“Who?” she asked.
“Let’s go find that homeless guy.”
Forty
“We’re going to Georgie’s.”
“It’s starting to freak me out that you know everyone in this town after less than a week,” Lucy said, checking herself out in the mirror and fixing her hair.
“I don’t know everyone,” I said. “It’s a small town. People tell you their names and you remember them; it’s not as if there are eight million of them.”
I hadn’t really expected the homeless guy to still be standing where I’d seen him yesterday, but Georgie’s was as good a place to start looking as any.
“You mean Sam?” Georgie asked. Were there many homeless guys pushing Big Y shopping carts with American flags on them in this town? I said yes.
“That was a wonderful thing you did for him. I been telling everybody how you gave Sam a whole new start.”
I don’t usually give money to people on the street. In New York, conventional wisdom says they’d only go straight to the liquor store with it and buy another bottle; here, it seemed different. But twenty bucks hardly qualified as a whole new start. “It was only a few dollars. Have you seen him?”
“Not since yesterday.” He clammed up as if he thought I might be looking for change from the twenty.
“He might be in trouble,” Lucy said.
“Scout’s honor, I haven’t seen him,” Georgie said. “I kidded him, maybe he was going to Florida with all that dough.”
And who would have blamed him if he did leave town. Especially if Sam suspected what we did: that Billy Crawford was being set up and hunted for what he’d seen that night, and thought he might be next.
I scribbled a note on the back of a business card and left it with Georgie. “If you see him, please ask him to call me. We’re only trying to help.
“Is Betty Smallwood around?” I asked.
Georgie shook his head.
Betty had been running around trying to raise Claude’s bail. He looked from me to Lucy and back again. “Were you the girl in here with Claude the other night?” he asked.
“That was me,” Lucy said.
“Yeah, that Claude always had an eye for the ladies. You be careful now.”
We left Georgie’s and headed back to Titans, to see if anyone there had seen Sam/Big Y, the homeless guy who now had a real name.
Taylor, the clerk in the oversize jacket who was on duty the night I first arrived, was at the front desk. He was grinning and pleased with himself that he remembered my name.
“Hello, Ms. Cavanaugh. Welcome back to Titans.”
Lucy answered him and the kid looked confused. Then she did.
“Never mind,” I told her, “it’s too complicated.”
I asked if he’d seen Hector and he told me Hector and Rachel had been in the bar when he came on duty.
“I don’t know if they’re still there. I only noticed because I like to keep an eye on Amanda when she’s in the hotel.” So he was the boyfriend.
I was in no hurry to see Rachel Page again and knew she wouldn’t be helpful if we did see her. “Taylor, will you do us a favor?” He looked nervous, but Lucy picked up her cue and turned on the charm. “Will you call Mrs. Page’s number and see if she’s in her office? We don’t want to disturb her if she’s discussing important business with Hector.” I felt sorry for deceiving the guy, but what harm would it do? He thought about it for a minute, then Lucy flashed her baby blues at him and he couldn’t pick up the phone fast enough. Sometimes I hated her.
He put the phone on speaker and dialed. “Mrs. Page? Oh, there you are.”
“You just called me, you halfwit. Who did you think would be here? What is it?” she asked. Taylor paused; he hadn’t thought that far ahead and since the phone was on speaker we couldn’t help him out. “Young man, are you trying to get fired?” She slammed the phone down.
Once we knew Hector wasn’t with Rachel, we went into the lounge looking for him. He was at the far end of the bar, nursing what looked like an iced tea.
“You ladies just can’t get enough of this place, can you? Or is it me?”
“Hey, Hector.” We slid onto bar stools on either side of him.
“I like this. A Hector sandwich.”
“Dream on. Do you remember the homeless guy who was behind the hotel, near the Dumpster, the night Nick was killed?”
“Why?”
“C’mon. It’s a simple question,” I said, trying to sound tougher than I felt.
“Y. Big Y. We call him that because of the shopping cart.”
