A Tap on the Window (4 page)

We prayed it was a phase. All kids experimented, right? Who didn’t have a few too many beers, smoke a few too many joints? Still, we had the talk—lots of them—about making
smart choices
. Jesus, what a load of bullshit. What the kid could have used was a swift kick in the ass, and to be locked in his room till he was twenty.

Maybe, if we’d been smart enough to figure out that he would move on to something stronger, that’s what we would have done.

Because it wasn’t beer and pot they found in his bloodstream when they did the autopsy.

Donna and I talked—endlessly—about getting help for him. Counseling. Enrollment in a program. We sat up nights, searching for answers on the Internet, reading other parents’ stories, finding out we weren’t alone, but taking little comfort in that fact. We still didn’t know the best course to follow. We tried the usual things, to varying degrees, but with a consistent lack of success. Yelling. Grounding. Emotional blackmail. Rewards for improved behavior.
“Pass that math test and I’ll get you a new iPod.”
Instilling guilt. I told him what he was doing was killing his mother. Donna told him what he was doing was killing his father.

But there must have been part of us that thought—I know this was true of myself—that while things were bad, they weren’t
that
bad. Millions of kids got into trouble in their teenage years and came out the other side. I wasn’t high much when I was in my teens, but getting shit-faced was a weekly ambition. Somehow I’d survived.

We deluded ourselves.

We were stupid.

We should have done more, and we should have done it sooner. It ate at me every day, and I knew it ate at Donna, too. We blamed ourselves, and there were moments when we blamed each other.

Why didn’t you do something?

Me? Why didn’t you do something?

In my heart, I believed I deserved more of the blame. He was a boy. I was his father. Shouldn’t I have been able to get through to him? Shouldn’t I have been able to connect in ways Donna could not? Shouldn’t I have been able to use some of the smarts I’d acquired in my former career to knock some sense into him?

Reading the paper without really taking it in, staring at the TV without any idea of what I was watching, finishing my beer and going back into the kitchen for another, and repeating the whole process again, took up the better part of two hours. I figured by that time Donna really would be asleep and wouldn’t have to pretend.

I was right.

When I went upstairs the only light on was in the bathroom off our bedroom. If I’d come up earlier, Donna’s eyes still would have been closed, but she’d have been faking it. You don’t spend twenty years with someone and not know when they’re really sleeping, and when they’re trying to put one over on you. But never mind. It wasn’t like I’d ever call her on it. It was a game we played now.
I’ll pretend to be sleeping so you don’t have to feel weird not talking to me.

I stripped down in the bathroom, brushed my teeth, killed the light, and quietly slipped under the covers next to her, my back to hers. I wondered how long this would go on, how it would end, what could help us move forward.

I still loved her. As much now as the day we met.

But we weren’t talking. We couldn’t find the words. There was nothing to be said because there was only one thing either of us was thinking, and it hurt too much to talk about.

I imagined making the first move. Turning over, edging closer, slipping my arm around her. Not saying a thing, at least not at first. I imagined the warmth of her body as I held her. Felt her hair on my face.

Imagined it so perfectly, it was as though it was happening.

I lay awake for some time, staring at the ceiling, or the digital clock on the bedside table. One in the morning, then two.

It wasn’t all our fault.

Not everything.

Some of it, of course, was Scott’s. Sure, he was a kid, but he was old enough to know better.

But there was someone else. Not the kids from Cleveland. Not the kids from Griffon who might have sold Scott marijuana and liquor.

I wanted to find the one who gave him 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine. What the rest of the world knows as ecstasy.

That’s what the toxicology report turned up.

That’s the stuff that evidently made Scott believe he could fly.

I was going to track down the guy who provided that final, fatal dose.

We all had a lot to answer for, but that son of a bitch, as far as I was concerned, was the one who’d pulled the trigger.

FOUR

In
the morning, the woman comes into the bedroom bearing a
tray.

“Hey,” she says to the man, who is still under the covers.

He raises himself up on his elbows, surveys the breakfast as the woman sets it down on the bedside table.

“Scrambled,” he says, looking at the eggs almost suspiciously.

“Just the way you like them,” she says. “Well cooked. You should eat them before they get cold.”

He gets his legs out from under the covers, sits up on the edge of the bed. He is wearing a pair of faded white flannel pajamas with blue pinstripes. They are threadbare at the knees.

“How’d you sleep?” the woman asks.

“Okay,” he says, reaching for the napkin and spreading it on his lap. “I didn’t hear you get up.”

