by Andrew Gross
I couldn’t believe it was almost noon.
“I don’t think I’ve slept this late since college.” I gave Patrick a sleepy wave at the stove.
He was in a cut-off sweatshirt and jeans. “Breakfast’s almost ready. You mind green salsa in your eggs?”
“You mean lunch, right? And sure, I love salsa.”
“Grab a seat.” The table we sat at last night was already set. “It’s not much—I found whatever I could in the fridge. Turkey bacon, scrambled eggs and cheese over a tortilla. Help yourself to some coffee. There’s milk in the fridge.”
“Not much? This is great! Any chance for some tea?”
“It’s usually extra, but in your case, you did put up a larger deposit than usual.” He pointed to the counter. “There ought to be some in that jar over there.”
I found a tin and some English Breakfast inside. Next to it, I noticed a framed photo I hadn’t seen last night. A young boy, seemingly around eight. Bangs of light brown hair down to his eyes. An adorable smile.
The boy I’d noticed with him the day of the funeral.
“That’s Matt,” Patrick said. “His mother moved out west and remarried a guy who lives in Phoenix. He adored his grandpa.” He scooped the eggs out of the pan onto two plates and added a couple of strips of bacon.
“I bet he did,” I said. “He’s adorable.”
“You kidding . . . ?” Patrick grinned, putting a plate in front of me. “The kid’s a rock star. Takes after his mother, fortunately. Here . . .”
“Thanks.” I took the plate and looked up at him. “Really. For everything, Patrick.”
“C’mon. Eggs are getting cold.”
They were delicious. Scrambled eggs over a tortilla with a spicy green salsa and cheese. “You were obviously a short-order cook before you became a cop.”
He shrugged. “Remnants of a hospitality major for a while when I was in college.”
He read my look, which was kind of like, how the hell did a hospitality major end up working for the police?
“Switched to government in my junior year,” he volunteered without my asking.
“Where?” I asked, scooping a forkful of eggs onto a tortilla.
“Upstate New York. Cornell.”
“Jeez,” I said, “you’re also some kind of brain on top of everything else?”
He sniffed, shaking his head. “Hockey. I got recruited there, but by my junior year I’d banged up my knee and didn’t even play.”
“Well, these are good. At least that hospitality major didn’t go to waste. How’d that wife of yours ever let you go?”
“Didn’t. She left me. Long tale.”
“They all are,” I said. “And we all have one.”
“Anyway, after nine-eleven I had a change of heart. I decided to go into police work. And you?”
“You mean how I became a cop?”
“I was thinking more how you became single.”
I gave him the sixty-second version. Jim. My days in magazines, then my time at the agency. The Cesta debacle. I’d already talked about the divorce and Brandon.
“So he’s okay?” Patrick asked. He clearly meant Brandon. “Where he’s staying now?”
I nodded. “He and Remi have stayed with Elena whenever I had to travel and my folks weren’t around. No one would know that. I had her pick him up from school yesterday afternoon. Speaking of which, he’s got a doctor’s appointment today with his neurologist. I have to remind Elena.”
“Who’s Remi?” he asked.
“Remi’s the dog.”
“It must be very tough.” He broke off a piece of tortilla and dipped it in the salsa. “Dealing with all this on your own. And I don’t mean taking the money.”
“It’s tough . . .” I nodded. “Not like there’s a choice in the matter . . . But these past two years, with Brandon at Milton Farms, watching him evolve, it’s strangely also become the most rewarding time of my life. One I don’t want to let go of. Sorry, but in my book he’s kind of a rock star too.”
Patrick smiled. “I bet he is.”
“So I guess that brings us to present time . . .” I pushed my plate aside. It was pretty clean. “You have a next step?”
“I’ve been thinking . . . My dad had a GPS with him in his Honda. I’d thought about tracking down where he went that night, but until all this came up, it wasn’t exactly a mystery that needed to be solved. You know what I mean? But there’ll be a record in there of where he went. Maybe someone might know who he was there to see.”
I nodded. “Seems a start,” I said.
“A start?” he said, stacking my plate and putting it on the counter near the sink.
“Look, there’s something else I didn’t tell you.” I stood up.
“The mike’s all yours . . .” he said, and leaned with his palms against the counter.
“I found your father’s cell phone on the floor mat when I went into his car. Something made me take a look. I’m not sure why. There was a text message in there he had written.”
“Wasn’t his. My dad didn’t text message,” he said, shrugging.
“Well, I’m sorry, but he did that night. I even noticed the time of it. It was almost exactly when he went off the road. I can’t remember who it was to, but he was telling someone that he was on his way back, just as that deer ran in front of him. The police never mentioned that?”
“No. They didn’t.” He shook his head with surprise.
“I’m trying to recall who it was to. It was a woman. With a P. Patty, maybe . . . ?”
“Paula?” Patrick suggested, wrinkling his brow.
“Paula. That’s it. I remember now. Who is she?”
“Paula was my mom. But she’s been dead a couple of years. Why the hell would he be texting her? You’re sure? What did it say?”
