“Fleming, Fleming,” he said. “Not sure.”
“He’s got a body shop in town here,” I said. “He’s the kind of guy, I think, if he does come in here, you’d know him.”
I became aware that the two guys at the bar were no longer talking. “What sort of business you got with him?” the bartender asked.
I smiled, trying to be polite. “It’s sort of a personal matter,” I said. “But I’d be grateful if you could tell me where I could find him. Wait, hang on.” I dug out my wallet, struggling for a second to get it out of the back pocket of my jeans. It was a clumsy, awkward maneuver. I made Columbo look smooth. I laid a ten on the counter. “It’s a bit early for me for a beer, but I’d be happy to pay you for your trouble.”
One of the guys at the bar had slipped away. Maybe to use the can.
“You can keep your money,” the bartender said. “If you want to leave your name, next time he’s in, I could pass it on to him.”
“Maybe if you could just tell me where he works. Look, I don’t mean him any trouble. I’m just wondering if maybe someone I’m looking for might have been to see him.”
The bartender weighed his options, must have decided Fleming’s place of business was probably pretty common knowledge, so he said, “Dirksen Garage. You know where that is?”
I shook my head.
Across the bridge over into Stratford, he said. He drew me a small map on a cocktail napkin.
I went back outside, took a second to let my eyes adjust to the sunlight, and got back in my car. Dirksen Garage was only a couple of miles away, and I was there in under five minutes. I kept glancing in my rearview mirror, wondering whether Rona Wedmore might be following me, but I didn’t spot any obvious unmarked cars.
Dirksen Garage was a single-story cinder-block building with a paved front yard and a black tow truck out front. I parked, walked past a Beetle with its nose smashed in and a Ford Explorer with the two driver’s-side doors caved in, and entered the garage through the business entrance.
I’d come into a small, windowed office that looked out onto a large bay with half a dozen cars in various stages of repair. Some were brown with primer, others masked with paper in preparation for painting, a couple with fenders removed. A strong chemical smell traveled up my nostrils and bored straight into my brain.
There was a young woman at the desk in front of me who asked what I wanted.
“I’m here to see Vince,” I said.
“Not in,” she said.
“It’s important,” I said. “My name’s Terry Archer.”
“What’s it about?”
I could have said that it was about my wife, but that was going to raise a whole bunch of red flags. When one guy goes looking for another guy and says it’s about his wife, it’s hard to believe anything good can come of that.
So I said, “I need to speak with him.”
And what, exactly, was I going to speak with him about? Had I figured that part out yet? I could start with “Have you seen my wife? Remember her? You knew her as Cynthia Bigge. You were on a date with her the night her family vanished?”
And once I’d broken the ice, I could try something like, “Did you, by the way, have anything to do with that? Did you happen to put her mother and brother in a car and dump them off a cliff into an abandoned quarry?”
It would have been better if I had a plan. But the only thing that was driving me now was that my wife had left me, and this was my first stop as I went beating about the bushes.
“Like I said, Mr. Fleming is not here right now,” the woman said. “But I’ll take a message.”
“The name,” I said again, “is Terry Archer.” I gave her my home and cell numbers. “I’d really like to talk to him.”
“Yeah, well, you and plenty of others,” she said.
So I left the Dirksen Garage. Stood out front in the sun, said to myself, “What now, asshole?”
All I really knew for sure was that I needed a coffee. Maybe, drinking a coffee, some intelligent course of action would come to me. There was a doughnut place about half a block down, so I walked over to it. I bought a medium with cream and sugar and sat down at a table littered with doughnut wrappers. I brushed them out of my way, careful not to get any icing or sprinkles on me, and got out my cell phone.
I tried Cynthia again, and again it went straight to voicemail. “Honey, call me. Please.”
I was slipping the phone back into my jacket when it rang. “Hello? Cyn?”
“Mr. Archer?”
“Yes.”
“Dr. Kinzler here.”
“Oh, it’s you. I thought it might be Cynthia. But thanks for returning my call.”
“Your message said your wife is missing?”
“She left in the middle of the night,” I said. “With Grace.” Dr. Kinzler said nothing. I thought I’d lost my call. “Hello?”
“I’m here. She hasn’t been in touch with me. I think you should find her, Mr. Archer.”
“Well, thanks. That’s very helpful. That’s kind of what I’m trying to do right now.”
“I’m just saying, your wife has been under a great deal of stress. Tremendous strain. I’m not sure that she’s entirely…stable. I don’t think it’s a very good environment for your daughter.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m not saying anything. I just think it would be best to find her as soon as you can. And if she does get in touch with me, I will recommend to her that she return home.”
“I don’t think she feels safe here.”
“Then you need to make it safe,” Dr. Kinzler said. “I have another call.”
And she was gone. As helpful as always, I thought.
I’d downed half my coffee before I realized it was bitter to the point of being undrinkable, tossed the rest, and walked out the front of the shop.
A red SUV bounced up and over the curb and stopped abruptly in front of me. The back and front doors on the passenger side opened and two rumpled-looking, slightly potbellied men in oil-stained jeans, jean jackets, and dirty T-shirts—one bald and the other with dirty blond hair—jumped out.
