Page 65 of A Week Away
I went back in. The building was very quiet. Claudia was probably right when she said there were a lot of empty offices. I walked the hallway until I got to the rest rooms at the front. I went into the men’s. There was a urinal and two stalls, as well as two sinks both with mirrors. There was a paper towel dispenser on the wall and a tall garbage can with a plastic lining.
I took the top off the garbage can and looked down into it. There was very little trash in there, so either the janitor emptied it last night or the police took it. Probably the later.
Then I went into each of the stalls, took the lid off the toilet tank, looked inside, ran my hand around the back and the bottom as best I could. Yes, I’d seenThe Godfather.No, I did not find the gun. There were not a lot of other places to look.
The ceiling was a drop ceiling, large acoustic-style tile resting on a metal frame. I lifted the flimsy lid on one of the toilets and then, carefully placing my feet, I stood up, clinging to the stall walls and reached up to pop a tile. Sliding the tile to one side, I felt around. Nothing. Nothing was hidden up there. I got down and then checked the tile over the other toilet.
I was out of places to search, so I went into the ladies room next door and repeated the whole process. Nothing. Nada. Then I went up to the second floor. In the men’s room, which was the same as the one downstairs, the first thing I noticed was that on the tile over the stall closest to the wall there were a number of dirty handprints. I opened the stall and saw that there was fingerprint powder everywhere, including the tile above my head. There was no reason to search the rest of bathroom.
The police had already been there and they’d found something hidden in the ceiling. The hoodie or the gun or both. I stood there thinking for a bit. I was roughly six-foot three-inches. The toilet was about eighteen inches at the seat. That was seven feet nine inches. Add an inch or so for my shoes, seven foot ten. My arm was about two and a half feet. Over ten feet total.
I guessed the ceiling hung at about nine feet from the floor. I could have probably touched it if I tried. So… How short could someone be and, standing on the toilet, manage to get a gun and/or a hoodie up into the ceiling? Probably as short as five foot four, give or take. Which meant pretty much anyone, and that didn’t tell me anything.
Back in the Thunderbird, I sat for a moment thinking about what I’d learned. The police had a video of the killing. They had at least one piece of physical evidence, the hoodie or the gun. They might have fingerprints, they also might not. Most of this had not been released to the press.
It didn’t support the idea of this being a random carjacking gone wrong.
CHAPTERNINETEEN
September 17, 1996
Tuesday lunchtime
Who am I? I needed to decide who I was. I’d managed to gloss over the whole name thing when we’d talked to people, but I knew I couldn’t walk into a room full of people and not give them a name. Obviously, I wasn’t Dom Reilly. Was it safe to be Charles Henderson?
The police weren’t investigating the family. Or at least not yet. They’d decided a Black kid had killed Joanne. But that could change. What if they started asking questions about the family and my name came up? What should that name be?
Charles Henderson had recently flown to Los Angeles and never came back to Detroit. Cass Reilly had flown from Los Angeles to Reno and then to Detroit. There were no records as to how he’d gotten to Los Angeles.
It was okay that I was registered in a motel as Charles Henderson and that I rented a car under that name. As long as I didn’t go introducing myself to Cass’s family as Charles, that name should never come up in an invest?—
Oh shit. I’d made a mistake. A big one. Cass had flown to Reno, flown to Detroit with Dom Reilly. That was bad. Really bad. I needed to do some work covering that up. I needed to have a long conversation with Cass.
Before I got out of the car, I decided it might be smart to drive around the block. I drove to the end of the street and turned right. Approaching the next block, I slowed so I could look down the street and not have to—yup, as expected there was the white van. The Chevy Suburban was probably in front of it. I didn’t worry about whether it was actually there. Seeing the van there was enough.
I kept going forward and then worked my way back to Cass’s house in such a way that the Feds couldn’t see me. I parked a half block away from the house and walked down. Cass’s Belvedere sat in the driveway, seeming not to have moved since the last time I’d been there. The Voyager was there again, parked on the street this time, as was the blue Corvette. There seemed to be more Sedan DeVilles than there had been the night before.
Getting to the front door, I rang the bell. After a few moments Aunt Suzie answered. She let me into the foyer, but that was as far as I got before she said, “I called Big Brothers of America. They don’t work with any nonprofits who find kids’ lost parents.”
I put a smile on my face and said, “Sorry about that. Didn’t Cass tell you we met in an AOL chatroom about missing relatives. My daughter was missing for two years. Drugs. I was able to find her and get her into rehab. She’s doing really well now.”
“Is he paying you? That’s what he told me.”
“He’s just paying a few of my expenses.”
She searched my face for signs that I was telling the truth.
“You also didn’t tell me your name when you came to my house.”
“Nick. Nick Nowak.” Ironic that after hiding out for eleven years the safest name I could think of was to use was my own.
“Is that short for Dominick?”
“No. Mikolaj.”
“Pollack,” she said, looking suspicious again. “Pollacks say No-vack, not No-wack.”
“Yeah, well my grandparents got tired of having our name spelled wrong all the time so they started using a more American pronunciation.” It was the truth, but I wasn’t sure she believed me. I distracted her with, “How is Cass doing?”
