“Because of the man you were seeing at the time,” I said.
Rhonda put her hands over her face. “Oh God, oh God,” she said. “I knew you’d come. I knew you’d figure it out eventually.”
I reached out and gently pulled her hands away from her face. “Tell me about it, Rhonda.”
“It was never supposed to happen,” she said. “Never.”
“Did he do it because Scott had threatened him?”
She nodded, and I let go of her arms so that she could wipe her eyes. “Your son, Scott, said he was going to tell. He was all, ‘Hey, wait till everyone finds this out!’ You know?”
Rhonda was describing the incident at Patchett’s. Could she have been there? It seemed unlikely Ricky would tell her the story about his patdown of Claire.
“You saw that happen?” I said.
She nodded, reached for a tissue on a nearby table, dabbed her eyes and wiped her nose.
“You were at Patchett’s?”
That startled her. “What?”
Now I was startled.
“What’s Patchett’s have to do with this?” she asked.
My mind was struggling. “Wait,” I said. I had a theory. “Not Patchett’s. You were on the roof.”
Her head went up and down. She grabbed another tissue.
“You were there when Scott got pushed off the roof?”
She dropped her head. In sorrow, or shame, I wasn’t sure.
I pressed on. “You saw Ricky do it?”
Her head shot up and her mouth opened. She looked as startled as if I’d slapped her.
“Ricky?” she said. “You thought it was Ricky?”
Sixty-nine
It was dark. Half past ten. From atop Ravelson Furniture, I could see the Skylon Tower in the distance. It was quiet up here, the sounds from cars passing through downtown Griffon barely audible. I was standing with one foot on the ledge, one on the roof, in the very spot where Scott had to have gone off.
I’d called Kent, and he’d let me come up here. And he left a couple of doors unlocked so someone could join me.
I was expecting company any second now. Rhonda McIntyre had agreed to make a phone call for me to set up this meeting. I turned away from the view and looked at the door that led out onto the roof when I heard someone coming up the steps. I walked away from the edge so I could be closer to the door when it opened.
Seconds later, it did.
“Hello, Bert,” I said.
Bert Sanders stepped out onto the roof, his shoes crunching the gravel secured with tar.
“What— Cal, what are you doing here?”
“Waiting for you,” I said. “But I guess you were expecting someone else.”
He started to turn for the door, but I got around him and blocked his path.
“You were expecting Rhonda McIntyre,” I said.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Bert said.
“Bert, please. I went to see her, in Erie. We talked. I asked her to set this up.”
His eyes darted about, looking for an escape.
“Why don’t you tell me your version of what happened?” I said.
“Whatever Rhonda told you,” he said, “you have to understand where she’s coming from. She’s got an ax to grind. You’ve got to take what she says with a grain of salt. I was” — he looked around, to see whether anyone could possibly be listening — “seeing Annette, and this thing with Rhonda just wasn’t going anywhere. I mean, yes, there was the sex—”
“Which you had up here.”
Sanders nodded sheepishly. “It’s true. We met up here a few times. You know that kind of furtive, frantic sex you can have, where it seems all the more exciting because the location is so... different.” He tried an old boy’s smile on me, like, hey, you know what it’s like.
“So you came up here, the two of you, well after hours, and were getting into it,” I said. “Rhonda had keys, just like Scott did. Was he already up here, or did he come up after?”
Sanders swallowed. “After.”
“So lay it out for me. Where were you?”
There was a small structure that sat on the roof to accommodate the top of the stairwell and the door. Sanders pointed around the side. “We were leaning up against that. And then, suddenly, we heard steps, and the door burst open.” He paused. “And it was your son.”
“Go on,” I said.
“He was high as a kite, Cal. Skipping around, with a bottle of something in his hand. He was feeling pretty good.” A slightly accusatory tone, the suggestion that Scott wouldn’t have been up here if we’d kept better tabs on him.
“So he was high,” I said. “What then?”
“Rhonda and I, we knew we had to get back downstairs without him seeing us. All we had to do was slip away, and we would have done it — we almost did it — but as we were coming around the corner there, Rhonda, one of her high heels got stuck for a second in the gravel, and she stumbled. That’s when Scott turned around and saw us.”
“What did he say?”
“At first, nothing. He was as surprised to see us as we were to see him when he came out that door. It was like we’d caught each other being up to something we weren’t supposed to be doing.”
He shook his head regretfully. “But I guess, in his intoxicated state, he got over that worry pretty quickly and zeroed in on us. He knew Rhonda. He worked with her, saw her all the time. And he sure as hell knew who I was, too. He pointed a finger at us, like this, and he said something like, ‘Holy shit.’ He wasn’t so high that he couldn’t see that he’d caught us in something we didn’t want to get out.”
“What happened then?” I said. There was a cool breeze, four stories above the street, but I felt hot.
“I said, ‘Hey, Scott, it’s not what it looks like.’ And Rhonda said that too, that we’d just come up to see the stars. But the thing was, Rhonda’s blouse was undone, and so was my belt, and your son was no fool.”
Bert Sanders forced a smile. “In fact, Cal, he was a good kid. You know, he got into some bad things, but he was a good kid. Everyone, everyone at Ravelson said that. Rhonda said so, too, that—”
“Shut up, Bert.”
I paced slowly back and forth in front of him, picturing it. Seeing it all in my head.
“So he didn’t buy it,” I said. “What happened then?”
“He was kind of rambling. He was saying he couldn’t believe the two of us had something going on. Asking, wasn’t I married? Which I told him I wasn’t. And I don’t think he knew Rhonda was seeing Ricky Haines — you know about that?”
“I do,” I said. And I thought he was probably right about that. Scott might have tempered his taunts where Haines was concerned if he knew he was going out with someone he worked with.
“I said to him, I said, ‘Scott, you can’t ever tell anyone you saw us together.’ And he asked why, and I told him nothing good would come of it. And then Rhonda blurted out, she said if Ricky found out she was seeing me, he’d kill her. Scott says, ‘Ricky?’ He says, ‘Do you mean Ricky Haines, the cop?’ And Rhonda says yes. She says, ‘Please don’t say anything.’ Because there was something not right about him. I mean, we all know that now, don’t we? That Haines was sick in the head or something. Keeping his stepfather in the basement for almost a decade. He had to have a few screws loose.” He tapped his index finger to his temple twice.
“And there was more, you know. I mean, there I was, in the thick of it with Chief Perry, attacking him for how he runs his department, and I’m fooling around with one of his officers’ girlfriends. The optics weren’t good. Rhonda would be at risk, and I’d be compromised if it came out. The chief could have found a way to use it against me.”
“Scott,” I said. “What happened with Scott?”
“I was worried that even if he promised not to tell, would he keep it? When he came down off his high, when the drugs wore off, would he remember what he’d seen, but not what he’d promised to do?”