"Exactly," Vince said. "That kind of thing." He paused. "Can I get you some coffee?"
"Thanks," I said. "That"d be good."
He walked over to the counter, poured me a cup from the coffeemaker, and came back to the table.
"I"m still concerned that you and that detective and that cop have been asking around for me," Vince said.
"May I be frank without having my hair pulled out or a knife stabbed into the table between my fingers?"
Slowly, Vince nodded, not taking his eyes off me.
"You were with Cynthia that night. Her father found the two of you and dragged her home. Less than twelve hours later, Cynthia wakes up and she"s the only one left in her family. You are, presumably, one of the last people to see a member of her family, other than Cynthia herself, alive. And I"m not sure whether you had a fight with her father, Clayton Bigge, but at the very least it must have been an awkward situation, her father finding you, taking her home with him." I paused. "But I"m sure the police went over all this with you at the time."
"Yeah."
"What did you tell them?"
"I didn"t tell them anything."
"What do you mean?"
"Exactly what I said. I didn"t tell them anything. That was one thing I learned from my old man, G.o.d rest his soul. You never answer questions from the cops. Even if you"re one hundred percent innocent. n.o.body"s situation ever improved after talking to the cops."
"But you might have been able to help them figure out what happened."
"Wasn"t my concern."
"But didn"t that make the police suspect you had something to do with it? Refusing to talk?"
"Maybe. But they can"t convict you on suspicion. They need evidence. And they didn"t have any of that. If they"d had any evidence, I probably wouldn"t be sitting here having a nice chat with you right now."
I took a sip of my coffee. "Whoa," I said. "This is excellent." It was.
"Thank you," Vince said. "Now, may I be frank with you without you pulling my my hair out?" He grinned. hair out?" He grinned.
"I don"t think you have much to worry about there," I said.
"I felt bad about it. About not being able to help Cynthia. Because she was...I don"t wish to offend you here at all, being her husband."
"It"s okay."
"She was a very, very nice girl. A bit f.u.c.ked up like all kids that age, but nothing compared to me. I"d already been in s.h.i.t with the cops. I guess she went through a period of being attracted to the bad boy. Before she met you." He said it like I was a bit of a comedown for her. "No offense intended."
"None taken."
"She was a sweet kid, and I felt terrible about what happened to her. Jesus, imagine, you wake up one day, your f.u.c.king family"s gone. And I wished I could do something for her, you know? But my dad said to me, he said walk away from a chick like that. You don"t need those kinds of problems. Cops are going to be looking at you enough already, with your background, with an old man like me involved in the s.h.i.t I"m involved in, that"s all we need, you messed up with a girl whose entire family probably got murdered."
"I guess I can understand that." I chose my words carefully. "Your father, he did okay, am I right?"
"Money?"
"Yeah."
"Yeah. He did all right for himself. While he could. Before he got killed."
"I heard a bit about that," I said.
"What else did you hear?"
"I heard that the people who most likely did it got paid back."
Vince smiled darkly. "That they did." He came back to the present and asked, "So what"s your point, about money?"
"Do you think your father, do you think he would have had any sympathy for Cynthia, the situation she found herself in? To the point that he would have helped pay for her education, to go to college?"
"Huh?"
"I"m just asking. Do you think he might have thought you were responsible somehow, that maybe you had something to do with her family going missing, and that he gave money to Cynthia"s aunt, Tess Berman, anonymously, to help cover the costs of her schooling?"
Vince looked at me as though I had lost my mind. "You say you"re a teacher? They let people teach in the public schools with minds this f.u.c.ked up?"
"You could just say no."
"No."
"Because," I said, and I was debating with myself whether I should be sharing this information, but sometimes you just go with your gut, "someone did that."
"No s.h.i.t?" Vince asked. "Someone was giving her aunt money for school?"
"That"s right."
"And no one ever knew who?"
"That"s right."
"Well, that"s weird," he said. "And this aunt, you say she"s dead?"
"That"s right."
Vince Fleming leaned back in his chair, looked up at the ceiling a moment, came back forward and put his elbows on the table. He let out a long sigh.
"Well, I"ll tell you something," he said, "but not if you"re going to tell the cops, because if you do, I"ll tell them I never said any of this, because they might find a way to use it against me, the f.u.c.kers."
"Okay."
"Maybe I could have told them this and it wouldn"t have come back to bite me in the a.s.s, but I couldn"t afford to take the chance. I couldn"t admit to being where I was at the time, even if it might have helped Cynthia out. I guessed it might cross the cops" minds at some point that she had something to do with killing her own family, even though I knew she could never do that. I didn"t want to get dragged into it."
My mouth felt dry. "Anything you can tell me now, I"d be grateful."
"That night," he said, closing his eyes a moment, as though picturing it, "after her old man found us in the car, took her home, I drove after them. Didn"t follow them exactly, but I guess I was wondering just how much s.h.i.t she was in, thought maybe I could see whether her father was screaming at her, that kind of thing. But I was way back, really couldn"t see all that much."
I waited.
