“It might,” I said. “He still work for Sikorsky?”
“In his dreams. He works at a liquor store.” Right, I thought. I did know that. “He’s probably still on. I’d shop there, but the son of a bitch doesn’t give me a discount. So I take my business elsewhere.”
My cell phone rang.
“Hello?”
“You said you were going to get back to me.” It was Detective Jennings.
Hearing her voice made me feel as though a trapdoor had opened under me. “I’ve kind of had a lot on my plate,” I said. “When I get a minute, I’ll call you.”
“Where are you, Mr. Blake?” she asked.
“Out and about,” I said. Carol Swain looked at me curiously.
“I want to talk to you right now,” Jennings said. “In person.”
“Why’s that so important?”
“I dropped by your house,” she said.
I swallowed. “Oh,” I said. “Like I said, I’ve been out, looking for Syd.”
“I’m not asking you to come in,” Jennings said firmly. “I’m telling you. You’re coming in right now, or we’re going to find you and bring you in.”
I decided to take a shot at playing dumb. “I don’t understand the urgency.”
“Mr. Blake, one of your neighbors saw you come home less than an hour ago and leave again in a hurry. I know you were here.”
“I really have to go.”
“Mr. Blake, let me lay it out for you. Kate Wood is dead. Unless you can tell me something to persuade me otherwise, you’re the lead suspect in a homicide.”
“I didn’t do it,” I said. Carol was still looking at me.
“That’s not what I’d call persuasive,” Jennings said. “Call your lawyer, Edwin Chatsworth. He can arrange a surrender so no one has to get—”
I closed the phone and said to Carol Swain, “Let’s go see your ex.”
I PUT MILT IN THE BACK SEAT so Carol wouldn’t crush him when she got into the Beetle. She gave me directions to a store in Devon, not far from the dealership, that was sandwiched between a courier franchise and a distributor of appliance parts.
At a four-way stop, we waited for a police car to go through ahead of us. I gripped the wheel a little tighter and held my breath, trying to will myself into a state of invisibility as the patrol car went past.
Carol picked up on my anxiety. “Somebody looking for you?” she asked.
“I’m fine,” I said. I figured it would take a few more minutes for Jennings to put the word out to every cop in Milford to be watching for me. It wouldn’t take her long—a call to Susanne or Bob would do it—to find out what I was driving now.
It was getting to be dusk as I pulled into a spot in front of the liquor store. Carol Swain was out of the car before I’d turned the ignition off. She was making a beeline for the door and I told her to wait up.
An elderly, unshaven man clutching a brown-bagged bottle shuffled out the door as we went in. The old guy had evidently been the sole customer. The only one left in the store was the man behind the counter.
The guy who scratched Patty’s mother’s itch every eight to ten months might have been a good-looking man once. About five-ten, strong jaw, blue eyes. But he was thin to the point of emaciated, his hair was thinning, and he’d gone a day or two without shaving. He peered at me through a pair of cheap reading glasses.
“Hey,” he said. He noticed his ex first, me second, and my nose third. He didn’t look puzzled, surprised, annoyed, intimidated, you name it. There was nothing there.
“Hey, Ron,” she said.
“Hey,” he said.
I thought he might ask Carol if she’d heard from Patty, but he didn’t.
“Ron, this here’s Tim Blake.” He just looked at me. “He’s been trying to find his daughter, Francine?”
That had been my idea, to refer to Sydney by her first name, the one that the detective had used in his report.
Ronald’s expression stayed blank.
“She was a friend of Patty’s,” Carol Swain continued. “Now the two of them are missing.”
“Kids,” he said dismissively, shaking his head. He asked me, “Did they run off together?” It seemed a genuine question.
“We don’t know,” I said. “I came by to talk to Carol, see whether she had any idea about where either one of them might be.”
“I don’t know what your daughter’s like,” he said, “but Patty’s the kind of girl, she’s probably just blowing off some steam, getting a little wild for a couple of days. I’m sure she’ll turn up. And if your Francine is with her, they’ll probably come back together.” He looked at his ex-wife and said, “Joyce is going to give me a lift home when I lock up so, you know, you might not want to be hanging around when…”
“It’s okay,” Carol Swain said. “We just wanted to pop in, in case you’d heard from Patty, you know?”
“Yeah, well, no,” he said, looking back and forth between us.
I said, “Mr. Swain, do you know who I am?”
“What do you mean?”
“Do you recognize my name?”
He looked at me a moment and finally said, “Yup.”