A Tap on the Window

by Linwood Barclay

  I only had to wait ten minutes.

  He hobbled down the building’s front steps and headed straight for the sidewalk. When he reached it, he didn’t turn left or right, but watched for a break in traffic. He didn’t walk very quickly, so that break was going to have to be a long one. Across the street were a Target and several other stores clustered around it like pups nursing off their mother.

  I got out of my car and ran over to him before he started his trek across.

  “Timmy?”

  The man turned and eyed me curiously. “Huh?” he said.

  “You’re Timmy?”

  He looked afraid to say yes, but after a second’s hesitation, he said, “Yeah, that’s me.”

  “My name’s Weaver. I wonder if I could ask you a couple of questions?”

  “What about? Who are you?”

  I handed him a card. “I’m a private investigator. I need to ask you about something that happened a couple of nights ago. What’s your last name?”

  Hesitantly, he said, “Gursky. Timmy Gursky. Has this got something to do with work? Because I’m heading over there right now and I don’t want to be late.”

  He pointed. Not to Target, but to one of the other businesses. An electronics store, it looked like.

  “The stereo place?” I asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “This isn’t about work. And you’re not in trouble. But you might have been a witness to something I’m looking into. Two nights ago, when you were leaving Iggy’s, there was a car pulling out of the lot, and I’m hoping you might have noticed it.”

  “Noticed a car? You kidding?”

  “I admit, I’m grasping at straws here.”

  “How do you even know I was there? And which night you talking about?”

  I told him, briefly, about reviewing the surveillance video at Iggy’s, that I’d been trying to find a girl who got into a silver or gray Volvo station wagon, and that Sal said he ate there most nights, around that time.

  “Sal, yeah, he’s an okay guy,” Timmy said. “Yeah, two nights ago. You know what? I actually do remember that car.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Son of a bitch nearly ran over my foot. Like I need any more trouble. My knee here got all fucked-up in Iraq.”

  I wanted to ask about the car, but felt obliged to ask about his knee first.

  He grinned. “That’s always a good line to use with the ladies, you know? I usually come up with a better story for them than what I’ll tell you, which’ll be the truth. I was working in what they called the Green Zone, you know? Inside the compound but not with the actual army or anything. They had, like, this whole city inside there, with everything all American. I worked for Pizza Hut. We had this trailer in there, soldiers could come up, get a slice just like they’d get back home. So I’m coming out of the trailer one day, miss the step, and come down right on my goddamn knee. Fucked it up big-time.”

  “Sorry to hear that,” I said.

  “Still hurts like a son of a bitch. You figure, you go over there, if you have to come back hurt, it better be because of some car bomb or missile or something, am I right? I had to hurt myself coming out of a pizza trailer. The ladies do not get that version.”

  “You said the driver of the Volvo nearly ran over your foot.”

  “Yeah,” he said indignantly. “I noticed the car early on, because it was parked with the motor running, and the thing was really pumping out the exhaust, you know? It was an old car and the motor was noisy and really needed a tune-up. So anyway, I’m walking toward home, right here, across the lot, which is pretty empty that time of night, and I hear this noise coming from behind, to my right, and I look around, and there’s the car you’re talking about, zooming out of there. For a second, I thought they’re trying to run me down, but I think the asshole behind the wheel, he just couldn’t see me.”

  “It was a man.”

  “Yeah, I mean, I could tell that much. I didn’t get a real good look at him, but yeah, it was a guy.”

  “With a girl in the passenger seat.”

  “I didn’t get a look at her. I could tell someone was there, but I couldn’t tell ya if was Britney Spears or Sarah Palin.”

  “But you saw the driver.”

  “Yep. Not much I can tell you about him, but I think it was a black guy.”

  “Okay. What about age?”

  “I don’t know. Not old, but other than that, I can’t really say. Except he was an asshole. He came right up alongside me. I jumped back and gave him the finger. Then I went down.”

  “You got hit?”

  He shook his head. “Just lost my balance. Didn’t hurt myself. But I guess the driver must have been scared he’d hit me because he hit the brakes and stopped. I was getting up, so he must have seen me in his mirror, figured I wasn’t dead, and then he floored it.”

  “You get a look at the license plate?”

  Timmy shook his head. “You kidding? It was dark. I mean, I think it was a New York plate, but I couldn’t tell you any more than that. Listen, you need anything else? I have to get to work.”

  I said I didn’t, and thanked him for his time.

  My cell went off as I was putting on my seat belt.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey, finally.” It was a man, and in two words he’d managed to convey exasperation. “Bill Hooper here.”

  “Mr. Hooper,” I said. “Thanks for getting back to me.”

  “What can I do for you? I have to tell you, right up front, I’m not taking on any new jobs. I got all I can handle for now, I’m shorthanded, and it’s the end of the season anyway. What I’d suggest is, try me in the spring, we might have some people move, cancel service, and we could put you on the list.”

  “That’s not why I was calling. I need to know about Dennis Mullavey.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Him.”

