Brad Parks - Eyes of the Innocent

“We won’t say anything,” Sweet Thang said.

Right. Mum’s the word. We may end up printing it in a newspaper and distributing several hundred thousand copies of it. But we won’t tell Mom.

“So Windy kicks her out,” I said. “Then what?”

“Well, she came to me asking if she could stay with Ryan and me, and we-I–I just couldn’t. She was so mad. And she was saying how she had no place else to go. I told her she could get an apartment on her salary at the hospital, but she said there was no way she was moving back into some cold-water flat. When she left here, she was talking about how she was going to pay the mortgage herself.”

Tammy shook her head, like she was still in disbelief.

“I told her she wasn’t making nearly enough at the hospital,” Tammy finished. “But she didn’t want to hear it. She said she’d find a way.”

“That must be where the second-shift job came in,” I said. “She told us she was working at a pallet company, cleaning floors or something.”

“And that’s why she wasn’t home for those little boys when that fire started,” Tammy said. “So if I had just”-Tammy started losing her composure-“if I … I…”

She couldn’t finish her sentence. The guilty tears dripped down both sides of her face. Sweet Thang dove in to console her.

Meanwhile, I was starting to realize much of what we heard from Akilah-which I previously dismissed as one long fabrication-was really just a series of small twists on the truth. She wasn’t an orphan in the real sense of the word, but she was estranged from her mother and cut off from her sister. And she was struggling under the weight of a pretty hefty mortgage after all.

At the same time, my casting of Rhonda Byers as the vengeful wife was starting to look rather implausible. If Rhonda was of the mind-set to go after Akilah, she would have done it years ago-not now, when the affair was over. And if that was the case, Rhonda probably had nothing to do with her husband’s disappearance, either.

Then that thing that had been trying to wiggle and niggle its way out of my brain finally surfaced. It was that big, obvious blood smear. If Rhonda Byers was trying to hide a crime, wouldn’t she have been smart enough to clean it up before the police arrived?

So, to review, I had a missing councilman who threw around his weight to hide the existence of a now-torched love shack. And the former occupant of that love shack, the councilman’s secret girlfriend, was convinced the perpetrator of those crimes was now after her.

And I still didn’t have the slightest idea what was really going on.

* * *

It took a while to mop up the tears, meet the kids when they got back from ice cream, then say our good-byes. By the time we returned to Walter, it was starting to spit rain at us. It was also far later than I thought.

“Dammit,” I said, looking at Walter’s clock, which read 8:04.

“What is it?” Sweet Thang said.

“Damn, damn, damn,” I replied.

“What’s happening?”

“I, uh, I’m going to be late for something,” I answered.

“Something important?”

I looked over at Sweet Thang, with her bouncy blond curls and cute button nose, and I just couldn’t bring myself to explain that her tasty CR had a date with the city editor. I told myself it was because I didn’t want to break her heart. But if I was being more honest, it’s because I was a typical, despicable guy, and even though I knew I should have absolutely nothing to do with Sweet Thang, I still wanted to keep my options open.

“It’s, uh, just a dinner with a friend,” I said.

Except it wasn’t just dinner with a friend. It was a dinner at a four-star restaurant with a dress code. I looked down at myself. I was presentable, with my white shirt and my half-Windsor knotted tie. But I didn’t have a jacket. I needed a jacket.

I did some math as Sweet Thang pulled away from Tammy’s house and headed back toward Newark. It was going to take at least fifteen minutes to get back to Newark. From there, it was another fifteen minutes back to Bloomfield to grab a jacket out of my closet. It would take at least thirty minutes to get from there to Hoboken. At that point it would be after nine, even if I could find parking quickly. There was just no way I could be more than half an hour late for a date-at least not with a woman like Tina.

Okay, different plan: Bloomfield was ten minutes away. If I had Sweet Thang stop off there, I could run in and pick up my jacket. Then it would be fifteen minutes to Newark to get my car and only another fifteen minutes to Hoboken, if I got cute with the speed limit and decided to make some red lights optional. That would get me there only about fifteen minutes late. Anyone would forgive fifteen minutes. Hell, that was just being fashionable.

“Actually, would you mind stopping at my house in Bloomfield on the way back?” I said, as the rain picked up in intensity. “I’m a little pressed for time and I need to grab something.”

“No problem!” she said enthusiastically.

“Great,” I said. “Just get on the parkway and I’ll guide you from there.”

As Sweet Thang headed for the Garden State Parkway, I pulled out my phone and texted Tina: “Unavoidably detained. Running late but on the way. Wait for me.”

I shoved my phone back in my pocket, then settled into Walter’s passenger side seat. Sweet Thang had the radio on and was lightly singing along to some vapid pop song.

“So, Tammy seemed really nice,” Sweet Thang said between verses. “I just felt so badly for her because I know what it’s like to…”

She kept yammering on, but I wasn’t paying much attention. I threw in an “uh-huh” and “oh” every once in a while to at least pretend I was paying attention. Mostly, I was focused on the green Ford Windstar in front of me, which was inching along the entrance ramp to the parkway at precisely the same speed as the red Honda Civic in front of it, which was creeping like the white Mitsubishi Gallant farther up, and so on.

What was taking so long? Sure, it was raining-pretty hard now, actually-but why wasn’t the ramp moving? Where were all these people going anyway and how could it possibly be more important than my potential booty call with the ravishingly hot Tina?

Then, in the distance, I got a glimpse of the parkway itself. And there it was, 8:12 at night, and all four of its northbound lanes were a sea of red brake lights reflecting on puddles of water. The only thing moving was the puddles as more rain fell on them.

It took another six minutes just to get on the road, and I watched despairingly as the number on Walter’s clock grew larger. Sweet Thang was jabbering about something now-her recent trip to Turkey? The turkey sandwich she ate for lunch? I definitely heard the word “turkey” thrown in-and I kept trying to recalculate my various ETAs until they stopped having any meaning.

Then, at 8:31, I got a text from Tina: “UR late.”

I immediately fired back: “Stuck in traffic.”

Less than a minute passed before I received: “Not my fault. U close?”

I winced and tapped out: “Not really. Very sorry.”

This time it took a little longer to get: “Pulling waiter into supply closet now. Good night.”

I quickly texted: “Rain check?”

Her reply: “You suck.”

I sighed, buried my phone back in my pocket, and stared out at the brake lights of a disco-era Oldsmobile Cutlass.

“Something wrong?” Sweet Thang asked.

“Yeah, my friend had to cancel dinner,” I said. “I was supposed to be there”-I looked at the clock-“four minutes ago.”

“So? Won’t your friend wait for you?”

“I guess not.”

“That’s not a very good friend,” Sweet Thang said definitively.