THIS MUCH KIP JENNINGS TOLD ME:
Patty had a part-time job in that accessories store in the Connecticut Post Mall, two or three shifts a week. She was due in at ten that morning, and no one thought much about it when she hadn’t shown up by ten-thirty Patty had a somewhat cavalier attitude about things like punching in on time.
But when it got to be eleven, they started to wonder whether she didn’t realize she was scheduled to work, so they tried her cell. When they didn’t get any answer there, they tried her home. No luck there, either.
One of the staff knew where Patty’s mother, Carol Swain, worked, so a call was put in to her at a glass and mirror sales office on Bridgeport Avenue. She hadn’t seen her daughter since the afternoon of the day before, and while it was not unusual for Patty to get home late, her mother was surprised not to find her home in the morning. And then for her not to show up for work-while she was often late, she’d eventually show up-that was definitely out of the ordinary.
When Carol Swain got home and Patty wasn’t there, she tried her daughter’s cell herself. When that failed to raise her, she considered calling friends of her daughter’s, then had to admit she didn’t know very much about Patty’s friends. Patty didn’t tell her a damn thing about the kids she hung out with. Carol was telling all this to one of her friends, a woman she sometimes went drinking with after work, and the friend said, “Carol? Has it occurred to you your daughter might actually be in some trouble?”
So around six o’clock, Patty’s mother called the police. Almost apologetic about it. Probably nothing, she said. You know what girls are like today. But had there been, you know, any teenage girls who looked like her daughter run down at an intersection or anything?
The police said no. They asked Carol Swain if she wanted to file a missing-persons report on her daughter.
She thought about that a moment, and said, “Hell, I don’t want to make a federal case out of this or anything.”
The police said, “We can’t do anything to help you find her if you’re not going to report her missing.”
So Carol Swain said, “Oh, why the hell not?”
Jennings told me all this, finishing up with “I just made a couple of calls in the last few minutes, and she hasn’t turned up.”
“I tried to call her a couple of times today,” I said. “She never answered.”
“At the moment,” Jennings said, “it seems that you’re the last person who’s seen her.”
That seemed to be more than just an observation. “What are you saying?”
“Mr. Blake, you seem like a decent enough guy, so I’m just trying to be straight with you. We’ve found bloody towels in your house that you say were used to help a girl who hasn’t been seen in nearly twenty-four hours.”
“I’ve been totally straight with you,” I said.
“I hope so,” she said. “Now we’ve got two missing-girl cases, and you’re at the center of both of them.”
IN THE MORNING, I PHONED SUSANNE AT WORK.
“Has Bob got that Beetle ready?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “New tires, new headlight.”
“Oil leak?”
“I’m not a miracle worker, Tim.”
“I need a lift.”
“You had to give the car back already?” she asked.
“It’s gone,” I said. But it was the police who had it, not Laura Cantrell.
“I’m on it,” Susanne said.
I hoped she would come pick me up herself. I thought it was unlikely she’d send Bob.
I was surprised to see Evan drive down my street in the Beetle. There was an ominous rattling sound coming from under the hood. The short wheelbase allowed him to do a tight U-turn in the street, bringing the passenger door right to me.
I got in and he said, “What’s with the police tape around your house?”
I said, “Are you going to be able to pay those guys when they come back for the rest of their money?”
“Yeah,” he said, glancing back at my house as we pulled away.
“From your dad?”
“Yeah.” He cleared his throat. “Thanks for that yesterday.”
“I considered letting them have a go at you,” I said.
“Why?”
“Maybe you need to have the shit beat out of you. It might smarten you up.”
He kept his eyes on the road ahead. “Maybe,” he said.
“You do drugs, you steal, you’re addicted to online gambling,” I said. “And you slept with my daughter.”
He shot me a look. “Maybe she saw something in me that you don’t.”
