A Tap on the Window by Linwood Barclay
“Then what are you—”
And then it hit me.
“Scott,” I said, dropping my hands from his shoulders.
He lifted his head slowly and nodded. Tears were welling up in his eyes. “A couple of days before he, you know, I had some X. Sometimes, when Hanna and I would go around delivering beer and collecting money for it, you’d get the odd asshole who didn’t have the cash. This one guy, he wanted to pay Hanna with a couple of tabs, and she let him, and got back in the car with the X, and I told her she was an idiot, that Roman wasn’t going to take anything except cash and we were going to have to make up the difference, and I thought of Scott, because I knew it was his thing, and I got hold of him and he said, yeah, he’d take them off my hands.”
Sean looked at me, waiting for a reaction, but I was too numbed by the day to offer one.
So he continued, “I don’t even know if he was on the stuff I sold him when he jumped. I wasn’t the only guy he got it from. But I know it’s possible it was me.” A tear ran down each of his cheeks. “I’m so sorry. If you want to hit me or something, like, I’m okay with that. I’ll tell my parents why you had to do it. I’ve got it coming. But I’m sorry, Mr. Weaver. God, I’m so sorry.”
“I’m not going to hit you,” I said.
“I just—I just, I don’t know why I did it.” He sobbed quietly. “I could have just made up the difference with my own money, you know? And thrown the shit out. I should have flushed it or something. But I was thinking . . . I don’t know what I was thinking.”
His shoulders began to shake. I raised my arms tentatively, then put them around him and pulled the boy to me. I held him close, tightened my arms around him as he wept into my chest.
I felt Donna watching me as I did. Felt it was what she would want me to do.
“Everyone’s done some pretty dumb things lately,” I said.
I felt him slip his arms around my back. “I hate myself,” Scott said. “I hate myself so much.”
We all hated ourselves these days.
Holding Sean, this boy about the same age and size as Scott, I could almost imagine he was my own. I remembered the feeling of taking him into my arms, of the father-son hugs we once shared.
If I forgave Sean, would I be forgiving Scott, too, for what he’d put us through? And wasn’t there less to forgive Scott for, anyway, than what I’d once believed?
“It’s okay,” I whispered again. “It’s okay.”
Because I no longer believed Scott jumped. I knew, in my heart, he was pushed.
Thrown.
And there was one person I was now ready to talk to, in hopes that she might be able to shed some light on what happened that night.
* * *
Her name was Rhonda McIntyre.
I’d first heard it when I got a ride home with Annette Ravelson the night I’d found her in Bert Sanders’ bedroom. Annette said she’d been one of the mayor’s other flings, and she’d also been seeing a Griffon cop who didn’t know she had a thing going on with Bert. I remembered Annette saying Rhonda had broken it off with the cop, that she’d found him kind of “freaky.”
That cop had turned out to be Ricky Haines. Her name had come up as the Griffon police did a full investigation into his background. They’d found her e-mail address on his home computer, and in his phone.
When she broke things off with Haines, which was around the time she’d also stopped seeing the mayor, she quit her job at Ravelson and moved back in with her family in Erie.
I wanted to talk to her.
So I drove to Erie. I did the trip in just under an hour and a half. I’d gone back to Cayuga Lake one day, turned in my rented Subaru, and gotten my Honda back from the cottage where Dennis and Claire had been hiding out.
Rhonda McIntyre was living with her parents in a beautiful lakeside house on Saybrook Place, just west of the industrial city’s downtown. I didn’t call first. I had no idea whether she would want to talk to me, and I didn’t want to give her a chance to disappear.
I knew it was a long shot, but I was hoping Haines might have told her something, if not actually confided in her, some of the details surrounding Scott’s plunge off the roof of Ravelson Furniture.
Maybe, I thought, if she had some idea of what he’d done, it was the reason she’d broken things off with him and gone back to the safety of her family.
I found the house behind a tall, well-manicured hedge that shielded the McIntyres from the prying eyes of passersby. I drove up the long, paved drive and parked within steps of the front door.