“I got up around six, but I tiptoed around the kitchen so I wouldn’t disturb you. You given up your hobby?”

“What? What do you mean?”

“Where’s your little book? It’s usually right there.” She points to the bedside table.

“I write in it after you leave,” he says, setting the plate atop the napkin, resting it on his knees, taking his first bite. “Good eggs.” The woman says nothing. “You want to sit down?”

“No. I have to go to work.”

He picks up a strip of bacon, bites into it with a crunch. “You want some help?”

“Help with what?”

“At work. I could come and help you.” He chews the bacon, swallows.

“You’re confused,” she says. “You don’t come to work.”

“I used to,” he says.

“You just enjoy your breakfast.”

“I could help, I really could. You know I’m good at doing the books. I catch everything.”

The woman sighs. How many times has she had this conversation? “No,” she says.

The man frowns. “I’d like things to be the way they used to
be.”

“Who wouldn’t?” the woman says. “I’d like to be twenty-one again, but wishing don’t make it happen.”

He blows on his coffee, has a sip. “What’s it like out today?”

“Nice, I think. Rained last night.”

“I’d like to go out, even in the rain,” the man says.

She’s had enough. “Eat your breakfast. I’ll be back for the tray before I go.”

FIVE

I’d
arranged to meet Fritz Brott, owner of Brott’s Brats, the Tonawanda meat business I’d been watching for a couple of days, at his shop. He had an office in the back where we could talk privately.

Brott had been a fixture in the community for more than twenty years. He’d emigrated from Germany in the seventies with his wife and infant daughter. He found work behind the deli counters at several different grocery stores over the years, but his dream had always been to have a shop of his own. In the early nineties he learned that the elderly owner of an existing butcher shop wanted to retire. He’d hoped his son would follow him in the family business, but before the boy had even hit his twenties it was clear he was more interested in computers than red meat. So the father continued to run the business on his own for another two decades, but with no one to pass it on to, he decided to sell.

Fritz didn’t just know meat. He was a great cook, and had a recipe for bratwurst that had been handed down through several generations. That, he told his wife, would be the store specialty. It also provided the shop a new name.

Fritz’s wife, while an integral part of the business, wasn’t in the shop every day. From home, she handled the paperwork, paid the bills, did the payroll, all so Fritz could concentrate on making his bratwurst and selling his thick, beautifully marbled steaks. It was his wife who noticed things had not been adding up in recent weeks. They were making less money. The sides of beef hanging in the freezer were not turning out the same number of steaks and roasts as they used to.

Something was up.

Fritz employed three men. Clayton Mills, in his late sixties, had worked for the previous owner, and lived alone now that his wife of thirty-two years, Molly, had passed away. He lived frugally, and he never struck me as a viable suspect. Nor did Joseph Calvelli, about ten years younger than Clayton, with a wife and a grown son who ran an investment firm.

Very quickly, I zeroed in on Tony Fisk, twenty-seven, married, with two kids, aged five and two. It was his wife, Sandy, I’d seen drive up to the back door and wait for Tony to pop out with a green bag that he pushed through her window before running back into the store. This had happened at a time when Fritz was not in the shop.

“What have you got for me?” Fritz asked as he settled his nearly three hundred pounds into the chair at his desk in the tiny office.

I’d brought along a small laptop, onto which I had transferred some photos, and video.

“Mr. Brott, I watched your place for two days and based on what I’ve seen, you don’t have anything to worry about where Mr. Mills and Mr. Calvelli are concerned.”

He waited. He knew where I was going.

“Tony,” he said, pursing his lips. “The son of a bitch.”

I opened the laptop and set it on his desk. “This is yesterday afternoon. Just before five o’clock.”

His eyes narrowed. “When I was out. Getting my truck fixed.”

“That’s right.” I had clicked on
PLAY
to start the video. “You see this car pulling up here?”

Fritz nodded.

“I checked the plate to confirm. This car is registered to Anthony Fisk. Behind the wheel is his wife, Sandra. They call her Sandy.”

“Yeah, I know her. I know that car.”

“You can’t quite tell in the photo here, but there are two children’s safety seats in the back. I believe, although I can’t confirm, that she had their two children with her in the vehicle.”

Fritz was stone-faced. “Okay.”

“She stops the car right by the back door. She’s got her phone out now, and she’s using her thumbs, so it looks to me like she’s sending someone a text. Now she waits a few seconds . . .”

