Linwood Barclay: A Tap on the Window

It was nearly half past ten when I came in, and even though Donna would almost always be upstairs in bed by now, there was a time when she’d have come down to meet me the moment she heard the front door open and close.

At the very least, she would have shouted down, “Hey!”

And I would have said, “Hey!”

But now, there was no “Hey!” Not from her, and not from me.

I dropped my coat on the bench by the front door and ambled into the kitchen. I’d missed dinner, as I often did, but I hadn’t had much of an appetite the last couple of months. I’d gone in two notches on my belt to keep my pants up, and on those rare occasions when I wore a tie, I could get a couple of fingers inside a buttoned collar.

Last time I’d had anything to eat was around six, sitting in the car, watching the back door of a butcher shop in Tonawanda. A bag of Wise potato chips. The owner suspected someone on his staff was stealing from him. Product, not cash. He was running out of pot roasts and T-bones sooner than anticipated, and figured either his supplier was cheating him or someone under his nose was ripping him off.

I asked him for the hours when he left the shop in charge of his employees, and those were the periods when I staked out the back entry, positioning my Accord down an alley that still afforded a good view of comings and goings.

Didn’t take long.

Late this afternoon, around dusk, the wife of one of the butchers drove up to the back, sent a text. Then seconds later the door opened and her husband ran up to her window with a garbage bag wound tightly at the top. She took the bag, threw it onto the passenger seat, and drove off like she’d just robbed a liquor store.

I took pictures using the telephoto, then followed her home. Watched her take the bag into the house. Would have been even better if I could have crept up to a window and snapped some shots of her putting a pork roast into the oven, but there are limits to what I can do. I am called upon, in my line of work, to be something of a Peeping Tom at times, but it didn’t seem necessary in this circumstance. I didn’t have to prove she’d slept with dinner.

So maybe I wasn’t on the trail of the Maltese Falcon or some missing plutonium. In the real world of private investigation, it was food, or building materials, or gas, or cars, or trucks that got ripped off. A while back, I cracked the case of some stolen cedar shrubs that kept going missing every time the homeowner replanted.

When someone stole from you, you not only wanted your stuff back — you wanted to know who did it. Police are too busy and shorthanded to solve crimes like these. A random theft, a one-shot kind of thing, well, that was pretty hard for me to solve, too, but if there was a pattern, if you were the victim of a serial pain-in-the-ass offender, chances were I could help you out, because I had the time to wait until the son of a bitch who was preying on you did it again.

It wasn’t rocket science. It was sitting around and staying awake.

Finding people wasn’t all that much different. Husbands and wives and sons and daughters went missing as often as steak and lumber and fuel and Toyotas, although it had been my experience things were often more missed than people . Someone stole your truck, there was no question you wanted it recovered. But if your two-timing, fist-swinging, scotch-drinking husband failed to come home one night, you had to ask yourself whether good fortune had smiled upon you.

It hadn’t been smiling much on us lately.

I opened the fridge, took out a beer, then went into the family room, where I dropped myself like a bag of sand into a leather recliner. On the coffee table lay several sheets of paper torn from an art pad, each one a sketch of Scott. One profile, a three-quarter, and a third, straight on, like a passport shot. Alongside the sketches, half a dozen sharpened charcoal pencils, some soft, some hard, and a small container of fixative spray, about the size of a shaving cream dispenser you’d toss into your travel bag. When Donna had taken a sketch as far as she could — she never really finished one because she always found something wrong with it — she sprayed it to keep the charcoal from smearing. Even drawings she felt failed to capture our son she kept for reference, to copy those parts she believed she’d gotten right. There was a chemical whiff in the room, which told me she’d been using the fixative earlier. The stuff could take your breath away.

This was Donna’s coping strategy. Drawing pictures of our son, some from memory, others copied from photos. I found them all over the house. Here, in the kitchen, next to her bed, in her car. There was one taped to the bathroom mirror for a couple of days that she kept looking at as she put on her makeup. I thought it was a near-perfect likeness, and she must have been thinking the same, but finally she took it down and tucked it in the folder with her other rejects.

“I thought that was a good one,” I said.

“Ears were wrong,” she said.

It was, for us these days, an extended conversation.

I had doubts whether this obsession of hers to capture the perfect image of our boy was healthy. For her, or for me. I suppose that if she’d been so inclined to sit at the computer and work through her grief writing poems and recollections, I might not have felt the same. That method of coming to grips with what had happened to us would have been more private, would not have drawn me in, unless she invited me to read what she’d written. But the sketches involved me. I couldn’t avoid them. They might have been therapeutic for her, but for me they were a constant reminder of our loss, and of our failure. And the fact that so many were unfinished, and imperfect, underscored how troubled Scott had been.

Of course, Donna wasn’t that crazy about how I was dealing with things, either.

I found the remote under a drawing of Scott with one eye unfinished, turned on the flat-screen, kept the volume low and my thumb on the channel changer. So many of them now. Channels with nothing but food, or golf, or decades-old sitcoms. Even one for poker. People sitting around, playing cards. That was a channel. What would be next? The Parcheesi Channel? I clicked through a couple of hundred of them in under five minutes, then did them all again.

I found it increasingly difficult to concentrate. I had diagnosed myself with something I’d coined PT-ADD. Post-traumatic attention deficit disorder. I couldn’t focus because there was always just one thing on my mind. I managed to do my job, more or less, but it was always there, white noise in the background.

Finally, I settled on some news out of one of the Buffalo stations.

Three people were mugged outside a liquor store in Kenmore. A West Seneca man ordered his pit bull to attack a woman, who’d required thirty stitches. The dog’s owner told police she had “looked at him funny.” There was a “pedal-by” shooting in Cheektowaga. A man on a bicycle fired three times at a house, hitting the shoulder of a man who’d been sitting on his couch watching an old episode of Everybody Loves Raymond . Two men were rushed to Erie County Medical Center after getting shot coming out of a bar. A credit union on Main Street was robbed by a man who’d handed the teller a note saying he had a gun, although none was seen. As if all that weren’t enough, Buffalo police were looking for three teens who, after stabbing a fourteen-year-old boy behind a house on LaSalle Avenue, poured gasoline on him and then tossed a match. The kid was in the hospital, still alive, but no one expected him to last long.

And that was just tonight.

I turned off the set and scanned that day’s Buffalo News , which had been tucked into the wicker magazine holder next to the chair, the thin sections already pulled apart by Donna earlier in the day. On the page dedicated to smaller towns outside the city, there was a piece on whether our local police had overreacted at the Griffon Jazz Festival in August. When half a dozen young thugs from out of town crashed the event and started stealing refreshments from the beer tent, it was alleged that some of Griffon’s finest, rather than arresting and charging them, tossed them into a couple of cars, took them out past the town’s water tower, and liberated them from enough of their own teeth to make a nice necklace.