Hope Never Dies

by Andrew Shaffer

  “I checked under the bed,” I said. “You actually want me to touch the sheets?”

  “We’re looking for anything Finn may have left behind.”

  “But the sheets?”

  “Anything,” Barack said.

  I shuddered. At least Barack was taking the bathroom. I didn’t want to think about what sad state it was in, but I could guess I’d been inside cleaner porta potties at political rallies.

  The bedspread was pulled all the way up, with nice and tight corners. The way Jill made the bed. I pinched the top corner of the bedspread like I was picking up a dirty diaper and slowly peeled it back. I don’t know what I expected to find—blood, a bullet hole. Maybe a dirty diaper. All of the above.

  Fortunately, all I found was a bleached white sheet. Not that it made me feel any better about the room. It was no place to pass an hour, let alone the final months of your life. Dammit, Finn, if only you’d told me…

  Barack made his way out of the bathroom. He shook his head.

  “It was worth a shot,” I said, collapsing into the chair. To me, it was undeniable now that Finn had been part of something larger. We had nothing concrete to prove it to the cops, but there was at least one person sniffing around his trail. Possibly more, if the burglary and the break-in at the motel were two different parties. Two different criminals. Not to mention the hophead in Darlene’s room. At the very least, Finn had been involved with the wrong sorts of people. At the worst…he’d been the wrong sort of people. Could he have been a criminal himself? And what mattered more: the truth, or preserving Finn’s name?

  I’d promised Grace Donnelly that I’d find out what happened to her father. I hadn’t said what I’d do with that information once I found it.

  “The chair’s been moved.”

  I glanced up at Barack. “What did you say?”

  “The chair,” he said, pointing to where I was sitting, “has been moved.” He crossed the room and knelt down. He ran a hand over the carpet. “Recently, too. There are still indents here.”

  I raised myself out of the chair with only minimal wincing. The last thing I wanted was to worry Barack. He didn’t know how bad my knee was, and I intended to keep it that way.

  I bent down to tip the chair to see if there was something hidden underneath it, but Barack and Steve stepped in to do the heavy lifting. “Let us young bucks do it, Joe,” Barack said.

  They rolled it onto its back.

  There was a twelve-by-twelve-inch section of carpet missing. The edges were frayed, as if it had been cut up with a serrated knife. The bare plywood was showing. There was a faint pink stain in the center.

  My heart was beating fast, propelled by equal parts terror and excitement. None of us spoke.

  16

  I left a message on Lieutenant Esposito’s voicemail, letting her know we needed to talk ASAP. Since it was past nine o’clock, I wasn’t sure if we would hear from her until morning. Police had to sleep sometime. One assumed.

  “No luck?” Barack said, reading the expression on my face.

  I shook my head. “No answer.”

  Steve joined us in the car after returning the key to the front desk. The night clerk didn’t have a clue about the mysterious woman. Not surprisingly, the unhelpful gentleman also claimed ignorance when asked about the missing square of carpet. “He thought someone might have taken it as a souvenir.”

  I laughed. “The only souvenirs people take home from places like this are bedbugs.”

  “I guess we’re done here, then?” Steve said.

  “We’re waiting for Esposito’s call,” I said.

  “A few minutes,” Barack said, much to Steve’s obvious distress. “We can wait a few minutes.”

  I nodded toward the room. “What do you think happened in there?”

  “Somebody spilled something on the carpet,” Steve said.

  I glared at him in the rearview mirror. “No crap, Matlock.”

  “Cool down, you guys,” Barack said. “Steve’s right. All we know for sure is that something was spilled on the carpet.”

  “Blood,” I said.

  “We don’t know that, Joe.”

