Marilyn turned beet red at that, and didn’t answer.
I laughed, and we finished cleaning up and getting ready for bed. We crawled under the covers and I turned out the light on the nightstand, and Marilyn twisted around to kiss me good night. Then, with the lights out, she whispered, “It was better!”
I went to sleep with a smile on my face!
Chapter 80: More Trouble
We didn’t give the suspicious green car any more thought. Neither of us saw anything out of the ordinary. Nobody was driving past the house and stopping, nobody was following us around, nobody was watching us. At least, not that we could tell. All I knew about counter-surveillance was from reading spy novels and mystery novels, and who knows how correct those are. Marilyn would have been oblivious anyway. We never gave it any more thought.
At least not until a couple of weeks later. Mid-July, I got a panicked call at the office from Marilyn, who was at the grocery store with Charlie. I was in a meeting with Missy and John about a possible investment, when Grace knocked on the door and told me to pick up the phone, it was an important call. I looked at the other two, mystified, and shrugged my shoulders. I told them to stay seated, and grabbed the phone. “Hello?”
“Carl?! You have to come get us, we’re stuck at the mall!” It was Marilyn’s voice, sounding half exasperated and half scared.
“What do you mean, you’re stuck at the mall?” Across from me, Missy smiled over at John. I knew this sounded like Marilyn being crazy about something.
“It’s the car! All the tires are flat!”
Well, that made me sit up in my chair. All four tires flat?! I’ve had flat tires before, who hasn’t, and back in a previous life I once lost two tires on a construction site. But all four? That pushed the odds way beyond anything to be expected. “Where are you at?”
“The Hunt Valley Mall.”
“Was there anything else disturbed on the car? Anything broken?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t look. Why?”
I didn’t answer directly. “Don’t worry. I’ll be along in a few minutes.” Marilyn told me where to find her in the mall, and I called the meeting short.
“Is everything all right?” asked Missy.
I made a waffling motion with my hand. “Eh. Marilyn’s car has four flat tires. She’s stuck at the mall and I have to go pick her up. Can you get Grace to find a tow truck or a wrecker to go out there with some new tires? Maybe the Toyota place can do something.” I grabbed my jacket and headed towards the door.
John caught up to me and laid a hand on my shoulder. “Hold on a second, Carl. Something’s wrong here. Four flats isn’t an accident, it’s vandalism.” I opened my mouth to argue, but couldn’t. He was right. It was way too unlikely to be an accident. “You should call the police.”
“Call the cops? For vandalism? They won’t be able to do anything.”
“Maybe, maybe not. Didn’t you say a few weeks ago that your babysitter saw a car at your house? How do you know it’s not the same thing?”
“John, that’s crazy!”
He pushed back. “You should call the cops. I’m your friend as well as your lawyer. Listen to me.” He turned me back to my desk and pointed at the phone.
I muttered, “This is nuts!” and then dialed 911. The Baltimore County Police said they would send somebody in about fifteen or twenty minutes, which would allow me some time to get over there and find my wife and Charlie.
I looked over at John, who was leaning against the doorframe and smiling. “Happy now?”
“Happy.”
“You know, I already had one mother. Look how that worked out!”
He laughed. “Get out of here. Go find Marilyn and take her out to lunch. She’s too good for you anyway.”
“Very true!”
I took off and drove to the mall. Fortunately I had driven my Lincoln to the office that day. It was only about ten miles away, if that, and I found her and Charlie standing outside one of the entrances to the mall. Charlie was sitting in his stroller, and Marilyn was talking to one of the Rent-A-Cops at the entrance. I pulled up in front of the entrance, and Marilyn finished her chat and pushed the stroller and her purchases towards me. I climbed out and waved at Charlie, who waved back. The security guard took off.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“Well, it’s the car. The tires are flat, and the guard at the security office thought it looked weird. He said I should call the police. What do you think?” said Marilyn.
“I already did that. Come on, get in, and let’s go to the car. Where’d you park, anyway?” She pointed, just in time to see a Baltimore County patrol car come into the mall road. I flagged him down. He rolled down the window, and I asked, “Were you sent over to check on a vandalism complaint?”
He nodded. “You the one who called it in?”
“Yes, sir. I just got here. I’m loading my wife and son in the car, and then we’ll go over there, if that’s all right.”
“Yeah, sure.” He picked up the dashboard microphone and started mumbling into it, so I went back to the car and loaded Marilyn’s bags into the trunk, while she put Charlie in his car seat. Then we drove through the rows of parked cars to where Marilyn had left her Toyota.
The security guard was right, something did look weird. It didn’t look like anything random, and none of the other cars nearby were touched. Things got stranger when the cop knelt down and touched the valve stem on the rear right tire. Then he moved forward to the front tire. He looked up at me and said, “Your valve stems have been cut. This isn’t just flat tires.”
“Cut!” I exclaimed. What the hell?! I turned to stare at my wife in disbelief.
He checked all four tires, and then looked over the rest of the car. He stopped at the gas cap cover and looked at that carefully. He repeated the inspection at the trunk and hood latches. “Somebody was trying to get into your gas tank and trunk, too.” He went over to his patrol car. Before I knew what was happening, he had called back to his dispatcher and requested a crime scene investigator to come out. He made another call about five minutes later, after the wrecker from the Toyota dealership showed. It was decided to have the tow guy load the car on the flatbed and haul it to the Towson impound yard, which was close to the lab people.
All during this, he was peppering both Marilyn and me with questions. Did we have any enemies? Did we have any recent problems with neighbors? Were we involved in any law suits? What did I do for a living? What did Marilyn do? Did we have any other children? It was mostly background, but when Marilyn mentioned the problems the night of the reunion, you could see his ears pricking up, almost like a dog on a scent. That caused another call to headquarters, to talk to an investigator of some sort.
When the car was loaded on the flatbed, he released us, with instructions to follow the truck to Towson and go inside to ask for a Detective Lewis Carstans. Then he took off, to go back on patrol. I looked over at Marilyn. “What the hell is going on?”
“No idea!”
“One of your old boyfriends back in town?” I asked, jokingly.
She snorted. “It’s more likely to be one of your old girlfriends!”
That made me scratch my head. It made more sense then I wanted to think about. If this was related to the green car at the house, the night of the reunion, then it made a lot of sense. What if somebody at the reunion was trying to get back at me for something? What? Who? Why? None of this made any sense to me.
Detective Carstans asked us the same questions that the patrol officer had asked, and he asked for any details of the night of the reunion we could think of, which weren’t many at all. At least I knew the date, so he could go through their records and find the patrol officer who had come to the house. Then he took our fingerprints, both mine and Marilyn’s, to compare against anything they found on the car. I couldn’t believe they were taking this that seriously!