16

TEDDY

Cole was not at his father Adrian’s house; they called on the way to check Adrian was there and not at work. ‘Of course I’m not at fucking work,’ he said on the phone.

They didn’t know what he meant until they pulled up at his house. Outer suburban brick, with a gravel driveway, a firepit in the front yard, and freshly mown grass around it. Adrian was waiting on the front porch for them, looking somewhere in his forties, but worn out, despite his brown hair solidly unflecked with grey. He was leaning on a cane, and called out as they walked up to the stairs, ‘If I’d known you’d take that long, I wouldn’t have waited outside.’

Teddy did not respond to comments like that, but Art said, ‘The firepit is nice.’

‘Smokes too much,’ he said.

‘Fun guy,’ Teddy murmured. Art smirked and squeezed her shoulder.

Adrian brought them into the lounge. It was dark, with heavy curtains pulled halfway closed, and soft, squeaky, brown leather couches with splits all over.

Teddy pushed aside a few of the many hard little cushions arranged on the couches, sat down, and said, ‘Did Cole use the firepit a lot?’

Adrian stared down at her from above. ‘That’s why I know it smokes too much. Is that what you’re here to ask?’

Teddy exhaled. Art tried not to smile.

‘No,’ she said. ‘We’re here to talk about your missing son. Did you two get along?’

‘Look,’ Adrian said, sitting down as well, in a high-backed dining chair. ‘Cole doesn’t get along with anybody.’

‘That’s a shame,’ Teddy said.

‘Too fucking right,’ he said. ‘I can’t believe after all the effort to get him that job, he’d pick up and leave like that.’

‘So you’re not worried about him?’ Art said.

‘About Cole? No.’

‘Why not?’ Teddy asked.

‘Because he’s the kind of person that would just leave without wondering what effect it would have on anyone around him,’ Adrian said. ‘Always has been.’ He wrapped and unwrapped his fingers around the head of his cane, over and over.

‘Tell us about him,’ Teddy said.

Cole had never known his parents as a couple; they split up before he was born. He was trouble all along, running away whenever he could. His mother used a leash. Adrian went in for yelling. Both of these worked in their own way, and neither made Cole happy. He didn’t enjoy school, and wasn’t good at it. Adrian wanted him to get into soccer. Heidi thought he would be good at something solo, like swimming.

‘All he really liked was watching movies. Imagining he was a superhero or a fucking gangster of some kind. Bought a fake gun and posted a picture of himself with it online and got into a bunch of trouble at school,’ said Adrian.

‘Do you think he went for real guns after that?’ Teddy asked.

‘God, no. One thing that’s good about him, he hates being in trouble. Once he’d been dressed down by the school, he threw the gun out and gave up on the gangster stuff. He dealt a little weed, but that wasn’t so bad. He got me a good price on mine. I need it for medical purposes,’ he said, waving his cane. ‘You think fucking WorkCover would cover the one thing that works even slightly? Of course not.’

Art said, ‘You were injured at work?’

‘Fell off a ladder,’ he said, and left it at that.

‘Sorry to hear that,’ Teddy said.

‘Yeah, well, it’s been fucking years, and nothing seems to be getting better. Surgery, nothing. All that goddamn medicine, nothing. And then watching Cole sitting around watching movies and never doing his homework. I wish to hell I could work – but him? He’d sit on his ass all day.’

‘You’re friends with Pete at Gorilla & Giraffe, right?’ Teddy said.

Adrian snorted. ‘We’re definitely something. We played indoor soccer for a bit, and he owed me a favour.’

‘Why?’ Teddy asked.

When Adrian looked at her, his eyes were angry and black. ‘It’s not the fucking point, is it?’

She said mildly, ‘We’re just trying to find your son.’

‘Well, I should hope so, since that’s what I’m paying you for.’

Teddy sat up. Art coughed, but then said smoothly, ‘Of course. Why did you decide to hire us?’

‘To get back what he stole from me,’ Adrian said.

Teddy felt like she’d entered a sprint race an hour late. None of this had been in the files, but then, Choker often liked to give out cases clean of bias – or, as other people might call it, useful information.

‘Tell us about the last time you saw him,’ she said.

‘Look, he left a few weeks ago, didn’t he, said he was going to live with his mother. Then he bleeds her dry, and now he’s thinking it’s time to go sponge off his cousin. At least that kid got a job all on his own.’

‘Do you mean Elmo?’ Teddy asked.

‘Who else?’

Teddy breathed out loud through her nose and said, ‘Why did Cole move out of your place?’

He tapped his cane on the tiled floor. ‘Had an argument, didn’t we?’

Art flipped a rattan coaster on the side table. ‘What about?’

‘He was stealing from me,’ he said. ‘And lied and said it wasn’t him that did it.’

‘What was the proof that he was the one who stole from you?’

‘Nobody else even knew it was there.’

