The Accident

by Linwood Barclay

I pushed his hand away but didn’t go for the phone. “Tell me.”

  “Oh my God,” he whimpered. “Oh my God.”

  I waited.

  “I can’t believe Ann would have told Sheila this,” he moaned. “And that Sheila would tell you. That’s how you found out, right?”

  I smiled knowingly. Why tell him I’d learned about this from my daughter’s cell phone, and from what she’d taken from Ann Slocum’s purse? Try explaining that, I thought. And the truth was, for all I knew, Ann had told Sheila about this, although I seriously doubted it.

  “So you know,” he said. “I can’t believe Ann told her. That she would admit to what she was doing. Oh my God, if Ann told Sheila, she could have told …”

  He had his face in his hands. He looked like he was going to have an instant nervous breakdown. “You don’t know how long I’ve been living with this, worried that someone … anyone might find out that …”

  “Tell me,” I said, sitting there, looking as smug as a goddamn Buddha.

  It came out in a torrent. “Ann needed money. They were always running short, her and Darren, even with selling purses on the side. I’d always found her … compelling. Attractive. Very … forceful. She could tell, she could tell I was interested. I wasn’t the one who suggested it. I never could have done that. But she asked to meet me for coffee one time, and she … made a proposal.”

  “A business proposal,” I said.

  “That’s right. We met, a couple of times at a motel here in Milford, but that seemed a little too risky, being right in town, so we started going to a Days Inn in New Haven.”

  “So you paid her to handcuff you, and …?”

  He looked away from me. “We kind of worked up to that. At first, it was just, you know, regular sex.”

  “Things not good at home, George?”

  He shook his head, unwilling to get into it. “I just … I just wanted something different.”

  “What’d you pay her?”

  “Three hundred, each time.”

  “I guess none of this came up when you were at the lawyer’s office offering up judgments on my wife’s character,” I said. “Although I don’t know why it would. Totally different things, really.”

  “Glen, look, I’m asking for your complete discretion here, you get that, right?”

  “Oh, sure.” You stupid son of a bitch.

  “The thing is, she wanted more.”

  “She upped her rates?”

  “Not exactly,” he said. I took a sip of my cold beer and gave him a minute. “Ann said it’d be a terrible thing if Belinda ever found out. First time she said it, I thought, Yeah, I totally agree. Second time she said it, I realized what she was getting at. She wanted more money to keep quiet. I thought she’d never tell. That’d be crazy. She and Belinda were friends, had been a long time, and if she told, it would all come out, Darren would find out—”

  “Darren didn’t know?” That did make sense, given Ann’s orders to Kelly to keep quiet about what she’d heard.

  “He didn’t know anything about it. I really didn’t think she’d ever tell, but I didn’t want to take the chance. The thing was,” and his voice got very quiet, “she took a picture, once, with her camera phone, when I was, you know, hooked up to the bed. Just me in the shot. She said, wouldn’t it be funny, if somehow that got emailed to Belinda. I’m not even sure she actually took the picture. She might have been faking, but I just didn’t know. So I started giving her an extra hundred each time, and that seemed to satisfy her, until, well …”

  “Until she was dead.”

  “Yeah.”

  The boy who’d been chugging beer had stopped. “I can’t do any more,” he protested, laughing. “I can’t.”

  “Wanna bet?” one of his friends said. One grabbed him from behind, a second held his head, and the third put the pitcher right to his lips. He started tipping and beer slipped down the boy’s chin and all over his shirt. But a lot of it seemed to be going down his throat, judging by the way his Adam’s apple was bobbing.

  The boy was going to be very drunk, very soon. I just hoped these clowns weren’t planning to drive—

  “When she had that accident,” George said, “I was stunned, you know? I felt sick, and I couldn’t believe it. But part of me, I hate to say this, a part of me was relieved.”

  “Relieved.”

  “She didn’t have any hold on me anymore.”

