“What about Greenway? I mean, she's working with him every day in the office.”
“Maybe.” Carpington thought. “Or maybe Mr. Benedetto. He usually gets what he wants.”
“Greenway's boss? Is that who you're talking about?”
“That's right. He's the one who bought the land for the development. But he turns things over to Greenway, to get the actual subdivision going.” Carpington took another look at the photo, pressed his lips together. “I can't believe she'd be in on something like that. I thought she was better than the others, than the rest of that bunch at Valley Forest.”
“Yeah, you must be very disappointed. You hang out with a woman whose coworkers resort to blackmail and drop you into basements with snakes, it must be a shock to learn she might be less than upstanding.”
“I have to talk to her,” Carpington said. “I have to find out why she'd do this to me.” He grabbed the one print, folded it in half, and shoved it inside his suit jacket.
“That's okay,” I said. “I have more. But I think you're wasting your time.”
“What do you mean? Has she left? Did she actually go away? It was only yesterday that she was talking about this.”
“No,” I said. “Stefanie's dead.”
He opened his mouth to say something, but there were no words. He got up suddenly, shoved his way past me to get to the hallway. By the time I was out of my chair and had my head out the door, I could see him running down the hall for the doors to the parking lot.
when i got to the door, I spotted Carpington getting into a dark blue or black Cadillac. I ran to my Civic, got in, and debated my next move. I'd rattled Carpington's cage, to be sure, and it seemed worth knowing what he'd do next. I'd set something in motion by letting him know I knew about his affair with Stefanie, and by telling him she was dead, and I wanted to see where it went.
He didn't immediately race out of the parking lot, as I'd expected. I could see him in the car, punching numbers into a cell phone, waiting for someone to answer, then talking rapidly, waving his one free arm around inside the car. He talked for two, maybe three minutes, then threw the phone down. The brake lights came on, the Cadillac was put into drive and squealed out of the lot.
The Caddy had a lot more pickup than the Civic, which wheezed in pursuit. There weren't many cars on the road this late at night, and I didn't want to follow so closely that he'd notice me, and that was exactly how it was working out. The Caddy's taillights receded into the distance as Carpington floored it.
He was heading in the direction of Valley Forest Estates. He approached the subdivision from the south side, down by the creek, and I watched as the red lights sped into an area where the homes were in the earlier stages of construction.
When I saw the red lights come to a stop, I hung back, pulled over to the side of the road and killed my lights. The Caddy sat there, idling, Carpington staying behind the wheel, evidently waiting for a meeting. I backed the Civic between a stack of lumber and an idle forklift, figured it was far enough off the street not to be noticed, and got out. I was a couple of hundred yards away from Carpington's car, and crept along carefully, behind the houses, making my way between wheelbarrows and stacks of bricks and two-by-fours. The sky was clear, the stars were out and the moon was nearly full, so I could see fairly well once my eyes adjusted. Still, at one point, my right leg dropped down into a shallow ditch and I went down, but I was still far enough away from the Caddy not to have attracted any attention. I got up, worried that I might have twisted my ankle, but everything seemed to be working properly. My jeans and shirt were scuffed with dirt.
I wanted to get as close to the Caddy as possible without being detected. It was parked, the motor still idling, directly in front of a two-story house still in the skeletal stage. Boards that would later be covered with insulation and drywall marked out the exterior and interior walls. I bypassed the door frames and slipped between two studs into the house, making my way to the front, where I got down on the floor, made myself as flat as possible, and settled in to watch the show.
Carpington constantly checked his mirror, made another call on his cell, fiddled with the radio, blotted his brow. The two of us waited nearly ten minutes before a set of headlights appeared at the far end of the street, followed closely by a second. The two cars approached slowly. The first, a four-door imported sedan, drove past the Caddy and angled in front of it, while the second car, a small Lincoln, pulled up tight behind it. Carpington was effectively boxed in.
The driver of the Lincoln killed the lights and engine and got out. In the moonlight, I could see that it was Don Greenway, still in his suit. Carpington got out of the Cadillac, turning off the engine but leaving the headlights on. Rick, who got out of the import, shielded his eyes from the glare as he joined Greenway, who was standing in front of an already raving Carpington.
“She's dead!” he shouted. “This guy comes and sees me and tells me she's dead!”
“Roger, calm down,” Greenway said, trying to maintain a normal tone of voice.
“How do you expect me to calm down? Stefanie's dead!”
“I only just heard about it myself,” Greenway said. “The police were by the office.”
“Look, I never signed on for anything like this! Spender was one thing, and I never wanted to go along with that, but this is too much!”
Rick said, “I think you should lower your voice, asshole. There's houses over that ridge people are living in, dickwad, and they might hear you.”
“Maybe I don't care about that. Maybe it's too late to care about anything.”
Greenway looked at Rick and nodded. Suddenly, Rick slapped Carpington across the face savagely, sending the councilman sprawling up against the side of his Caddy. Before he even had time to touch his cheek, Rick had him by the shirt and was dragging him across the mud-caked street in the direction of his car. Rick reached into his pocket, pulled out a set of remote keys, and popped the trunk on the sedan, which opened about an inch.