‘Knew what was there?’

Adrian laid the cane on his lap, went silent again, and stared at them both.

Teddy said carefully, ‘We’re not the police. We don’t care if he stole something you need to keep off-record. It’s why you didn’t call them, right?’

Adrian looked at the ceiling and then at the floor. ‘Who’d trust them?’ he said. ‘It’s why I called that Choker guy instead. Helped out a mate of mine who needed to find out if his missus was seeing another man. Turns out she had a gambling addiction and that was even worse. My friend wished she’d just been screwing around. Anyway.’ He wiped his nose. ‘The kid stole my money. The government won’t give you anything if you have even ten dollars in the bank, even if you can’t work. So I keep it away from them.’

Teddy asked. ‘How much was it? Enough for him to go away?’

‘I don’t know for sure,’ he said, though Teddy thought he did know for sure.

‘Could he have told his girlfriend about it?’

‘That tall girl – Elizabeth?’ he asked, looking surprised. ‘I don’t think so. She’s very polite. She could do better than Cole anyway.’

Teddy thought ‘better’ meant ‘Adrian’. ‘Can you take a guess at the amount?’

‘A few thousand,’ Adrian said. ‘And he’s taken it and he’s run off to go on holiday with it.’

Elmo did say big cash, Teddy thought. ‘So he took your money and disappeared, straight away?’

‘Not straight away,’ he growled. ‘It’s been a few weeks. And he took my car! Said his was busted, said he was going to borrow it since I can’t drive anyway now. But it’s mine! And he took it, bloody ran off with it and sent me a text saying he’d bring it back when he got a new one.’

‘He do that a lot?’

‘Well, this one’s got a dent from the last time he “borrowed” it. You ask him what happened when you find him,’ Adrian said. Then he told them anyway: ‘Hit a pole.’

Teddy said, ‘So he has your car and your money, but he did say he’d return the car, and denied taking your money?’

‘Says he didn’t need it, didn’t need me, all this bullshit. Needs the wheels, though, when it suits him, doesn’t he? Little hypocrite. You ask his mother what he stole from her.’

Art leaned forward, still spinning the coaster he’d been playing with this whole time. ‘What did he steal from her?’

Adrian crossed his arms, and didn’t say anything.

‘Where could he have voluntarily gone?’ Art said. ‘Are there any places he liked to go?’

‘How would I know?’

Teddy dug her fingers into the tear in the fabric next to her. A father who wouldn’t even pretend to know what his son liked to do? She hoped Cole had been the one who took this man’s fucking money and spent it on getting to a sunny island away from these people who didn’t care for him. Eventually, they would find him; for now, all she could do was make the hole in this prick’s couch bigger and hope one day he fell into it.

Adrian did not see them out when they left, and as they drove away, Teddy said, ‘He’s what happens when plants don’t get any sun. He’s withering.’ She retrieved the pieces of couch leather from her pocket and put them in the centre console. ‘What a fucking asshole. Why can’t he go missing instead?’

‘Who would look for him?’

Teddy didn’t say anything. She thought, even though she hated him, I would. Then she wondered, would I? Aloud, she said, ‘Do you think Cole stole his money?’

‘I mean, if nobody else knows about it, then it seems likely he took it to follow his cousin to England.’

‘But he said he didn’t,’ Teddy said, though the words felt empty.

‘We’ll give him a lie detector test when we find him,’ Art said. ‘And he can pay for the cost of the lie detector machine with the money he almost definitely stole from his father.’

Teddy didn’t like it. ‘It looks bad – it feels bad, I know. It looks like a man who ran off with a lot of money. But it’s been weeks since the money went missing, and there was no reason, back then, to put off running that I can see. It’s not like he used the time to tie up any loose ends.’

‘Fair point,’ Art said.

‘What do you think Cole stole from his mother?’

‘A personality? Though that implies he had one, which he didn’t.’

Teddy tsked. ‘Now you’re just being mean.’

‘I’m just going by what everyone’s saying,’ he said, holding up his hands. ‘So what now?’

‘We find this Hank guy, and then more of Cole’s friends, and then we find Cole.’

Art leaned in and turned the heater up. ‘I mean, come on. It seems a lot like he’s done a runner, doesn’t it?’

‘What, because he’s not been in contact with his terrible parents whom I, too, hope never to speak to again?’

Art snorted. ‘Yeah, and disappeared with a stack of money he was the only person to know about. I don’t know what to tell you, Ted.’ He looked at her with mournful eyes. ‘The kid’s gone on purpose.’

Teddy was not so sure. All she knew was that there was somebody who nobody particularly seemed to love, and he was gone, and nobody knew where. A couple of thousand – if that’s all it was – wasn’t enough to run away with, not if you already had a decent job and lived at home with your mother. They needed to know more, but Teddy couldn’t help thinking: we are already too late.