“So Rob’s thinking Canada might just be a rest stop,” Jackie said.
“That’s assuming he made it as far as the nearest traffic light,” Malcolm said. “You checked the snowbanks between here and his house?”
“Looking into all possibilities,” Navarro said.
“And there’s been another development that’s sort of interesting,” Jackie said. “He changed his life insurance beneficiary, about eighteen months ago. The beneficiary is now a person named Mark Duro. You ever hear that name? All the people who come through the bar? We figure if anyone would know him you would.”
The name didn’t ring a bell.
“Could be a fake name, right?”
“Could be.”
“I still don’t get why he’d have his stuff up here.” He pictured Tripp brushing his teeth, settling in for the night.
“Yeah, you’re right,” Navarro said. “Why stay here? He lives on Acorn. Big house. It’s not that far.” He walked to the window, peered down at the street. “He takes the train to work every day. His wife said he’d been coming home every night until Friday, unless he’s out of town for business. He’d been having trouble at work, was really stressed out. She didn’t think much of it until he never got home Friday night.”
Malcolm thought of a regular from Hugh’s era, an old-timer everyone called Mr. Met who used to spend his days bouncing from the deli to the library to the OTB to the Half Moon, because if his wife saw him sitting down in the middle of the day, she’d come up with something for him to do.
“Maybe this was his daytime spot. A place to be instead of the office. Are you sure he’s been going to work?”
The officers looked at each other.
“I can call,” Navarro said.
With music on, the bar was loud even when it was empty. A person staying up there could move about freely without a worry of being heard. They would have to be careful at opening, Malcolm moving through the quiet, getting ready for another day. Any unusual creak of a floorboard and he would have noticed. Was Tripp listening when he negotiated with his suppliers last week? Had he been eavesdropping when Malcolm called the bank for a third time to ask about a line of credit, and then how did he interpret the silence on Malcolm’s end when the loan officer explained equity to Malcolm like he was a five-year-old?
“Will you be here later? Or tomorrow?” Jackie asked. “We’ll need to get back in at some point.”
“Depends on this next storm. I have to run a couple errands and I have to check on my mother.” As he was talking, he was making his way to the staircase at the far end of the room, the one that led down to the bar. He jogged down and went to unbolt the door, but it was already unlocked.
“That’s weird,” Malcolm said. He opened the door, stepped through. “This door has been locked for years.”
He turned to face the officers standing at the top of the stairs.
“Maybe he came and went through the interior door when the bar was full,” Navarro suggested.
The bar was rarely that crowded, Malcolm thought, especially not during the day. Someone would surely have noticed if a guy went down the hall to the men’s and never returned. He pictured the money lying around in the mornings sometimes, if he was counting out payments. He pictured all the bottles left out when deliveries were made. He was short a bottle of Jameson around Christmas and he thought it odd, figured one of the delivery guys had nabbed it. He lined up all the bottles along the bar, thinking he’d missed it, checked the lineup against the packing list, but then he’d just let it go, figured the delivery guys were in as bad a shape as he was and it was Christmas.
Then he remembered the clean pile of undershirts just sitting there in the men’s room cabinet the night before, how he hadn’t even questioned it. The men’s room downstairs was a lot bigger than the tiny bathroom upstairs, and a man of Tripp’s size would need space to clean himself.
“You might as well come down this way,” Malcolm called up to them but Navarro said no way, said it was bad luck to leave a place by a different door. So Malcolm left the door unlocked, went back up, and exited with the cops by way of the street stairs.
“If I’m not here, you can always let yourselves in,” he said when they reached the sidewalk. He hoped they were noticing how cooperative he was being. “This door seems locked but it’s actually just jammed. If you shove hard, it’ll open.” He lowered his shoulder and rammed it against the door to demonstrate. As he did, it occurred to him that Tripp might have figured that out.
“Better if you’re here, though,” Jackie said.
“Sure, okay,” Malcolm agreed. “Hey, can you guys give me a lift home?”
* * *
Malcolm grabbed the empty gas canister, his phone, the cash pouch, and hurried to the backseat of the cruiser. Sitting inside the warm car, he noticed how cold he was, pinpricks of pain at his fingertips, his toes. He hoped his mother had a fire going. He hoped she had the sense to close the living room door and trap the heat, to sleep on the couch down there. He needed to get his car out of his driveway, no matter what it took. He had too many stops to make. He needed to charge his phone. He needed to refill the generator, get that space heater going again.
The roads were better than they’d been twenty-four hours earlier, and there was movement about, the occasional car, kids playing despite the bitter cold. He noticed lights on here and there. “Is the power back?” he asked.
“Some blocks but not many. And it’ll be tricky with more snow coming. They’re saying another foot, minimum.”
“It’s not too cold to snow?”
The officers looked at each other. “We were just talking about that. Is that a real thing?”
All three shrugged.
At home, he went directly upstairs, stripped, dipped a washcloth in the cold water he’d collected in the tub, and rubbed his face roughly, brushed his teeth. As he did he thought of Tripp off the grid somewhere, squatting next to a campfire, perhaps, until he figured out how to live. Next Malcolm pictured Tripp stiff as a board, dead since Friday night. Either way he had no worries about roofs leaking or pipes bursting. No worries about a mortgage or filing quarterly tax estimates or where he and his wife were in their health insurance deductible or getting his car inspected or cutting the stupid lawn and getting the edges just so. No worries about Hugh Lydon and getting a payment to him month after month after month.
Once he was dressed in fresh clothes, Malcolm went to the window and looked at the sky, wondered what muted parts of a person’s DNA were possible to reawaken given the right circumstances. Life was ticking by, day by day, and it was dawning on him lately that the distance between his present life and his future was getting shorter every minute. Malcolm’s grandfather in Galway had been able to smell rain a day away, could probably tell by the particular shade of the sun what weather was coming across the meadows and fields, but Malcolm had lost all that, had never been taught how to look for these things, had never known how to live any life but the one he was born to. Had Tripp really been drunk on Friday? Malcolm was almost certain it was no performance, but maybe this guy was that good. He must have been sober to have disappeared so completely, to have gracefully slipped away into a window so narrow that he’d have to have very steady hands to pull it off. Brilliant, really, when Malcolm thought about it. He wished he knew the whole plan. Maybe even the fight he’d gotten into was designed so that everyone would remember he’d been there, would swear to it should it ever come up when the police came knocking.