To Love and to Perish

TWELVE


THROUGHOUT THE DAY, TEMPERATURES had risen. When we opened the doors to the BMW in the insurance office’s parking lot, clouds of hot air billowed out. I took off my suit jacket, laid it across the back seat of the car, and rolled down my window before climbing in to singe my butt on the hot leather. Cory already had the engine running and the air conditioning turned up full blast.

I twisted in my seat to face him. “What did you make of all that?”

Cory grabbed the yearbook and flipped through the pages. “I’m relieved and overjoyed to hear he didn’t think Brennan was guilty of drunk driving or pushing Gleason into the street, but he didn’t seem to like Brennan much. I didn’t feel like he was all that forthcoming with information, either. I’m not even sure he was telling the truth. He definitely wasn’t looking you in the eye.

“I want to see … I knew it.” He turned the book around to show it to me. “Wayne was in drama club. Look, there he is playing a villain.”

The black outfit was a dead giveaway, as was the dark, vacant look in Wayne’s eyes. A giveaway in more ways than one.

“Oh my god, it’s him.” I pointed at Wayne’s picture. “That’s the guy.”

“Of course it’s him, Jo. His name is right under the photo.”

“No, no, no. Wayne’s the man I saw at the vintage festival. He stepped right in front of me, coming out of the beer tent. He wouldn’t get out of my way. I had to go around him, but not before I got a good look at him. It was him. Wayne. He even had on a Binghamton sweatshirt.”

“What’s the sweatshirt got to do with anything?”

“He had a diploma on his office wall from the university. He’s an alumnus. I know I saw him at the festival, Cory. I know it was him.”

Cory snapped the yearbook shut. “Should we go back in and ask him about it?”

“No.” I didn’t see where that would help us. Wayne had closed the door on us, both literally and figuratively when he escorted us out of his office. “It’s strange he didn’t know anything about Gleason’s death or Brennan’s arrest.”

“Yeah, well, the guy has acting experience, and he’s a salesman.”

“Oh, yeah, we all know what a bunch of slippery liars salespeople are.”

“Especially those car salespeople.” Cory grinned and, for a moment, I caught a glimpse of the guy I’d worked with for fourteen years. Then the shadow returned to his eyes. “I’d really like to ask Brennan if he saw him there, not that I think he would tell me.”

“Cory, did Brennan ever talk to you about high school or his friends or anything that might provide any insight into what’s going on here?”

He shook his head. “I knew he didn’t speak to his father. I knew his mom left him the money he used to start his company. Otherwise, we pretty much talked about the here and now—and sometimes about our future, you know, together.”

I wanted to hear more about their future together, but not right now. Something was bothering me. Brennan, Wayne, Elizabeth, and Monica had kept in touch enough to attend the reunion together, and only after that did their relationships end. “Wayne said the four of them were inseparable in high school. They even went to the reunion together. I don’t understand what could have happened to erase their friendship in one night.”

“You don’t? I do.”

“What?”

“Brennan must have told them he was gay. How would you like to be the high school girlfriend of a gay guy? Or his best friend, who never knew and shared a locker room with him? Even if your friends accept you, you’re not the person they thought you were. Everything changes.”

I considered Cory’s statement. “So you think, during the reunion, Brennan told them he was gay, causing Wayne to say unkind things to him and ruin their friendship?”

“It’s possible.”

“And maybe Brennan was so upset that his driving was effected on the way home?”

Cory frowned. “Maybe, but in that case, the accident would still be his fault.”

“It would be an accident, not illegally driving under the influence.”

“True.”

“The girls couldn’t have been too upset with Brennan about everything because they got in the car with him.”

“Right.” Cory’s expression turned sheepish. “I have to say when I told my high school girlfriend that I was gay, she said, ‘Well that explains everything.’ Brennan’s girlfriend must have suspected.”

“So Monica might not be angry. She’d be relieved to know why he wasn’t all over her.”

“Exactly.”

I leaned back against the headrest. “This is all great conjecture, but even if we’d guessed correctly, it doesn’t help Brennan’s current situation, other than to lift the stigma of the drunken driving rumor. In fact, it leaves us with no motive for Elizabeth to blackmail Brennan.”

“Unless she planned to lie and say Brennan was drinking.”

