ELEVEN
Phyllis
led me back through Patchett’s, behind the counter, and into an office. I briefly considered protesting, telling her I was fine. But first, she had a viselike grip on my arm. And second, I thought she’d be worth talking to. As we passed the guy who’d handed me my Corona, she said, “Get me some ice in a towel, Bill, for Sam Spade here.
“Have a seat,” she ordered, releasing her grasp on me and pointing to a leather couch across from a desk. I sat. Bill appeared with a red-and-white-checkered towel in which he’d collected half a dozen ice cubes.
“Put that on your noggin,” Phyllis said. I took the towel and held it against my temple, which, I had to admit, was throbbing. As Bill left and closed the door behind him, Phyllis parked her butt on the edge of the desk and held up a fist in front of my eyes.
“How many fingers am I holding up?”
“That’s funny,” I said.
She extended the middle one. “How about now?”
“One.”
She laughed. “I think you’ll live. But you keep that ice on there. Head injuries are no joke. Remember how Mannix got knocked out nearly every week? That guy should have been brain-damaged.”
“I’m guessing the Mannix and Sam Spade references mean you know what I do for a living,” I said.
She nodded. “I recognized you when I saw you lying down there. You’re Cal Weaver.”
“And you’re Phyllis . . .”
“Phyllis Pearce.”
“If we’ve met before, I’m sorry, but I don’t remember.”
“We haven’t,” she said, shaking her head. “But I’ve seen you around. I make a point of knowing who everybody in Griffon is. Lived here my whole life, so whenever a new face comes to town, I ask who it belongs to. You moved here, what, eight, ten years ago?”
“Six,” I said.
“Sorry about your boy,” she said.
I raised my head slowly to look her in the eye. “Thanks.”
“Could have been anybody, you know.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Could have been anybody who sold him those drugs.” I must have looked surprised at what she seemed to be implying she knew, and it made her smile. “I hear you’ve been asking around. That what you were doing here tonight?”
“No,” I said.
“Because,” she said, talking right over my denial, “I can’t have that. You want to go around interrogating kids about what happened to your boy—and I don’t blame you one bit in that regard—you can’t be doing it on my premises. Starting a fight on my front steps, I won’t have that. You do what you have to do, but don’t be causing any trouble on my turf.”
“I didn’t start a fight,” I said, feeling like some kid telling his mother he was blameless. “And that’s not why I’m here.” I took the ice away from my head for a second. “I’m looking for Claire Sanders.”
“The mayor’s kid?”
“Yeah.”
“That who slugged you out there? Some little thing of a girl?”
“No. I don’t know who it was. I was coldcocked. I wanted to talk to a kid named Sean Skilling. You seem to know everyone around here, so you probably know that name.”
“Ford dealer’s kid.”
“Yeah.” I paused. The ice was so cold it was starting to hurt, but I held it in place. “I should take you on as a partner, you know so much of what goes on. Save me a lot of legwork.”
Phyllis Pearce grinned. “I got enough to do, running my vast empire.” She opened her arms wide. “What’d you want with the Skilling kid?”
“His girlfriend is friends with Claire. She may know where Claire is.”
Phyllis Pearce nodded slowly. “Got it. I think Claire was around here a night or two ago. Whatcha want to talk to her for?”
“I just want to find her,” I said.
“Who you working for?”
I looked at her and said nothing.
“Oh, I get it. Client confidentiality and all that.” She went around the desk and dropped into her oversized, overly padded office chair. There was a keyboard in front of her, but the monitor was angled off to the side, so we could see one another. She brushed her long gray hair off her shoulders, raised her head so it would fall on her back. “Although it would stand to reason it’s her dad who wants her found.”
“I would imagine he does,” I said.
“Who’s the Skilling kid’s girlfriend?”
I told her.
“Hanna, oh yeah, Chris Rodomski’s kid. We had to throw that drunken son of a bitch out of here all the time fifteen years back. Well, my husband. Not me.”
“Your husband’s the bouncer?” I hadn’t noticed anyone on the premises who looked like an age-appropriate match for Phyllis.
“It was among Harry’s duties back then. But I lost my husband seven years ago.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
She shrugged. “Not easy, running this place on my own. Our son ended up pursuing a different line of work, but I’ve got good people working for me here.”
I stopped pressing the cold, damp towel to my temple. “What should I do with this?”
Pearce pointed to a small sink along one wall. She had a small bar set up there. I got up, tossed the towel into the sink, the shrunken cubes clinking into the drain. I scanned the room, which had maybe twenty old black-and-white photos of Griffon from its early days. Horses and buggies in the streets in some of them.
She noticed me admiring them and said, “No, I didn’t take them myself. Even that was before my time.”
