I got in my own truck, and set out to find Doug Pinder, if the police hadn’t found him already.
I tried his cell first but there was no answer. I didn’t have a number for Betsy, or her mother’s place, so I decided to just drive there first. When I pulled up out front of the house around one, there was a police car parked across the street. The only car in the driveway was an old Chevy Impala, which I guessed belonged to Betsy’s mother.
As I got out of the truck an officer got out of the police car and said to me, “Excuse me, sir!”
I stopped.
“May I have your name please?”
“Glen Garber,” I said.
“I need to see some ID.” He was closing the distance between us. I dug out my wallet and slid my driver’s license out of it for him to examine. “What’s your business here, sir?”
“I’m looking for Doug Pinder,” I said. “That who you’re waiting for, too?”
“Do you have any idea where Mr. Pinder may be?”
“I’m guessing he’s not here, then.”
The officer said, “If you have any idea, you need to tell us. It’s important we speak with him.”
“I know,” I said. “I just came from the Stamos place. I know what this is about. I made the 911 call. Is Betsy in?”
He nodded. He didn’t seem to want me for anything else, so I walked up to the door and knocked. A woman in her mid-sixties answered. Several cats gathered about her feet as she opened the door, and three of them scooted outside. “Yeah?” she said.
“I’m Glen,” I said. “You must be Betsy’s mother.” When she didn’t deny it, I said, “Is she here?”
“Bets!” the woman screamed back into the house. “I swear,” she said to me, “it’s like a goddamn three-ring circus around here.”
Betsy came through the living room and the look on her face said she wasn’t very pleased to see me. “Yeah, Glen, what is it?”
“I’m looking for Doug,” I said, stepping inside, being careful not to squish a cat in the door as I closed it.
“You and fucking T. J. Hooker out there,” she said. “What the hell’s going on?”
“I don’t know,” I said bluntly. “I need to find Doug and talk to him.”
“You talked to him enough yesterday. Accusing him like you did. I thought you were his friend.”
“I am his friend,” I said, although I knew I didn’t have much business saying so. “When did he leave here?”
“Beats me,” she said. “Middle of the night he disappeared, took off in my car.” So far as I knew, Doug’s truck was still at the office, so that made sense. “I got no way to get around. Where the hell is he? What do the cops want with him? They think we don’t have enough problems already? Is this what they do to people who lose their houses? Start treating them like criminals? We’re supposed to go to the bank today to try to get our house back. How the hell are we supposed to do that if he’s out wandering around somewhere?”
I was going to ask her to tell him to call me if he came home, but I figured, what with the cops waiting for him out front, he wasn’t going to have a chance to do that.
“What the hell do they think he did?” Betsy demanded.
“Did Doug say he was going to see Theo?”
“He didn’t say anything to me. You talking about that Greek electrician?”
“Yeah.”
“What about him?”
“He’s dead,” I told her.
“Dead?”
“Someone shot Theo last night. The police need to talk to Doug. If he went out there to see Theo, he might have seen something, heard something, that would help the police catch who killed Theo.”
“So it’s not like the cops think Doug had anything to do with it,” she said. “He’s, like, a witness?”
“They just need to find him, Betsy. That’s all.”
“Well, I hope he’s got my car with him when they do, because I’ve got to go to the bank and try to get our goddamn house back.”
I decided to try the office next. The chain-link gate that seals off Garber Contracting from the street was in place. With no one to watch the office, Ken had locked the place up before heading off to whichever job site he felt had priority. There was no sign of Betsy’s Infiniti, but there was another police car sitting across the street, and I had to go through the same routine again, explaining that I was not Doug Pinder.
I wondered if Doug might have found a way to slip in anyway, and once the cop was done with me I unlocked the place and walked through the office and shed, checking to see whether Doug might be sitting in his truck around back. It was still there, but there was no sign of him.
Once I had the place locked up again, I set off for the house Doug and Betsy had lost the day before. Even though they no longer lived there, I wondered whether Doug might try to break in, grab a few extra things he and Betsy hadn’t been able to drag out onto the lawn with the little time they’d been given yesterday.
As I came around the corner, I saw the Infiniti sitting in the driveway. Doug sat slumped on the front step, his arms resting on his knees, a bottle of beer in his right hand, a cigarette in the other.
“Hey, pardner,” he said, a smile crossing his face. “Can I get you a cold one?” It sounded as though he’d had a few.
I walked toward him. “No, I’m good.”