“She must have,” I said. I didn’t know whether Evan was trying to be on his best behavior because he had me in the car, but he signaled all his turns, kept to the speed limit, and made no improper lane changes.
I said, “Have you seen Syd’s friend Patty in the last couple of days?”
“Huh?” he said. “No. Why?”
I shook my head, not interested in answering his questions since I had more of my own. “You used a fake credit card,” I said. “To pay for some of your gambling.”
“Yeah.”
“How does that work? If you win, doesn’t the money go back to the account of the guy whose card number you’ve ripped off?”
“I hadn’t really thought it through. It’s the playing that matters, not whether there’s money coming in.”
Once you put yourself in the head of a gambler, that actually made some sense. “Where’d you get the card?”
“I don’t want to get anyone in trouble,” he said.
“It was Jeff Bluestein, wasn’t it?” I said.
Evan glanced over. “How did you-” And then he cut himself off.
“I didn’t,” I said. “Not until now.” I leaned back into my seat. “He’s my first visit today.”
Evan seemed to break out almost instantly into a sweat. “Don’t tell him I said anything.”
I said nothing for a moment. I was listening. Finally, I said, “Does the engine sound funny to you?”
I SLIPPED IN BEHIND THE WHEEL of the Beetle after we pulled into Bob’s Motors. Susanne, still on the cane, came out of the office as Evan slunk away.
“What’d you say to him?” she asked.
“Nothing,” I said. I told her, as I always did, that if I found out anything, I’d be in touch. Even though, sometimes, there were things I chose not to tell her. Like what had happened last night at my home.
“What can I do?” she asked.
“Be here,” I said.
“What are you going to do?”
“Poke around,” I said.
As I’d told Evan moments earlier, I planned to start with Jeff Bluestein. I knew where he lived. I’d dropped Sydney off there the odd time before either of them had a driver’s license.
I parked the Beetle out front, strode up to the front door, and leaned on the bell. Jeff’s mother appeared at the door and smiled.
“Good morning,” she said. Her smile seemed forced, like she really didn’t want to see me. I don’t think she’d liked it, from the very beginning, that her son had been helping me. I was a man with problems, and nothing good could come from letting your son associate with a man like that.
“Hi,” I said.
“Jeff’s still sleeping.”
“Wake him up, if you don’t mind. He knows I wanted to see him this morning.”
Still standing in the doorway, Mrs. Bluestein said, “If this is just about some technical questions about the website, can’t it wait until later?”
“I’m afraid not,” I said.
“Just a moment,” she said, letting the storm door close. It was a one-story house, and I watched her cross the living room, go down a hall, and tentatively enter a door on the right side. She was in there about half a minute, then came back.
“Just another half hour? He’s very sleepy.”
I moved past her and went down the hall, Mrs. Bluestein trailing after me, saying, “Excuse me! Excuse me!”
I pushed open the boy’s door, saw Jeff huddled under his covers, and said, making no effort to keep my voice down, “Jeff.”
“Hmm?”
“Let’s talk.”
He blinked his eyes several times, getting me in focus. “It’s really early,” he said, hunkering down.
“Throw some clothes on. We’ll go get some breakfast.”
“Mr. Blake!” his mother shouted. “He was out late with his friends.”
I leaned in close to Jeff, putting my mouth to his ear, enduring his early-morning breath. “You get your ass out of bed and come talk to me or I’m going to ask you all about Dalrymple’s in front of your mother.”
I didn’t actually know whether she knew about what had happened with Jeff’s restaurant job, but judging by how that made him jump under the covers, I was betting not.
“Mr. Blake,” his mother persisted, “please leave right now.”
I backed away from her son. He was already throwing off his covers. He said, “It’s okay, Mom. I just kind of forgot when we were supposed to meet.”
I flashed his mother a smile. “See?” To Jeff I said, “I’ll be out front. Five minutes.”
“Yeah,” Jeff said.
