Vanishing Act Read online

  “What did Tommy say?”

  “He had a fit.”

  “When did Chris tell him?”

  “Right before Thanksgiving.”

  “You mean right before Melissa disappeared?”

  Beth grabbed one of my hands in hers. “Tommy would never do anything to hurt her. You have to believe that.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Because I just am.” And she started to cry.

  “Who the fuck are you to come into my place and start talking trash to me?” Tommy demanded. His face was suffused with anger, so was his voice, but he was keeping the volume low. He didn’t want any of his fraternity brothers popping their heads out of their rooms again to see what was happening.

  He’d been in the middle of studying when I’d walked in on him unannounced. Other than his books being scattered all over his bed, the place looked the same as it had when I’d been there a couple of days before—messy.

  “I can’t believe you’re saying something like that,” he continued.

  “Believe it.” At first I’d tried being tactful, but that hadn’t worked. I’d intimated and he’d ignored. Finally I’d just come straight out and asked and Tommy had gone ballistic. His fraternity brothers rushing out had quieted him down though.

  “Why don’t you drop the act,” I’d told him after they’d left. “I know you know. According to Beth, her boyfriend already told you about Melissa.”

  “Yeah?” Tommy hurled the book he’d been holding down on the floor. It landed on a shriveled-up piece of pizza that had been sitting in an open box. “Well, she’s a goddamned liar, because Chris didn’t tell me anything. And I wouldn’t believe him if he did. Which he wouldn’t.”

  I caught his gaze and held it. After a few seconds he glanced away. “Why should Beth lie?” I asked.

  “How the fuck should I know?” His voice was truculent. He was glowering, all contained energy ready to charge. “Maybe because she’s jealous of Melissa.”

  “Why should she be?”

  He poked himself in his chest with one of his fingers. “Because she was going out with me and I ditched her for Missy.”

  “This is just a regular little Peyton Place, isn’t it?”

  “What the hell is Peyton Place?”

  “Nothing.” Suddenly I felt incredibly old.

  I folded my arms across my chest and leaned against the door to his room while I wondered if what Tommy had just told me was true. By now it was almost four o’clock and I was tired and irritable. Maybe having a Snickers and a Coke for lunch had something to do with my mood. Or maybe it was getting another parking ticket, my third this month. Or it could have been finding out from Tim when I’d called that the crickets we’d ordered hadn’t come in, and that two of our baby boas had mouth rot. Or maybe it was the information that George had dropped by Noah’s Ark wearing a scowl that would have scoured the paint off a wall. Or maybe I was just tired of smart-assed fraternity boys swaggering around as if they owned the world.

  But by any measure I was having a crappy day. Maybe it was time I shared the wealth.

  “Tommy,” I said, “I’m told a lot of guys consider that kind of thing a turn-on, but I guess you’re not one of them. Or are you?”

  Tommy’s jaw clenched. So did his fists. He jumped off his bed and started toward me. In the mood I was in, I was half hoping he’d take a swing at me.

  “My father was right,” he growled as he approached. “He’s spoken to people about you. They said you were scum. And you are.”

  “I’m glad to live up to my reputation,” I told him in the kind of smarmy voice guaranteed to set someone’s teeth on edge. “I wouldn’t want to disappoint you. Or him.”

  “Get out,” he screamed, doing a good imitation of a train barreling down the track as he came toward me. “I won’t have you talking about Melissa that way.”

  So much for not making a scene in front of his fraternity brothers. I could hear doors opening around me. Guys were out in the hall, demanding to know what the hell was going on. Not that I could answer them. All my attention was focused on Tommy.

  By now he was a little less than six feet away from me.

  He was still coming.

  I didn’t budge. I didn’t even flinch. Six years ago I would have run for cover. But not now. The kid was just a punk. After some of the guys I’ve handled, he didn’t faze me at all. I continued talking.

  “You’re going to get hurt,” I told him.