"I saw them pull into the driveway, go into the house together. She was a bit wobbly on her feet, you know? She"d had a bit to drink, we both had, but I"d already built up a pretty good tolerance by that point." He grinned. "I was a young starter."
I felt Vince was moving toward something important and didn"t want to slow him down with my own stupid comments.
"Anyway," he continued, "I parked down the street, thinking maybe she"d leave again after her parents reamed her out, you know, she"d get all p.i.s.sed off and storm out, and then I could drive up and pick her up. But that didn"t happen. And after a while, this other car drove past me, going slow, like someone was trying to read the house numbers, you know?"
"Okay."
"I didn"t really pay much attention, but then when it got down to the end of the street, it turned around, and then parked on the other side of the street, a couple of houses down from Cynthia"s place."
"Could you see who was in it? What kind of car was it?"
"It was some piece of AMC s.h.i.t, I think. An Amba.s.sador or Rebel or something. Blue, I think. Looked like one person in the car. I couldn"t really tell who it was, but it looked to me like it was a woman. Don"t ask me why, but that was the sense I got."
"A woman was parked out front of the house. Watching it?"
"Seemed like it. And I remember, they weren"t Connecticut plates on the car. New York State, which were kinda orange, I think, back then. But s.h.i.t, you see plenty of those around."
"How long did the car stay there?"
"Well, after a while, not that long really, Mrs. Bigge and Todd, the brother?"
I nodded.
"They came out and got in the mother"s car, this yellow Ford, and they drove off."
"Just the two of them? The father, Clayton, he wasn"t with them?"
"Nope. Just Mom and Todd. He got in the pa.s.senger side, I don"t think he had his license yet, but I don"t really know. But they went somewhere. I don"t know where. As soon as they rounded the corner, this other car, the lights came on, and it followed them."
"What did you do?"
"I just sat there. What else would I do?"
"But this other car, this Amba.s.sador or whatever, it followed Cynthia"s mother and brother."
Vince looked at me. "Am I going too fast?"
"No, no, it"s just, in twenty-five years, I know Cynthia has never heard about this."
"Well, that"s what I saw."
"Is there anything else?"
"I guess I sat there for another forty-five minutes or so, and was just thinking of f.u.c.king off and going home, and suddenly the front door of the house opens, and the father, Clayton, he goes running out of the house like he"s got a huge bug up his a.s.s. Gets in the car, backs out at like a hundred miles an hour, drives off fast as can be."
I let that sink in.
"So anyway, I can do the math, right? Everyone"s gone except Cynthia. So I drive up, I knock on the door, figured I could talk to her. I banged on it half a dozen times, real hard, didn"t get any answer, figured she was probably sleeping it off, right? So I f.u.c.ked off and went back home." He shrugged.
"Someone was there," I said. "Watching the house."
"Yup. Not just me."
"And you"ve never told anyone this? You didn"t tell the cops. You never told Cynthia?"
"No, I didn"t tell her. And like I said, I didn"t tell the cops. You think it would have made sense to tell them I was sitting outside that house for any time that night?"
I gazed out the window and into the Sound, at Charles Island in the distance, as if the answers I"d been searching for, the answers Cynthia had been searching for, were always beyond the horizon, impossible to reach.
"And why are you telling me this now?" I asked Vince.
He ran his hand over his chin, squeezed his nose. "f.u.c.k, I don"t know. I"m guessing, all these years have been hard on Cyn, am I right?"
I felt that like a slap, to know that Vince might have called Cynthia by the same term of endearment I used. "Yes," I said. "Very hard. Especially lately."
"And why"s she disappeared?"
"We had a fight. And she"s scared. All the things that have happened in the last few weeks, the fact that the police don"t seem to entirely trust her. She"s scared for our daughter. The other night, there was someone standing on the street, looking at our house. Her aunt is dead. The detective we hired has been murdered."
"Hmm," Vince said. "That"s a h.e.l.l of a mess. I wish there was something I could do to help."
We were both startled at that moment when the door opened. Neither of us had heard anyone coming up the stairs.
It was Jane.
"Jesus Christ, Vince, are you going to help the poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d or not?"
"Where the h.e.l.l were you?" he said. "You been listening in this whole time?"
"It"s a G.o.dd.a.m.n screen door," Jane said. "You don"t want people to listen, maybe you better build yourself a little bank vault up here."
"G.o.dd.a.m.n," he said.
"So are you going to help him? It"s not like you"re really busy or anything. And you got the Three Stooges to help you if you need them."
Vince looked tiredly at me. "So," he said. "Is there any way I could be of a.s.sistance to you?"
Jane was watching him with her arms folded across her chest.
I didn"t know what to say. Not knowing what I was up against, I couldn"t predict whether I needed the kinds of services someone like Vince Fleming offered. Even though he"d stopped trying to yank my hair out by the roots, I was still intimidated by him.
"I don"t know," I said.
"Why don"t I tag along for a while, see what develops," he said. When I didn"t immediately take him up on it, he said, "You don"t know whether to trust me, do you?"