in Milford, although this stuff is around. But across the country, it’s getting bad. Some of the stuff going into new houses, man, I wouldn’t use it in my dog’s house. Listen, Glen, I have to send this on to the insurance company, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “And once they find out that house had equipment in it that didn’t meet code, they’re not going to pay up. In fact, they might just cancel your entire policy. They’re going to figure, if you put that kind of shit in one house, maybe you’ve put it in any other house you’ve built.”

  “I didn’t put that crap in, Alfie.”

  “Not you. Glen, I’ve known you long enough to know you wouldn’t knowingly do this, but somebody working for you did.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’ve got a good idea who. He’s not working for me anymore.”

  “Anybody else that guy is working for, they need to know,” Alfie said. “He wires up enough houses with that knockoff shit, sooner or later someone’s gonna die.”

  “Thanks for the heads-up, Alfie.”

  I flipped the phone shut and tossed it onto the seat next to me.

  I wanted to find Theo Stamos. I wanted to find Theo Stamos and kill the son of a bitch. But, seeing as how I was now going through Bridgeport, Theo was going to have to wait while I paid a visit to someone else.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Belinda Morton couldn’t believe it when Glen Garber told her he’d put the money in the mail. An envelope with sixty-two thousand dollars? Surely he wasn’t crazy enough to trust all that cash to the mailman. But maybe that was his way of making a point, of showing how angry he was with her.

  Not that she could blame him.

  She’d just been about to head out for an appointment to show a condo to a couple in their thirties who’d had enough of living and working in Manhattan, had found jobs in New Haven, and were looking for something with a view of the Sound. She phoned and said she’d had a family emergency and had to race home.

  And she was almost out the office door when this guy showed up.

  Said his name was Arthur Twain, that he worked for some private investigation or security company or something, and he wanted to talk to her about Ann Slocum, and fake purses, and whether she’d been to any purse parties, and did she know that the money that went to buy knockoff products supported organized crime. She could feel herself sweating right through her clothes, even though it was barely sixty degrees out there today.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, probably ten times. “I don’t know anything about this. I really don’t.”

  “But you were a friend of Ann’s, weren’t you?” Twain persisted.

  “I really have to go, I’m sorry.”

  Ran to her car, squealed out of the lot so fast she nearly ran down a woman on a bicycle.

  “Calm down calm down calm down calm down,” she kept telling herself. She would have to call Darren, tell him about this Arthur Twain, ask him what she should say if he came to see her again.

  She hoped that when Glen said he’d put the money in the mail, he meant the mail slot of her home. She got out of the car so quickly she didn’t even bother to close the door. If she hadn’t needed her keys to get into the house, she’d have probably left the motor running.

  She ran to the door, nearly rolling over on a heel, tried three times to get the key into the slot before she was able to turn it. She swung the door open, looked down onto the floor where the mail always fell.

  Nothing.

  “Shit, shit, shit,” she said. She half stumbled three steps into the house and allowed herself to fall onto the stairs, leaned up against the railing and felt herself starting to shake.

  Just because the money wasn’t there didn’t mean it had been lost, she told herself. Maybe Glen still had it. Maybe he was planning to drop it off later. Maybe he was on his way.

  And maybe the son of a bitch really had put it into the mail. That would be just like him. If there was one thing she’d learned from being friends with Sheila all those years, Glen did have a bit of a self-righteous streak in—

  She heard a noise in the house.

  It sounded as though it had come from the kitchen.

  She froze, held her breath.

  Someone was running water into the sink. There was the sound of a clinking glass.

  Then someone called out, “Honey? That you?”

  Belinda felt a weight being lifted off her chest, but only briefly. It was George. What the hell was he doing home?

  “Yes,” she gasped. “It’s me.”

  He rounded the corner and saw her collapsed on the stairs. He was in the same suit he wore the day before to the funeral. A different shirt, but still with French cuffs, bands of brilliant white between his hands and sleeves.