  Tommy grunted and took a swing at me with his right hand. He put his weight into it, but he was too slow. I had time to move out of the way. He hit the door frame, knuckles first. I heard a thunk.

  He turned white and grabbed his hand.

  “I think I broke it,” he gasped, doubling over in pain.

  Chapter 20

  I hung my jacket on one of the pegs in George’s closet and shut the door. It was nine-thirty at night, and given the last couple of days, I should have been home in bed, but George had called me at the store around seven and insisted I come over. “I have a surprise for you,” he’d told me.

  “It better be good,” I said, thinking of our last conversation.

  “It’ll make up for the other night,” he’d promised.

  How could I have said no?

  “Where’s your dear nephew?” I inquired, stifling a yawn. The house smelled of spaghetti sauce and garlic bread. I wondered if George had any left.

  “Gone for the evening.” George grinned. “That’s my surprise. Quiet, isn’t it?”

  “Very.” The TV was off. So was Raymond’s boom box.

  “Are you sure you didn’t tie the kid up in his room and duct-tape his mouth shut?”

  “Now, that’s a tempting thought.” George bent down and scratched Zsa Zsa’s rump. She leaned against him and let out little woofs of pleasure. The dog was shameless. “Alas, no. He’s at a Junior Crunch playoff game.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “You reneged and let him out of the house to go to a hockey game? What did he do to earn time off for good behavior? Scrub your bathroom floor with a toothbrush?”

  “Don’t get smart. He’s with a teacher I know.”

  “That was nice of him.”

  George straightened up. “Don thinks he and Raymond can connect.” He made the quote sign with his fingers around the word connect, leaving no doubt about what he thought of the sentiment.

  “What gives him that idea?”

  “Because he was raised in the suburbs and doesn’t know any better.”

  “I’m sure Raymond will teach him. It will probably be an educational evening all around.” I got down to the important question. “When will this teacher friend of yours bring him back?”

  George’s grin grew wider. “Not for a while.”

  “A while, a while?”

  George nodded.

  “Works for me.” At this point I would have taken a five-minute quickie—not, of course, that I would ever have said that to George. I wouldn’t want his ego to get even larger than it is.

  The wind was rattling the glass in the storm door as I walked toward the hall closet. The wooden floor was cold under my feet. A draft eddied around my ankles. Zsa Zsa looked up from George’s sofa, woofed a hello, and went back to sleep again. She looked elegant with her blond curly fur framed against the leather, although I was sure George wouldn’t think so. The wind shook the windowpanes and prowled around the house’s corners, looking for a way in. I repressed a shiver as I reached for my jacket and started looking through my pockets. Maybe it was the middle of March, but it sounded like February outside. According to the Weather Channel, it was going to be twenty degrees with a windchill factor of three tonight. I hurried back up the stairs, wishing I were wearing something besides George’s shirt.

  George opened one eye as I came in the room. “Where’d you go?” he asked, his voice heavy with the sleep I’d disturbed.

  “To get this.” I handed him the restraining order against me that had bee
n taken out by Tommy’s father. I’d been carrying it around in my jacket pocket ever since I’d been served earlier that day.

  He turned over on his back. “What is it?” he asked, holding up the paper so he could read it by the bathroom light.

  “You’ll see.” I pointed toward the ceiling. “You want me to turn on the overhead?”

  George shuddered. “God, no,” he said, and kept on reading. “Too bright. Nice,” he commented when he was done.

  “Not to mention fast,” I observed, getting back under the beckoning warmth of the covers.

  George stifled a yawn. “Less than twenty-four hours. That guy definitely lit a fire under someone’s ass.”

  “And I didn’t even do anything.”

  “If I’m reading right, it says here his son broke two knuckles on his right hand.”

  “It’s not my fault if he was trying to punch me and missed.”

  George grunted. “MacVaney obviously didn’t see things the same way you did.”