“Get in,” Baldy said.
“Excuse me?” I said.
“You heard him,” said Blondie. “Get in the fucking car.”
“I don’t think so,” I said, taking a step back toward the doughnut shop.
They lunged forward together, each grabbing an arm. “Hey,” I said as they dragged me toward the SUV’s back door. “You can’t do this. Let go of me! You can’t just grab people off the street!”
They heaved me in. I went sprawling onto the floor of the backseat. Blondie got in front, Baldy got in the back, rested his work-booted foot on my back to keep me there. As I was going down I caught a glimpse of a third man behind the wheel.
“You know what I thought he was going to say for a second there?” Baldy asked his buddy.
“What?”
“I thought he was going to say ‘unhand me.’” They both started pissing themselves laughing.
The thing was, it had been the next thing I was going to say.
33
As a high school English teacher, I didn’t have a lot of experience in how to handle being grabbed by a couple of thugs out front of a doughnut shop and tossed into the back of an SUV.
I was learning, very quickly, that no one was particularly interested in what I had to say.
“Look,” I said from the floor of the backseat, “you guys have made some kind of mistake.” I tried twisting around a bit, onto my side, so I could at least get a glimpse of the bald man who was pressing down on my thigh with his boot.
“Shut the fuck up,” he said, looking at me.
“I’m just saying,” I said, “I’m not the kind of guy anyone would be interested in. I don’t mean you guys any harm. Who do you think I am? Some gang guy? A cop? I’m a teacher.”
From the front seat, Blondie said, “I fucking hated all my teachers. That’s enough right there to get y
ou capped.”
“I’m sorry, I know there are a lot of shitty teachers out there, but what I’m trying to tell you is I don’t have anything to do—”
Baldy sighed, opened up his jacket, and produced a gun that was probably not the biggest handgun in the world, but from my position below him, it looked like a cannon. He pointed it at my head.
“If I have to shoot you in this car, my boss is going to be pissed that there’ll be blood and bone and brain matter all over the fucking upholstery, but when I explain to him that you wouldn’t shut the fuck up like you were told to do, I think he’ll understand.”
I shut up.
It didn’t take a Sherlock Holmes to figure out that this had something to do with my asking questions about where to find Vince Fleming. Maybe one of those two guys at the bar at Mike’s had made a call. Maybe the bartender had phoned the auto body shop before I’d even got there. Then somebody’d put in a call to these two goons to find out why it was I wanted to see Vince Fleming.
Except nobody was asking that question.
Maybe they didn’t care. Maybe it was enough that I was asking. You ask around about Vince, you end up in the back of an SUV and nobody ever sees you again.
I started thinking about a way out. It was me against three big guys. Judging by the extra fat they were carrying around their middles, maybe not the fittest thugs in Milford, but how in shape did you have to be when you were armed? I knew for sure that one of them had a gun, and it seemed reasonable to assume the other two did as well. Could I get Baldy’s gun from him, shoot him, open the door, and jump from a moving car?
Not in a million years.
The gun was still in Baldy’s hand, resting on top of his knee. The other leg remained propped on top of me, and his boot had left a gravelly smudge on my jeans. Blondie and the driver were talking, nothing to do with me, but about a ball game from the night before. Then Blondie said, “What the fuck is that?”
The driver said, “It’s a CD.”
“I can see it’s a CD. It’s what CD it is that’s got me worried. You are not putting that in the player.”
“Yeah, I am.”
I heard the distinctive whir of a CD being loaded into a dashboard player.
“I don’t fucking believe you,” Blondie said.
“What?” Baldy asked from the backseat.
Before anyone else could say anything, the music started. An instrumental intro, and then, “Why do birds suddenly appear…every time…you are near?”
“Fuck me,” said Baldy. “The fucking Carpenters?”
“Hey,” said the driver. “Knock it off. I grew up with this.”
“Jesus,” said Blondie. “This chick singing, isn’t she the one who wouldn’t eat anything?”
“Yeah,” the driver said. “She had anorexia.”
“People like that,” said Baldy. “They should have a fucking hamburger or something.”
Could three guys debating the merits of a seventies singing group really be planning to take me someplace and execute me? Wouldn’t the mood in the car have to be a bit more grim? For a moment, I felt encouraged. And then I thought of the scene in Pulp Fiction where Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta are arguing over what a Big Mac is called in Paris, moments before they go up to an apartment and commit murder. These guys didn’t even have that kind of style. In fact, there was an unmistakable whiff of body odor coming off one or more of them.
Is this how it ends? In the backseat of an SUV? One minute you’re having coffee in a doughnut shop, trying to find your missing wife and daughter, and the next you’re looking down the barrel of a stranger’s gun, wondering if the last words you hear will be “They long to be…close to you.”
We took a couple of turns, went over some railroad tracks, and then it felt as though the SUV was descending, ever so slightly, as though we were heading toward the shore. Down toward the Sound.
Then the truck slowed, did an abrupt right, bounced up over a curb, and came to a stop. Looking up through the windows, I saw mostly sky, but also the side of a house. When the driver killed the engine, I heard seagulls.