There was one shot of a much younger, slimmer Phyllis, her hair in exactly the same style but dark, arm in arm with a man I presumed was Harry, standing in the street in front of Patchett’s. Maybe an inch taller, curly-haired, and thinner than his spouse.
“This your husband?” I asked.
“Yup. But not Harry. That’s my first husband there. That was taken around 1985 or so, before he got cancer and passed on. Harry I met in 1993, married him a couple of years after that.” She cackled. “I was about sixty pounds lighter then. But as I gained weight, I gained wisdom.”
I sat back down on the couch. Maybe she was expecting me to leave, now that I was done treating my injury, but I still had things to ask her.
“Obviously, you know about my son, Scott. Did you ever see him around here?”
She thought. “It’s possible, but I don’t know. If they look like they’re still reading the Hardy Boys, they don’t get in. It’s like throwing back a fish that’s too small. Your boy, he was still pretty wet behind the ears.”
“Probably half the clientele here right now shouldn’t be.”
Phyllis Pearce smiled warily. “For someone who’s lived here as long as you have, you don’t seem to have an idea of how things work in Griffon.”
“Enlighten me.”
She leaned forward, her elbows on the desk, her heavy breasts resting on the keyboard. “Sure, we got people having a drink here, a little something to eat, who may technically be under twenty-one years of age. The State of New York, in its infinite wisdom, raised the drinking age from nineteen to twenty-one back in 1985. Based on your observations, Mr. Weaver, would you say that stopped people under the age of twenty-one from drinking?”
“No.”
“Of course not. I would imagine that in 1985 you yourself were under the age of twenty-one.” When I said nothing she continued. “And did that law put the fear of God into you, or did you and your friends get hammered every weekend anyway?”
“We pretty much got hammered.”
“Damn right you did. We know what kids are going to do, because we know what we did when we were that age. Better it’s happening in one place, where we can keep an eye on it, don’t you think?”
“So we’re surrendering. We’ve decided we can’t control
what
our kids do, so we’re just happy if we know
where
they’re doing it.”
Pearce beamed at me like I was the smartest kid in the class. “And not just that. I’m doing what I can to help the local economy. Because if they can’t come here, they can be across the border to Canada in ten minutes, where the drinking age is nineteen. A seventeen-year-old with the right ID can pass for nineteen. But a seventeen-year-old has a lot harder time passing for twenty-one. All these kids, before and after they come to Patchett’s, they buy pizza, go to Iggy’s for a burger, get gas, pop into the local 7-Eleven. And zipping across the border ain’t what it once was. How many of these kids have passports? Used to be, they whisked you through in five seconds, but now, if you haven’t got a passport, you’re not going across that border one way or the other, thank you very much, Osama bin Laden, may you rot in hell, you motherfucker.”
She leaned back in her chair. “I’m not gonna tell you I’ve managed to put every Griffon parent’s mind at ease, thinking if their kids are drinking, they’re doing it here. Kids are still having parties in their basements, having a wild time when their parents are out of town. There’s quite a little business going on of getting booze to kids who aren’t old enough to go into stores to buy it themselves. They even deliver.” She smiled. “But I do my part.”
“And the police leave you alone.”
“They’re very . . . supportive. Once in a while, we get some riffraff in from the south, and they look after us in that regard. Couple of fellows out there right now, monopolizing the pool table, have me a little concerned.”
“Maybe the local cops give you a pass because, as you’ve demonstrated, you know everybody’s business. Pissing you off might not be in anyone’s interest.” My eyes narrowed. “And maybe there’s a little something in their Christmas stocking, too.”
“You smooth talker,” Phyllis said, grinning. “Thinking I wield any power around here. Nothing could be further from the truth. I’m just a simple businesswoman, trying to get by. But I will say this—that Augustus Perry, he’s a good man.” She served me a sly smile. “Not that I have to tell you.”
“One last thing,” I said. “I’d like a peek at your security tape. See who it was who clobbered me.”
“I can’t help you there,” she said.
“If you don’t show me, you’ll just have to show it to one of Griffon’s finest.”
“Oh, don’t be silly.” She gave me a look of disappointment. “You’re not going to the police about that and you know it. Is that what a real private eye does? Goes running off to the cops every time he gets a knock on the head? Please.”
She was right. I had no intention of reporting the assault.
“But that’s got nothing to do with why I won’t let you see the security tape,” she said, and then waved her arm around the room, like she was about to pull back the curtain to Door Number Two. “You see any monitors in here? We have no surveillance system. No closed-circuit cameras.”
“Not even out front?” I asked.
She shook her head.
“You look surprised,” Pearce said.
“I’d heard different.”
“You were misinformed. Or you misunderstood.”
“Maybe so,” I said, getting up off the couch.