Clever.
“I haven’t seen him since that night. Some of Nick’s friends were asking, too. They think he rolled the body before he reported finding it. Seems Nick had an expensive watch or something.” Hector took a sip of his drink and I revised my first guess about what was in the glass. “Don’t look at me like that, mamí, I’m off duty.”
Having seen Sam recently—and not looking flush—I didn’t buy it, but I said nothing to Hector.
“Is there anything else I can do for you ladies? Private tour of the grounds? The hot tub?” He knew the answer was no, so he finished his drink and left us sitting at the bar.
Lucy looked at me. “Now what?” she said.
I wasn’t sure. I only knew two other places in town, the trailer park and the Crawfords’ cabin on the mountain.
“You can forget about that cabin,” Lucy said. “I’ve spent enough time there, thank you very much.”
The bartender came over to see if we needed anything. I felt like a drink but didn’t order one so we sat there with club sodas, as I had a few nights earlier when Nick Vigoriti was alive and Billy Crawford wasn’t on the run. The bartender came back with a bowl of Goldfish.
“Did I hear you guys are looking for old Sam?” she whispered.
Forty-one
When you walk confidently and with purpose, people generally think you know where you’re going and that you have every right to be there. So even though neither was true, that’s how we strode through the first set of doors labeled Authorized Persons Only. Eventually we wound up in the same corridor that I’d been in with Hector and the cops when they brought me to identify Nick’s body. Past two or three unmarked doors and a laundry room, where one of the busboys was folding tablecloths.
“Kitchen?” I asked.
“Around the corner.”
By that time we could smell it. The kitchen was immaculate. Two men were busy chopping vegetables on gleaming stainless-steel surfaces when Lucy and I breezed through the Employees Only door, announcing to whoever might have cared that Helayne the bartender had said it was okay for us to enter.
My only experience with the kitchen at Titans had been a decent club sandwich, but the head chef and his staff looked like they knew what they were doing, at least to a woman whose idea of cooking was nuking a can of soup.
“Helayne doesn’t run my kitchen. You two don’t even have hairnets on. What the hell was she thinking?”
“We’re not health inspectors and we don’t want to get in your way, we just want to know if you’ve seen Sam,” I said, talking fast before he had the time to kick us out.
At the mention of Sam’s name, he softened, and walked us over to the sinks, where our long hair wouldn’t get in any of the food. “Sam hasn’t been here since the night of the murder and I’m worried sick. He was hunkered down, waiting by my van, the night Nick died. He looked terrible. I had two containers of food with me that I was taking to my mother. I gave them to Sam instead to tide him over until the police had cleared out. If I’d known he was going to be in the parking lot I would have brought more.”
“Did Sam ever mention a hiding place, or someplace he went when it was too cold to stay outside?”
The chef shook his head. “He might have gone to Billy’s cabin—if the police weren’t looking for Billy.” He was genuinely concerned. As the bartender had been.
“Sam must be a pretty nice guy for
all of you to have tried so hard to help him.”
“Years ago every kid in this town that wanted a summer job went to Sam,” the chef said, smiling. “Sam would ask for a résumé and give them a formal interview and then always announce that they’d gotten the job. That’s how we met. He was the foreman at a shoe factory, but it closed down eight or nine years ago.”
That’s when I knew what our next move was.
___________
“You expect me to go to a deserted factory with you?” Lucy asked, out in the parking lot. She plucked a bite-size dinner muffin out of a doggie bag the chef had given her, and popped it into her mouth. “Are you nuts?”
“You went to a deserted cabin with a man you barely knew.”
“That was different. Besides, I wouldn’t have gone if I’d known there was a killer on the loose.”
“I’m strapped.” It was an expression I’d heard in a movie.
“I’m sorry, what did you just say?” Lucy said, wincing, and poking through the bag for more food.
“I have a weapon.”
“I know what it means, I took you to that screening. When did you turn into Sarah freaking Connor?”
