Linwood Barclay - Broken Promise - A Thriller

“A real whiz kid,” he said, nodding.

“What I’m saying is, you’ve got something to offer. You have skills. There’s got to be someone in town here who could use those. But you have to stop getting wasted every night.”

“You been spying on me?”

“No, I’m just — I’m making an assumption. But tell me I’m wrong.”

Victor set his coffee on the counter. “Why aren’t you upset?”

“Excuse me?”

“I don’t get it. Why aren’t you a mess like I am? She was your fucking daughter.”

Walden came at him like a cannonball. He grabbed the man by his jacket, yanked him close to his face, then threw him up against the counter. Victor’s head flung back, hit the upper cupboards, rattled dishes. But Walden wasn’t finished. He grabbed hold of Victor again with everything he had, and this time threw him down onto the floor.

He was some three decades older than Victor, but Walden had no trouble throwing the man around. Maybe it helped that he was angry, and Victor was hungover.

“Never!” Walden shouted. “Never say that!” He brought back a leg and kicked Victor in the thigh. The younger man pulled in on himself, put his hands up over his head in case Walden’s shoe connected with him there next.

“I’m sorry! Jesus! I’m sorry!”

“You think you’re the only one who grieves?” Walden said, still shouting. “Goddamn your arrogance, you little shit.”

“Okay! I didn’t mean it!”

Walden collapsed into a kitchen chair, rested his arms on the table, and worked on catching his breath. Slowly Victor got to his feet, pulled out a chair on the other side of the table, and sat down.

“I was out of line,” he said.

Walden’s hands were shaking.

“Really. That was wrong. I should never have said anything like that. You’re a good man. I know you miss her. You’ve always been good to me. What you did for me last night, bringing me here, I appreciate that. That was real decent of you.”

Walden looked at his hands, put one over the other to stop the trembling. Slowly he spoke.

“I had Beth,” he said. Victor looked at him, not sure what he meant by that, so he waited. Walden continued. “I had Beth, so I had to hold it together. She went to pieces. She was never really able to move on. What would have happened to her; who would have looked after her if I went to the bar every night to feel sorry for myself? Where would she have been then?”

He lifted his hand and pointed an accusing finger at Victor. “I couldn’t be as selfish as you. I couldn’t drown my sorrows the way you have. I had responsibilities, and I met them.”

“I had nobody to be responsible for,” Victor said. “So what difference did it make what I did?”

“What difference?” Walden asked. “Are you asking what’s the point?”

“Is there one? What about you? Now that your wife is gone? Now that you’ve lost the person — the people — who were most important to you, what’s the fucking point?”

“We honor them,” Walden said.

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“When you do what you do, you shame Olivia.”

“What? I don’t get that. I don’t get that at all.”

“People see you and they think, What kind of man is he? Can’t make anything of himself. Full of self-pity. They wonder, What was Olivia thinking, that she’d spend the rest of her life with this man? What you do, the way you act, it diminishes Olivia. Makes people think less of her.”

“That’s horseshit. People aren’t entitled to grieve?”

“Of course they are. For a period. But then you have to show people what you’re made of. Show people what Olivia saw in you in the first place. So people know she was a good judge of character. It’s all about character.”

Victor appeared to be thinking about that. “I don’t know. What about you? How do you honor her? How do you honor Olivia? And Beth?”

“I’m finding my own way to do that,” Walden said. He looked away, out the window. “You should go,” he said.

“Okay,” Victor said, pushing back his chair.

“Of all the things you said last night, you were right about one thing.”

“What was that?”

“You shouldn’t have been late,” Walden said. He turned away, looked down at his right hand, spotted a rough fingernail, brought it to his mouth and bit it.

I was planning to head straight to the address I had for Marshall Kemper, the Davidson Place custodian who’d booked off sick who, I hoped, might know where I could find Sarita Gomez.

I felt an urgency to get there, but I realized my route would take me to within a block of where Marla’d told me Derek Cutter, the young man who’d gotten her pregnant, lived. He was someone I wanted to talk to, and this might be my best chance at catching him.

So I hung a left and pulled up in front of a brick duplex, a simple box of a building, constructed without a single nod to any kind of architectural style. One apartment on the first floor, another on the second. Marla had said Derek shared the upper apartment with some other students. I parked at the curb, then went up and rang the bell for the top unit.

I heard someone running downstairs, and then the door opened. It was a young woman, maybe twenty, in a tracksuit, her hair pulled back into a ponytail.

“Yeah?” she said.

“Hi,” I said. “I was looking for Derek.”

Her mouth made a big “O.” “Oh, yeah, right, he said he called you late last night, after all the shit that went down. He’ll be glad to see you.”

“Wait, I think—”

But she was already heading back up, taking the steps two at a time, shouting, “Derek! Your dad’s here!” She must have turned right around when she got to the top, because a second later she was flying past me. “Just go on up. I gotta do my run.”

I climbed the stairs, and as I reached the door to the second-floor apartment it opened, and a man I guessed was Derek looked startled to see me.

“You’re not my dad,” he said. He looked thin in his T-shirt and boxers, his legs coming out of them like two white sticks. He had a patchy beard, and black hair hanging over his eyes.

“No, I’m sorry, your girlfriend, she just assumed. I didn’t have a chance to set her straight.”

“She’s not my girlfriend; she’s a roommate, and, like, who are you?”

“Marla’s cousin,” I said. “I’m David Harwood.”

“Marla?” he said. “You’re Marla Pickens’s cousin?”

“You got a minute?”

“Uh, sure, yeah, come on in.”

He created a space on the couch by clearing away several books and a laptop. I sat down and he perched himself on the end of a coffee table that was littered with half a dozen empty beer cans.

“Why are you here about Marla?” he asked.

When his roommate mentioned something about “all the shit that went down,” I’d assumed it had to do with the Gaynor murder, and Marla’s possible involvement. It had made the news.

“You haven’t heard?”

“I’ve heard about what went down on campus last night, but that hasn’t got anything to do with Marla, does it?”

Now it appeared neither of us was up to speed, but on totally different events. “What happened at Thackeray?” I asked.

“Fucking security killed one of my friends, that’s what happened,” Derek said. “Shot him in the goddamn head.”

“I don’t know anything about this,” I admitted. “Who was your friend?”

“Mason. They’re saying he was the guy.”

“What guy?”

“Who was attacking girls at the college. There’s no fucking way. He wasn’t like that.”

“What’s his last name?”