As Rick swung the trunk open a tiny light came on long enough for Carpington to see what was inside. There was barely time for him to scream “No!” before Rick had shoved him inside and slammed the trunk shut.
21
maybe, if i'd ever served my country in the military or something, I'd be more familiar with the sounds of a man screaming. Once, when called out around midnight to a particularly grisly highway accident as a young newspaper photographer, I listened while a man burned to death in a car, rescue crews unable to get close to him. The driver of a tanker truck had fallen asleep at the wheel and gone through a red light, virtually crushing a Chevette that was crossing its path. It was a wonder the man in the Chevette remained alive long enough for police and fire officials, and me, to arrive and hear him die. His final cries of anguish had stayed with me for a long time. Even now, some twenty years later, I can still hear him calling “Princess!” which I learned later was the nickname of the nine-year-old daughter he'd left behind.
And maybe those cries were worse than what I was hearing now. It's a tough one to call. But there was something about Carpington's screams that had nothing to do with pain. They were screams of outright terror and hysteria, and listening to them made my blood run cold. They were the screams—interspersed with cries of “Get me out!” and “Let me out!”—of a man finding himself locked in a trunk with his worst nightmare. The parked car bounced on its springs like it was being driven down a washboard road as Carpington rolled about and kicked and pounded at the trunk lid and walls.
It was hard to hear what Greenway and Rick were saying to each other, but they couldn't have looked more relaxed. At one point, Greenway pointed at the moon, and Rick looked up, nodded, as if to say “You're right, it is a beautiful moon tonight, isn't it?”
Finally, the screams not subsiding at all, Greenway nodded to Rick, who popped the trunk open and hauled Carpington out. I was surprised, frankly, to see him still alive. At the very least, I figured Quincy would already be in t
he process of squeezing the life out of him, which I'd have almost welcomed if it would have meant an end to the screaming. But aside from his clothes being all rumpled, and a cut on his face from bumping into something in the trunk, the councilman didn't look too bad.
Rick said, “Now, are you ready to calm down?”
“Yes, yes, thank you, thank you for getting me out of there.”
“He's still pretty drowsy,” Rick said. “Look at him, he's practically sleeping like a baby.” He slapped Carpington in the face again. “I think you upset him.”
“What, why isn't he moving more?” Carpington asked.
“He's on Prozac for Pythons. Merle and Jimmy gave him something, it's taking him a while to recover. But I think I can guarantee you that the next time we put you in there, if we have to put you in there, he's going to be right back to his old self.”
“Okay,” Carpington said. “Okay. That won't be necessary, I promise.”
Greenway approached Carpington and slipped his arm around his shoulder like they were old friends. “Now, Roger, what's gotten you so upset tonight?”
“This man came to see me. He wanted to know about Stefanie, and he told me she was dead.”
“Who was this man?” Greenway asked.
“I'm trying to remember his name. He said he lives in Valley Forest, on the street you named after yourself.”
Rick cocked his head to one side. “Was his name Walker?”
“Yes, that was it.”
“That fucker. He's turning up everywhere tonight. You know what he did?” He was asking Greenway.
“What did he do?”
“He fucking hit me right in the head with a robot.”
Greenway appeared to be considering whether this was something he wanted to follow up on, then decided against it. But Rick wasn't through: “And I was really prepared to like the guy, you know? He wrote this book I got from the prison library, about these Earthlings who go to another planet, and they try to get everyone to stop believing in God, but when they do, there's all this shit.” He paused. “I don't read all that many books, you know.”
“Really,” said Greenway.
“But I really liked that one. He told me he's writing a sequel, although I got a feeling he may not get a chance to finish it.” He smiled to himself. “I'm gonna have to drop in on him again. He's got some of the coolest toys. Check this out.” He pulled my Batmobile from his jacket pocket.
“That's very nice, Rick.”
“You press this little button here on the hood, and this chain cutter pops out of the front bumper. It used to have an antenna, but I guess that snapped off.”
That son of a bitch. Mint condition since I was seven years old, and now this.
Greenway waited a second to see whether Rick was done, concluded that he was, and said to Carpington, “Roger, why did this Walker guy come to see you?”
“Like I said, he wanted to know about Stefanie. What happened to her?”
“From what I understand,” Greenway said, “someone broke into her house and killed her. She'd been hit in the head.”
“Oh my God.”
“I know. It's been a terrible blow for all of us. She was a very special lady. I still can't believe it's happened.” He said this all very evenly, as though he'd rehearsed it. Calmly, he asked, “It wasn't you, was it, Roger? Did you have a bit of a tiff with Stefanie?”
He recoiled in horror. “What? Of course not! It's not my style to go around hitting people in the head. Or leaving them dead in creeks, for that matter.” Carpington was looking at Rick when he said this. “You said that was going to look like an accident.”
Rick shrugged.
“You said it would look like he'd tripped and hit his head and drowned. But the police say he was murdered, that his head was bashed in before he hit the water. You're an amateur, you know that?”
Rick said, “Maybe you need a bit more time in the trunk.”
Carpington thought about that. “No. That won't be necessary. All I'm saying is, it was supposed to be an accident.”