Mrs. Bluestein attempted to ask me if this was about something other than the website, but I deflected all her questions. I went out to the car, got in behind the wheel, and would have passed the time listening to the radio if the knob hadn’t broken off in my hand.
Jeff came out in four minutes, walked across the lawn, and got in next to me.
“What do you want?” I asked him.
“Huh?”
“For breakfast.”
“I’m not really hungry,” he said.
“McDonald’s it is, then,” I said, and cranked the engine.
I drove us to the closest one, led the way inside, and ordered an Egg McMuffin with coffee and a hash brown. As we slipped into a booth sitting across from each other, I noticed Jeff eyeing my hash brown.
“You want that?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Take it,” I told him, and he did.
“How did you hear about Dalrymple’s?” he asked.
“That’s not important right now,” I said. “But I want you to tell me all about it.”
“Why?”
“Because I do,” I said.
“What’s it to you?”
“I won’t know that until you tell me,” I said. “Maybe nothing, but maybe something.”
He took a bite of hash brown. “It’s got nothing to do with Sydney. I mean, that’s why you’re asking, right?”
“What did you do?” I asked.
“It was no big deal. Nobody really got ripped off. The credit card companies don’t make people pay for stuff they don’t buy.”
I wasn’t up for giving a lecture on how theft drives up the price of everything, so I let it go.
“You’d been doing it for a while before the manager caught you, is that right?”
“Not that long, but yeah, it was for a while.”
“If it had been somebody else who caught you, it’d be a different story now, wouldn’t it? We might be holding phones and looking at each other through a pane of glass.”
Jeff looked mournful. “I know it was a stupid thing to do. I did it to make some extra money.”
“Tell me what you did, exactly,” I said.
Jeff hung his head down, ashamed, but not so ashamed that he couldn’t finish the last bite of my hash brown. I took a sip of coffee.
“I had this little thing, you could swipe Visa and MasterCard and American Express cards through it, and it kept all the data, you know, like the numbers and all that stuff. It could hold the information from lots and lots of cards.”
“Who gave it to you? Who wanted you to do it?”
“I don’t know.”
I put down my sandwich and leaned across the table, so close our heads were nearly touching. “Jeff, I’m not fucking around here. I want answers.”
“You’ve never liked me, have you? Like, when Sydney and I were going out, you didn’t like that.”
“Don’t try that with me, Jeff. Maybe you know how to pull your mother’s heartstrings, make her feel guilty, but I don’t care. Does she even know about any of this? Did your dad tell her?”
“How do you know my dad knows?”
“I’m guessing that means no. You want me to go back and tell her what you did?”
“No,” he whispered.
“The thing is, you’re not the only one in trouble anymore. Evan, for example?”
“What’s going on with Evan?”
“His little online gambling problem? That’s out in the open now. He’s been stealing money to pay off his debts. And he used at least one fake credit card that he got from you.”
“Oh man,” Jeff said. “He wasn’t supposed to tell anybody about that.”
“Did you give him money, too?”
“I loaned him some, the odd time. He’s never paid me back.”
“There’s a surprise.” I shook my head tiredly. “Look, I’m not interested in getting you in any more trouble than you’re already in.”
“You don’t understand,” he said. “I could get in a whole lot more trouble.”
“What do you mean?”
“The guy, the one who was paying me to rip off the credit cards in the first place, he was kind of creepy. Like, smarmy?”
“What was his name?”
“I don’t remember,” Jeff said.
“How’d you get in touch with him?”
“He gave me a cell phone number.”
“What do you mean, the guy was smarmy?”
“Like, I just got this vibe off him, like if you crossed him you’d really pay for it.”
“He must have been pissed when you got caught.”
“I only heard from him once after that. He was pissed, but when he found out I wasn’t being charged, and that my dad got the manager at Dalrymple’s to forget about it, I guess he thought it was better not to stir things up.”
“What about your dad? Didn’t he want to find out who the guy was?”