  “Unless that picture’s really out there somewhere. On her phone.”

  “I keep praying it’s at the bottom of the harbor. Every day that goes by, and the police don’t get in touch …”

  I said, “You might get lucky on that score.”

  “Yeah, I hope.”

  I poked the inside of my cheek with my tongue. “I’ve got a favor to ask of you, George.”

  “What?”

  “I’d like you to get Belinda to rethink what she told those lawyers. That the whole pot thing, she got it wrong. It was just some Turkish cigarettes or something. She might also say that any time she ever saw Sheila drink, she was very responsible about it, which as far as I’m concerned, is the truth.”

  I looked long and hard at George to see that he was getting the message.

  “You’re going to blackmail me, too,” he said. “If I don’t do this, you’ll tell Belinda.”

  I shook my head. “I would never do that. I was thinking I’d tell Darren.”

  He swallowed. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Don’t think I don’t appreciate it.”

  “But that money. That sixty-two grand. What the hell is that about?”

  “Like I said, you’ll have to ask Belinda.”

  If they weren’t calling Ann’s death an accident, I might have been less inclined to make him that deal. Because if Ann had been murdered, George would be a prime suspect.

  So would Darren and Belinda, for that matter. If they knew what had been going on.

  I was so bone-tired I didn’t have the energy to think about these new revelations. I went home, and to bed.

  Sleep came pretty quickly this time. That might have been a blessing, if it hadn’t been for the nightmare.

  Sheila was in a chair, a kind of dentist’s chair, with gleaming chrome and red padding and straps and belts that secured her into it. And forced into her mouth was a funnel, jammed in so far it had to be pushing up against the back of her throat. Tipping into the funnel, supported from brackets bolted to the ceiling, a bottle the size of a refrigerator. A vodka bottle. Vodka was spilling out, overflowing the funnel, splashing onto the floor. It was like some alcoholic form of waterboarding. Sheila was struggling, trying to turn her head, and somehow I was in the room with her, screaming, telling them to stop, whoever it was that was doing this, screaming at the top of my lungs.

  I woke up, tangled in the sheets, soaked through with perspiration.

  I was pretty sure what had triggered the nightmare. It was those kids at the other table. Chugging beers. My mind kept coming back to the moment when three of the guys pinned their friend’s arms and started forcing him to drink even more alcohol.

  They poured the beer down his throat.

  The kid was going to get drunk on his own, anyway, that was pretty clear. But what if that hadn’t been his intention? What if he hadn’t wanted to get drunk? There wouldn’t have been a damn thing he could do about it.

  You could make someone drink too much. You could force them to get drunk. It wasn’t all that complicated.

  And then I thought, What if they’d put that kid in a car? What if they’d put him behind the wheel?

  Jesus.

  I sat up in bed.

  Was it possible? Could it have happened that way?

  What if Sheila had been compelled to drink too much? So much that she lost all sense of judgment and got into her car. Or what if someone put her in the car, after making her consume a large quantity of alcohol?

  Was that so crazy? In a word, probably yes.

  But the
more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that it was at least possible. I thought, again, of the Sherlock Holmes line Edwin had quoted me. As far-fetched as this scenario was, it made more sense to me than the one I’d been led to believe, that Sheila had willfully gotten drunk and driven her car.

  The trouble was, if I started to buy into a theory as wild as this, it raised a couple of very huge questions.

  Who would force her to drink so much?

  And why?

  When the phone rang, I jumped. The digital clock read 2:03 a.m., for Christ’s sake. I had a feeling that it would be Joan. I wasn’t up for any more of her problems.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “Glen, it’s Sally.” She sounded frantic. “I’m so sorry to call you so late, but I don’t know what to do, I didn’t know who else to call or—”

  “Sally, Sally, just hold on,” I said. I picked at my shirtfront, feeling how wet it was. “Just slow down and tell me what’s happened. Are you okay? What’s wrong?”

