Trust Your Eyes

by Barclay, Linwood

  “He’s got ya there,” Julie said.

  I ignored her. “I know, Thomas. I’m just telling you what I saw.”

  “What else did you do?”

  “I did go up to the apartment,” I said. “Knocked on the door.”

  Thomas studied me. “Then what?”

  “No answer. The place is empty.”

  “Empty?”

  “Apparently. A woman down the hall told me. No one’s lived there for months.”

  “Did you ask her if anyone had been killed in the apartment?”

  “No, I did not ask her if anyone had been killed in the apartment. I’m guessing that’s the kind of thing she might have mentioned.”

  “Not if she did it,” Thomas said.

  “She didn’t look like a murderer to me. She said the girls or whatever had moved out a long time ago.”

  “And the apartment has been empty ever since?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “I guess.”

  “Isn’t that kind of weird?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve heard that apartments are in very short supply in New York City,” he said. “Why would someone let an apartment sit empty all that time?”

  “I don’t know, Thomas.”

  “What did the landlord say when you asked him?”

  “What?”

  Thomas still had my phone, and had swiped his thumb across the screen to see the next picture. “What’s this?”

  “Oh, that’s the directory, in the lobby.”

  “Is that the landlord’s number?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “So you talked to him?”

  “No, I did not talk to him.”

  “Why didn’t you talk to the landlord? He would probably know if someone had been killed in one of his apartments.”

  “Thomas, look, I got you some pictures, I knocked on the door, there was no one there, I don’t know what else I could have done.”

  Julie made a little snorting noise.

  “What?” I said.

  She asked, “How hard would it have been to talk to the super? Or some of the other neighbors?”

  “And this involves you how?”

  She smiled. “You were already there. In the city, in the building. You might have knocked on a couple more doors, make it worth the trip.”

  I glared at her.

  “Yeah,” Thomas agreed, looking at me with disapproval. “Why did you even bother? I should have gone myself last night.”

  “Yeah, well, you still wouldn’t be there for another week,” I said.

  “But at least when I got there, I’d have found out something. This is just like before, when there was someone in trouble in a window.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “This wasn’t much of an investigation. It’s certainly not up to the standards of the Central Intelligence Agency. I hate to think what they’d have to say about it.”

  “Yeah,” said Julie.

  “Okay,” I said, raising my hands in defeat. “Next time, you can leave the house and get on the train and go to New York and be Archie Goodwin and I’ll be the one who sits in the house while you go around and gather clues. I’ll just tend to my orchids.”

  “Archie? Orchids?”

  “Thomas, I did what I could. Honestly. There’s nothing at all online about anyone being killed at that address. No news stories. Whatever you saw, it’s pretty clear it was nothing. The best thing to do now would be to let this go.” I took the printout from my pocket, crumpled it, and tossed it into the trash. Thomas studied the paper ball as it bounced into the receptacle, then looked back at me.

  “That’s a bit dickish,” Julie said.

  I gave her another look, then sighed. Maybe she was right, but it had been a long day, and I was exhausted.

  I was expecting Thomas to agree with Julie, but what he said next came out of left field.

  “I don’t like Mr. Prentice.”

  I blinked. “What?” I allowed my brain two seconds to switch gears and asked, “Why don’t you like Mr. Prentice?”

  “He wants me to do stuff I don’t want to do.”

  “Thomas, what are we talking about here?”

  “He wanted to take me out for lunch and I didn’t want to go.”

  “Today? He came by here?”

  My brother nodded. “He grabbed me to make me go and then I hit him.”

  I took a step forward and put a hand on his shoulder. “Jesus, Thomas, you hit Len Prentice?”

  Thomas nodded. “Only a little.” He stood up out of the computer chair so he could demonstrate. He took my hand and put it on my arm. “He grabbed me like that and then I pulled away and then I hit his face.” He did it in slow motion, touching my cheek with the back of his hand.

  “You hit Len Prentice in the face.”

  “I don’t like him. I’ve never liked him.”

  “Thomas, you can’t go around hitting people.”

  “I told you, he grabbed my arm first. I didn’t hit him hard. He didn’t bleed or cry or anything.”

  “What did he do then?”

  “He left.”

  I sighed. I was never going to be able to leave Thomas alone again. At least not for an entire day. Before I could sell this house and go back to Burlington, I was going to have to get Thomas settled in a place where he’d be supervised. The other thing that alarmed me was that, within a very short time, Thomas had gotten physical. Twice. He’d tackled me. And now he’d struck Len Prentice. In his defense, both times he’d been provoked.

  “Thomas,” I said, “it’s not like you to lose your temper. This isn’t like you.”

  “I know,” he said, settling back into this chair and looking at the monitors. “Usually I’m good.”

  Thomas started clicking on the mouse and said nothing more.

  I felt Julie’s hand on my back. “Come on,” she said softly. “I think we could both use that drink.”

  THIRTY-THREE

  “WHO’S Len Prentice?” Julie asked as I handed her a beer from the fridge.

  I told her, and said she might remember him from the funeral. When I described him, she did. “Thomas has never liked him,” I said.