“That he was heading home. Then just a ‘wi,’ which I assumed meant with . . . That he was heading home with—”
“With what . . . ? The money?”
I shrugged. “That would be my guess, Patrick.”
“He could just have been letting me know he was on his way back and hit the wrong key. My mother’s name would’ve come right after mine.”
“I thought you just said your father didn’t text? And anyway, what else could he have meant but ‘with the money’? Which wouldn’t have meant anything to you. It wouldn’t have ever meant anything to anyone, even the police, because no one knew it was in there. But it damn well did to someone.”
“So you’re saying what?” Patrick scratched his head. “He was letting someone know?”
“He may have hit the wrong key, Patrick; I don’t have a clue. But he was definitely telling someone he had that money. So who would that be? I’m not the detective here, you are. That said”—I smiled—“I’m kind of thinking it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to get your hands on that phone.”
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
An hour later, Patrick was back on Baden Avenue. He pulled his truck up in front of his father’s house.
It was after two P.M. He hadn’t assigned any work crew for today. Patrick went in through the kitchen and checked out what they’d done. A whole wall of new drywall had gone up yesterday. The kitchen island would be new, as well as a new fridge and the stove. And he’d also put new wood facings on the cabinets, which were probably from before the war. He pulled out a utility drawer in the counter where his folks kept loose things they used around the house: calculators, picture hooks, thumbtacks for the bulletin board. The ferry schedule.
He had to find his dad’s GPS. But this was also where they threw their old cell phones.
The more he thought about it, the more he knew Hilary had to be right. His dad was contacting someone. He was trying to tell someone what he had.
He rummaged through the drawer. When the police in Westchester returned his father’s belongings, the phone was in the box, along with his wedding ring, his Longines watch, and his wallet—all of which Patrick had given to his sister as keepsakes.
; All except the phone, which she had no use for, and which Patrick was pretty sure they had tossed in here.
His mom and dad weren’t exactly tech savvy—they honestly didn’t even know how to get on a computer—but you could literally trace the evolution of cell phones by pawing through the kitchen drawer. There were a bunch of them in there, all sizes and weights. He searched around for the BlackBerry his dad had had with him that night. It had been a Christmas gift from him and Annette a couple of years back, and while his dad first claimed he had zero use for all this new technology crap, as he called it, within a month, he was looking up the weather anyplace Patrick or one of the grandkids would go, as well as pointing out constant weather reports on some app along with all the cheap garages wherever he went.
Where the hell was it? Patrick said to himself, sifting through the drawer. It had to be in here. They’d just thrown it in a week before.
He turned over a calendar and there it was.
He took it over to an electrical outlet and plugged it in. It took a few minutes for the phone to come to life.
The first thing he did was look for the text message Hilary said that his dad had sent from the car.
He found it. To Paula. Just as Hilary had said. To his mom?
I’m on my way it read. He’d probably been writing it just as the deer bolted out. Maybe his attention had been diverted. It probably killed him. And Hilary was also likely right about what he was saying: I’m on my way with the money.
So who could he possibly have been telling? Patrick leaned against the counter. His mom had been dead for two years.
Paula.
He pushed the button on the upper-left-hand corner of the keyboard. It displayed the history of recent calls and texts.
He saw three or four calls that were to him, going back maybe a week. And there were a couple to Annette, his sister, two days before the accident, and one to Chris, his grandson. Probably to discuss the Knicks. Patrick smiled.
Then something took him by surprise.
He counted them: five alone over the three days leading up to the accident. Five calls from his mother’s old cell phone number.
That phone had been inactive for almost two years.
It didn’t make sense.
Who the hell could be calling him from there? And why?
He put his father’s phone down and dug through the utility drawer again, looking for his mom’s old Nokia, which he knew was in here somewhere too. Joe would never throw it away or close down the number. For sentimental reasons. It was a memento for him. Patrick could visualize the damn thing. They didn’t throw out anything. This was definitely where it had to be.
One by one he removed each old phone from the drawer and placed it on the counter.
It wasn’t there.
A numbing feeling rose up in Patrick’s gut as he stood there staring at the counter full of phones.
Either his father was calling a ghost to say he was on his way back with a half-million dollars.
Or he’d given the phone out. And he was in this, this scheme that had gotten him killed, with someone else.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Patrick came back that afternoon, and around five we drove over the Whitestone Bridge, retracing his father’s route.
We found the address in his GPS device under “Recent Destinations”: 110 Main Street in Banksville, New York. I Googled it on my phone and it came back as something called the Stateline Diner.
“You know the place?” Patrick asked.
I shook my head. “I’ve probably passed it a dozen times. Banksville is the size of a postage stamp on the New York–Connecticut border. There’s not much there beyond a food market, a pharmacy, and a post office. And this fancy French restaurant Jim took me to a couple of times, Le Cremaillaie.”
Patrick shrugged. “Well, I’d bet you a buck to a dime that my father damn well didn’t know it.”
“Maybe. But I’d take that bet that he was meeting someone who did.”
It took about an hour for us to get up there. Patrick told me about the missing phone and the calls back and forth between his father and whoever he’d given it to. He had no idea who that could be. We didn’t need to follow his dad’s exact route, as Patrick had already gone up there to reclaim his father’s belongings and visited the accident site.
