Linwood Barclay - Too Close to Home

“He came in here last week and threw up,” Linda said. “Not the driver, the mayor.”

“So I heard. It’s kind of his specialty.”

“Throwing up?”

“Well, making an ass of himself. He has a wide repertoire of techniques at his disposal.”

Linda smiled, got some more pablum on the spoon. “Yeah, no kidding.”

The way she said it suggested she had some familiarity with the mayor’s leadership style.

“You look like you want to ask me something,” Linda said. “You want to know why I’m here, why I haven’t got a husband.”

It was true, I was about to ask her something. But not that. “I don’t think that would be any of my business,” I said.

“It’s okay,” she said. “This guy, Eric, he got me pregnant, and I think maybe he would have married me, but he got sent to Iraq, and I was thinking that when he got back, he’d be a father to this boy, even if he didn’t actually want to marry me, but then he got killed.”

“I’m sorry.”

“He was in a helicopter, and it went down.”

“I’m sorry,” I said again.

“It’s a stupid war,” Linda said.

“That’s what a lot of people think,” I said.

“So I didn’t have a job or any money, and they’re letting me and my baby stay here until I get myself back on my feet, you know?”

“Sure.” I paused. “You’re right, I was going to ask you something, though, but not that. Something else.”

“Oh yeah?”

“You look familiar to me. I feel as though we’ve met before somewhere.”

She looked away from Sean long enough to study my face, then went back to the feeding. “Yeah, I might have met you once,” she said. “It’s possible. I’ve met a lot of people.” She hesitated. “A lot of men.”

Then I remembered. She was the girl standing outside the room, in the hallway, the night I found Randall Finley with the underage hooker. Linda, I’d assumed, was earning her money the same way as Sherry Underwood, at least that was what the tight top, short skirt, and heels had suggested to me at the time.

“You used to. . I mean, I seem to remember that you. .” How did one put this to a young mother feeding her baby?

“Fucked guys for money? Don’t worry,” she said, nodding at Sean. “He can barely say ‘Mommy’ yet.” She studied me again. “But I don’t think I ever did you.”

“No,” I said. “You didn’t.” I sat down at the table so she wouldn’t have to crane her neck up to look at me. “So you managed to get off the street.”

“Yeah,” she said, then gestured around her. “I moved up to this. A home for knocked-up teens.”

I smiled. “Don’t put yourself down.”

“I’ve been a screwup most of my life,” she said. “But I really want to get it together, especially now.” Her cheeks swelled with pride as she looked at her baby. “I’d like to finish high school and go to college.”

“What would you like to do?” I asked.

“I’d kind of like to get into journalism,” she said. “I’ve seen a lot of shit, ways people live that they shouldn’t have to, that people should be writing more about. I don’t think most people really care about street kids or what happens to them. Believe me, I know what I’m talking about. I’d like to try and change that.”

“Good for you,” I said, trying hard not to sound patronizing, because I meant it. For a moment neither of us said anything. Finally, I said, “You knew a girl named Sherry, didn’t you?”

“Sherry?”

“Sherry Underwood,” I said. “Back then, when you were, what do you call it, a working girl?”

“Hooker,” Linda said.

I smiled. “Hooker. Back then, you hung out with her? Worked together?”

She thought back. “Yeah. Sherry. Shit, haven’t thought of her in a while. She was a couple of years younger than me. Kind of young to be out there, but what are you going to do, right? You need to eat.”

“So you knew her.”

“A little.”

“Do you know what ever happened to her?” I asked.

“Why?” Linda asked.

I hesitated. How to explain. “Well,” I said, “I was around one night, when she was in a bit of trouble. She should have gone to a hospital. She’d gotten kicked in the nose. I tried to talk her into going to see a doctor but she wouldn’t do it.”

“Oh yeah,” said Linda. “I remember that. You were there.” She glanced out the kitchen door. “So was that guy out there handing over the check.”

My eyebrows went up. “You remember him?”

“You’d be surprised how many people I remember. Some more important than him. Anyway, I can tell you why she wouldn’t have gone to the hospital. You sit there all night, you lose a lot of money, plus it’s not like we had any kind of health plan, you know?”

“Sure. She still around? Is Sherry still working the street?”

“I don’t know,” Linda said. “I got out of that before she did. So our paths didn’t cross that much. But I saw her one time, not long after I got knocked up, downtown, in Kelly’s?” Another downtown diner. “She didn’t look so good.”

“What do you mean?’

“I don’t know,” Linda said. “She was looking really rough. She was, like, sixteen or seventeen, looked like a hundred. Some kids, they handle the street okay, but others, it wears them down, they get into drugs, meth sometimes. Or they get AIDS or something like that.” She said it very matter-of-factly.

“So things weren’t going that well for her,” I said. “You think she still hangs out down there?”

Linda was using a damp cloth to clean Sean’s face. “Like, I kind of doubt it,” she said. “Given how she looked last time I saw her, unless someone got to her and helped her get her life back on track, she’s a goner.”

“Dead? You think she’s dead?”

Linda shrugged. “Shit, who knows? Unless she managed to turn her life around on her own, which is not very likely. I mean, come on, what are the odds anyone else is going to take the time to help some dumb street kid get her life back in order? It’s like I said, most people, they really don’t want to deal with people like us.”

Mayor Finley popped his head into the kitchen, looking for me. “Hey, let’s roll,” he said, without so much as a glance at Linda and her baby, just like when I had Drew standing next to me outside of Lance’s place. If Randy didn’t need to speak to you, didn’t need to know who you were, he didn’t see any need to acknowledge your existence.

Back in the car, he said, “Okay, so we might as well go back to the office. I got a committee meeting at two, then at three-thirty I got this tree planting at a school.”

“Sounds nice,” I said.

“Fucking pain in the ass,” he said. “Every goddamn school in the city is on this green kick, you know? They make the kids stop bringing plastic bags to school, they think they’ve solved global warming. Then their mommies come pick them up after school in their fucking Hummers.”

Once in a while, Randy actually had an insight that was valid.

He said, “So, who you think did it?”

I had been thinking about Derek and Drew, wondering how their first day working together was shaping up, how Derek’s second day out of jail was going. “Huh?” I said.

“Lance. Who offed Lance?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“I’m thinking, jealous husband? Dope dealer? Some pimp he tried to get out of paying? Gambling debts, maybe? Or what about this?” He leaned forward in his seat, all conspiratorial, like there was someone else in the car with us. “Maybe a gay lover.”

“I don’t know,” I said again.

Finley settled back in his seat. “The thing is, despite all the time we spent together, I didn’t really know all that much about him.”