  “What the hell was he doing here trying to drag your brother out for lunch?”

  “I don’t know. Thing with Len is, he doesn’t quite grasp the concept that some people are different. He figures if Thomas hears voices he should just put in earplugs, and his ailing wife should be more energetic so she can travel with him. You know. ‘Walk it off.’”

  “Yeah, I know the type.”

  “Maybe I should call Len. See if he’s upset. It’s too late now. Maybe in the morning. Honest to God.”

  We stood there in the kitchen, leaning up against the counter, sipping our beers, not saying anything for a few seconds.

  Finally, I said, “Thank you for being so nice to him, taking him out for dinner, letting him use your iPad.”

  “You see, that’s what he’s talking about,” Julie said.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You’re thanking me for spending time with him. Like I was babysitting, or looking after your cat.”

  “I never meant—”

  “Thomas is a nice man,” Julie said. “A decent, well-meaning guy. Yeah, he’s got some issues. He’s slightly out of the ordinary. I mean, he told me how he got you to go to New York looking for this head-in-a-bag person, which I have to admit is kind of out there. Sorry about calling you dickish, by the way.” Her smile suggested she wasn’t sorry at all. “Did you really go into the city just to do that?”

  “I had a meeting about a job.”

  “How’d that go?”

  “Not bad.”

  “You moving there?”

  “No, it’s the kind of work I can do from my studio.”

  She nodded. “Anyway, thing about your brother is, there’s more to him than just this map stuff. That’s what I was going to say.”

  I had no comment.

&
nbsp; “Did you know he dreams about your dad every night?”

  I turned my head. “He told you that?”

  “Yeah.”

  He’d never told me. “I’m sure he misses him,” I said.

  “He said, when he’s wandering all these different cities in his sleep, he keeps seeing your dad sitting in cafés and restaurants.”

  That made me sad.

  “And you remember Margaret Tursky?” Julie asked.

  I had to think. “Yeah, I do. Red hair? Braces?”

  “Thomas had a real thing for her.”

  I looked at her skeptically. “I don’t think so.”

  “It’s true. He told me. He was eating a drumstick at the time.”

  “He and I, we don’t really talk about stuff like that. We kind of deal with more immediate issues. There’s kind of a lot going on around here, Julie, since our dad passed away.”

  She turned, leaning her hip into the counter, and said, “Look, I know I’m speaking out of turn here, that’s it’s none of my business. There’s just more to Thomas than meets the eye. Reminds me of my aunt. She’s gone now, bless her, but she was in a wheelchair for a while, and whenever I took her out, like to a restaurant or whatever, people would ask me what she wanted. ‘Would your aunt like to start with a drink? Would your aunt like an appetizer?’ Assholes. ‘Ask her,’ I’d say. Just ’cause she couldn’t walk didn’t mean she was deaf. It’s like that with Thomas. Just because he’s got a few screws loose, and I say that with respect, there’s still a lot of other shit going on.” She reached out and poked me in the chest. “And you’re not mean.”

  “But he said I was.”

  She nodded. “He did. But after that, he said you’re just trying to do the right thing. Ray, he loves you, he really does. I didn’t mean to give you the gears.”

  “No, you’re right,” I said. “I guess…I guess all I tend to see when I look at him is his, you know, handicap, although he doesn’t see it that way. I don’t always look at the entire person.”

  She took a step closer and gave me a friendly punch in the shoulder. “Maybe this is why I do what I do. I like to try to see all sides, to see the whole picture. I’m not claiming to be all holier than thou or anything. You’re just really close to the situation, and like you say, you’ve got a lot on your plate. Don’t beat yourself up about it.”

  “He must trust you, to tell you those things,” I said.

  “Maybe it’s just that nobody asked,” Julie said. “When we were having our chicken, I got talking to him about high school. And speaking of chicken.” She touched her lower belly. “I don’t think that stuff totally agreed with me.” She drank down the rest of her beer. “That’ll help.”

  “Let me just try again and say thanks, without it meaning anything derogatory about anyone.”

  She smiled and nodded. “You are welcome.” She took another step, closing the distance between us, went up on her toes, and gave me a peck on the cheek. “All is forgiven.”

  I set my beer on the counter and took hold of Julie’s arm. I leaned in to kiss her, and not on the cheek, and she was showing no signs of trying to stop me from doing this, when Thomas started shouting from upstairs.

  “Ray!”

  I let go of Julie and moved back as I heard Thomas coming down the stairs. He said, “I called the landlord.” I recalled that he’d lingered on that picture on my phone of the tenement building’s directory. He’d memorized the number.

  Thomas continued, “He had some interesting things to say, which you would have found out if you’d taken the time to ask.”

  Julie started heading for the door. “G’night, guys,” she said.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THERE were times when Nicole wondered how she’d gotten here.

  Not exactly here, in Ohio, in this Dayton apartment across the street from Allison Fitch’s mother’s residence. She’d gotten here by car.

  But hold on—that really was what she was pondering. How was it that someone who’d beat all the odds to make it to the Olympic Games, who had returned home from Sydney with a silver medal hanging from her neck—how could it be that that same person could be sitting here now, surrounded by electronic eavesdropping equipment, waiting for a break so she could find Allison Fitch and kill her?