“He was so mad, right? But he didn’t want my mom to know, because she’d have totally freaked out about it, so he decided it was better to let it go, too.”
“So this guy,” I said. “What’d he look like?”
Jeff shrugged. “Just a guy, you know?”
It was like pulling teeth. “Was he tall, thin, fat, black guy, white guy?”
“A white guy,” Jeff said, nodding, like that should do it.
“Fat?”
“No, he was in pretty good shape. And he had kind of light-colored hair, I guess. And he had pretty decent clothes. He smoked.”
“How old was he?”
“He was pretty old,” Jeff said.
“Like what, sixties, seventies?”
Jeff concentrated. “No, I think thirties.”
“How much was he paying you?”
“Well, he gave me the thing, you know, the wedge he called it, and he said he’d give me fifty bucks for every card I swiped through it. But mostly he wanted them to be high-end cards, like gold cards and stuff like that. So in a single shift, I could make a thousand bucks. Dalrymple’s, they were paying, like, just minimum wage, plus tips, but some nights they were good and some nights they weren’t, although I always told my mom they were big so she wouldn’t wonder why I had so much money.” He paused. “While it lasted.”
It wasn’t hard to understand the appeal for a young kid looking for some fast cash.
“But that last night, when Roy-”
“Roy?”
“Roy Chilton, the manager? When he saw me swiping the card an extra time through the wedge, he knew right away what it was and went all ballistic on me.”
“Why’d you do it, Jeff?” I asked. “You’re a good kid.”
He shrugged again. “I wanted to get a laptop.”
I stared out the window for a moment, watched the traffic go past. I asked, “Did Sydney know about this?”
“No way,” he said. “I never told her anything about it. I kind of didn’t want anyone to know. I told Sydney I got the job at Dalrymple’s, but when I got fired right away I told her I dropped a family’s entire order all over the floor and that was why they got rid of me. And I made Evan swear not to tell Sydney anything about the card I gave him.”
I could recall Syd mentioning something about Jeff losing his job, but never the reason why.
“You’re not saying anything,” Jeff said. “You pissed at me?”
I laid my hands flat on the tabletop and closed my eyes for a moment. When I opened them, Jeff was looking at me warily, wondering, I think, whether there was something wrong with me.
“You probably weren’t the only kid this guy had doing this,” I said. “That’s a lot of fake cards, a lot of identities getting ripped off for a lot of money.”
“One time,” Jeff said, “he made some mention, it was to get some people started, people who’d just come to the country, so they could get things and stuff.”
I thought about that a moment.
“You still have that cell number for this guy?”
Jeff shook his head.
“You sure you don’t remember his name?”
Jeff struggled for a moment. “Thing is, he told me his name once, but then when he answered his phone, he said, like, ‘Gary here.’”
“But Gary wasn’t the name he gave you?”
“No, it was something else.” Jeff wrinkled his nose, like the answer was out there and all he had to do was sniff it out. “It mighta been Eric.”
“Eric,” I repeated.
“I think that was it.”
“How’d you hook up with him the first time?”
“Someone told me that if I was looking for a way to make some extra money, to give this guy a call. I thought, maybe I could do something different than the Dalrymple’s thing, or work this other job on the side. Turned out the two of them went together.”
“Who?” I asked. “Who told you this?”
“Please, Mr. Blake, I don’t want to get anyone else in trouble.”
Maybe, if he hadn’t mentioned the name Eric, I’d still think it was possible Jeff’s problems were in no way connected to Sydney. Now I had the feeling there was a very strong link.
“Spill it, Jeff,” I said. “Who tipped you to this guy?”
Jeff ran his index finger sideways under his nose, then said, “You know him. He sells cars where you work? Andy?” I blinked. “Andy Hertz?”
“Yeah, that’s him. But don’t ever tell him I told you.”
I sat there, trying to put it together. Jeff looked at me and said, “Hey, Mr. Blake, you seen Patty around lately?”