  “You scared me half to death,” she scolded him. “What are you doing here? Your car’s not in the driveway.”

  “When I got to work, I wasn’t feeling all that well,” he said. “I think it might be that fish you made last night. So I decided to come home, work from here today. I’m not going back to the office, so I put the car in the garage.” George ran his management consulting business out of New Haven, but it was just as easy for him to work from home. “And what about you? I thought you had a showing?”

  “I … it was canceled.”

  “What are you doing on the stairs? You look like you’ve been crying.”

  “I’m … I’m fine.”

  “Are you sure?” George asked, reaching into his suit jacket and pulling out a brown envelope. “Is it possible it has something to do with not finding this?”

  Belinda was on her feet. She recognized the envelope immediately. By its thickness, and her own handwriting on the outside. “Give me that.”

  She went to grab for it but he pulled it away, slipping it back into his jacket.

  “I said give it to me,” she said.

  George shook his head sadly, as though Belinda were a child who’d just come home with an F. “So you were expecting this,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “There’s sixty-two thousand dollars here. I counted it. It was dropped through the mail slot. You knew this was coming?”

  “It’s business. It’s a down payment on a property down on East Broadway.”

  “What’s this phone number on it? And who makes a down payment with cash, and doesn’t even get a proper receipt? And is it just a coincidence I saw Glen Garber’s truck driving away from the house when I turned down the street? Is Glen the one putting a down payment on a property? Would you mind if I asked him about it?”

  “Don’t meddle in my affairs, George. You’ve done enough already, making me talk to those lawyers about Sheila. Do you know how much that hurt Glen? Do you have any idea what that may do? It could wipe him out. It could bankrupt him.”

  George was unruffled. “People need to be accountable, Belinda. They need to be held to a certain standard. And if Glen wasn’t cognizant of problems Sheila was having, when he should have been, then there’s a price to pay for that. And envelopes stuffed with cash, dropped through a mail slot, do not meet those standards. Don’t you realize the sort of risks that exposes us to, to have that kind of cash around the house?”

  Cognizant. She wanted to kill him. All the years she’d put up with this. Thirteen years of his sanctimonious bullshit. The fool had no idea what he was talking about. No idea how deep she was in. And no sense that this money, this envelope stuffed with cash, was her ticket to digging herself out.

  “What I’m going to do,” George continued, “is I’m going to
put this money away someplace safe for you, and when you can show me what exactly it relates to, and assure me it’s going to be handled in a responsible manner, then I’ll be happy to hand it over.”

  “George, no. You can’t do this!”

  But he was already walking away, heading to his ground-floor study. By the time she caught up, he was already across the room, swinging out the hinged portrait of his equally sanctimonious, judgmental, ramrod-stiff, son-of-a-bitch father—dead, thank God—to reveal a wall safe.

  “I need that money,” Belinda pleaded.

  “Well, then you better explain where it came from and what it’s for.” George turned the dial on the safe and opened it in seconds. He tossed the envelope in, closed the door, and gave the combination a spin. “I hope this doesn’t have anything to do with those illegitimate women’s accessories Ann used to sell. Those dreadful parties.”

  She glared at him.

  “You know how I feel about the sanctity of trademarks and copyright. Selling bags that are not what they purport to be, that are not authentic, that’s just not right. The fact is, I don’t even know why a woman would want a bag that said it was a Fendi or whatever when in fact it was not. You know why? Because you’d always know. What pleasure is there in carrying around something you know to be fake?”

  She looked at his comb-over attempt.

  “For example,” he continued, “if I could get a car that looked like a Ferrari for a fraction of the price, but underneath it was a Ford—well, that’s not a car I would want.”

  George in a Ferrari, Belinda thought. She could no more picture a donkey piloting an airplane.

  “What’s happening to you?” she asked. “You’ve always been a self-righteous, pretentious asshole, but these last few days there’s something else going on. You’re sleeping on the couch, saying you’re sick but you don’t have the flu or anything, and you freaked out when I tried to join you in the shower, you—”