  How did that talented young athlete, who’d performed her routine on the uneven bars for thousands of spectators in the stadium and millions more on television around the planet, end up killing people for a living?

  Well, you had to do something, right?

  Anyone else might have returned from the Games with their head held high. Okay, so maybe you didn’t win gold, but bringing back a silver medal, doesn’t that say you came pretty damn close?

  “Close only counts in horseshoes,” her father had always liked to say.

  And it was true what they said, that winning silver, it was worse than coming in third and taking the bronze. You won bronze and you thought, Okay, I’m coming home with a medal, and that’s pretty fucking awesome, and the great thing is, I don’t have to beat myself up over coming so close to winning. But when you came in second, when the gap between your score and the winning one came down to inexplicable differences of interpretation by the judges, you drove yourself mad. The “what-ifs” made you crazy. What if your landing had been just a bit steadier? What if you’d held your head up a little straighter? Was it because you didn’t smile? Did they just not like the look of you?

  Was there anything you could have done to win gold?

  You lay awake at night, wondering.

  “Close only counts in horseshoes.”

  The bastard.

  And her coach wasn’t much better. The two of them, those two impossible-to-please men, had put all their hopes and dreams on her. She’d been a fool to ever think she was doing it for herself. Turned out she was doing it for them. She just might have been proud of herself for winning silver, but not them.

  “Look at the endorsement deals you’ve lost,” they told her. “Millions of dollars, thrown away. The life you could have had.”

  Her father didn’t talk to her all the way home. Pretty long flight, Sydney to L.A., then the connecting trip to New York, the limo ride back to Montclair.

  She started doing poorly in school. Went from being an A student to getting Cs, and worse. Her father wanted to know what the hell was wrong with her. Did she take a stupid pill in Australia? Was it something in the water?

  Nicole—of course, that wasn’t her name then—knew what the problem was. She could never make the man happy, so why bother? Maybe, if her mother hadn’t died from cancer when Nicole was twelve, things might have been different. That woman, she had a life as a successful real estate agent. She didn’t have to live through her daughter, unlike her dad, whose greatest achievement in life was being assistant manager at a Payless Shoes outlet.

  She didn’t just let her grades slip. She partied. She slept around. She did drugs. Let her once perfectly toned body get out of shape. When she was eighteen, she met up with a man thirty years older than her who didn’t actually run a meth lab, but worked for someone who did.

  His name was Chester—honest to God, like from an old Western—and he had one of those RV things, a Winnebago, and he used to load that thing up with product. Maybe Chester was the perfect name for him, given that the RV was like a modern covered wagon. Meth was stuffed everywhere. In the fridge, under the beds, in the actual walls of the RV. Because you couldn’t send meth by FedEx or Purolator and you couldn’t take it on a plane, if you wanted to get it from one part of the country to the other you had to damn well take it there yourself. And because Chester’s boss was linked into a major distributor based in Las Vegas, it meant making plenty of trips to Nevada.

  But driving an RV cross-country all by yourself, that could look kind of suspicious, so Chester hired Nicole to tag along with him. If he ever got pulled over by police, and if they asked, he’d tell them she was his daughter, and he was taking her out west to be with h
er mother. Plus, Chester got her to help out. She made meals in the RV kitchen while they made good time on the interstates. She’d take the wheel while he had a nap. Only time they ever had to stop was to fill the tank.

  Sometimes, Chester would have Nicole meet his needs in ways that didn’t involve getting him a drink or making him a sandwich or cutting him up an apple. She didn’t like it, but he always threw an extra hundred her way when she helped him ease his “interstate tensions.”

  This business of making men happy, it never ended.

  They made the trip from New Jersey to Vegas a dozen times. Always pulling the RV into the same warehouse on the outskirts of Vegas, making the exchange with the same people. Looked like they were all trying out as extras in a Scarface sequel, but nice enough. They’d all have a drink when the exchange was made. They liked Nicole, and loved to tease Chester about how he passed the time driving all those thousands of miles, back and forth across the country, with that hot young thing riding along with him. Chester would give them a nod and a wink, doing nothing to make them think otherwise.

  She kind of hated him for that.

  It was the thirteenth trip where things went off the rails.

  Nicole knew something was up the moment the warehouse door began retracting. Usually, first thing they’d see would be the Scarface guys’ Escalade sitting in there, back hatch open, the boys leaning up against the grill. But instead of the Escalade, there was a Ford Explorer. No one outside the car, but two inside.

  “I don’t like this,” Nicole said, standing behind Chester, looking through the massive front window like it was a movie screen.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I got a call couple hours back, while you were sleeping. They said they’d have someone else receiving today.”

  “They say why?”

  “They’re gonna tell me their troubles? Don’t worry about it.”

  Nicole took a few steps back into the kitchen, slipped open a drawer, grabbed something. Chester pulled the RV up alongside the Explorer, killed the engine, got out of his oversized captain’s chair, and opened up the side door.

  The two men from the Explorer were out now, waiting near the door of the RV for Chester to hop out.