  “Would you go to all that trouble to cover up a ketchup stain? No, you wouldn’t. The woman wasn’t in there long enough to cut the carpet up and move the chair, so we can forget about her for the moment. If there’s even a chance that’s Finn’s blood in there…”

  I had the scenario all worked out in my head already. There was something Detective Capriotti had said the other day that kept coming back to me: He may have even been dead already. I’d done a little googling and found that rigor mortis takes up to two hours to set in. Medical examiners can’t determine the exact time of death. All they can give you is an approximate timeframe. Being hit by a train would almost certainly muddy the waters further. If the faint pink stain on the plywood was indeed Finn’s blood, it was possible that Finn hadn’t died of a heart attack, or an overdose, or even suicide. He could have been murdered.

  I picked my phone up. No calls. I would have heard it ring, but sometimes missed calls show up that don’t ring, for whatever reason.

  “Something happened in that room,” I said. “Something awful. Even if it has nothing to do with Finn, the cops need to take a look.”

  Steve leaned between the seats. “Maybe it’s the police who ripped up the carpet. Did you think of that? Maybe they took it to test whatever was on there.”

  “And left it out of the case file?”

  “If it was a dead end, sure.”

  I swallowed hard. I was searching for a comeback, but he had a point. I’d gone so far down one road that I hadn’t stopped to examine any other possibilities.

  “You may have a point,” I squeaked.

  “I can’t hear you,” Steve said.

  “I said it’s possible, okay?”

  Barack stuck a hand between us. “No need to raise your voice, Joe. We can all hear you just fine.”

  I placed both hands on the wheel to calm myself. “Steve’s right. I’m sure the police have already checked all of this out. When Esposito calls back, it’ll be to chew me a new asshole. And you know what? She’d be within her rights to do that. I’m a grown man. I can take it. But dammit, something’s not right. Something stinks to high hell.”

  Barack placed a hand on my shoulder. “I understand you’re frustrated, Joe. But we’ve already gone above and beyond. When you talk to the lieutenant, tell her about the woman we saw. Tell her about the missing carpet. If she’s as good as everyone says she is, she’ll do the right thing and put more detectives on this investigation. She’ll connect the dots.”

  “If we’d had our heads screwed on straight, we could have caught that woman red-handed. Instead…”

  “Say we realized she had broken into the room,” Barack said. “What difference would it have really made? We couldn’t have held her against her will.”

  “Steve could have. Isn’t that right, Steve?”

  He cleared his throat. “Technically, you’re correct. If we witness a crime in progress, Service agents are allowed to make an arrest without a warrant.”

  “See?” I tapped Barack on the arm.

  “But I left my handcuffs in the Little Beast,” Steve continued. “Speaking of which, we shouldn’t leave her at the Walmart for too long. Renaissance won’t be happy if anything happens to her baby.”

  I glanced at Barack. “Renaissance” was Michelle’s Service code name.

  “I thought the car was yours.”

  He didn’t look at me. “The Little Beast is insured by that tiny Australian gecko,” he said, holding his thumb and index finger a couple inches apart for Steve. “She’ll be fine.”

  “It’s a British gecko,” I said.

  Barack and Steve both stared at me.

  “The insurance company m
ascot,” I said. “He’s British, not Australian.”

  Barack rubbed the fatigue from his eyes. “I just don’t know about you sometimes, Joe. I just don’t know.”

  I stuck my keys in the ignition. Besides my Challenger, there were only three cars and a pickup in the parking lot. Either the motel wasn’t doing much business tonight, or most of its clientele arrived on foot. A hot-pillow joint like this, I guessed the latter.

  Suddenly, a thought hit me like I’d just stuck a fork in a socket.

  “What happened to Finn’s car?” I asked Barack.

  “The Wilmington PD found it here in the lot. The report doesn’t say anything more than that. Could be in the impound.”

  “But Finn hasn’t been formally suspected of a crime. The car wouldn’t be evidence.”

  “Then it’d be towed,” Barack said, pointing to the sign on the light pole closest to my car. WARNING, it read. UNAUTHORIZED VEHICLES WILL BE TOWED.

