Linwood Barclay - A Tap on the Window

“Guess what,” he said. “You got the part.”

He steered me down another hall and into an interrogation room. Four pale green walls, a table and three chairs. Two on one side, a single chair on the other. He put me in the single and pulled out one of the others across from me.

“I got a few questions for ya,” Brindle said.

“I’ve got nothing to say. Not until I have representation. You haven’t even told me why I’m here.”

“You don’t know why you’re here? You really don’t?”

“I really don’t. But I can guess. You found something in my car. Something that wasn’t there when you towed it.”

He frowned. “Why don’t you come with me. Maybe I can help bring it all back to you.”

I thought of that old James Thurber cartoon, where the prosecution produces a kangaroo and says to the witness, “Perhaps this will refresh your memory!” I doubted Brindle was going to show me any creatures from the Australian outback.

He took me out of the room and down another hall. I knew, from the many times I’d been in this building — trips that had never included visits to a holding cell or the lineup room — that we were heading toward the main entrance.

We passed through two more doors and came out behind the reception counter. On the far side of the room were a man and a woman, with, I presumed, their son. He was eighteen years old, slightly built, about five three with a short, bristly haircut, wearing jeans and a sport jacket, white shirt and tie. Looked very respectable.

I knew his age, but that wasn’t all I knew about him. I knew he used to go to my son’s school last year, but over the summer had moved to Lockport. I knew his name was Russell Tapscott, and that he had his own Audi convertible. Blue, with black interior.

I knew that it hadn’t been forty-eight hours since I’d last seen him.

Russell was sitting in one of the chairs, next to his mother. His father was pacing back and forth in front of them.

Russell saw me first.

“That’s him!” he shouted, standing and pointing. “That’s the fucker who tried to throw me over the falls.”

Okay. Now I knew why I was here. It had nothing to do with the car at all.

There was a time, not that far in the past, although it felt like a lifetime ago, when I’d been standing in the Griffon police department reception area with my own son. Scott had been fourteen, and he’d been picked up for being under the influence — of what, it was not immediately clear — in a public place.

The place had been a Griffon residential neighborhood, the time shortly after midnight. Scott had been running up and down the street, flapping his arms like he was trying to achieve liftoff. When he failed to get out of the way of a Griffon cruiser, he was tossed into the back and brought downtown.

Augie, as it turned out, was at headquarters at the time, and recognized his nephew as they brought him in. He waved the cops over, asked what was going on, then sent them on their way, leaving Scott in his custody.

Not wanting to upset his sister, he placed a call to my cell. I had muted the ringer, but heard it buzz on the bedside table and managed to answer it without waking Donna.

I told him I’d be right down.

Augie turned Scott over to me without a word of lecture. The boy seemed to be floating. I waited until we were in the parking lot before I tore into him.

“What the hell’s going on?”

He pointed into the night sky. “You see that thing moving. A little light is going by. It might be a satellite, or a plane.”

“I’m taking you home.”

“Wait. I have to see where it goes. What if it’s coming for me?”

“For Christ’s sake.” I grabbed hold of his arm and dragged him to the car, put him into the front seat.

“It’s okay,” he said. “I don’t think it’s coming for me. It’s going too far thataway.”

“Why did the police pick you up? What goddamn stupid stunt did you pull?”

“They were in my way.”

“In your way?”

“They were blocking the runway.”

“Jesus, you’re totally out of it, aren’t you? When are you going to stop this kind of crap? You’re killing us, you know that? You’re killing me and you’re killing your mother.”

He turned slowly and looked at me, like he was seeing me for the first time. “I don’t want to kill you guys.” He smiled. “I love you guys.”

“This is a hell of a way to show it.”

“I won’t do this again,” he said, and made a definitive, karate-chop motion to emphasize his point, but he ended up hitting the side of his hand on the dash. “Ouch. Shit.”

“You’ve said that before, Scott. Don’t even bother telling me that.”

He gazed through the windshield at the sky again. “I’d like to go into space. Or maybe not. It’s probably freezing. Where’s Mom?”

I wondered if she was awake. I had left her a note that said I’d gone out to give our son a lift home. Nothing about the police picking him up. “At home, probably worried sick about you.”

Scott wrinkled his brow. “Why?”

I sighed. I wondered, at the time, how much longer this would go on, whether we would ever come out the other end of the tunnel. “We just want you to stop hurting yourself. We want you to stop doing this.”

He nodded, and for a moment there, I thought I was getting through.

Finally, he said, “Okeydoke.” A pause, and then, “Home, James.”

Hank Brindle, bringing me back to the present, said, “Things clearer now?”

“Lawyer,” I said.

“God, you’re a goddamn broken record,” he said.

He hustled me back through a door and out of the reception area. “So, that kid sure seems to know who you are.”

“He does seem to have some kind of problem with me.”

“Yeah, he does. He does have a small problem with you. He says you tried to kill him.”

I said nothing.

“What he tells us is, you arranged to meet him, and that when you did, you threatened to throw him into the Niagara River, in a park not too far up from the falls, if he didn’t admit to you that he was the one who sold your boy drugs before he went flying off the top of Ravelson Furniture.”

I said nothing.

“He says you wouldn’t believe him when he said he wasn’t the guy who did it, and that you said if he hadn’t done it, he probably had a pretty good idea who did. All the time, you’re getting ready to push him over the railing into the water. Is any of this sounding familiar?”

I stared at Brindle blankly. We went into an interrogation room and he pushed me into a chair. He went around to the other side of the table and sat down.

“You scared that kid to death, I gotta tell ya. He says you said something to him, like, that if he told anybody about what happened, about your little encounter, that not only would you deny everything, but you’d tell the cops everything you knew about him being a dealer, so if he had half a brain in his head, he’d keep his mouth shut.”

Brindle leaned back in his chair and smiled. “But guess what? You couldn’t intimidate the little fucker. You know why? Because his father is a lawyer — not the one you want to get in touch with — but he’s a lawyer, and the kid knows you can’t get away with shit like that, even if this Russell twerp was the head of the entire Mexican drug cartel. Which, by the way, he is not. He hasn’t got so much as a charge for having a joint in his pocket.”

I looked at the door, then back at Brindle.

“You’ve still got nothing to say?” Brindle said. “Maybe if I just asked you a few simple questions. Where were you night before last, around eight?”

“I’m not sure.”