I sighed. “You want to come in?”
She weighed the offer, then, without saying anything, stepped into the house.
“Tell me how Doug is,” I said.
“How he is? How the fuck do you think he would be? He’s in jail.”
“Betsy, I’m really asking here. How is he?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen him.”
“They won’t let you see him?”
She didn’t like the question, looked off to the side. “I haven’t exactly had a chance. But they’ve probably got him locked up where I couldn’t see him anyway.” She looked, briefly, at her hands, which appeared to be trembling ever so slightly. “God, I’m a nervous wreck.” She shoved her hands into the front pockets of her skintight jeans.
“Have you got him a lawyer?”
She laughed. “A lawyer? Are you kidding me? How the hell am I supposed to afford a lawyer?”
“Can’t you get a court-appointed one?”
“Yeah, right. And how good would one of those be?”
I thought about the money between the studs in my study. I could hire a lawyer for Doug with that.
“Besides,” Betsy added, “I’ve had stuff to do.”
“Getting the truck? That’s your number one priority?”
“I need wheels. My mom needs her car back.”
“Have you written him off, Betsy? Is that it? You don’t care what happens to Doug?”
“Of course I care. But they’ve got him. They wouldn’t have charged him if they didn’t have the goods on him, that’s what my mom says. I mean, I guess they know he was there, up at Theo’s trailer. There’s the gun in the car, and they say it was the one that shot him. What more do they need? I have to tell you, I didn’t even know he had a gun.” She gave her head a shake. “You think you know someone.”
“I didn’t know you were this cold, Betsy.”
“I just want a decent life,” she spat. “I deserve better than this. That makes me some kind of criminal?”
“Doug said to me one time, like he was making a joke, that he wondered if you had some money tucked away someplace. Why would he say that?”
“If I had some secret stash, would I be living with my mom and begging you to let me get at my husband’s piece-of-shit pickup truck?”
“That’s not an answer, Betsy. Is Doug right? Do you have some money stashed away? I noticed those stacks of bills in your kitchen didn’t stop you from going out shopping. You still had some money somewhere even as your cards were probably getting canceled.”
“I can’t believe you. I really can’t. You think I’m turning tricks or something?”
“No,” I said, although I thought it was an interesting thing to say, given what I’d found out about Ann Slocum.
She shook her head angrily. “Okay, so sometimes, my mom helps me out. She gives me a little something here and there.”
“Betsy, level with me here.”
“Okay, look, she may not look like she’s living the high life, but there was some money, she had this uncle a couple of years back, there was about eighty thou after his house was sold. She was the only relative left, so she got it all.”
“And Doug didn’t know about this?”
“Hell, no. I’m not crazy. Mom snuck me some once in a while, when we were short, or if we couldn’t pay the minimums on the Visas.” She laughed. “If all those different banks wanted to keep sending us credit cards, it seemed wrong not to use them. I’m not one to be ungrateful.”
“This has lost you a house, Betsy.”
The hands came out of the pockets and went back on the hips. “When did you start thinking you were so much better than everybody else? Is it something you’re born with, or do you develop the attitude over time?”
“What were you doing when Doug went out to Theo’s place?”
“Huh?” she said. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m just asking, Betsy. What were you doing while Doug was out?”
“I didn’t even know he’d gone until I got up in the morning and my car was gone. What do you mean, what was I doing? I was sleeping.”
“You ever been up to Theo’s place?”
“What? No. Why would I have been there?”
“How did you know he lived in a trailer?”
“What?”
“Just a minute ago, you mentioned Theo’s place was a trailer. How did you know that?”
“What the hell are you getting at? I guess the cops must have told me, I don’t know. What’s wrong with you? And are you going to let me get that truck or not?”
“Drop by tomorrow,” I said. “If I’m not there, Sally might be. Or KF. Someone will help you out. But right now, we’re closed.”
I showed her out the door and closed it behind her.
Something was bothering me. I kept thinking about what Doug had said, how he and Betsy didn’t even sleep together when they were at her mother’s house. When Doug left the house to go see Theo, for all he knew, Betsy wasn’t even home at the time.
She could have been anywhere.
I wasn’t sure where I was going with this, why I was suspecting Betsy of… something. It must have had to do with her apparent lack of concern for what had happened to Doug. She hadn’t even been to see him since his arrest. She seemed content to accept the police version of events.
Like Darren Slocum, Betsy Pinder wasn’t interested in challenging the facts. She was okay with things just the way they were.
FORTY-EIGHT
Sommer brought the Chrysler to a stop half a block down from Belinda Morton’s house, turned off the headlights and killed the engine.
Slocum, in the passenger seat, said, “I gotta ask you something.”
Sommer looked at him.
“Tell me you weren’t trying to kill Garber’s kid? When you shot out her window?”
Sommer shook his head tiredly. “It was kids doing a drive-by. They went past when I was parked there. After that, it wasn’t safe to hang around, so I went to see Garber the next morning.”
“Jesus, you couldn’t have just told me that? Here I’d been thinking you’d nearly killed my daughter’s best friend.”
“And yet here you are, still doing business with me,” Sommer said.
“What about Twain? Did you-”
Sommer held up a hand. “Enough. Are you coming in with me?”
“No,” Slocum said. “So long as you give me my share, I don’t need to.”
Sommer got out of the car, leaving the keys in the ignition. The warning bell chimed briefly as the overhead light came on. Slocum watched as Sommer walked purposefully toward the Morton house. Silhouetted by the streetlights, Sommer looked like Death, Slocum mused.
George Morton was sitting in the family room, watching Judge Judy on the forty-two-inch plasma. “Honey, come in here and watch this,” he said. “Judy’s really going to town on this woman.”
Tonight, it was some mother who was making a million excuses for her dumbass son, who’d taken the family car without permission to a party where lots of underage kids were drinking. One of the son’s drunk friends had taken the car for a spin and totaled it, and now this mother wanted the parents of the other kid to pay for the damages, ignoring the fact that if her own son hadn’t taken the car and let a drunk friend drive off with it, none of this would have happened.
“Are you coming in here or not? You’re not still mad, are you? Listen, honey, I want to talk to you about something.”
Belinda was in the kitchen, standing at the counter, looking over various real estate documents, unable to concentrate at all. Mad? He thought she was mad? More like homicidal. Sommer was expecting his money and that asshole husband of hers was still stubbornly holding on to it, keeping it locked up in his study safe, refusing to hand it over until Belinda told him what it was for. Totally improper, George kept saying, these large cash transactions. After all, he said, you’re not in business with criminals.
When he was in the bathroom, she’d tried to open the safe using numbers from his Social Security card, his license plate, his birthday, even his mother’s birthday, which he never failed to remember, even in years when he forgot Belinda’s. But she hadn’t stumbled upon the right sequence yet.