“He must have come up through New Jersey and over the Tappan Zee to avoid the BQE. That’s why he was on that back road.”
“You’re probably right,” I agreed. I called Elena, thinking of how his father’s choice of routes had probably cost him his life. Brandon had a doctor’s appointment at four.
I got her voice mail in Spanish.
They were probably in there now.
We took the Merritt up to Greenwich and then all the way out on North Street to the New York state line. We wound past some of the huge estates—sprawling gated properties hiding Loire-like chateaus set back from the road. It was enough to impress anyone, but these were clearly not the kind of places Patrick saw on a regular basis on Staten Island and in Bensonhurst.
“Kinda reminds me of your place.” He chuckled as we drove by a particularly impressive one.
“My place would be the garage for some of these homes,” I said. “And trust me, they can fill it!”
We slowed when the GPS announced we were a quarter mile from Banksville. The Stateline Diner was on Main Street, a cozy, shingled white house, and if you didn’t stop quickly, you’d pass through the town. About four or five cars were parked in the lot. We were about as out of the way as one could get here. If you were meeting someone and you didn’t want anyone else in the world to see, you’d come to the right place.
We parked, went up the porch steps, and stepped inside. The early dinner crowd seemed pretty local. Three or four tables were filled, a handful of stragglers at the counter. FOX News was on the screen with the sound muted.
A middle-aged hostess told us to take a seat. We found an empty table in the corner. A waitress came over, a girl with frizzy red hair and multiple earrings who seemed in her early twenties and who said her name was Amy. She pointed to a board on the wall that listed the specials. I was dying for a glass of wine, but I went for a Diet Coke instead. Patrick asked for a light beer. A few minutes later when Amy brought them back, Patrick asked her if we could show her something.
“My father was in here,” he said, “a couple of weeks ago.” He took out a photo. His dad smiling proudly with Patrick’s son. “It was a Thursday. Maybe an hour or so later than now. I wonder if anyone here might recognize him?”
“I’m not in on Thursdays,” the waitress said. “Lorraine might remember.” She indicated the hostess. “I’ll have her come by.”
A couple of minutes later the hostess came over. Patrick showed her the photo and asked if she recalled him from a few weeks before.
At first she just stared. “He looks familiar . . .”
“Maybe you heard,” Patrick said. “He was killed in a car accident on his way home.”
“Oh my, yes, of course we heard!” the hostess said with an empathetic sigh. “Dina read about it in the local papers. Such sad, sad news. That was your father? I’m so, so sorry, dear . . .”
“Thank you,” Patrick said. “Appreciate it. We’re trying to reconstruct what brought him up here, and who he might have been meeting with. The truth is, we don’t have a clue.”
“Well, I don’t know,” The hostess shook her head. “I know I served him coffee. It was just before dinnertime if I recall.”
“He was here with someone?”
Lorraine put a hand to her curly blond hair as if trying to jog her memory. “Not when he came in, if I recall. But yes, someone did sit down with him a while later. They didn’t stay very long. They both got up and continued their conversation outside. I remember because I ran to take some leftovers out to a customer who had left them on the table and saw them over by a car . . .” She pointed. “Over there.”
Out in the dark parking
lot.
“Any chance you know who this person was?” Patrick asked. “It’s really important.”
“I don’t, hon. Sorry. But Deena might. I’ve seen the man in here from time to time. I think she’s waited on him before. Deen . . .”
She called over a pretty waitress who looked to be in her forties with her long dark hair in a ponytail. “You remember that guy you read about who was killed after he was in here? The one who got into that accident . . .”
“ ’Course . . . Wasn’t I the one who brought the newspaper in?”
“Well, this is his son. You remember the guy he was in here with that night? Stocky, short lightish hair. He’s got a mark on his face . . .” She touched her cheek. “Here. I know you’ve waited on him before.”
“You mean Charlie,” Deena the waitress said.
Charlie.
Patrick glanced at me, a rush in his eyes, as if we were finally getting somewhere. “Charlie who? Do you happen to know a last name? Or where he’s from?”
“Sorry. To me, he’s just Charlie. He comes in here maybe once a month. Mostly lunch or breakfast.”
“There must be something you can tell me about him?” Patrick asked. “Anything would be helpful.”
Deena shrugged, kind of blankly. Then, “Maybe one thing,” she said. “He works up in Hartford, I’m pretty sure.”
“Hartford?”
“In the state capital. Always bragging how he’s such a VIP. Acts like he’s God’s gift to women, which I assure you he ain’t.” Deena rolled her eyes.
“You think he works for a lawyer up there?” Patrick asked. “Or in law enforcement?”
“No.” Deena shook her head. “I think he works for some big-shot representative. Someone high up, he likes to brag. In the state government up there.”
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
The army changed me.
Maybe it was what it took to make it through. The discipline. Or how they broke you down, completely down, until there was virtually nothing of who you were before, which helped me put the past behind.
Maybe it was being at war. Or for the first time having people who relied on me. Who didn’t know me. And me them.
