Linwood Barclay: A Tap on the Window

We were stupid.

We should have done more, and we should have done it sooner. It ate at me every day, and I knew it ate at Donna, too. We blamed ourselves, and there were moments when we blamed each other.

Why didn’t you do something?

Me? Why didn’t you do something?

In my heart, I believed I deserved more of the blame. He was a boy. I was his father. Shouldn’t I have been able to get through to him? Shouldn’t I have been able to connect in ways Donna could not? Shouldn’t I have been able to use some of the smarts I’d acquired in my former career to knock some sense into him?

Reading the paper without really taking it in, staring at the TV without any idea of what I was watching, finishing my beer and going back into the kitchen for another, and repeating the whole process again, took up the better part of two hours. I figured by that time Donna really would be asleep and wouldn’t have to pretend.

I was right.

When I went upstairs the only light on was in the bathroom off our bedroom. If I’d come up earlier, Donna’s eyes still would have been closed, but she’d have been faking it. You don’t spend twenty years with someone and not know when they’re really sleeping, and when they’re trying to put one over on you. But never mind. It wasn’t like I’d ever call her on it. It was a game we played now. I’ll pretend to be sleeping so you don’t have to feel weird not talking to me.

I stripped down in the bathroom, brushed my teeth, killed the light, and quietly slipped under the covers next to her, my back to hers. I wondered how long this would go on, how it would end, what could help us move forward.

I still loved her. As much now as the day we met.

But we weren’t talking. We couldn’t find the words. There was nothing to be said because there was only one thing either of us was thinking, and it hurt too much to talk about.

I imagined making the first move. Turning over, edging closer, slipping my arm around her. Not saying a thing, at least not at first. I imagined the warmth of her body as I held her. Felt her hair on my face.

Imagined it so perfectly, it was as though it was happening.

I lay awake for some time, staring at the ceiling, or the digital clock on the bedside table. One in the morning, then two.

It wasn’t all our fault.

Not everything.

Some of it, of course, was Scott’s. Sure, he was a kid, but he was old enough to know better.

But there was someone else. Not the kids from Cleveland. Not the kids from Griffon who might have sold Scott marijuana and liquor.

I wanted to find the one who gave him 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine. What the rest of the world knows as ecstasy.

That’s what the toxicology report turned up.

That’s the stuff that evidently made Scott believe he could fly.

I was going to track down the guy who provided that final, fatal dose.

We all had a lot to answer for, but that son of a bitch, as far as I was concerned, was the one who’d pulled the trigger.

In the morning, the woman comes into the bedroom bearing a tray.

“Hey,” she says to the man, who is still under the covers.

He raises himself up on his elbows, surveys the breakfast as the woman sets it down on the bedside table.

“Scrambled,” he says, looking at the eggs almost suspiciously.

“Just the way you like them,” she says. “Well cooked. You should eat them before they get cold.”

He gets his legs out from under the covers, sits up on the edge of the bed. He is wearing a pair of faded white flannel pajamas with blue pinstripes. They are threadbare at the knees.

“How’d you sleep?” the woman asks.

“Okay,” he says, reaching for the napkin and spreading it on his lap. “I didn’t hear you get up.”

“I got up around six, but I tiptoed around the kitchen so I wouldn’t disturb you. You given up your hobby?”

“What? What do you mean?”

“Where’s your little book? It’s usually right there.” She points to the bedside table.

“I write in it after you leave,” he says, setting the plate atop the napkin, resting it on his knees, taking his first bite. “Good eggs.” The woman says nothing. “You want to sit down?”

“No. I have to go to work.”

He picks up a strip of bacon, bites into it with a crunch. “You want some help?”

“Help with what?”

“At work. I could come and help you.” He chews the bacon, swallows.

“You’re confused,” she says. “You don’t come to work.”

“I used to,” he says.

“You just enjoy your breakfast.”

“I could help, I really could. You know I’m good at doing the books. I catch everything.”

The woman sighs. How many times has she had this conversation? “No,” she says.

The man frowns. “I’d like things to be the way they used to be.”

“Who wouldn’t?” the woman says. “I’d like to be twenty-one again, but wishing don’t make it happen.”

He blows on his coffee, has a sip. “What’s it like out today?”

“Nice, I think. Rained last night.”

“I’d like to go out, even in the rain,” the man says.

She’s had enough. “Eat your breakfast. I’ll be back for the tray before I go.”

I’d arranged to meet Fritz Brott, owner of Brott’s Brats, the Tonawanda meat business I’d been watching for a couple of days, at his shop. He had an office in the back where we could talk privately.

Brott had been a fixture in the community for more than twenty years. He’d emigrated from Germany in the seventies with his wife and infant daughter. He found work behind the deli counters at several different grocery stores over the years, but his dream had always been to have a shop of his own. In the early nineties he learned that the elderly owner of an existing butcher shop wanted to retire. He’d hoped his son would follow him in the family business, but before the boy had even hit his twenties it was clear he was more interested in computers than red meat. So the father continued to run the business on his own for another two decades, but with no one to pass it on to, he decided to sell.

Fritz didn’t just know meat. He was a great cook, and had a recipe for bratwurst that had been handed down through several generations. That, he told his wife, would be the store specialty. It also provided the shop a new name.

Fritz’s wife, while an integral part of the business, wasn’t in the shop every day. From home, she handled the paperwork, paid the bills, did the payroll, all so Fritz could concentrate on making his bratwurst and selling his thick, beautifully marbled steaks. It was his wife who noticed things had not been adding up in recent weeks. They were making less money. The sides of beef hanging in the freezer were not turning out the same number of steaks and roasts as they used to.

Something was up.

Fritz employed three men. Clayton Mills, in his late sixties, had worked for the previous owner, and lived alone now that his wife of thirty-two years, Molly, had passed away. He lived frugally, and he never struck me as a viable suspect. Nor did Joseph Calvelli, about ten years younger than Clayton, with a wife and a grown son who ran an investment firm.

Very quickly, I zeroed in on Tony Fisk, twenty-seven, married, with two kids, aged five and two. It was his wife, Sandy, I’d seen drive up to the back door and wait for Tony to pop out with a green bag that he pushed through her window before running back into the store. This had happened at a time when Fritz was not in the shop.