I returned to my room and tried to go back to sleep, but I mostly tossed and turned. Judging by the steady breathing coming from the other bed, Kevin had no such problems.
I finally ended up falling asleep at about five and slept late, until about 9:30. Kevin was still asleep, so I went next door to my office for a while, catching up on emails.
When he woke up, he didn’t even ask about what happened last night, as if a terrible thing in the middle of the night was a routine occurrence. Most likely, he just wanted the memory to fade, like an awful nightmare. Unfortunately for him, I had a few questions. Of course, things might go smoother on a full stomach.
“Let’s get some breakfast,” I said.
We both got dressed and walked across the quiet parking lot to Sandy’s place. Took my usual booth, and I watched as Kevin read every entry on the menu. I remembered when I could eat like a glutton without putting on weight. Those days were in my rear-view mirror, emphasis on the rear.
“Okay. I know what I want.” He put the menu down.
“I thought you pretty much sampled everything they had yesterday.”
He relinquished a small smile. “It was all good.”
Sandy wasn’t in yet, so Crystal arrived with some water for Kevin and coffee for me, then took our orders. After jotting them down, she practically ran off without any small talk beyond a quick howyadoin and backinajiffy. Sandy was a world-class chatterbox, but Crystal hadn’t inherited that gene. Which was okay with me, especially this morning. I had a few questions to fly by Kevin, then Vell and I had some people to visit.
“How’d you sleep?”
“Okay, I guess.” His eyes didn’t meet mine.
“Do you remember waking up in the middle of the night?”
“Yeah.”
“Pretty scary, huh?”
He shrugged as if getting your room vandalized in the middle of the night happened every other day. His ho-hum reactions to horrible events upset me. A lot. “Well, it scared the crap out of me.”
“I guess.” He peeled the paper off his straw and stuck it into his glass, but his hands shook as he did it. He slurped a big gulp of water, taking an extra-long time, trying to avoid the unavoidable ensuing conversation. I’d seen lots of kids and their false bravado, and while it might provide a temporary coping mechanism, in the long run, I thought it was better to face things head-on, embrace the issue, and forge ahead. I saw no reason not to try that now.
I leaned back and put my arm across the back of the vinyl seat. “I have a question.”
Kevin set his glass down.
“Do you have any idea why someone would want to break into your motel room and trash it like they did?” I tried to ask the question in as even a tone as I could muster.
He stared at me for a moment, then shook his head. Earnestly. “No, I don’t. Maybe it was a mistake.”
“Possible.” But unlikely. “Is there anyone out to get your mom?”
“Besides my stepdad?” His stare had turned into a glare.
“Do you think he could have done this?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think he did it?”
Kevin shrugged.
“Why?”
“Because he hates to lose. At anything. And if he can’t have Mom, then…”
“Then he’d try to harm her?”
He nodded. “Yeah. Exactly.”
I considered that. A scathing—and chilling—indictment of a man. Living with someone like that, day-to-day, must have been terrifying. But what about the note on the mirror? “Do you know anything about any money your mom might have received lately? Bonus check from work? Inheritance? Anything like that?”
Kevin half-closed one eye, like I’d seen him do before when I’d asked him a question. I didn’t know if he was aware of it and had adopted it as some kind of teenage affectation or whether it was some kind of natural by-product of thinking about his answer. The more I hung around Kevin, the more I realized I had a lot to learn about teenagers. And about raising them. I’d gleaned how to interact with little girls from playing with my nieces, but teenagers were practically another species altogether.
“No. I don’t remember Mom talking about any money or anything. If she had, maybe we wouldn’t have had to come here, you know?”
An excellent point. “Okay. If you think of something—”
“Why do you want to know?”
“Just trying to locate your mom. You never know what bit of information will help.”
“She’s not coming back, is she?”
“She’ll be back, Kevin. As soon as she takes care of whatever it is she’s taking care of. There’s no way she’d leave you behind.”
Crystal brought our food, and we ate in silence. Toward the end of the meal, Kevin’s phone buzzed. He looked at it, then put it aside, but his features tightened.
“Who was that?”
“Nobody.” He ate another bite of waffle. Chewed. Swallowed. “Did you try talking to my stepdad? Maybe he knows where my mom is.”
“Is that who just texted you? Your stepdad?”
“What? No.” His gaze flitted over my shoulder. “It was just a friend. Don’t worry, I didn’t tell him where I am.”
“Okay.” I pushed my empty plate aside. “Do you know if your stepfather owns a gun?”
Kevin stared at me for a moment, then nodded his head a fraction of an inch. I wasn’t surprised by his answer; in fact, I’d be surprised if a guy like Payton didn’t own one. Or more. Nice to know for sure, though.
“You have a key to your old apartment, right?”
“Yeah.”
I held out my hand. “Mind if I borrow it?”
My car was still on loan—to whom, I wasn’t exactly sure—so I headed back to the registration office to get the keys to the courtesy car. About a month ago, I’d told Cesar I thought it would be more convenient if I just kept the keys on my own key ring rather than having to bother him every time I needed the car. He’d thought otherwise, and after he bored a hole into my head with his steely gaze for about sixty seconds, I’d come around to his way of thinking.
I opened the door and walked into the office, and as soon as I did, Uncle Phil popped out of one of the four chairs in the minuscule area we jokingly referred to as the lobby. He took a few steps forward, making sure he crowded into my personal space and started haranguing me.
