Peter Spiegelman - Thick as Thieves

The call comes in the empty night, when it seems even the ocean is still. The voice on the other end is held together with tissue paper and trembling breath, and Carr almost doesn’t recognize it as Eleanor Calvin’s. When he does, he’s certain she’s calling to report a death, but he’s wrong.

“He is… I don’t know… I can’t find him anywhere. I came over this afternoon and… the ambassador was gone.”

Carr ignores the phone twitching in his pocket for the third time in ten minutes, for the hundredth time since dawn, and focuses on the Stockbridge cop shifting nervously on the porch steps. He’s young and earnest, and every time he speaks his Adam’s apple jumps behind the collar of his uniform shirt. He reminds Carr of Dennis.

“There’s nothing new since the Lenox PD called this morning, to say they found his Volvo in the town lot. They haven’t found anyone who saw the ambassador park it yet.”

Carr bites back the reflexive correction and nods. “My mother is buried in Lenox. He may-”

“Mrs. Calvin told us. Lenox has a man doing drive-bys in case he shows up there, but they haven’t seen him yet.”

“Did they check the local inns?”

“Lenox checked the inns in town, the Staties checked the motels along Route Seven. Nobody’s seen him.”

“How about the car? Did it look like he’d slept in it? Did it look broken into?”

“Broken into?”

Carr sighs. “Is it possible it was stolen from someplace else and dumped in Lenox?”

The cop reddens. “I… Lenox didn’t say anything special about it, but I can ask them.”

“I’ll ask myself, when I go up there. What about the temperature last night?”

“The temperature?”

“How cold did it get up there?”

The cop squints, and then it dawns on him. “No, no-he would’ve been okay. It was in the low sixties last night.”

Carr nods. “You’ll tell the Lenox PD I’m coming up?”

“Sure, Mr. Carr,” he says. “Did you have any luck finding his cell phone, sir? Because if it’s turned on-”

“It was in his sock drawer. The battery is dead.”

The cop’s Adam’s apple leaps, and he shakes his head regretfully. “We’ll be in touch then,” he says, and he walks down the path to his cruiser.

Carr rubs his palms over his face, which feels thick and numb. His eyes are sticky and he smells like airports and rental cars.

Eleanor Calvin is inside, red-eyed, sniffling, smaller. “Tim Binney,” she says. “He’s a nice boy. I just wish he had more to tell us.”

“Uh-huh,” Carr says. Even with the shades up and all the windows open, the house is gloomy, and it reeks of food and heat and mildew. Carr swallows hard, tries not to breathe too deeply or to look too closely at anything.

He fishes his phone from his pocket and scans through a long list of missed calls. Mike, Bobby, Bobby, Mike, Valerie, Valerie, Valerie. He turns the ringer on, and as soon as he does the phone burrs. Valerie again. He turns the ringer off.

“Your phone is always ringing.”

“Work,” Carr says. He looks up at Eleanor Calvin. She’s crying again. “Mrs. Calvin, it’s not your fault.”

“Yes, it is. I knew he was upset. I knew he was confused. I just never thought he would… I lost patience with him.”

“He has that effect on people.”

She shakes her head. “No. I was stupid. He was upset and confused and frustrated, and I shouldn’t have argued with him. I didn’t know that Volvo still ran. I didn’t think he had the key.”

“I took it away last year, but he must’ve had a spare. He was upset even before he found out that you were moving?”

She nods. “He’s been agitated for weeks, on and off.”

“About anything in particular?”

“He’s been talking about your mother.”

“Why?”

An embarrassed look crosses her face, and she looks away from Carr. “Her birthday is coming up, dear-next Tuesday. She’s always on his mind, this time of year.”

“What does he say?”

Eleanor Calvin’s cheeks redden. “He curses sometimes, the way he cursed at me-but I don’t think he means anything by it. Other times, I can tell he misses her. Just a few days ago he was talking about… I don’t know, I suppose it might’ve been a vacation the three of you took. And there was something about a fairy tale-King Midas, I think, and a maze. Honestly, I couldn’t follow most of it. Does it mean anything to you?”

Carr looks at her and shakes his head.

The Lenox Police Department is headquartered in a reassuring brick building with columns and dressed stone trim that dominates the south end of Main Street. But when Carr steps through the heavy doors, into the heat and glare of the afternoon, he is not reassured. The Lenox force is no larger than its Stockbridge counterpart, and its strengths run similarly to directing traffic and protecting weekend homes. Manpower is stretched thin in this high season of outdoor concerts, dance recitals, and outlet shopping, and though the stocky, gray sergeant promised they were doing all they could, Carr knows it’s not much.

There’s a bench outside headquarters, in the shade of a wide oak and with a view of cars streaming toward a concert at Tanglewood. Carr takes a seat and sighs. His bones are leaden.

The sergeant had led him out back, to where the Volvo had been towed, and let him look over the car. There wasn’t much to see. The doors had been unlocked when the Lenox cops found it, but there were no signs of a break-in. It was as mud-spattered and pollen-caked as it had been when Carr had seen it last, decomposing in his father’s driveway. Inside, it was bare and sour. No motel keys or gas receipts or maps with circled destinations. The sergeant had told him his patrols would keep an eye on the lot where the Volvo had been found, in the event Arthur Carr returned for it. Carr had nodded and thanked him.

What had he expected them to do about a man who’d simply gotten in his car and driven away? Did he think they would organize a posse? Call out the bloodhounds? Dredge the Stockbridge Bowl? And really, what had he expected to accomplish up here himself? What the hell was he doing?

Latin Mike had asked a similar question, in a call Carr had made the mistake of answering in the Miami airport, while he waited for a flight to Boston. “Forty-eight hours to game time, and you fucking disappear on us? The fuck’s the matter with you, cabron? This job’s not hard enough as is-you got to walk off in the middle of the night?”

“I told Bobby that I’d be back in time.”

“I don’t give a shit what you told him-I want to hear it for myself, pendejo. I want to hear about this personal business -or maybe you just lost whatever balls you pretended to have.”

“I’ll be back before the party, Mike.”

“That’s all you got to say? I got money sunk in this thing, asshole-I got plans -and if you fuck them up-”

Carr had hung up then, and had answered only one call since, from Valerie. He was about to board the Boston flight, and her voice was soft and worried. He could barely make it out over the announcements.

“Bobby said you had an emergency. Are you okay, baby? Can I do anything?”

“Just keep people calm,” Carr had said. “I’ll be back soon.” If Valerie had said anything in reply, he hadn’t heard, and he couldn’t bring himself to talk anymore. Bobby, undaunted, had turned to texting. His last message summed it up nicely: “4 q s hole.”

A bus rolls by, leaving behind a cloud of diesel and an impression of wrinkled faces and wispy white hair at the windows. Carr hoists himself from the bench, rubs his eyes, and drives to his mother’s grave.

The cemetery is two miles outside of town, off a pitted road and behind a leaning wrought-iron fence. There’s a chapel by the gate, with black shutters, peeling white clapboards, and a steeple with no bell. Carr doesn’t come here often, and when he does, his heart pounds. It’s pounding now, as he follows the path that climbs the hillside, and his face is warm, though not from exertion.