George peered up and saw Sommer standing there. “Well, hello. I don’t believe we’ve-”
Sommer grabbed hold of George by the back of the neck, hauled him out of the chair, and propelled his head directly into Judge Judy. The plasma TV shattered.
No one got out of the car right away after the headlights went out. But Slocum thought he could make out the driver looking at the Morton house. Thinking about what to do, maybe.
Slocum thought, Who the hell is this?
The flat-screen TV shattered. George screamed. Belinda screamed.
Sommer dragged George away from the TV. The top of his head was bloodied and he was flailing his arms about wildly, trying to strike out at Sommer, getting in the occasional slap that might have worked with a mosquito but wasn’t going to have much effect here.
“Where is it?” Sommer asked.
“What?” George whimpered. “What do you want?”
“The money.”
“My study,” he said. “It’s in my study.”
“Lead the way,” Sommer said, but held on to George by twisting a fistful of shirt at the back of the neck.
“You didn’t have to do that!” Belinda shouted at Sommer. “He’s bleeding!”
With his free hand, putting his palm directly on her right breast, Sommer shoved her out of the way. Belinda stumbled back against the doorjamb.
“It’s in a safe, is that right?” Sommer asked.
“Yes, yes, it’s in the safe,” George said, steering them into his study and around his desk. “It’s in the wall, behind that picture over there.”
“Open it,” Sommer said, shoving George across the room until his face was forced into the portrait of his father.
Sommer let up on the pressure slightly so George could swing the picture out of the way to reveal the safe with the combination lock.
“So this is the kind of people you’re doing business with,” George spluttered at Belinda.
“You stupid bastard!” she screamed at him. “You brought this on yourself!”
George put his fingers on the dial, but they were shaking. “I… I don’t know if I can do it.”
Sommer sighed. He switched his grip on George from his right to his left hand, then pulled him out of the way so he could twist the dial himself. His hand was rock steady.
“Tell me,” he said.
“Okay, okay, okay, spin it a couple of times around to the right, then left to twenty-four, right to eleven-”
I’ll be damned, Belinda thought. He used my birthday.
Just as George was about to call out the third number, which Belinda was now able to predict, there was a ringing in the room.
A cell phone.
Belinda kept hers on when she was home, but it wasn’t her ring tone. George always turned his off when he wasn’t out somewhere. So it had to be Sommer’s. But with one hand on George and the other still spinning the dial, he didn’t have much choice but to ignore it.
The driver’s door opened. Slocum squinted, trying to get a look at who it was.
The person started crossing the street.
“Get under the light, get under the light,” Slocum whispered through gritted teeth.
It was as though Slocum’s pleadings could be heard. The person stood, just for a moment, under the streetlamp. Still looking at the house. Slocum could now make out who it was.
“Shit, no,” he said, and reached into his pocket for his cell phone. He flipped it open, called up Sommer’s number, hit the button.
“Pick up, pick up, pick up.”
Sommer spun the dial to the last number, heard the tumbler fall into place, and swung open the safe door. By the time he’d done that, his cell had stopped ringing. He let go of George’s shirt and reached in for the cash-stuffed envelope.
“At last,” he said.
George, sensing an opportunity, started to bolt. But he wasn’t fast enough for Sommer, who dropped the envelope, turned, grabbed George by the arm and threw him into the leather office chair. It pitched over as George fell into it.
Sommer reached into his jacket and pulled out his gun. He aimed it straight at George and said, “Don’t be an idiot.”
But Belinda screamed when she saw the weapon, so George barely heard Sommer’s warning.
And none of them heard the doorbell.
FORTY-NINE
Once Betsy and her mother had driven off, I went upstairs to the bathroom and splashed some water on my face. I looked in the mirror, at the bags under my eyes. If I’d ever been this run-down before, I couldn’t remember when.
I came out of the bathroom and sat on the edge of the bed I’d shared with Sheila. I ran my hand across the spread, over to where she used to sleep. This was where we’d come to rest every night, where we’d shared our hopes and dreams, where we’d laughed and cried, where we’d made love, where Kelly had begun.
I put my elbows on my knees and my head in my hands and stayed that way for a few moments. I could feel tears welling up, but I refused to let them out. This wasn’t the time.
I took a few deep breaths, tamped down the hurt and the pain and the sorrow.
“Pull it together, dipshit,” I said. “You got places to go, people to see.”
I wasn’t entirely sure what all those places, or who those people, might be. I couldn’t sit still. I wasn’t going to sit around while Rona Wedmore ate her Big Mac and fries and then went to bed and waited until tomorrow to follow up on the things I’d told her. I wanted to find things out now. I had to keep moving, keep asking questions.
I had to know what had happened to Sheila.
I knew what she would say to me right now if she could: “Make one of your lists.”
I kept a notepad and a pen on the bedside table for the times I woke in the middle of the night, thinking something like This is the day the countertops are going into the Bernsteins’ place, I gotta make sure the cabinet guys are ready. I’d make a note so I wouldn’t forget.
When I put pen to paper, I found I wasn’t so much making a list of things to do, but a list of questions that remained unanswered.
What had Sheila done in her final hours? How did she get so drunk? Was she, as I was strongly inclined to believe now, murdered? And if Sheila’s death was murder, did it follow that Ann’s was, too?
Could Ann have been murdered by her husband Darren? Or George Morton, whom Ann was blackmailing? Or even Belinda, who might have found out what was going on? And what about Sommer, who was already a murder suspect, according to Arthur Twain? The Slocums were tight with him.
It could have been any of them. Did it make sense that, whomever it turned out to be, that same person also killed Sheila?
My gut said yes. But my gut didn’t have a lot to go on.
And what about Belinda? By her own admission, she was the one who gave Sheila the money to deliver to Sommer. I couldn’t help but wonder whether Belinda knew more than she’d told me so far. I wanted to talk to her again, preferably without George hovering over us.
Finally, there was Theo. How did his murder figure into all of this? Was it related at all? Or was it as simple as it looked? He and Doug had gotten into a fight and Doug had shot him?
I just didn’t know, but I kept scribbling.
The very last question I underlined four times: Why did Theo write me a letter saying he was sorry about Sheila?
I looked at everything I’d written down and wondered if, and how, all these puzzles might be connected. If I could get the answer to just one of these questions, would I have the answer to them all?
I knew who I wanted to see first.
On the way out the door, I grabbed the paper bag with the gun in it. It was going to end up in Long Island Sound, or maybe Milford Harbor, or Gulf Pond. Some body of water deep enough to swallow up this gun forever.
I locked up the house and got into my truck, tucking the bag under my seat. I hit the headlights as I backed out of the drive. I didn’t have all that far to go. Just from one Milford neighborhood to another.
When I got to the house, I rolled the truck to a stop. I was parked across the street from it, looked at the house for a moment, thought about what I wanted to say. Some of these questions were going to be tough to ask. One of them I would leave right to the end.