  “It’s Theo.” She was crying. “I’m at his place and he isn’t here. I think something may have happened to him.”

  FORTY-TWO

  Sally gave me directions. My hand shook slightly as I wrote them down.

  Theo lived in a trailer on an empty lot out in the countryside west of Trumbull. I took the Milford Parkway up to the Merritt and headed west. Once I was past Trumbull, I got off and went north on Sport Hill Road, then hung a left onto Delaware, at which point I phoned Sally’s cell. She’d warned me that the driveway into the property wasn’t easy to spot, especially at night, so if I called her then she’d be sure to be down by the side of the road so I’d see her.

  It took me the better part of an hour to get up there. When I pulled over to the shoulder, it was coming up on 3:30 a.m. Sally was leaning against the back of her Chevy Tahoe, and when she saw headlights moving over off the road, she took a few steps, checking that it was me. I hit the inside light a second and waved so she didn’t have to worry that I was a stranger.

  This really was the middle of nowhere. I didn’t see any other houses along this stretch of road.

  She ran up to the truck and I gave her a reassuring hug as she fell into my arms. “There’s no one inside, but Theo’s truck is here,” she said.

  Theo had left it at the bottom of the driveway, which explained why Sheila hadn’t pulled her Tahoe off the road. As I walked past I noticed Theo had not yet replaced the decoration I’d removed from below the rear bumper.

  We walked up the two ruts that constituted Theo Stamos’s driveway. It was about a hundred feet up to the trailer, a fifty- or sixty-foot rust-streaked mobile home that had probably been manufactured in the seventies. It was set on an angle, the side with the two doors—one forward and one aft—facing northwest. There were lights on inside, providing enough illumination so we could see where we were walking.

  “How long’s he lived here?” I asked.

  “Long as I’ve known him,” Sally said. “That’s a couple of years. I don’t get where he would be. I talked to him on the phone a couple of hours ago.”

  “At one in the morning?”

  “Around then.”

  “Kind of late for a phone call?”

  “Okay, so, we kind of had a fight, you know?” She sighed. “Because of you.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “I mean, Theo was pretty pissed at you, and he was going on about it to me, like it’s my fault or something because I work for you.”

  “I’m sorry, Sally,” I said. I meant it.

  “And then I find out that something has happened since then, with Doug.” Even in the darkness, I could make out her accusing look. “Something that might get Theo off the hook.”

  I hadn’t gotten around to telling her about finding the bogus electrical parts in Doug’s truck. “I was going to fill you in on that,” I said.

  “Doug had those fake parts? Boxes of them?”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “Did it occur to you then that maybe it wasn’t Theo’s fault? I mean, if Doug had those parts now, couldn’t he have had them when the Wilson house burned down?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But regardless, Theo installed them, and he should have been able to spot the difference.”

  “You’re impossible.”

  “How did you hear about Doug?” I asked.

  “He called me. He was so upset. Especially after you’ve been friends for so long, how he saved your life and everything.”

  I winced mentally.

  “And I told Theo,” Sally continued. “And he was super mad, he kept calling me about it, the last time around one, I guess. So I thought, I better come over here and try to calm him down.”

  “And he wasn’t home?”

  We’d arrived at the steps that led up to the trailer door.

  “No,” Sally said. “But if he’s not here, why’s his truck here?”

  “You’ve been inside?”

  She nodded.

  “You’ve got a key?”

  Another nod. “But it was open when I got here.”

  “He’s not in there passed out or anything?” She shook her head. “Let’s have a look just the same.”

  I swung open the metal door and stepped inside the trailer. It was pretty spacious, as trailers go. I stepped into a living room, about ten by twelve. There was a couch and a couple of cushy chairs, a big-screen TV sitting atop a stereo unit, a scattering of DVDs and video games. There were half a dozen empty beer bottles around the room, but it wasn’t quite a frat house in here.