“But if there’s anything else I can help you with, my door’s open,” she said. “You strike me as someone who could use a bit of guidance.”
TWELVE
As
I walked out I tried to get my sore head around what Phyllis Pearce had told me. No surveillance system? That spot out in front of Patchett’s was only steps from where Claire Sanders had tapped on my window asking for a ride. How was that caught on a security camera if the guy who’d sucker punched me was not?
Before I crossed the street to get in my car, I looked for cameras out front anyway. There were none. But hadn’t Haines and Brindle—one of them, I couldn’t remember which—told me that was how they’d been led to my door? That my license plate had been picked up on the bar’s camera when Claire got in?
Had either of them actually said that? Or had they only intimated it? Allowed me to think it when I raised the suggestion that my car had been caught on closed-circuit?
I couldn’t recall how the conversation had gone exactly, and the throbbing in my head wasn’t helping my powers of recollection. But if they had, in fact, told me I’d been picked up on a camera, why had they lied? If there was no camera, what had led them to me? Did they already have Patchett’s staked out? Were they already following Claire?
It wasn’t a stretch to think the local cops might have a cruiser parked across the street from the place now and then, watching for people getting into their cars who were too drunk to drive. Or maybe they had quotas to fill, and picked up the occasional underage drinker to show they were keeping Griffon a safe and decent place to raise our children, even if they were letting Patchett’s serve drinks to minors.
Maybe the cops had been called to Patchett’s earlier for some kind of disturbance, and before they’d left had noticed a teenage girl hitching a ride with a strange man, and had the presence of mind to make note of a plate number. Then, later, when Claire was reported missing, some cop at the morning briefing said, “Hang on.”
I fumbled in my pocket for my keys, hit the remote button to unlock the car, and slid in behind the wheel. I took a glance at myself in the rearview mirror before I closed the door and turned the lights out. My hair was mussed. I combed it with my fingers to the point where I looked moderately respectable.
I was about to turn the key when the two bikers came out of Patchett’s and wandered across the road to the motorcycles parked directly ahead of me. As they were getting ready to swing their legs over like a couple of cowboys mounting their horses, headlights came on about a hundred yards away.
Almost instantaneously, a bank of multicolored swirling roof lights was activated on the same vehicle. A siren whooped for five seconds before the cruiser screeched to a stop beside the bikes.
The bikers stood there and watched as two cops got out of the car. A woman from the driver’s side, a man from the passenger’s. I recognized the woman as Donna’s friend Kate Ramsey. Late thirties, short blond hair, about a hundred and seventy pounds, no more than five six. Chin up, formidable. Her partner I didn’t know, but I guessed he was in his early thirties, five ten, about the same weight as Ramsey, strong chin and cheekbones.
It looked like Kate was going to take the lead here. I put down my window so I could hear.
“Where you boys from?” she asked. She had one hand on the nightstick hanging from her belt.
Biker One said, “What’s the problem, Officer? We do something wrong?”
“I asked a question,” she said. “Where you from?”
“Elmwood,” Biker Two said. A Buffalo neighborhood, and a pretty nice one at that.
“What brings you up to Griffon?” the other cop asked.
“We just rode up for a couple drinks, play some pool,” Biker One said.
“That’d be all you’re doing up here?” Kate Ramsey asked. “You wouldn’t be up here doing a bit of business?”
Biker Two shook his head. “Listen, we just wanted to get some air, do some riding on our bikes. That’s all. We’re not looking for trouble.”
Kate’s partner said, “We don’t need your kind up here.”
“Our kind?” Biker One said. “The fuck is that supposed to mean?”
“It means,” Kate said, “we don’t need greasy, drug-dealing dickheads like you two fucking up our town.”
The first biker moved an inch toward Kate, but the other one held up his hand. “Then I guess we should be on our way.”
“We don’t have to take this shit,” the first one said.
Kate’s partner moved forward, taking the nightstick from his belt. “Oh, I think you do.” He walked around to the front of the second biker’s bike, swinging the stick casually. “What’s a headlight like that run?”
“Come on, man, we’ll go,” Biker Two said. “We’re on our way.”
“And you won’t be back,” Kate said.
“Fine,” the first one said. “Who the fuck would want to come back here anyway? Everything they say about this hick town is true.”
Kate Ramsey and her partner stood there and watched as the two got on their bikes, started them up with a roar, then navigated their way around the Griffon police cruiser. Once they were on the road, one of them stuck his hand into the air and offered up a one-finger salute.
Ramsey and her partner watched until their taillights were reduced to the size of pinheads, then got back into their car and drove away.
* * *
I
was
going to hunt up the Skilling house, but decided that before I did that, it made more sense to find, and talk to, Claire’s father, Bertram Sanders.