  “Yeah. He worked for you?”

  “I can’t believe Dennis’d put me down for a reference. That takes balls. Guy walks out on me, doesn’t give me any notice at all. I’d think long and hard about hiring him. I mean, he’s a good worker and all, a good kid, but you gotta be ready for him to quit on ya just like that.”

  “I don’t exactly have his résumé in front of me. You have a number where I can reach him? An address? I gather he’s not from Griffon.”

  “Haven’t got any of that on me,” Hopper said. “I could get my girl to call you. I think he’s from around Rochester. Came to work for me for the summer, even rented a room in my house. Look, he’s a nice kid. I liked him, he did good work, was pretty reliable, right up until the end. And now that everybody is back to school, I can’t get anyone else to work for me till the snow starts to fly. I only got one other guy. People say there’s all this huge unemployment, but you think you can find someone willing to push a lawn mower or ride a tractor or swing a leaf blower around? I’m behind. I got some clients, I haven’t been to their place in two weeks.”

  “That’s rough.”

  I thought of the long grass at Phyllis Pearce’s house. I asked, “You do the Pearce place?”

  “Yep, that’s one. I’m way behind getting to her.”

  “Why’d Dennis quit?”

  “No idea. All he did was leave a note. ‘Thanks for the job, sorry about leaving’ was all he had to say. I still owed him some money—even if a guy quits on me I’m not going to stiff him on what I owe him—but I don’t think my girl’s been able to get in touch with him. He just cleared out his room and he was gone.”

  “This girl—is it the one I called initially?”

  “Yeah, that’d be Barb. I’ll give her a heads-up that you’re going to call.”

  “I appreciate it. One last question. Dennis have a car?”

  “Yup,” Hopper said. “But if he needs it for work, I don’t know how reliable it i
s. He had it parked here all summer. I let him use one of my trucks off-hours, if I had one available. He always topped up the tank, I’ll say that for him.”

  “What kind of car?”

  “Volvo. A wagon.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Hopper. I’ll give Barb a call shortly.”

  “Okay,” he said, and hung up.

  I sat there for a moment, thinking. If Dennis Mullavey had been maintaining the grounds at Phyllis Pearce’s place, why didn’t she have any idea who he was? Then again, she might have never known the name of the young man tending her property, or been at Patchett’s when Hopper’s crew came over to—

  My thoughts were distracted by another phone call.

  “Hello?”

  “Mr. Weaver? It’s Sheila Skilling.” Her voice was shaking. “They arrested Sean, they think—”

  “I know,” I told her. “I’m sorry.”

  “You have to help us,” she pleaded. “You simply have to help us.”

  I wasn’t sure what I could do for the Skillings at the moment. Finding Claire was the priority. What Sean needed was a good lawyer. But I did have some questions for Sheila and Adam Skilling. For example, how much did they know about what Sean and Hanna were doing for Roman Ravelson? And there was one question I wanted to ask Adam Skilling privately.

  Why was he on Iggy’s surveillance video, standing at the counter, so soon after Claire and Hanna had switched identities?

  FORTY-THREE

  The woman says to him, “I’m going to ask you something, and I need you to be totally honest with me.”

  He sits in the wheelchair, avoiding her eye. “Of course,” he says.

  “Did you write anything in the book other than the usual?”

  “I . . . I told you, I can’t find it. I need you to get me another empty one so I can start writing things down again.”

  “I know you gave it to the boy. You admitted it the other night. What I want to know is what you wrote in it.”

  “Like you said, just the usual. Nothing to worry about.”

  “But you always wrote down the dates.”

  The man says nothing.

  She puts her fists on her hips. “What the hell were you thinking? Can you tell me that?”

  “I don’t know.” He speaks so quietly she can barely hear him.

  “If he gives that to someone, someone who remembers your little habits—I swear I don’t know what gets into you.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m really—”

  She doesn’t hear the rest. She steps out of the room, closes the door and slips the lock on. Her son is standing there, by the washer and dryer.

  “He’ll be the death of me,” his mother says. “What are you doing here?”

  “I think the detective might be getting close.”

  His mother nods. “I get the sense he doesn’t give up easy.”

  “But this is good,” the son says. “I’m going to drop everything for a while. Indefinitely, I guess, while I see where he goes.”

  “We need a contingency plan,” she says, and lowers her voice to a whisper. “If the girl, and the kid, show up on their own, before Weaver finds them, we need to be ready. We need to be able to deny everything. We need to be able to show the kid up as a liar. We say we don’t know what he’s talking about.”

  The son leans against the washing machine, folds his arms across his chest and shakes his head. “You’re talking about moving Dad?”

  The woman hesitates. “I guess you could say that.”

  “Where would we move him? Where could he go where we could still look after him?”

  His mother says nothing. Her silence speaks volumes.

  “No, Mother. We can’t do that.”

  “I can’t keep this up,” she says. “I just can’t.”

