No Time for Goodbye - Linwood Barclay [143]
Rolly’s look grew grim. “I just, I don’t want to bombard you with questions. You’ve only been home a couple of minutes.”
“Do you want to know how they died? What actually happened to them?”
“Sure,” he said.
“Maybe in a minute.” I took another drink of water. I hoped the Advils would kick in soon. “Rolly,” I said, “were you the one who delivered the money?”
“What?”
“The money. For Tess. To spend on Cynthia. It was you, wasn’t it?”
He licked his lip nervously. “What did Clayton tell you?”
“What do you think he told me?”
Rolly ran his hand over the top of his head, turned away from me. “He’s told you everything, hasn’t he?”
I said nothing. I decided it was better for Rolly to think I knew more than I actually did.
“Jesus Christ,” he said, shaking his head. “The son of a bitch. He swore he’d never tell. He thinks it was me that somehow led you to him, doesn’t he? That’s why he’s reneged on our arrangement.”
“Is that what you call it, Rolly? An arrangement?”
“We had a deal!” He shook his head in anger. “I’m so close. So close to retirement. All I want is some peace, to get out of that fucking school, to get away, to get out of this goddamn town.”
“Why don’t you just tell me about it, Rolly? See if your version matches Clayton’s.”
“He’s told you about Connie Gormley, hasn’t he? About the accident.”
I didn’t say anything.
“We were coming back from a fishing trip,” Rolly said. “It was Clayton’s idea to stop for a beer. I could have done the drive home without stopping, but I said okay. We went into this bar, we were just going to have a beer and go, and this girl, she starts coming on to me, you know?”
“Connie Gormley.”
“Yeah. I mean, she’s sitting with me, and she’s had a few beers, and I ended up having a few more. Clayton, he’s kind of taking it easy, tells me to do the same, but I don’t know what the hell happened. This Connie and I, we both slip out of the bar while Clayton’s taking a leak, end up out back of the bar in the backseat of her car.”
“You and Millicent, you were married then,” I said. It wasn’t really a judgment, I simply wasn’t sure. But Rolly’s scowl made clear how he’d taken it.
“Once in a while,” he said, “I’d slip.”
“So you slipped with Connie Gormley. How’d she end up going from that backseat to that ditch?”
“When we…when we were done, and I was heading back to the bar, she asked me for fifty bucks. I told her if she was a hooker she should have made that clear from the outset, but I don’t know if she even was a hooker. Maybe she just needed the fifty. Anyway, I wouldn’t pay her, and she said maybe she’d look me up sometime, at my home, get the money from my wife.”
“Oh.”
“She started scrapping with me by the car, and I guess I shoved back, a little too hard, and she tripped and her head came down right on the bumper, and that was it.”
“She was dead,” I said.
Rolly swallowed. “People had seen us, right? In the bar? They might remember me and Clayton. I figured, if she got hit by a car instead, the police would think it was some sort of accident, that she’d gone walking, that she was drunk, they wouldn’t be looking for some guy she picked up in the bar.”
I was shaking my head.
“Terry,” he said, “if you’d been in that situation, you’d have been panicking, too. I got Clayton, told him what I’d done, and there was something in his face, like he felt he was as trapped by the situation as I was, he didn’t want to be talking to any cops. I didn’t know then, about the kind of life he was living, that he wasn’t who he claimed to be, that he was living a double life. So we put her in the car, took her down the highway, then Clayton held her up at the side of the road, tossed her in front of the car as I drove past. Then we put her in the ditch.”
“My God,” I said.
“Isn’t a night goes by I don’t think about it, Terry. It was a horrible thing. But sometimes, you have to be in a situation to appreciate what has to be done.” He shook his head again. “Clayton swore he’d never tell. The son of a bitch.”
“He didn