  “That man would sign anything someone put in front of him. Okay, I admit I may have upset the kid a little, but that’s it.” I turned on my side and supported my head with my hand. “It just goes to show what high-priced legal talent and contacts can do. I couldn’t have gotten something like this rammed through.”

  “One thing I’ll say about you,” George began to say.

  “That I’m good in bed?”

  “No. I was going to say that you certainly have a flair for making enemies.”

  “Well, my grandma always said ...”

  “Let me guess. If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right,” George finished for me. “Do me a favor. If you’re going to go back and talk to Tommy again let me know, so I can have some bail money set aside.”

  “You don’t think they’d release me on my own recognizance?”

  “Not with these people involved.”

  “Maybe,” I mused, “I should go talk to Tommy’s father instead. He seems to be the man calling the shots.”

  George chuckled dryly and handed the restraining order back to me. “Good luck,” he told me after I’d put it on the nightstand.

  “Why not? What could he do to me?”

  “That’s not the issue. The issue is why bother? If he knew anything, and I doubt he does—what kid confides in his father?—why would he talk to you anyway?”

  I shrugged. “You never know.”

  “In this case, I do.” The planes of George’s face composed themselves into a serious expression. “Robin, don’t annoy this guy. You’re like a mosquito to him.”

  “Mosquitoes draw blood.”

  “They also get squashed.”

  “Not if they’re fast.”

  “There’s always Raid,” George pointed out. “You can’t run from that.”

  “I can mutate.”

  “Puhleeze.”

  “All right. But I’m beginning to wonder if there isn’t something seriously wrong here.”

  “With the kid or the father?”

  “Take your pick.”

  “I disagree.” George made the kind of soft popping sounds with his mouth that he did when he was interested in something.

  “Okay,” I said after turning everything over in my mind for a minute. “I’ll grant you the kid going off was in the normal range. I come in; I make some sexual insinuations about his missing girlfriend.”

  “And him,” George reminded me.

  “Right. I could see where he wouldn’t take it well.” I stretched and tugged the blanket up. “I concede I shouldn’t have pushed so hard, but until I did, I couldn’t get anything out of old Tommy-boy.”

  “Well, you did get a reaction.”

  “True.” The wind keening outside interrupted my thoughts. “God, I wish it were spring.”

  “It will be soon.”

  “I don’t want soon. I want now.”

  “You know that’s your besetting sin. Impatience.”

  Personally, I thought anger and arrogance were, but I wasn’t going to argue the subject.

  “Do you think Tommy knew about Melissa?” George asked after a couple of seconds had gone by.

  “Definitely. Why should Beth lie?”

  “Because if he did know, it would give him a motive for killing Melissa.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that, but it seems a little excessive.”

  George turned toward me. “Never underestimate male vanity. It’s a powerful force. Maybe Melissa said something like ‘You think you’re so good.’ And laughed in his face. Told him that all the time she’d been pretending and had really been getting it off with Beth. Don’t forget. Women kill men in the kitchen, but men kill women in the bedroom.”

  “I’m trembling already.” I fluffed my pillow up. George’s sheets were Egyptian cotton. Mine were from J.C. Penney. On sale. Sometimes you really do get what you pay for. “You just wouldn’t think that kind of thing would be such a big deal these days,” I reflected.

  “No matter what the media says, it still is to some people,” George said quietly.

  “How do you mean?”

  “My aunt kicked one of her sons out of her house when she found out he was gay. Her pastor told her it was the right thing to do.”

  “What happened to him?”

  George shrugged. “I don’t know. He disappeared.”

  “I wonder if Mrs. Hayes knew?”

  “You could always ask her.”

  I considered the suggestion for a moment. I couldn’t imagine doing it. “Only if I absolutely have to,” I concluded. “Even then, I’d think about it.”

  George yawned.

  “What about Tommy’s father?” I said.

  “You mean, did he know about Melissa?”

  “I was thinking about the restraining order.”