  “Eventually,” I said. “It’d be towed eventually.”

  “You don’t think…”

  I nodded. “If his family didn’t pick it up, Finn’s car could still be here.”

  Unfortunately, neither Barack nor I had any idea what Finn’s car looked like. Steve checked with the front desk, but they said they didn’t record license plates. The reason was easy to guess—it provided plausible deniability for any number of law enforcement requests. Such as this one.

  If Lieutenant Esposito ever returned my call, I could ask if she had Finn’s license plate number handy. Steve offered to have one of his pals at Service headquarters do a records search, but I was worried about raising flags.

  We paced the lot. Barack had his hand on his chin, trying to get his gray matter to work overtime. I never picked up the hand-on-the-chin trick. Whenever I tried, I didn’t look like I was thinking. I just looked confused.

  “The pickup isn’t his,” I said. “We can cross that off the list.”

  “You’re sure?” Barack asked.

  “He lived in Riverside. That area’s ninety percent black. He wouldn’t last long with that Confederate flag on his license plate.”

  “Cross it off the list.”

  “And that one…that’s a Virginia plate,” I said, pointing to a newer Mini Cooper. “I don’t see him as having registered with the Virginia DMV, unless he was leading some sort of double life.”

  “Plenty of addicts lead double lives.”

  “But most addicts don’t register their cars in other states for the fun of it.”

  “So Occam’s razor says it’s not his car,” Barack said.

  “Occam?”

  “William of Occam,” he said. “An English philosopher who had a theory that the simplest answer was usually the correct one.”

  I nodded. I vaguely remembered the term from my law school days—but only vaguely.

  These eliminations left just two cars, both with dark-blue plates proclaiming Delaware the “First State.” One was a Buick Century, the other a Chevy Impala. Both looked to be from the last century. The last century…

  Of course. I walked around back of the cars and examined their bumpers. “Found it,” I said, patting the Buick Century on the trunk.

  “Ridin’ with Biden,” Barack said, reading the faded bumper sticker. “Cute.”

  The driver’s side door was locked. I peered into the backseat window. It was a mess of plastic to-go bags and empty Styrofoam cups. “Looks like he’s been living out of his car.”

  “Looks like your car, actually,” Barack said, peering into the front driver’s side window. “Looks like someone beat us here, too.” He reached for the passenger side door and opened it.

  “Maybe he left it unlocked.”

  Barack ran a finger over the rim of the window, stopping at a scratch in the glass. “Someone jimmied the door. That’s why it was unlocked. Not a clean job, though. A professional wouldn’t have left marks like this.”

  I examined the scratches. “How do you know so much about jimmying car locks?”

  “You’ve never locked your keys in your car?”

  “That’s what a towing company is for,” I said.

  “If you can afford Triple-A,” Barack said. “If you’re a high-schooler and you’ve spent all your money on Al Green records and six-packs, you’ve got to rely on other means. Like friends who boost cars.”

  I shook my head. We’d had very different adolescences, to say the least.

  I popped the button for the trunk. While Barack searched in back, I checked out the glove compartment. I still didn’t know what we were looking for, but the glove compartment was a bust. I found the car’s registration and a yellowed manual that hadn’t been cracked open since the Reagan administration. But no insurance card. Finn must have kept it in his wallet. I felt underneath the seats. Nothing there but used napkins.

  I sighed. I hadn’t been expecting to find a handwritten manifesto, but I’d hoped there’d be something. A secret laptop that he hadn’t told anyone about, with files that showed what he was really up to. Anything to shed light on the mystery that his life had become.

  Barack slammed the trunk shut, then knocked on the back window. I reached over and popped the lock.

  “They don’t make backseats like this anymore,” he said, sliding in.

  “They sure don’t.”

  Backseats were where the action was, back in the day. There was one car—the Chevy I’d gotten for my sixteenth birthday—with a backseat as big as a king-size bed. I’d had big intentions of putting it to use, but I was too timid around girls to be much of a Romeo in high school.