“There you are. What’s this about a break-in last night? One of your special guests acting out? We can’t have that kind of thing happening here. You’re going to kill our business with episodes like that.” He punctuated his words with finger jabs into the air. “I demand you fill me in immediately, and we need to come up with an action plan for turning this place around.”
I felt as if I’d been sucker-punched, and it took a moment for me to regain my balance. He stared at me, waiting for a response, as I took a few deep breaths.
“Okay, Uncle Phil. Relax, and we’ll talk about it.” I glanced behind the counter, and Cesar was calmly reading the newspaper, pretending not to pay attention to my reaming out. “Let’s have a seat.”
“I don’t want to sit. I want some answers.”
I took his elbow, trying to steer him to a chair, but he flapped it like a chicken wing and shook me off. “Benjamin, this has gone too far.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Cesar raise his head when Phil called me by my given name, as if he thought I was going to smack the old guy in the face or something. “Uncle Phil, please. Let’s have a seat, and we can discuss this.” I looked around. “What if a customer came in and saw us standing here, arguing like a couple of cranky old men? That would be bad for business.” Of course, the odds that a customer would be walking in here on a Saturday morning at ten a.m. were pretty slim, but Phil, living in his fantasy tower, wouldn’t know that.
He nodded.
I grabbed his elbow again, and he shook me off again, although not as hard as before. Progress.
We took seats next to each other, knees touching. “How did you find out about last night?”
“I called this morning to ask Cesar about the latest financial report, and his…Diego answered. Wanted to know if I was calling about the incident last night. The incident.” He shook his head back and forth, as if we were talking about the tragic deaths of a dozen people rather than the destruction of a couple of mattresses and a flat-screen TV.
“I don’t know that I’d call it an incident. More like a minor dust-up. And it wasn’t any of our guests going on a rampage, by the way.”
I glanced behind the counter to gauge Cesar’s reaction, but he’d disappeared. Obviously, Cesar had told Diego what happened, and Diego had spilled to Phil. Maybe I should try to impose some kind of gag order when it came to communicating with Phil. Cesar wouldn’t like it, but it would sure make my life a lot less stressful.
“Were you ever going to tell me? You know, I promised your father I’d keep an eye on things while he was out of the country, and I take my promises very seriously. You need to keep me apprised, Benjamin. For the good of the business and for your own good, too.”
“Okay. I’ll try to keep you filled in.” Fat chance.
“I’m not kidding around,” he said. “I speak to your father on a regular basis, you know.”
“Say hi for me.”
“Don’t be disrespectful, Benjamin. Without this…” Phil held his arms out. “You’d be working in a fast-food restaurant or something. Don’t bite the hands that feed you.”
I bit my tongue instead.
“Now, about last night. First, what happened to the security system you were supposed to install? We earmarked some funds to do that.”
I’d used the money to help a family who’d been evicted move to a new place in Delaware. “Yeah, we need to get on that.”
“And did you ever fix the parking lot lights? Vandals look for easy opportunity, you know. They like dark, vulnerable places.”
That money went to help a family rebuild after a house fire. “It’s on our list.” I didn’t see the need to tell Phil the truth about the intruders. Better he thought it was some kind of random mischief than that one of my special guests had been targeted. “Something like this could have happened anywhere. At any motel in the area.”
“But it didn’t. It happened here. Where was your Griff character, anyway? Don’t we pay him to prevent this kind of thing from happening?”
“Griff scared them away. It could have been much, much worse if he hadn’t been here. How about if I show you the room so you can see what a minor issue this is?”
“Finally, a good idea.”
We checked out Room Eight and, predictably, Phil fixated on the still-broken door lock, rather than on the restored room. “How soon can you get this fixed? Every room not available is a potential loss of revenue.”
“Cesar’s got someone coming out today or tomorrow, I think.”
“Good, good. I hope you know how valuable he is. If we lost him…”
“You’re right about that.”
“What I’m trying to say is, don’t do anything to antagonize him. Whatever you do, make sure he’s happy, okay?” Phil pointed his finger at me, and I resisted the urge to swat it away.
Nice to know who mattered more to Phil, Cesar or me. “Sure, Uncle Phil,” I said. “Sure.”
Vell and I stood in the dirty hallway outside Payton’s apartment.
“You sure this is a good idea?” Vell asked.
“Actually, I’m pretty sure this is a bad idea.”
I’d gotten Payton’s phone number from Kevin, and we’d called it, but no answer.
We’d also called the Benton Furniture warehouse and asked to speak to Payton, to ascertain his whereabouts. The person who answered paged him, but when he didn’t answer, she said she didn’t know if he’d come to work or not. Some people didn’t have to work on Saturdays. She said it in a tone that led me to believe she wasn’t happy she was.
In other words, Payton could be reaching for the doorknob on the other side of the door at this very second.
So we were pressing our luck. At the very least, if Payton was home, it was unlikely he had his army of buddies with him in his apartment. Which meant our two against his one. Which meant we were probably only slight underdogs if things devolved into a fight. And based on how things went yesterday at Gerry’s, I’d say it was a strong possibility.
I knocked on the door, three quick raps. Listened for footsteps. Nothing.
Waited a minute and tried again. Still nothing.
“Guess he’s not here,” Vell said. “Oh well. We can come back another time.”
“Okay, we’re going in,” I said. “All set?”
“Not a chance. But go ahead.”
I stuck the key in the lock and slowly turned the knob, tensed and ready for whatever may happen.
I wasn’t ready for what I saw.