  “He already told his son not to talk to anyone else. This is just one step up.”

  “Having it issued makes the kid look guilty.”

  “I’m sure Michael West doesn’t see it that way. Look at it from his perspective. If you had a kid, would you want someone coming around and asking him all sorts of sensitive stuff at any time of the day or night? I certainly wouldn’t.”

  “I’ve talked to the kid only twice,” I protested.

  “But you’re the third person that we know of. Don’t forget, he’s already been spoken to by the police and campus security and most likely more than once. Then you come along and get his son all hot and bothered. Another problem to deal with. Maybe he can’t get his son to listen to him—which must put a hair up his ass—but he sure as hell can get you to back off. Most likely he’s got a lawyer on retainer. So it doesn’t cost him anything to get a restraining order written up.”

  “Having a father like that would certainly give you a sense of invulnerability,” I mused. “I can do whatever. Daddy will take care of it.”

  “Or it could make you feel like you don’t have any balls.”

  “Maybe,” I agreed, remembering the tentative expression on Tommy’s face when he’d come out to greet me the first time.

  George reached over and put his arm around me. I snuggled into him. We lay that way for a few minutes, listening to the sighing of the wind. He kissed the tips of my fingers and then he kissed me. I kissed him back.

  He wrapped his arms around me. I moved closer.

  A car stopped in front of the house.

  Zsa Zsa began barking in the high-pitched yappy way small dogs do.

  “Jesus, your dog is a pain in the ass,” George grumbled in my ear. “She barks at everything.”

  That wasn’t true, but I wasn’t going to argue the issue now.

  Instead, I yelled at her to shut up and we went back to doing what we had been doing before.

  I heard the front door opening.

  The word “yo” floated upstairs.

  George glanced at the clock and cursed. I followed the arc of his look. It was almost eleven. Somehow we’d both lost track of time.

  Then we he
ard footsteps running up the stairs.

  “I didn’t know it was so late,” George muttered.

  I think we both realized at the same time that the bedroom door was opened. What had we been thinking, I wondered as I pulled the sheet up under my chin. George leaped out of bed and raced across the room. He tripped over his shoes, stumbled then righted himself, and continued on.

  The stumble cost him no more than a second or two, but that second or two was enough.

  George had his hand on the doorknob when he and Raymond met.

  Raymond’s eyes slowly traveled the length of George’s body. He grinned.

  “Damn,” he said. “There goes another myth.”

  Chapter 21

  The next few minutes were frenetic. George grabbed Raymond by the shoulders and jacked him up against the door. I heard a thud as the kid’s body made contact with the wood. He hung there, his arms flattened against the door, his feet dangling a couple of inches off the ground. His mouth was open, his eyes were wide with surprise. He looked like a scarecrow on a pole. Too bad he didn’t have a field to guard.

  “Listen, you little shit ...” George was saying in a tone of voice that would have frozen Lake Erie solid when I yelled from the bed for him to put Raymond down.

  The sound distracted George, and he turned his head toward me. He must have loosened his grip slightly at the same time, because suddenly Raymond’s feet were planted on the floor while his jacket was still being pinned to the door by George. As he took a step back, a tight, smug little smile flitted across Raymond’s lips for a few seconds before vanishing. Seeing the expression on Raymond’s face jolted me. It made me realize that maybe Raymond had gotten what he wanted: George out of control. Except I don’t think he was aware of the possible ramifications. This was someone who’d never heard the saying about reaping the whirlwind, or if he had, he hadn’t paid close attention to the message.

  Raymond took a couple of steps back. His movements were jerky with nervous energy. George let the jacket go. It dropped at his feet in a heap. He didn’t even look at it. He was too busy glaring at his nephew. I hadn’t realized how skinny Raymond was until that point. If he weighed in at one hundred forty pounds I’d have been surprised. George had about eighty pounds on him, and all of it muscle. It was like watching a cairn terrier and a rottweiler.