“Water under the bridge, as they say,” said Greenway. “We have to deal with things as they are now, not as we wish they were. The police have been to see me about Mr. Spender, but I can assure you that they don't think we have anything to do with this. We are businessmen. We don't handle things that way.”
Carpington swung his head back and forth briefly, as though trying to make the madness go away. He stopped, glared at Greenway accusingly. “Is it standard business practice to take pictures of people when they're making love?”
“I'm sorry, Roger, what's that?”
The councilman pulled the folded print out of his inside jacket pocket and thrust it before the developer. Greenway opened the Caddy door so the dome light would come on and examined the picture. Rick leaned in for a look.
“I always said Stef had nice tits,” Rick said. “Do you have more of these?”
“Well, Roger, how did you happen to come into possession of this?” Greenway asked.
“Walker. He gave it to me. Said he's got the negatives. How would he have these? Is he working for you? Did you have these taken? Walker said there was a camera in the ceiling.”
“That is interesting,” Greenway said, thinking. To Rick: “Does any of this make any sense to you?”
“I haven't really had a chance to update you, Mr. Greenway. But you know how you sent me out earlier, to try to find Stefanie and see if she'd run off with the ledger—”
Ledger?
“—I went by her mom's house, and she said this guy had been by looking for her, said he had something of hers, which kind of sounded like bullshit, but I also thought it sounded kind of suspicious, so I tracked this guy down through his e-mail address, and it turned out to be this asshole who wanted his shower fixed? Remember you sent me out there to have a look at it?”
Greenway's head went up and down slowly. “The obnoxious man who came by the office, when Mr. Spender dropped by.”
Obnoxious? I was the one who was obnoxious?
“Yeah, same guy, I guess. So I go see him, and he hands me Stefanie's purse.”
“What was he doing with Stefanie's purse?”
Stretched out on the plywood floor, my head tucked low, I thought, Man, this is confusing.
“Said he'd found it, was trying to give it back. So I dumped it out, right, but there's no ledger there. It's too big to fit in it, I think. But you know what was in there?”
Greenway shook his head.
“Money. Two envelopes, stuffed with fifties. Tons of them. Looked like the stuff we make up on the photocopier sometimes, to pay off inspectors and stuff. But these bills, they didn't look like they'd been weathered at all like we usually do them. It's like she'd just made them.”
Greenway took this in. “She must have been doing a lot of photocopying. It's like she was planning to make a run for it. Grab the ledger, print up some cash, head for the hills. Something spooked her.”
“She was talking to me yesterday,” Carpington offered, “about going away someplace. She was mentioning lots of different places, like she hadn't decided where to go, but she was going to go someplace.”
“Did you notice anything else in the purse?” Greenway asked Rick.
He tried to think. “Now that you mention it, I think there was one of those little film things.”
“Stefanie was supposed to have brought that in to me a couple of days ago,” Greenway said. “Makes you wonder whether she was ever planning to do it.”
“So she was in on it,” Carpington said. “She let you take pictures of her with me.”
“Roger, Roger, Roger, what am I going to do with you? Yes, I had those pictures taken. Just a little extra insurance for our relationship. It wouldn't be a good thing for you to suddenly get a conscience. That could be a very bad thing for all of us, but especially for you.”
Carpington was quiet.
“You see, Roger, you don't work for the town of Oakwood. You don'
t represent all those people in your ward. You work for me. You represent me. You only have one constituent, Roger. I'm your constituent. I pay taxes, and I want to be represented well. You're my guy, and I want you to be doing your very best. You just might be mayor of Oakwood someday, once that blue-haired bitch decides to step down, and we might even have some ways of persuading her to do just that. We have things on you, Roger. Things that could send you away for a very long time. We go down, you go down, but you go down a lot harder. Our lawyers have bigger dicks than yours, Roger. If things ever came crashing down, and I don't see any reason to think that they ever would, but if they did, you can be sure that the only person who's ever going to go away is you.” Greenway paused. “If you were even lucky enough to make it to prison.”
Carpington seemed to understand. Rick smiled at him and patted the trunk of his car loudly.
“It's very important to Mr. Benedetto that you keep doing the fine job you've been doing on the council. You've been speaking up for us at every opportunity, and we appreciate it. He and I were talking just the other day, and he said to me, ‘Do you think Roger would like an addition built on his house?'”
“An addition?”
“A deck maybe. Or a family room? Someplace to put in a home theater? You've got kids. I'm sure they like to watch a lot of movies.”
“It's true,” Carpington said quietly. “They do like to watch movies. Especially those ones with that Adam Sandler guy.”
“I like him, too,” said Rick. “You know that one, where he's the water boy?”
“Yeah?” said Carpington.
“What's that one called?”
“The Waterboy.”
“I know, that's the one I mean. Where he plays the water boy.”
“That's what it's called,” said Carpington. “It's called The Waterboy.”
“Oh yeah, I think you're right.”
Greenway cut in. “I wish we had time to continue this conversation all night, gentlemen. But we have other matters to attend to. Roger, I'll talk to Mr. Benedetto about that tomorrow, see if we can't get something going on those home improvements for you.”