Inside the car, I showed Lucy the Taser, carefully sliding it out of the leopard-print case. I was getting more comfortable with it, especially since the cartridges were in my other pocket.
“Are you planning to shave the bad guy’s legs?” Now that she mentioned it, it did look a bit like an electric razor.
“It’s a Taser. Don’t worry, Babe showed me how to use it this morning. Put your seat belt on.”
“I feel so much better knowing you had a five-minute lesson on how to use a weapon with a former backup singer.”
Still muttering, Lucy did as she was told and we went to find the factory. Now that we could charge her TomTom, we plugged it in and followed the disembodied voice as it instructed us to turn left and take the highway, take the highway.
“Why does this woman have to sound so snippy?” Lucy asked, playing with the TomTom and testing other voices. “Someone could make a bundle marketing one of these that sounded like George Clooney.”
Our destination was less than seven miles away. TomTom/not George chose the fastest route; it took us half a mile past the turn for the mobile park.
“If we don’t find him, we can go back and ask some of the residents at the mobile park if they’ve seen him. He might have hitched a ride with one of them,” I said.
“I want to find him, too, but you are officially on drugs. I am not going into a trailer park at this hour, ringing doorbells or whatever they have and asking if anyone’s seen a homeless man with an American flag and a Big Y shopping cart. It’s not happening.”
“Then you and Claude have to hope we find him here,” I said, pulling into the deserted parking lot.
The For Sale or Lease sign was faded from so many years in the sun, and the new banner’s information that the owner was willing to subdivide the twenty-thousand-square-foot facility hadn’t made it any more attractive to potential occupants. Except perhaps one.
Having seen the two-story property on the news, I recognized the spot where Billy Crawford had eluded the cops. “Let’s circle the building first to see what looks promising,” I said.
“Nothing looks promising. Let’s go. This place is creeping me out.”
We drove around to the back and parked, out of sight of the road. We tried all four doors to the building but they were locked.
“Satisfied? Now can we go?” Lucy said. The sun had gone down an hour ago and it had turned chilly; she rubbed her arms to warm them up.
“There,” I said, pointing to an overturned trash can and the partially open window above it.
“There what?”
“That’s where he goes in,” I said.
Forty-two
The overturned drum made a lousy step and it was flaking and rusted in enough places to make me wonder when I’d had my last tetanus shot.
“Maybe Sam weighs less than we do,” I said, half-joking.
“That’s a depressing thought.”
More likely he was just less fastidious about where he put his shoes, or maybe more confident that the crusted lime-green gunk on the drum wasn’t toxic.
“The car. We’ll move the car under the window and I’ll stand on that to get in.” I still had the rental car keys so I didn’t wait for Lucy to agree. I kicked the drum over on its side, watching the dregs of the green gunk seep out through the bigger rust spots. Another kick moved the drum out of the way but not before punching a hole in it and spitting a gob of slime on my right pants leg.
Belgian blocks bordered a weedy strip underneath the window where I was sure that Sam had entered the building. The Subaru cleared the first block easily but its undercarriage scraped noisily over the second and third blocks.
“Good thing it’s rented,” Lucy said, practically.
I parallel-parked as close as I could to the side of the building, accidentally tapping the drum a couple of times before getting close enough.
“I’ll go first,” I said, as if there was any doubt. I climbed onto the hood of the car, then the roof. If I’d had the Jeep, getting in would have been a breeze, but the Subaru was lower to the ground and a longer way up to the windowsill.
I placed my bare hands on the splintered windowsill, wishing I had my heavy-duty work gloves. It took all of my strength to hoist myself up, lock my elbows, and shift my weight onto the windowsill. Thank goodness my Gravitron workouts had prepared me for this, although I rarely found broken glass in my local gym. I seesawed there for what seemed like minutes but was probably only seconds before I wriggled off the frame and dropped inside the building, tearing a nice hole in my hoodie in the process. Outside I could see Lucy pointing her phone at me and snapping pictures.
