“That your Mustang out front?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“Your parents bought that for you?”
“Yeah, so?”
“What’s your dad drive?”
“What the hell? Why are you asking?”
“Just tell me.”
“He’s got a BMW. Him and my mom both got ’em.”
BMW didn’t make a pickup truck. But I was betting Ravelson Furniture had one or two for deliveries. Roman could have borrowed one.
“Do you know why Dennis broke things off with Claire?”
“Man, I don’t even think Claire knew the reason, from what I hear. My guess is, he was just a total douche.”
I nodded. “Yeah, that would explain it. Roman, you know Claire, you went out with her. Where would she go? If she was scared, or just wanted to get away from everybody, where would she hide out? Aside from her mom’s place in Toronto.”
He thought, then said, “I got nuthin’.”
I got out of the computer chair. “Good luck with your meeting with Steven.”
Forty-two
If Roman Ravelson weren’t so unlikable, I might have felt bad mocking his ambitions. If I’d had a daughter and he’d sent her a photo of his erection, I’d have made him eat his phone. And I didn’t think much of him sending Sean and Hanna all over Niagara and Erie counties selling booze out of the back of a truck. It exposed them to countless risks, legal and physical. If Roman wanted to make a buck selling booze to minors, fine. But he didn’t need to be getting others on board.
I got into my Honda, thinking about Roman’s zombie movie, about his character named Tim, out to save the world from an alien plot to—
Tim. Timmy.
The name hit me like cold, wet spray coming over the bow of the Maid of the Mist. The young man with the limp who came into Iggy’s every night for a late dinner. The man who left the restaurant only seconds before Claire did.
Where was it Sal had said Timmy lived? It was the four-story apartment building just a stone’s throw down the road.
Maybe Timmy had noticed something.
It was a long shot, to be sure. But not only had they left at almost exactly the same time — Timmy had struck off in the same direction the driver of the Volvo had taken.
I pulled away from the Ravelson house and headed back to Iggy’s.
There was no mistaking the building. There was only one like it within spitting distance of Iggy’s. Most everything along this stretch of Danbury was commercial. Fast-food joints, gas stations, strip malls, a Target on the other side of the street. The low-rise apartment complex stood alone as a place where anyone near here might actually live.
I tried to remember what Sal had told me. Timmy came in at the end of his working day, after his shift, wherever that shift happened to be. My guess was Timmy didn’t have a car. If he did, he’d probably drive to Iggy’s on his way home, not walk over. Which meant he worked very close to where he lived, or took a bus from work every night. Either way, it meant he probably finished work around nine, and most shifts were seven or eight hours.
It was twelve thirty p.m. My guess was if Timmy hadn’t already left for work, he’d be coming out the lobby doors of that apartment building anytime now. I parked the car where I could watch. If he didn’t show in the next fifteen or twenty minutes, I’d go into the lobby and see if I could find him, but I knew the directory wasn’t going to be much help. Even if last names were attached to the buzzers on the intercom system, I didn’t know Timmy’s. If there was no super in the building, I was going to have to go knocking on doors. The building had at least forty units, and while I was wandering the halls, my man Timmy could be slipping out the front door.
I only had to wait ten minutes.
He hobbled down the building’s front steps and headed straight for the sidewalk. When he reached it, he didn’t turn left or right, but watched for a break in traffic. He didn’t walk very quickly, so that break was going to have to be a long one. Across the street were a Target and several other stores clustered around it like pups nursing off their mother.
I got out of my car and ran over to him before he started his trek across.
“Timmy?”
The man turned and eyed me curiously. “Huh?” he said.
“You’re Timmy?”
He looked afraid to say yes, but after a second’s hesitation, he said, “Yeah, that’s me.”
“My name’s Weaver. I wonder if I could ask you a couple of questions?”
“What about? Who are you?”
I handed him a card. “I’m a private investigator. I need to ask you about something that happened a couple of nights ago. What’s your last name?”
Hesitantly, he said, “Gursky. Timmy Gursky. Has this got something to do with work? Because I’m heading over there right now and I don’t want to be late.”
He pointed. Not to Target, but to one of the other businesses. An electronics store, it looked like.
“The stereo place?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“This isn’t about work. And you’re not in trouble. But you might have been a witness to something I’m looking into. Two nights ago, when you were leaving Iggy’s, there was a car pulling out of the lot, and I’m hoping you might have noticed it.”
“Noticed a car? You kidding?”
“I admit, I’m grasping at straws here.”
“How do you even know I was there? And which night you talking about?”
I told him, briefly, about reviewing the surveillance video at Iggy’s, that I’d been trying to find a girl who got into a silver or gray Volvo station wagon, and that Sal said he ate there most nights, around that time.
“Sal, yeah, he’s an okay guy,” Timmy said. “Yeah, two nights ago. You know what? I actually do remember that car.”
“Seriously?”
“Son of a bitch nearly ran over my foot. Like I need any more trouble. My knee here got all fucked-up in Iraq.”
I wanted to ask about the car, but felt obliged to ask about his knee first.
He grinned. “That’s always a good line to use with the ladies, you know? I usually come up with a better story for them than what I’ll tell you, which’ll be the truth. I was working in what they called the Green Zone, you know? Inside the compound but not with the actual army or anything. They had, like, this whole city inside there, with everything all American. I worked for Pizza Hut. We had this trailer in there, soldiers could come up, get a slice just like they’d get back home. So I’m coming out of the trailer one day, miss the step, and come down right on my goddamn knee. Fucked it up big-time.”
“Sorry to hear that,” I said.
“Still hurts like a son of a bitch. You figure, you go over there, if you have to come back hurt, it better be because of some car bomb or missile or something, am I right? I had to hurt myself coming out of a pizza trailer. The ladies do not get that version.”
“You said the driver of the Volvo nearly ran over your foot.”
“Yeah,” he said indignantly. “I noticed the car early on, because it was parked with the motor running, and the thing was really pumping out the exhaust, you know? It was an old car and the motor was noisy and really needed a tune-up. So anyway, I’m walking toward home, right here, across the lot, which is pretty empty that time of night, and I hear this noise coming from behind, to my right, and I look around, and there’s the car you’re talking about, zooming out of there. For a second, I thought they’re trying to run me down, but I think the asshole behind the wheel, he just couldn’t see me.”
“It was a man.”
“Yeah, I mean, I could tell that much. I didn’t get a real good look at him, but yeah, it was a guy.”