“Wayne would have denied it.”

“That’s what he said today, but he never came forward back then. They could have been in on it together.” Cory tapped the yearbook’s cover. “You saw Wayne at the festival, which means two people Brennan angered were at the festival. When and where did you see Wayne?”

“I saw him right when we arrived, a little after five o’clock, over an hour before the accident. He stepped out of the beer tent, which was a hundred yards or so down Franklin Street from where the car struck and killed Gleason a little over an hour later. I didn’t see Wayne in the crowd at the time of the crash, but he could have been there. I thought he was drunk earlier when he walked right in front of me and didn’t even notice. He could have just been preoccupied.”

“He could have pushed Gleason into the road.”

I laughed. “Anyone could have pushed him, Cory. Anyone could have pushed Brennan or me or anyone else standing there on the edge of the curb into the road, too. Wayne could as easily have been half a mile down the road or inside a bar and missed the whole thing.”

“But not anyone could have been right at the same spot on the road. The only people who could be pushed at that spot on the curb were Brennan and Gleason. They had to be next to each other, right?”

“I assume so.”

“Everyone said the crowd surged a second before Gleason fell into the road.”

“Right.”

Cory’s knee bobbed up and down, a sure sign of his excitement. “Do you think there’s a chance Wayne pushed Gleason into the road?”

“Why would he want to do that?”

“Maybe Gleason’s been harassing him about the reunion and drinking and letting his sister get in the car with Brennan. Or maybe he was aiming for Brennan, but he hit Gleason instead?”

“Wow, Cory, that’s a huge leap.”

“But it’s possible.”

I tried to get Cory to regain his perspective. “We don’t even know if Wayne was close enough to do that. We’d never be able to prove it either way, not without photos of the crowd.”

“Does the sheriff’s office have any photos of the crowd?”

I thought about it. “I know the photographer, Howard Pint, had to give them his memory card, but he didn’t have any crowd pictures, except for the shot of Brennan’s arm. I don’t know if the sheriff’s deputies took other people’s memory cards, too. They could have. Ray’s friend Ken would know.”

“Okay, so call Ray.” Cory pointed to my purse.

“Right now?”

Cory waved his hand as if to say, why not? I pulled my cell phone out and hit the speed dial button.

Ray answered before I heard a ring. “You’re psychic.”

“Why?”

“I was just picking up the phone to call you. Brennan got his bail money together, and he wanted Cory to pick him up from the jail.”

“Why didn’t he call Cory directly?”

“He did.”

“His phone hasn’t rung.” I raised my eyebrows at Cory.

He pulled his cell phone from his pocket, snapped it open, pushed a few buttons, and frowned. He showed me the dark screen.

“I take that back. Cory’s cell phone needs charging. Where’s Brennan now?”

“When he couldn’t reach Cory at your shop or on his cell phone, he called here and asked where you two were.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I told him you were on a scouting expedition for the day.”

“Did he buy that?”

“Hard to say.”

“Can we pick him up now?”

“His construction foreman is on his way down to pick him up.”

“Well, we’re in Binghamton. We won’t be home for another couple hours or so.” I wanted to stop by Elizabeth Potter’s home and ask her a few questions before we headed back to Wachobe.

“Did you learn anything new?”

“Yes.” I proceeded to fill Ray in on our meeting with Wayne Engle and the fact that I saw him at the Watkins Glen festival. “Can you call your friend Ken and ask him if he has any pictures of the crowd so we can try to spot Wayne?”

“I can call him. He’s not going to appreciate your interference in his investigation. And he’ll want to know everything you’ve learned. Are you prepared to tell him?”

Yikes! “Never mind. Maybe we can get pictures from another source.”

I hung up with Ray and looked at Cory. “Brennan got his bail money together. His foreman’s on his way to pick him up.”

“Good.”

I looked at the yearbook still clutched in Cory’s hand and thought about the check registers he’d spread on my desk yesterday. “Not good.”

“Why?”

“Cory, if you think the check registers and this yearbook are evidence that needs to be hidden from the sheriff’s department, don’t you think Brennan will be thinking the same thing, too?”

The puzzled expression on Cory’s face quickly changed to horrified.

“When he finds them missing, what’s he going to think?”

Cory’s eyes closed. “Oh my god, I’m dead.”