  The first time I’d gotten intimate in a car wasn’t until several decades later, during the ’88 campaign. Jill and I were in the parking lot of the Iowa State Fair, waiting on my Secret Service detail. I kissed my beautiful bride on the lips, and she kissed back with a little tongue. Before we knew it we were rounding first base in the backseat of a rental car while my personal aide kept tapping on the window to get our attention.

  I got called out at second.

  “How can someone live like this?” Barack asked. He was pawing through the trash on the floor behind me.

  “Sometimes, you just forget to clean out your car,” I said. “It’s not a top priority for most people.”

  “Maybe you should make it a priority.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, you,” Barack said. “It took me twenty minutes to clean out your car just so Steve would have a place to sit. I don’t even want to think about what happens when you hit the road, windows open, and all that trash just starts flying up into the air. You’re liable to cause an accident, driving around like that.”

  I hadn’t taken the car out all summer. The garbage in the back was from the days I’d been going to the University of Pennsylvania campus for the spring semester, and it had always been raining. I didn’t say any of this, though, because it wasn’t any of Barack’s business.

  “Sorry that I don’t have the Secret Service to vacuum my car out, like some people,” I mumbled.

  Barack went around to the passenger side. “You know, Joe—”

  “What?” I said, daring him, taunting him to do his worst. To say something that couldn’t be taken back. To say what he really thought of me: for once, to speak what was truly on his mind.

  “—I think we’re onto something here.” Barack held up a Styrofoam cup with a Waffle Depot logo. “What does this look like to you?”

  “A coffee cup.”

  “There’s a dozen of these bad boys,” he said. “Along with a bunch of to-go bags. Looks like, before work, he would stop at the Waffle Depot for coffee, and maybe a bite to eat.”

  I thought this over. Finn’s shift began in the early morning, before the sun was up. There weren’t many early-hour diners between the motel and Wilmington Station. There was, howev
er, a Waffle Depot.

  “Do you think he went there the day of the accident?” I asked.

  Barack held up a receipt. “I know he went the day before, at least. Says here his server was named Tina.”

  “Maybe he said something. Maybe he was acting funny.” I paused. “We could swing by, just for a bite. I haven’t had anything since lunch. I’m so hungry I could eat the balls off a low-flying goose.”

  Barack started to say something, then stopped.

  “Hey, Steve!” he shouted across the lot. “You like waffles?”

  17

  Except for the waitress and cook, the Waffle Depot was deserted. We sat in a booth in the far corner. All three of us had sunglasses on, both to disguise ourselves and to protect our eyes from the fluorescent lighting that lit the room like John Boehner’s tanning bed. Our caps were pulled low.

  “Are you sticking your gut out on purpose?” Barack said.

  “Are you talking to me?” I asked.

  “I wasn’t talking to Steve. Steve has one percent body fat. Isn’t that right, Steve?”

  “One-half of one percent,” he said.

  “Is that healthy?” I asked.

  Barack shrugged. The forty-fourth president was in pristine shape as well—not one-half of one percent body fat, but close enough for government work. He’d been out in the world, kayaking, parachuting, and (probably) kickboxing in underground fight clubs. Meanwhile I’d been at home, staring at the rowing machine in the basement and occasionally hopping on the treadmill.

  Steve yawned. There were dark circles under his eyes.

  Our waitress, a short woman with dark hair and a pierced nose, stopped by to take our orders. Her name, according to her name tag? Tina. She poured a coffee for Steve. Barack and I stuck with water.

  Just before she turned, Barack told her she looked familiar. “You work the graveyard shift, right? I think I’ve seen you closer to breakfast before. Must be some long nights.”

  She smiled. “I thought I recognized you from somewhere. Not from here, but from…well, I shouldn’t even say it out loud, it’s kind of ridiculous. You just look like someone famous, that’s all.”