  “Look, just let me see how this plays out with Weaver. If we’re going to have to get rid of anybody, I’d rather it was him and the others, not Dad.”

  “Of course,” she says. “That goes without saying.”

  “That Weaver guy, God, he’s as big a pain in the ass as his kid was. At least everything worked out the way it should have with him.”

  FORTY-FOUR

  Driving over to the Skillings’, imagining what they had to be going through with their son, I flashed back to when Scott was only six years old, years before our troubles began.

  Around that time, he’d been having a lot of nightmares, and he was coming into our room in the middle of the night.

  “I had a scary dream,” he’d say each time. Donna and I would allow him to crawl into the bed with us, but we worried we were establishing bad precedents, being too soft, that he’d be snuggling with us every night until he left for college.

  But it was something we decided we would worry about later, and looking back now, I’m glad we let him slide in between us, pull the covers up to his neck, and drop his head into the chasm between our pillows.

  One night, I was the one with the nightmare. It was a recurring one, one I still get every once in a while. In it, I’m slamming that drunk driver’s head into the hood of the car. I’ve got a fistful of his hair, a good strong grip, and I’m banging his head again and again and again until it becomes apparent that it is no longer attached to his body. I realize what I’ve done and turn his dismembered head around so that I’m looking him right in the eye.

  “I’ve learned my lesson,” he says, and grins. “Have you learned yours?”

  I always woke up in a cold sweat. This particular night, I did not wake Donna up tossing and turning or, as I sometimes did, screaming. I was afraid to try to go back to sleep for fear of seeing that head again, so I slipped out from under the covers and went down to the kitchen. I ran myself some water from the tap and sat there at the table, thinking about the mistakes I’d made, about how we’d ended up in Griffon.

  I’d been sitting there maybe ten minutes when I realized I was being watched. Scott was standing in the doorway, and my heart did a flip. I tried not to show that he’d nearly scared me to death.

  “What are you doing up?” I asked.

  “I could see a light on,” he said.

  “You shouldn’t be wandering around the house at night.”

  “What are you doing?” Scott asked.

  “Just sittin’ here.”

  “Did you have a bad dream?”

  I hesitated. “As a matter of fact, I did.”

  “What was it about?”

  “I don’t really want to talk about it.”

  He nodded. “Are you scared if you go back to bed it’ll start again?”

  “A little.”

  He gave that some thought for a few seconds. Finally, he proposed a solution. “You can come sleep with me.”

  I had a sip of water, put the glass down. “Okay,” I said.

  He waited while I put my glass in the sink and turned out the light. He reached for my hand and led me to his room as though I didn’t know how to get there.

  His bed was a single. I lay on my side, my back up against the wall. Scott got in and tucked himself up against me.

  “Don’t snore,” he said. “You snore a lot.”

  “I’ll try not to.”

  He was back asleep in seconds. I felt his body swell and shrink with each breath. Anticipating his rhythms calmed me. Before long I was asleep, too, and at least for the rest of that one night, the bad dreams were absent.

  * * *

  Once again, I found myself sitting in the Skillings’ living room. Adam and Sheila were settled in chairs across from me. I was on the couch. On the table between us was coffee, which Sheila must have started making the moment she’d hung up the phone with me. Steam rose as she poured some into a china cup.

  “Cream? Sugar?” she asked, hovering. It was right there in front of me. As were some cookies. Sometim
es, in times of extreme stress, you had to do something to keep yourself occupied. Make coffee. Bake cookies. Clean out a closet.

  “For God’s sake, he can spoon in his own sugar,” Adam Skilling snapped.

  Sheila promptly sat down, put her hand over her mouth and pressed hard, as though trying to hold a scream inside.

  “Mr. Weaver,” Adam said, “our son, he can be a bit of an idiot at times, like all kids his age, but he didn’t kill Hanna.”

  “Tell me what’s happened,” I said.

  Shortly after I had left him, Sean called his parents from the bridge where we’d found Hanna’s body, and they immediately drove over. Ramsey and Quinn—the Skillings had made a note of the names on their badges—were still attempting to question him, but it seems he’d taken my advice and was keeping his mouth shut.

  About six hours later, as the Skillings were getting up for the day—not that anyone had gotten any sleep—Sheila noticed the police were outside, poking around Sean’s Ranger. They had the doors open, and were searching inside.

  “Were these the same police who’d been interviewing Sean the night before?”

  Sheila had managed to tamp down that scream hiding in her throat, removed her hand from her mouth, and said, “They were different. Two men, instead of a man and a woman.”

  “Did you get their names?”

  “One was . . .” She paused. “One was named Haines and—”

  Adam interjected. “Brindle, that was the other one.”

  “How’d they get into the truck?” I asked.

  “Sean must have left it unlocked,” Adam said. “When you were here, and we ordered him home, he ran into the house so fast he probably didn’t think to lock it.”

  “So it had been sitting unlocked all night?” I asked.

  The two of them glanced at each other, then looked at me and nodded. “Probably,” Adam said.