Fritz’s jaw tightened as his eyes stared at the screen.

“And out comes Tony, with the garbage bag. Hands it off to her and runs back into the shop. She takes off.”

“Go back.”

“Hmm?”

“You can go back and frame-freeze this?”

“Freeze-frame, sure.” I fiddled around with the mouse pad, took the video back about fifteen seconds, then started advancing it again.

“There. Stop it there.”

I had to go back a fraction of a second. Fritz wanted to get a look at the bag. He appeared to be studying the shape of what was inside, tracing its outline with his finger, half an inch from the screen.

“Can you blow that up?” he asked me.

“Sure.” I moved my finger on the mouse pad, clicked. “There you go.”

“Shoulder roast,” he said.

I smiled. “I guess you would know.”

“The son of a bitch,” he said.

“I can try to get hold of the text message his wife sent him. But all it would probably say is she’s there. It’s not likely she’d type out ‘bring out the meat’ or anything. If you’re going to bring the police in and have him charged, they can probably get the transcript.”

“You think I should call them?”

“That’s up to you. You asked me to find out if someone was stealing from you, and I believe this answers your question. What happens next is your decision. Is he a good employee?”

Fritz nodded sadly. “He’s worked three years for me. Does his job. Does what I tell him. I treat him good. Why would he steal from me?”

“He’s maxed out on his credit cards. And his wife just got cut from four days a week to three at Walmart.”

The sorrow that had washed over Fritz’s face a moment ago was transforming into something else. “There were days I didn’t think I’d be able to keep a roof over my head, back when I first came to this country, but I never stole from anybody.” He pointed his finger into the air. “Not once.”

He stared down at the top of his desk, shook his head, then trained his eyes on the closed metal door like it was made of glass and he could see Tony right through it.

“I went to his kid’s christening,” Fritz said.

“It happens,” I said.

“I let him stay, what’s it say to the others? It says ‘Hey, you steal from Fritz, he’ll forget about it. He’s a softie.’ That’s what they’ll think.”

“Like I said, it’s your call. I’ll write you up a formal report of my investigation, my hours, what—”

Fritz waved his hand. “Fuck that. I know.” He pointed to the laptop, the frozen image of Tony clutching the bag of meat. “I’ve seen it with my own eyes.”

“You’ll get a report, just the same,” I said, “when I invoice you.”

His eyes were still boring into that door. I had a pretty good idea what he was thinking, and what he was going to do next, but hoped I was wrong.

“Tony!” he bellowed. I was right. In the tiny office, it was like a cannon going off.

I’d have preferred that Fritz waited until I was gone before he acted on what I’d found out for him. I gathered information. I didn’t hang around to mete out sentences. I could handle the confrontations if they developed, but they weren’t what I was paid to deal with. I wasn’t a counselor, God knows. I just found stuff out.

This was never more true than when I handled cases involving cheating spouses. You watch TV detective shows, especially back in the sixties and seventies, you’d think a lot of investigators are above that kind of work. In the real world, those kinds of detectives have to rely on food stamps. When you worked in private investigations, saying no to divorce work was like opening a donut shop and refusing to sell coffee. When I found out a husband was sleeping with his secretary, I didn’t tell his wife she should kick the guy out, pour gasoline all over his Porsche and light a match, drill a hole in the bottom of his boat. If she wanted to forgive him, look the other way, didn’t matter to me one bit.

I didn’t care what Fritz did with Tony, just so long as he did it without my being there.

Wasn’t working out that way.

The door swung open and there stood Tony in a bloodied apron, a blood-smeared cleaver in his right hand. He looked like he’d just stepped off the set of a horror movie. All that was missing was the severed head grasped by the hair with his other hand.

“Yeah, Fritz?” he said.

“How long?”

“What?” A look of puzzlement. Feigned, no doubt, but it looked genuine.

“How long you been stealing from me?”

I’d never taken any employee relations course, but there had to be a rule somewhere that you shouldn’t accuse one of your people of theft when they’re wielding a meat cleaver. If Fritz was worried about it, he gave no sign.

He planted his hands on the arm of the chair and pushed his considerable bulk to a standing position, then came around the desk on the far side from where I’d been sitting. But now I was on my feet, too, and the three of us had formed a little triangle.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Tony said.

“Don’t lie to me,” Fritz said. “I know what you’ve done.”

I kept my eyes on the cleaver. The thing looked like it weighed ten pounds if it weighed an ounce. And Tony’s arms were evidence that in his hands the tool was light as a feather.