I found his address through my smartphone. Sanders lived on Lakeland Drive. I knew Lakeland, but never understood why it was called that. The street neither overlooked nor led directly to any body of water. I was hoping that when I knocked on the door, it wouldn’t be the mayor who answered, but Claire herself. After all, if she’d returned home since the cops had been to see me, there wasn’t anyone who would have felt obliged to let me know.
It was a lower-income, postwar neighborhood. That’d be the Second World War, not the one in Korea, or Vietnam, or the Gulf, or Iraq, or Afghanistan. We’d had so many of them, it was hard to keep track. It was a simple two-story house with clapboard siding, painted brown, and while the place looked narrow from the front, it went back a long way. The house was better maintained than many others on the street, several of which still sported rusted television aerials that probably hadn’t picked up a signal in years. Behind the house, at the end of the long, single-lane drive, stood a separate one-stall garage.
I parked on the street, went up to the door, and knocked. It was past eight and the streetlamps were on, but I didn’t see lights on in the Sanders house. I shielded my eyes and peered through the rectangular window set vertically in the wooden door. No signs of life.
It seemed fruitless, but I decided to walk around and try knocking on the back door, which, once I got there, I could see entered the kitchen. Again I put my eyes to the window and saw that the only light inside appeared to come from a digital display on a toaster. No one came when I knocked.
“You looking for the mayor?”
I turned and saw an elderly woman standing beneath a porch light of the house next door. She had a view of me over the fence.
“That’s right,” I said slowly. “I was hoping I’d catch Bert at home.”
“It’s Thursday night,” said the woman, like I should know the significance of that.
“What’s Thursday night?”
“The night the town council meets. You must not be from around here.”
All the years I’d lived in Griffon, and tonight I felt like a stranger. Everyone pointing out how little I knew.
“It slipped my mind.”
From inside her house, a man shouted, “Who you talking to?”
She turned around and shouted back, “Man looking for Bert!”
“Tell him to try the town hall!”
“I did that! You think I’m an idiot?” She turned back to me. “He thinks I’m an idiot.”
“I thought Claire might be home and I could just give her a message.”
“Haven’t seen her around today.” She hesitated, licked her lips, like she was weighing whether to tell me something. “You never know where she might be. Thank God our kids are grown and gone; they hardly ever call, but frankly I couldn’t be happier. But it can’t be easy for Bert, raising a girl on his own.”
I recalled what Donna had told me, that the mayor and his wife had split up. “Yeah, they can be a handful,” I said.
“What are you talking about?” the man yelled from inside the house.
“I’ll tell ya in a minute!” she shouted at her husband. “Don’t mind him. He just likes to be included.” She rolled her eyes.
“Does Claire spend all her time here?” I asked. “Or does she spend half of it with her mother?”
“That’d be tricky, spending half her time here and half across the border. Caroline’s living in Toronto with her new husband, what’s-his-name.”
“What
is
his name?” I asked, like I’d known it myself at one time. Maybe Claire was with her mother. It’d be worth checking.
“Ed,” the woman called back into the house. “Ed!”
“Huh?”
“What was the name of that guy Caroline married? One that runs the jewelry store that has the ads on the Toronto station.”
“Uh . . . it’ll come to me. It was Minsky.”
“No, that wasn’t it,” she shot back. “That’s your sister-in-law’s name.”
“Oh, right.”
She looked back at me. “I remember. His name’s Jeff Karnofsky. With a ‘k.’ Well, two of them. One at the beginning and one right near the end.”
“When’s the last time you saw Claire around here?”
“Last night. Saw her take off in some pickup truck.”
“What time would that have been?” I asked.
She shrugged. “I don’t know. It was after the news.”
“Which news?” These days, especially with the cable networks, there was never a time when the news wasn’t on.
“Brian Williams,” she said. That would be the
NBC Nightly News
, on WGRZ, the local NBC affiliate. The show ran from six thirty to seven p.m. “He’s a handsome bugger, that one.”
“So was it soon after the news ended that Claire left?” I felt my questions were starting to get too specific, but this woman seemed happy to talk, and violating confidences didn’t seem to be something that troubled her.
“I don’t know. Seven, eight, eight thirty, I don’t know. Took off in a real hurry, tires squealing and all. Police should give them a ticket for driving like that. God knows they’re here enough.”
“What do you mean?”
“Been going on for a while now. There’s often a Griffon cruiser parked along the street, like they’ve always got their eye on the mayor’s house. I was wondering whether he was getting death threats or somethin’, but when I asked him about it, he said it was nothing, not to worry.” She chuckled. “I’d sure hate to have someone come by and shoot out his windows or anything. They might hit our house by mistake.”