He turned on his heel and looked back at the warehouse, clearly anxious to be done with me and get back to work. I couldn’t blame him.
“So what makes you so sure that Daniel Clay is dead?” I asked.
“I don’t think I like your tone,” he replied. His fists clenched involuntarily. He became conscious of the reflex and allowed them to relax, then wiped the palms dry on the seams of his jeans.
“There’s nothing in it. I just meant that you seem pretty certain that he’s not coming back.”
“Well, he’s been gone a long time, right? Nobody has seen him in six years, and from what I hear, he left with the clothes on his back and nothing else. Didn’t even pack an overnight bag.”
“Did your ex-wife tell you that?”
“If she didn’t, I read it in the newspapers. It’s no secret.”
“Were you seeing her when her father went missing?”
“No, we hooked up later, but it didn’t last more than six months. I found out she was seeing other men behind my back, and I let the bitch go.”
He didn’t seem embarrassed to be telling me this. Usually when men discussed the infidelities of their wives or girlfriends, it came with a greater degree of shame than Legere was showing, the memories of the relationship underscored by an abiding sense of betrayal. They were also careful to whom they told their secrets, because what they feared most of all was that they would somehow be held accountable, that it would be adjudged that their failings had forced their women to seek their pleasures elsewhere, that they had been lacking in the ability to satisfy them. Men tended to see these matters distorted through the prism of sex. I’d known women to wander out of desire, but I’d known more who had cheated because with it came the affection and attention that they weren’t getting at home. Men, by and large, sought sex. Women traded it.
“I guess I wasn’t no innocent either,” he said, “but that’s the way of men. She had everything she needed. She had no call to do what she did. She threw me out of the house when I objected to how she was behaving. I told you: she’s a whore. They hit a certain age, and that’s it. They become sluts. But instead of admitting it, she turned it on me. She said I was the one who done wrong, not her. Bitch.”
I wasn’t sure that this was any of my business, but Rebecca Clay’s version of her marital difficulties was very different from her ex-husband’s. Now Legere was claiming that he was the injured party, and while Rebecca’s story had more of the ring of truth about it, perhaps that was simply because Jerry Legere made my skin crawl. But I could see no reason for him to lie. The story didn’t reflect well on him, and there was no mistaking his bitterness. There was a little truth somewhere in his story, however distorted it might have become in the telling.
“Have you ever heard of a man named Frank Merrick, Mr. Legere?” I asked.
“No, I can’t say that I have,” he replied. “Merrick? No, it doesn’t ring a bell. Is he the guy who’s been bothering her?”
“That’s right.”
Legere looked away again. I couldn’t see his face, but his posture had changed, as though he had just tensed to avoid a blow. “No,” he repeated. “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”
“Strange,” I said.
“What is?”
“He seems to know you.”
I had his full attention now. He didn’t even bother to hide his alarm.
“What do you mean?”
“He was the one who told me to talk to you. He said you might know why he was looking for Daniel Clay.”
“That’s not true. I told you, Clay’s dead. Men like him don’t just drop off the face of the earth only to pop up again later someplace else under a different name. He’s dead. Even if he wasn’t, there’s no way he’d be in contact with me. I never even met the guy.”
“This man, Merrick, was of the opinion that your wife might have told you things that she kept from the authorities.”
“He’s mistaken,” he said quickly. “She didn’t tell me nothing. She didn’t even speak about him much.”
“Did you think that was odd?”
“No. What was she gonna say? She just wanted to forget him. Nothing good would come from talking about him.”
“Could she have been in contact with him without you knowing, assuming that he was still alive?”
“You know,” said Legere, “I don’t think she’s that smart. You see this man again, you tell him that.”
“The way he was talking about you, it sounded like you might get the chance to tell him yourself.”
The prospect didn’t appear to give him much pleasure. He spit on the ground, then rubbed the spittle into the dust with his shoe just to give himself something to do.
“One more thing, Mr. Legere: what was the ‘Project’?”
If it was possible to freeze a man with a word, then Jerry Legere froze.
“Where did you hear that?”
The words were spoken almost before he realized it, and I could see instantly that he wished he could retract them. There was no anger left now. It had disappeared entirely, overwhelmed by what might almost have been wonder. He was shaking his head, as if in disbelief.
“It doesn’t matter where. I’d just like to know what it is, or was.”
“You got it from that guy, right? Merrick.” Some of his belligerence was already returning. “You come here, making accusations, talking about men I’ve never met, listening to lies from strangers, from that bitch I married. You got some nerve.”
His right hand shoved me hard in the chest. I took a step back and he started to advance. I could see him preparing to land another blow, this one harder and higher than the first. I raised my hands in a placa-tory gesture, and positioned my feet, my right foot slightly forward of the left.
“I’ll teach you some—”
I came off my left foot and hit him in the stomach with a door-breaker kick, following through with the full weight of my body. The force of the impact drove the air from his body and sent him sprawling backward in the dirt. He lay there gasping, clutching his hands to his belly. His face was contorted in pain.
“You bastard,” he said. “I’ll kill you for that.”
I stood over him.
“The Project, Mr. Legere. What was it?”
“Fuck you. I got no idea what you’re talking about.”
He forced the words out through gritted teeth. I took one of my cards from my wallet and dropped it on him. The other man appeared at the entrance to the warehouse. He had a crowbar in his hand. I raised a finger of warning to him, and he paused.
“We’ll talk again. You might want to think some on Merrick and what he said. You’re going to end up discussing this again with one of us, whether you like it or not.”
I started to walk back to my car. I heard him get to his feet. He called after me. I turned around. Lang was standing at the entrance to the warehouse, asking Legere if he was okay, but Legere ignored him. The expression on his face had changed again. It was still red, and he was having trouble breathing, but a look of low cunning had taken shape upon it.
“You think you’re clever?” he said. “You think you’re hard? Maybe you ought to make some inquiries, see what happened to the last guy who started asking about Daniel Clay. He was a private dick too, just like you.”
He put a lot of emphasis on the word “dick.”
“And you know where he is?” Legere continued. “He’s in the same fucking place as Daniel Clay, is where he is. Somewhere, there’s a hole in the fucking ground with Daniel Clay in it, and right next to it is another hole with a fucking snoop rotting to hell inside. So you go right ahead, you keep asking questions about Daniel Clay and ‘projects.’ There’s always room for one more. It don’t take much effort to dig a hole, and it takes less to fill it up again once there’s a body in it.”
I walked toward him. I was pleased to see him take a step back.
“There you go again,” I said. “You do seem certain that Daniel Clay is dead.”
“I got nothing more to say to you.”
“Who was the detective?” I asked. “Who hired him?”
“Fuck. You,” he said, but then he reconsidered. A broad, bitter grin creased his face. “You want to know who hired him? That bitch hired him, just like she hired you. She was fucking him too. I could tell. I could smell him on her. I bet that’s how she pays you, too, but don’t think you’re the first.
“And he asked all the same questions that you did, about Clay and ‘projects’ and what she said or didn’t say to me, and you’re gonna go the way he did. Because that’s what happens to people who go asking after Daniel Clay.”
He snapped his fingers.
“They disappear.” He wiped the dirt from his jeans Some of his false courage began to dissipate as his adrenaline failed him, and for a moment he looked like a man who had glimpsed his own future, and what he saw frightened him. “They disappear…”