“What?” he persisted. “What the hell are you talking about?”

Fritz swung the laptop around, pointed to the screen, the paused video of Tony running out to his wife’s car. Said nothing.

Tony blinked a couple of times, looking at it. “What’s that?”

“That’s a thief,” Fritz said. “And that’s a thief’s wife.”

Tony, his mouth tight, shot me a menacing look. He’d put it all together in a second.

“Get out,” Fritz said to him. “Get out and don’t come back. I’ll mail you your last check.”

Tony took his eyes off me and focused them on his former boss. “You docked me,” he said.

“What?”

“The day my kid was sick. She had that fever, a hunnert and four, we thought she was gonna die, we took her to the hospital. I couldn’t come in and you docked me a day’s pay.” Tony shook his head. “I’m just paying back what you owe me.”

And he raised the cleaver over his right shoulder, getting ready to put some power into it.

“Don’t even think about it,” I said, my voice firm but calm.

Tony glanced my way. A lot had happened in the few seconds since he’d last looked at me. I had a pistol in my hands now, the Glock 19 for which I had a concealed carry permit. The weapon was pointed directly at Tony’s chest.

“Don’t be a part of history,” I said.

“Huh?”

“I’ve never shot anyone before. You’d be a first.” We sized each other up for a full five seconds. Finally, I said, “We all need to catch our breath.”

His arms frozen, he stared straight into the barrel. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Fritz retreat a couple of steps.

“Put the cleaver down,” I said.

Tony nodded at me with his eyes, telling me he was going to do what I asked. But he brought that cleaver down a hell of a lot faster than I was expecting, driving the blade into the top of Fritz’s desk. When Tony took his hand off the handle, the cleaver was still standing.

Tony looked at me and said, “I don’t forget.” Then he turned and walked out of the room, his hands going around his back to undo the knotted apron strings.

Fritz was dumbfounded, his mouth hanging open so wide I could have shoved a pot roast in there. His eyes went from my gun to the door and back to the gun. He’d just had the shit scared out of him.

I was feeling a little rattled myself. I holstered my weapon.

“I thought it was bullshit,” he said, his voice cracking. “About his girl being sick. I thought he was making it up.”

* * *

I
had
a hell of headache on the drive home. Tension, most likely. I usually have some pain reliever in the glove box, but there was nothing there, so as I was coming into Griffon I wheeled into a gas station that was also a convenience store and went inside.

They had small bottles of Tylenol, so I grabbed one of those, along with a bottle of water, and reached into my back pocket for my wallet as I approached the counter.

“Hey, how ya doin’,” the kid at the cash register said, not really asking, just saying what he felt he had to say to everyone. He was about Scott’s age, fifteen to seventeen. Face ravaged by acne, hair hanging over one eye that he brushed away every three seconds.

“Great,” I mumbled. I handed him a ten and he rang up the two items.

“Bag?”

“Hmm?”

“You want a bag?”

“No.” I glanced at the counter. There was a clipboard there, with what looked like a petition attached to it, as well as a pen on a string.

But the people who had signed, a considerable number, were not opposed to something, but in support. It was headlined:
.

“You can sign it if you want,” the kid said without enthusiasm. “Manager says I’m supposed to ask everyone.”

I worked my nail under the plastic wrapping that hugged the top of the pill container as I scanned the form’s preamble, which sat below the headline, and above the names. It read: “We the undersigned are 100 percent behind the good men and woman of the Griffon Police Force and appreciate the terrific job they do! Our cops are tops!”

I peeled away the plastic, popped the lid, struggled to remove the cotton. If I’d had only ten seconds to live, and one of these pills could have saved me, I’d have been a goner. Getting the cotton out of the way took the better part of half a minute. Then I shook out three red pills, cracked the cap on the water bottle, and washed them down.

“You must have some headache,” the boy said.

Holding the clipboard, I looked over the names of those who’d signed the top sheet, which was about half full, but didn’t see any I immediately recognized. There was a spot, alongside an individual’s name, where people were supposed to write down their home and/or their e-mail addresses. Not everyone had included this information.

I flipped to the second page, which was full, as were the three behind it. About seventy percent had put down information other than their names, thereby making it easier for someone to authenticate the signatures, should they want to.

“How many people who come in sign this?” I asked.

The boy shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s mostly just the old people, anyway.”

I smiled. “People like me.”

“No offense,” he said. “When you’re my age, cops around here stop you all the time for doing nothing.”