“Okay,” said Baldy, looking down at me, “I want you to be nice. We’re getting out and going up some stairs and into a house, and if you try to run away, or if you try shouting for help, or try doing any other kind of retarded thing, I’m going to hurt you. You understand?”
“Yes,” I said.
Blondie and the driver were already out. Baldy opened his door, got out, and I pulled myself up first onto the backseat, then scooted over until I was out the side.
We were parked in a driveway between two beach houses. I had a pretty good idea we were on East Broadway. The houses are packed in pretty tight together along there, and glancing south between the houses I could see beach and beyond that, Long Island Sound. When I saw Charles Island out there, I was even more sure where we were.
Baldy motioned for me to climb up a set of open-back stairs that went up the side of a pale yellow house to the second floor. The first floor was mostly garage. Blondie and the driver went ahead, then me, then Baldy. The steps were gritty with beach sand and made soft, scratching noises under our shoes.
At the top of the stairs the driver held open a screen door, and the rest of us walked in ahead of him. We entered into a large room with sliding glass doors facing the water, and a deck that was suspended over the beach. There were some chairs and a couch just inside the door, a shelf weighed down with paperback novels, then as you moved back into the room there was an eating table and a kitchen along the back wall.
A heavyset man with his back to me was standing at the stove, steadying a frying pan with one hand, a spatula in the other.
“Here he is,” Blondie said.
The man nodded without saying anything.
“We’ll be down in the truck,” Baldy said, and motioned for Blondie and the driver to follow him out. The three of them walked out and I could hear their boots receding on the steps.
I stood there in the center of the room. Normally, I would have turned to take in the view out the glass doors, maybe even walked out onto the deck and taken in a whiff of sea air. But instead, I stared at the man’s back.
“You want some eggs?” he asked.
“No thanks,” I said.
“It’s no trouble,” he said. “Fried, scrambled, over easy, whatever.”
“No, but thanks just the same,” I said.
“I get up a little later, sometimes it’s nearly lunchtime before I make breakfast,” he said. He reached up into a cupboard and brought down a plate, transferred some scrambled eggs to it, added some sausages that had been sitting on some paper towel that he must have cooked earlier, then reached into a cutlery drawer for a fork and what appeared to be a steak knife.
He turned around and walked over to the table, pulled out a chair, and sat down.
He was about my age, although I think I can say, objectively, that he looked a bit worse for wear. His face was pockmarked, he had an inch-long scar above his right eye, and his once black hair was now heavily peppered with gray. He was in a black T-shirt, tucked into some black jeans, and I could see the bottom edge of a tattoo on his upper right arm, but not enough to know what it was. His stomach strained against his shirt, and he sighed at the effort of plopping down into his chair.
He motioned to the chair opposite him. I approached, cautiously, and sat down. He upended a bottle of ketchup, waited for a huge dollop to land on the plate by his eggs and sausage. He had a mug of coffee in front of him, and when he reached for it, said, “Coffee?”
“No,” I said. “I just had some at the doughnut shop.”
“The one by my business?” he said.
“Yes.”
“It’s not very good there,” he said.
“No, it’s not. I threw out half of it,” I said.
“Do I know you?” he asked, shoving some eggs into his mouth.
“No,” I said.
“But you’re asking around for me
. First at Mike’s, then at my place of business.”
“Yes,” I said. “It wasn’t my intention to alarm you.”
“‘Wasn’t my intention,’” he parroted. The man I now knew to be Vince Fleming speared a sausage with his fork, held it in place, then picked up the steak knife and cut off a piece. He shoved it into his mouth. “Well, when people I don’t know start asking around for me, that can be a cause for concern.”
“I guess I didn’t fully appreciate that.”
“Given the kind of business I do, sometimes I run into people with unorthodox business practices.”
“Sure,” I said.
“So when people I don’t know start asking around for me, I like to arrange a meeting where I feel I have the advantage.”
“I think you do,” I said.
“So who the fuck are you?”
“Terry Archer. You know my wife.”
“I know your wife,” he said, as if to say, So? “Not anymore. But a long time ago.”
Fleming scowled at me as he took another bite of sausage. “What is this? Did I fool around with your old lady or something? Look, it’s not my fault if you can’t keep your woman happy and she needs to come to me for what she needs.”
“It’s not that kind of thing,” I said. “My wife’s name is Cynthia. You would have known her when she was Cynthia Bigge.”
He stopped in mid-chew. “Oh. Shit. Man, that was a fucking long time ago.”
“Twenty-five years,” I said.
“You’ve taken a long time to drop by,” Vince Fleming said.
“There have been some recent developments,” I said. “I take it you remember what happened that night.”
“Yeah. Her whole fucking family vanished.”
“That’s right. They’ve just found the bodies of Cynthia’s mother and brother.”
“Todd?”
“That’s right.”
“I knew Todd.”
“You did?”
Vince Fleming shrugged. “A bit. I mean, we went to the same school. He was an okay guy.” He shoveled in some more ketchup-covered eggs.
“You’re not curious about where they found them?” I asked.