“You never know. Could be usable,” she said.
“Are you coming?”
She made it to the top of the car, but after three tries still couldn’t raise herself up to the windowsill or any place where I might have helped her get in.
“Okay, stay down there. If I’m not back in fifteen minutes dial Babe’s number; I’ve got her phone. If I don’t answer, get out of here and call the police.” I walked away to look for Sam.
“Wait, what’s her number?”
I gave it to her and she plugged it into their phone’s memory.
“Wait,” she yelled again, “you still have the car keys.” I fished them out of my pocket and tossed them onto the roof of the car. They bounced off and landed in a puddle of ooze near the front tire.
“You know, this was supposed to be a free trip to a spa,” I said. “So far, I’m not relaxed. You’re going to have to get me something really nice at Fendi.”
“Fifteen minutes,” she said, looking at her watch. “And I will get you something nice.”
Half of the windows were blacked out and the flood lights from the parking lot gave the floor the look of a checkerboard, light squares mixed with dark, for six feet or so until I reached the center of the floor, where it was pitch black.
“Sam? Sam? Can you hear me? My name’s Paula. I was at the hotel the night Nick died.” I heard a rustle and closed my eyes, briefly thinking, Please don’t let it be rats. I heard it again and saw a line of giant water bugs conga-dancing across the floor.
“Your friends at Titans are worried about you. And Georgie, and Claude. Everybody’s worried about you. I know you saw something. I was there that night, remember? Come on out, I can help you.”
I ventured farther into the dark, waving my arms around, trying to avoid bumping into anything. Every once in a while I felt a cobweb on my face and that made me catch my breath. “Sam, are you here?” I was beginning to think he wasn’t when I walked straight into the sharp edge of a piece of equipment, tearing a gash in my jeans and my thigh.
“Damn.”
The next sound I heard built slowly, from a small creak to a thunderous explosion. A metal shelf unit filled w
ith spare parts and lubricants for machines that no longer existed teetered, then came crashing down around me. The unit grazed my shoulder but there was no serious damage.
“Gee, Sam, was that on purpose?” I fiddled in my bag for the Taser, terrified that I would shock myself trying to load the cartridge.
“No. Just the vibration.”
I followed the answer and saw him sitting in a corner on an old office chair. I couldn’t place the smell, then it came back to me from my last camping trip. He reeked of Sterno.
“Let’s get out of here before something else falls, okay?” I reached out a hand to him. He was surprised, but took it. I tried taking him to the window where I had climbed in but he resisted, and I wondered if I was going to have a problem getting him out of the building.
“Door’s easier,” he said, picking up a dirty red and white shopping bag and leading me to a door at the opposite end of the floor. Sam and I took the fire stairs two at a time until we reached a side door with a keypad lock that obviously hadn’t been changed since the days when he worked at the factory.
Sam knew something was wrong before I did. Maybe you get used to a place—even an abandoned factory building—and can tell when something was out of whack as I’d been able to tell in my driveway, what was it . . . how many days ago?
One thing I did notice was different. Lucy’s car was gone. And so was Lucy.
Forty-three
The cellular customer you are trying to reach is not available.
I’d try Lucy again later. She hadn’t called but maybe the sound of the crash in the factory spooked her and she went for the cops. Sam and I waited for twenty minutes, then, by unspoken agreement, we started walking.
Ordinarily a seven-mile hike is a piece of cake for me; I’d made it to the top of Half Dome, for pete’s sake, but I’d had a pretty full forty-eight hours and my thigh was bloody and throbbing from the cut. And my shoulder was aching from the shelf unit that had winged it. The road had virtually no shoulder and when the occasional car passed, it felt as if we’d be swept under the tires. There were no truckers, who probably would have stopped to help us, just a few kids who came too close, threw beer cans at us, and scared the crap out of me. But not Sam.
The Big Dirt Nap Page 17