A handsome woman in her fifties answered. “Mrs. McIntyre?” I said. When she nodded, I told her who I was, and that I was here to speak with Rhonda.
“About all this sordid mess,” she said.
“Yes,” I said.
“I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” she said.
“It might be easier talking to me than the police,” I said. An implied threat that sometimes worked.
This time, it did the trick.
She led me through the house to a sunroom at the back that looked out over Lake Erie. The sky was overcast, and there was a north wind raising whitecaps. I could feel cold drafts of air sneaking their way around the windows.
“I’ll get Rhonda,” she said.
Moments later, a small, wispy woman of twenty-five entered the room anxiously, her mother right behind her.
“Yes?”
“Hi, Rhonda,” I said. “I need to ask you a few questions.”
“I’m sorry. I forgot your name,” the mother said.
“Weaver,” I said. “Cal Weaver.”
Rhonda blinked. Her anxiety level appeared to have taken a jump. I thought it would be easier for her to talk to me without her mother present.
“Mrs. McIntyre, would you mind if your daughter and I spoke privately?”
“Well, I think I need to be here if—”
“It’s okay, Mom,” Rhonda said. “I’ll be okay.”
The woman withdrew reluctantly. Rhonda and I sat in white wicker chairs with puffy yellow-flowered cushions.
“You should have called ahead,” she said.
“Rhonda, we know an awful lot now about Ricky, and his mother, and what they’d been up to for more than a decade. But there are still a few gaps in what we know—in what I would like to know—and I know that for a while there you were going out with Ricky.”
She became defensive. “We went out a few times, but I could never . . . I was never really all that serious. There were things not right with him.”
I waited.
“First of all, this relationship with his mom, it was kind of sick, you know? He was always trying to please her, always rushing over to the house. Of course, I sort of get now why he was always there, because he was helping his mom look after his stepdad, in the basement there. I mean, that kind of explained a lot.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’d never take me to his mother’s house. I mean, he wanted me to meet his mother once, but we did it at a coffee shop. We never went out to her place. One time, I was going by there and saw Ricky’s pickup in the driveway, so I turned in and knocked on the door, just figuring I’d say hello, and he came out on the porch and went crazy on me.”
“They couldn’t take a chance of anyone going inside,” I said.
“No kidding. But there was more. He was like two people. He could pretend to be all nice when it suited him, but underneath, he didn’t really feel anything. Except maybe anger. Sometimes you could tell it was just simmering under the surface. I don’t think he ever understood what it meant to be someone else.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like, to be in someone else’s shoes. He had no, you know, empathy. Everything was about how it felt to him. He didn’t care if he hurt you—like, your feelings, mostly?
Rhonda looked out over Lake Erie.
“I really don’t see how I can help you,” she said. “That’s really all I have to say.”
“The thing is,” I said, “I’m not really here about any of that. I’m here about a more personal matter.”
Her head moved ever so slightly in my direction. “What sort of personal matter?”
“My son. I had a son named Scott. A couple of months ago, he died. Maybe you heard about that.”
Rhonda nodded. “Of course. I was still working at Ravelson Furniture then. Everybody felt just awful about it. He was a nice boy.”
Her voice started to get shaky. I leaned in closer to her.
“I drove down here today, hoping you might know something about what happened on the roof that night. For the longest time, I’ve believed Scott went off that roof because he was high on drugs. That’s not what I believe anymore.”
Her face looked as though it might shatter.
“Why would I know anything?” she asked.
“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
“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?”
Sanders tried to look as earnest as possible, like he still believed he could count on my vote in the next election.
“How did it happen, Bert? I need to hear it from you.”
He stammered. “It—it was an accident. Really. He stumbled and—”
I closed in on him, grabbed his collar and propelled him closer to where Scott had gone off the building. He stumbled, but caught himself about ten feet shy of the edge.
“Cal,” he said. “Please.”
“If you’re honest with me, if you admit what you did, I won’t throw you over,” I said.
“He just—he started shouting. He wasn’t himself, you know. It was the drugs. But he was shouting our names. Out loud. If he’d kept it up, he was going to draw somebody up there. The police, a security company.”