Patrick’s eyes grew wide, his expression a mix of stupefaction and utter disbelief. “You just said half a million dollars.”
“I did.”
I could see the gears start to turn. His father was an MTA worker who’d spent a lifetime in the soot and darkness of the New York City transit tunnels. Where would he ever lay his hands on a half-million dollars? He cleared his throat, his voice barely a notch stronger than mine, his eyes tunneling in on me. “Exact?”
I nodded. “In bound packs of hundred-dollar bills. Fifty of them.”
“In a satchel? On the seat of his car?”
“That’s right.” I nodded again.
“Jesus son of Mary.” He sat back and blew out his cheeks.
I said, “I guess it’s safe to say I don’t think he was up there to see any building supplier, Patrick.”
He nodded almost reflexively, then his gaze fell back on me. “You’ve got a lot of balls, coming in here and telling this to me.”
“I realize that,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“So where is it all? Now?”
“I’d rather not say exactly where it is, if that’s okay. Until I have an idea what you’re going to do about it.”
“What I’m going to do about it?”
“Don’t worry, it’s safe. It’s more yours than mine. Or someone’s—I’m not exactly sure who it belongs to.”
“What do you mean, who it actually belongs to?”
“Patrick, please, you know it wasn’t his. You said at the funeral you didn’t even know what he was doing up there.”
“I’m trying to make sense of this … My father, who spent his whole life repairing tracks; who left a pension of seventy-nine thousand dollars after removing most of it to pay for his wife’s medical treatments; and who paid off his mortgage twenty years ago and never had a dollar in debt—somehow had half a million dollars in hundred-dollar bills in his car? And now you have it, hidden somewhere?”
“Actually, it’s down to four hundred and thirty-seven thousand.” I shrugged. “I told you about the school. I also paid my house taxes for half the coming year. And my mortgage. And part of a business note for my parents. I know I’ll have to pay it all back.”
He looked at me without telling me much. The air seemed to go out of his anger.
“Look, I don’t know how you want to handle this … You want to arrest me, go right ahead. I guess that seems right. It’s just that before you do, there’s more …”
“More money?” His eyes grew wide again.
“No. More to the story.” I let out a painful breath. “There’s Rollie.”
“Rollie?”
“Yeah.” I swallowed guiltily. “I’m afraid so.”
Rollie. The person who, according to all the reports, had been first on the accident scene. And who was now dead. On top of a missing half-million dollars.
I watched Patrick slowly fit the pieces together.
“I told you this was hard. I’ve no idea if he truly killed himself or not. As much as I could find out, he didn’t suffer from depression, he wasn’t sick, he was happily married, he didn’t have financial problems. I mean, I’m not a detective, but anyone who might be looking into that accident, say, from the point of view of trying to find something that didn’t end up on any police report or in the press—say half a million dollars—would discover that Rollie was first on the scene. Before the cops and EMTs even got there. The only one. Not me.”
“I think I’m starting to see where this is heading.” Patrick exhaled somberly. “And I don’t like it.”
“I don’t like it either. It nearly scared me to death when I first read about it. I’d waited ten days to see if the missing money appeared anywhere. I started to think he was the first one anyone would go to, if the police report didn’t mention a satchel of cash being found. Certainly the newspaper never mentioned anything.”
“So you’re suggesting that this wasn’t a suicide? That this guy was what, murdered?”
“The people closest to him certainly didn’t see it as a suicide. I went on a family grief page and anyone who knew him seemed to be at a loss for words. And nothing’s come out since to change that. At first I just thought maybe I’d been watching too many detective shows. I mean, I’ve been on total edge about this since I took it. Then something else happened. Last night. Something that made me think maybe it wasn’t my imagination running away with me after all.”
“I’m listening.”
“My house got broken into. I don’t know if you’ve heard—why would you?—but there’s been a string of them going on up in Westchester. So at first, when I came home, I thought that’s all it was. Not all, of course—I mean it freaked me out. Brandon and I live there alone. The place looked like a neutron bomb had gone off inside. Things were missing. Drawers rifled through, turned upside down.”
“What made you think it wasn’t just a normal robbery?”
“I have this ring. My diamond engagement ring. Jim gave it to me. A nice one. Almost four karats. All I could think of was that I’d worn it the day before and never put it away, and I’d left it right out in the open on my dresser. A blind thief would have found it.”
“Okay …”
“But when I ran up to my room, the place was just as I’d left it. Nothing up there had been touched. I figured we must’ve come home just as whoever it was had gotten up there, and when they saw us drive up they took off. The door to the deck was open. And I found my ring. Sitting there, right on the dresser. At first I couldn’t believe my luck. Then I saw what it was on …”
“What what was on?” Patrick furrowed his brow.
“The ring. What it was sitting on. Right there on my dresser for me to see.”
This time he just sat there, waiting for me to fill in the blank.
And I did.
“It was on a crisp new hundred-dollar bill.”