He opened the door quietly. I held on to the screen door behind him, keeping it from slamming shut. It was about then it occurred to me that I was breaking and entering. Under some sort of duress, sure, but I was breaking and entering. With a cop, no less.
Once inside, I eased the screen door shut, and we waited a moment for our eyes to adjust. Just inside the door, on the right, was a set of stairs. We both held our breath, and upstairs, we could hear snoring.
Trimble smiled devilishly at me and pointed up. He had his gun out now and was taking the carpeted steps one at a time. I let him get a couple of steps ahead of me before I began to follow.
The stairs turned at a landing, and as we reached it, the snoring grew louder. These were loud, rumbling snores. We could have stomped our way up these stairs and not wakened Mayhew.
Once we reached the upstairs hallway, Trimble paused again, making sure he could tell which room the snores were coming from. He crept ahead of me to the doorway of the bedroom on the left, where, from the soft beam of moonlight that was coming through the window, we could make out a shape under the covers, which were pulled up so far you couldn’t see any more of the person than what appeared to be a few tufts of hair. I didn’t remember Mayhew having that much hair.
Trimble pointed to the lamp on the bedside table and whispered, “Get ready to turn that on.”
I slipped my hand under the shade, found the small grooved knob, and held it between my thumb and forefinger as the snores continued to echo through the room. Trimble gripped his weapon with both hands and held the muzzle to within a couple of inches of Mayhew’s head. He nodded to me.
I turned on the light.
Trimble shouted, “Wakey wakey, Eddie!”
And Mayhew stirred suddenly, reached up an arm to pull the covers down, and, upon seeing the muzzle only inches away, screamed.
Only it wasn’t Mayhew screaming. It was a woman.
“Jesus!” Trimble shouted, moving the gun away. But that didn’t stop the woman from continuing to scream.
“Shut up!” Trimble shouted. More screaming. “Shut up! Shut the fuck up!”
Screaming back at her wasn’t working, so he brought the gun back into play, putting the barrel right up to her nose. Trimble said, “Shut. Up.”
She managed to compose herself. She struggled to sit up in the bed, and I could now see that what I’d thought were tufts of hair were rollers. She had a good dozen of them on her gray-haired head, pinned into position. She was wearing an off-white, heavy flannel, full-sleeved nightgown, and it was fair to say that we had not caught her at her best.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“Where’s Eddie?” Trimble asked.
“I just, I don’t, what do you want?”
“I just asked you, I want to know where Eddie is. He’s your husband, right?”
“Yes, he is. What do you want with Edward?”
“We want to know where he is.”
“I don’t know. I really don’t know. I wish I did know. If he was going to be late, he should have called me. He’s supposed to call, but sometimes he doesn’t.”
Trimble looked very tired. “Is there anyone else in the house?”
“What? No, there’s no one else. Unless Edward’s downstairs.”
Trimble sat on the edge of the bed, brought the gun down so that it was still in his hand, but lying on the covers. “Mrs. Mayhew,” he said softly. “It’s very important that we find your husband.”
“Is he in some kind of trouble? Because if he is, I have to tell you, I’m not all that surprised, the bastard.”
“If we can find him in time, maybe we can keep him out of any trouble.”
“Are you the police?”
“We are,” Trimble said slowly, “a branch of the police, but we work a little under the radar, if you get my understanding.”
Mrs. Mayhew nodded. She was starting to look a little relieved now that maybe we weren’t bad guys, as she’d first thought.
“Because your husband works for the government,” he said, “he’s been able to assist us in our investigation, working somewhat undercover himself.”
“Edward? Working undercover? He’s certainly never mentioned anything to me. But of course, he hardly talks to me about anything. I ask him, ‘How was your day? What happened? Who did you see?’ And you know what he says? He says absolutely nothing.”
“That’s good. That’s good, that he didn’t tell you. A lot of times, you figure, even when you tell someone not to tell anyone what they’re doing, you figure they’re still going to tell their wives, you know?”
She nodded.
“But now we’re into a situation where we’ve lost track of Eddie and need to locate him.”