  The kitchen, to the left of the partition as you walked in, was another story. The sink was overflowing with dirty dishes. There were several empty takeout containers littering the countertop, a couple of empty pizza boxes. Theo’s truck keys were on the kitchen table, next to a stack of invoices and other work-related papers. While the place was a mess, nothing looked particularly out of order. It wasn’t like there were upturned chairs and blood on the walls.

  I picked up the keys and jangled them. “Wouldn’t think he’d go far without these,” I said, as though they were some sort of clue.

  On the far side of the kitchen was a narrow hallway that led down the left side of the trailer. There were four doors off it—two small bedrooms, a bathroom, and a larger bedroom at the tail end. The smaller bedrooms had been turned into storage rooms. Empty stereo boxes, clothes, tools, stacks of Penthouse and Playboy magazines, and others raunchier than those, filled each of them.

  I didn’t, at a glance, see any boxes of counterfeit electrical equipment.

  The bathroom was about what you’d expect of a single guy. Just one step above an interstate highway gas station restroom. And the large bedroom was an explosion of work clothes and boots and tossed covers.

  “You ever stay here?” I asked Sally. It wasn’t a question about her sex life. I just couldn’t picture her tolerating this mess.

  She shuddered. “No, God. Theo’d sleep over at my place.”

  “When you guys get married, you moving in to your house?” I almost called it her father’s place.

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “Anything look funny here to you?” I asked.

  “Just the usual horror show,” she said. “Where would he go?”

  “Would he have gone out with a friend? Maybe someone came over and they went out for a drink or something.”

  Sally pondered a moment. “Then why didn’t he take his keys and lock up when he left? He’s not going to want someone to steal his truck.”

  “Did you try his cell?” I asked.

  She nodded. “Before I came over. And his phone here. Both went to message.”

  I thought. “We should give it another try.” I walked back up the narrow hallway and picked up the phone on the kitchen counter. “Hang on,” I said. “Let’s check the history. If somebody called him on his landline, invited him out, we’ll see who it is.”

  I found Sally’s number on there, b
ut nothing else in the last several hours. “Just you,” I said.

  “Maybe he called somebody,” Sally suggested.

  “There’s an idea,” I said, and hit the outgoing call list. It showed not only the last number called, but the last ten.

  There were three calls out in the last eight hours. One was to Sally’s cell, another to her home phone, and the third, the most recent, to a number I knew well.

  “He called Doug’s cell,” I told Sally. “Looks like maybe an hour after the last time he talked to you.”

  “He called Doug?” Sally said.

  “That’s right.” I suddenly had a bad feeling. If Theo really hadn’t known those parts he’d installed were bad, and believed Doug Pinder was responsible, he might have been inclined to have a face-to-face meeting.

  But then again, Theo’s truck was still here. Could someone else have picked him up and taken him to see Doug? But then we were back to why he hadn’t taken his keys with him. You want to lock up, and you don’t want to leave your keys so someone can steal your truck.

  “I wonder if I should call him,” I said.

  “Who?” Sally asked. “Doug or Theo?”

  I’d been thinking Doug, but if Sally hadn’t tried Theo in some time, it made sense to try him again.

  I moved through the kitchen to the door, looked outside, hoping maybe we’d see Theo coming up the driveway.

  “Try him,” I said to Sally.

  Sally got out her cell and hit a button. She put the phone to her ear. After a few seconds, she said, “Nothing.”

  I wasn’t sure, but I thought I’d heard something. “Try it again,” I said.

  I went out onto the step and stood very still, holding my breath. Nothing but the sounds of night. And then, off in the woods, I was pretty sure I heard a phone.

  Sally came outside. “I tried it again, but still no answer.”

  “See if there’s a flashlight around,” I said. I had one in the truck, but didn’t want to have to run all the way down to the road.

  Sally went back in, returned a moment later with a heavy-duty Maglite.

  “Stay here,” I told her, getting a grip on the flashlight. “Keep trying the number.”

  “Where are you going?”