I ignored her and steered Andy toward the door. I took him outside and walked him around back of the dealership, where I’d chewed him out for stealing a commission out from under me.
“What’s with you?” he asked. “I didn’t swipe any more of your customers. Besides, you’re not even working here now, so if someone did come in and dealt with you before, what the fuck am I supposed to do about it?”
“Think back,” I said, putting my face into his. “A year ago. You put Jeff Bluestein in touch with someone for a job.”
“Huh?”
“Jeff. You remember. He and Sydney were going out for a while.”
“Yeah, I know who he is,” he said defensively.
“I’m guessing you know Syd and all her friends. Jeff tells me you used to hang out with them.”
He protested that. “Aw, come on, a few drinks was all.”
“That was the other thing he mentioned. That you used to buy booze for them since they’re underage.”
“Jeez, Tim. Shit, you were their age once, weren’t you? Didn’t you have someone buy beer for you when you were sixteen?”
“Any other day, Andy, I’d carve you out a new one for getting booze for my daughter, but I’m worried about bigger things right now. I want to know about this guy you put Jeff onto.”
“It was just some guy,” he said.
I pushed him up against the side of a minivan. “I want a name.”
“I only knew his first name,” Andy said. “It was Gary. Just Gary. That’s all I knew.”
“Where’d you know him from?”
“I used to see him at this bar I go to, kept seeing him there, then one day, I’m walking into the Dairy Queen, and he’s sitting there having a milk shake with Patty.”
“What?”
“Yeah. They were just kind of hanging out and talking. Patty waved and I went over and said hi, told Gary I recognized him from that place, and that was about it.”
“Patty?” I said. “Patty Swain?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you ever ask Patty about him?”
Andy shook his head. “Not really. I just figured they knew each other. Anyway, not long after that, I ran into the guy at a bar, I go, ‘Hey, I know you.’ It’s like we already know each other, and we got talking.”
“What’d this guy do?”
“He was, like, a businessman, you know? He was into a lot of things. Asked me if I wanted to make some extra money, but that was around the time I started here and things were going pretty good, you know? But I said if I knew anybody who was looking for some work I’d send them his way.”
“So the guy gave you a number?”
“He gave me a card, but it wasn’t his own business card. It was another card he happened to have on him, so he wrote his number on the back.”
“You still have that card?”
“Yeah, probably, at home. I’ve got a jar I toss business cards into.”
“You remember whose card it was?”
“I don’t know. Like I said, it wasn’t his own card. It could have been for a body shop or a hotel or something, maybe a lawyer’s. I just don’t remember. It was a whole fucking year ago!” I still had his head pressed up against the minivan, his neck arched at an awkward angle. I moved back half a step so he wouldn’t have to contort himself.
“Okay, tell me about Gary.”
“He said he remembered Patty saying I worked with cars. He wondered what, exactly, that entailed. Like, did I service them? Run a Mobil station, what? And I told him I sold cars, and he said I wasn’t the kind of guy he was looking for. He wanted people in the restaurant business, gas stations, convenience stores, that kind of thing, a place where there are lots of transactions.”
“You didn’t wonder what that was about?”
“Not really,” Andy said. “He wasn’t interested in me, so I wasn’t interested in what he was looking for.”
“Go on.”
“So, you know, one night I’m hanging out after work with Sydney, and Jeff, and Patty, and Jeff is going on about how he wants to get some really cool laptop, one of the new Macs that are really thin or something, and I said, hey, you work in a restaurant, right? And Jeff said yeah, so I gave him the number of this guy—I guess I still had his card at that time—and said he might have something for him. And that was it.”
“Did you ever give that number to anyone else?” I asked him.
“What do you mean?”
I moved in closer again. “I mean, did you ever give that number to anyone else?”
“I don’t know, maybe. Like who?”
“Did you ever give that number to Sydney?”
Andy licked his lips, like his mouth was dry. “Look, Tim, like, I give a lot of numbers out to a lot of people. How do you expect me to remember something like that?”
“I swear to God, Andy, I’m—”
“Okay, okay, uh, let me think. Honestly, I don’t think I ever did. But one time, Patty said she was thinking of switching to some other job, and I remembered I still had that guy’s number, and I went to offer it to her, but when she looked at it she goes, oh, that guy, I already have his number. So I guess, if she knew it, she could have given it to Sydney.”