Chapter XXXV
CHAPTER XXXV
I haven’t learned a lot during my years on this earth, or not much worth sharing. Getting shot hurts, but you probably worked that out already, while getting shot more than once constitutes carelessness, a death wish, or a message from God to seriously reconsider your lifestyle choices. The great mass of people are fundamentally decent, but the worst make the most noise and do harm out of all proportion to their numbers. Fear is more prevalent than hatred, but the first morphs easily into the second, which is why moral courage is essential. Never trust strangers who call you pal, buddy, or friend, because they mean you no good.
And here’s something else: most people want to talk. They want to share their thoughts. They want to be heard, to be recognized. The ones who don’t are either without insecurity or insane—which, when examined closely, is the same thing. If you give them the opportunity, and are patient, men and women will tell you a great deal more than they might originally have intended, especially in the case of those who have been asked, perhaps out of friendship or weakness, to conceal knowledge of an act they believe to be wrong.
The noise of Dunkin’, the comings and goings, faded away, leaving only Rybek, me, and the last word Rybek had spoken: children . I broke the silence.
“Wyatt Riggins was involved in a kidnapping?”
Rybek appeared miserable but relieved. The wound had been lanced. The poison was flowing out.
“What he admitted was that they took children out of Mexico in December, and it was a real bad idea. Which, you know, maybe goes without saying.”
“Who were these children?”
“He didn’t say. He wasn’t crying when he came clean, not exactly, but he was close. I could hear his voice catching. I could also see that he was worried, even scared.”
“And how did you respond?”
“I probably wore the same expression you’re wearing now,” said Rybek. “Taking someone’s kids is about as low as a man can sink, next to taking their lives. This wasn’t the Wyatt I’d grown up with, and I told him so, but he said he hadn’t known.”
“Wait, he was engaged in an operation that required at least a month of preparation and he wasn’t aware of its purpose? That doesn’t sound plausible.”
“He claimed he’d been employed to steal artifacts, except the word used was transfer . He’d been informed that those items properly belonged in a museum, except the museums down there had nowhere to display the stuff they already had, so they’d hardly be missed. They’d also been looted, which meant they were stolen property. Once they were in the United States, they’d be sold to private collectors. It was a victimless crime, unless you counted the original thieves as victims, which no one was in a hurry to do.”
We were in no danger of being overheard, but still we kept our voices low, as though even to speak of this was somehow shameful.
“Then he gets to the location that’s been targeted, and instead of looted treasure, he finds children waiting to be transported across the border?”
“Four of them,” said Rybek. “That’s the story, more or less. It began in Ruski’s and unraveled further at my place, so Wyatt was pretty messed up toward the end. We both were, and I might have missed some of the particulars. Plus, Wyatt was rubbing his face and mouth, and mumbling some, so I couldn’t always make out what he was saying. By the end, he didn’t even seem to be speaking to me. I think he was trying to apologize to those kids.”
“Were they to be ransomed?”
“I asked him if they’d wanted to leave Mexico,” said Rybek. “Like, whether it could have been a custody thing, with the kids taken south of the border against their will and one of the parents paying to have them snatched back to the United States.”
“How did Wyatt reply?”
“He told me the children didn’t say anything at all. Then he laughed, but not because he’d found something funny. He laughed because it was better than the other option.”
Rybek flicked his fingers, like a man casting seeds to the wind.
“Which was when Wyatt said he needed to stop drinking, stop smoking, and particularly, stop talking. We were done. He called an Uber to take him back to Zetta’s place. Like flipping a dime, he was sobering up. He warned me to keep my mouth shut before we parted, as if I needed telling. Not because of anything he might do—he wasn’t threatening me—but in case someone else might hear.”
“Did he give any indication of who that person might be?”
“I’m no detective, but whoever they stole those kids from would be my first guess.”
Rybek let that hang, along with the implication.
“The second,” I said, “being whoever employed Wyatt and the others to take them out of Mexico.”
I closed my notebook, less to signal we were done than that whatever was said next would not be recorded.
“Do you think Donna Lawrence was instructed to find a position for Wyatt at BrightBlown?” I asked.
“Wyatt knew about selling pot to college kids,” said Rybek, “and he could roll a joint better than I can, which is no faint praise, but he wasn’t about to make employee of the month at BrightBlown. Unless he fell from the sky and was fortunate enough to land next to Donna on a day she was feeling uncommonly tolerant, which seems a stretch, I’d say that, yes, she was under orders to put him on the payroll.”
“Do you know who owns BrightBlown?”
“I know the name of the holding company listed on my pay stub, if that’s what you mean.”
“It’s not.”
“I didn’t think so. Yes, I know who owns BrightBlown ultimately: Devin Vaughn. I was one of the first hires and I did my homework before I signed the contract.”
“Were you uneasy?”
“That a criminal was the beneficial owner of a cannabis concern? Until recently, everyone involved in the industry was technically a criminal. I was a criminal, with a record that said so. There’s being particular and then there’s being hypocritical. I’ll concede that I had some questions, but I made sure to ask them quietly.”
“Of whom?”
“Donna Lawrence. She told me shortly after I joined that Vaughn was only one of a number of investors in the business, even if he was the major stakeholder. BrightBlown, like his motels and stores, was legit and she was determined to keep it that way.”
“Did you believe her?”
“I chose to. I don’t count the cash at the end of the day, and I don’t balance the books. Officially, I’m deaf, dumb, and blind, beyond checking on the plants and directing customers to their best high. Unofficially, I’d admit to suspecting that if BrightBlown has investors other than Vaughn, they’re all linked to him and do his bidding. Also, even with my math skills, I can tell there might be some discrepancy between the amounts of cash taken in and those declared, if not so much recently.”
“A large discrepancy?”
“I told you, I don’t balance the books.”
“Which isn’t to say you don’t glance at them.”
“You know,” said Rybek, “I really am sorry I agreed to talk to you.”
“You’d have been sorrier if you hadn’t. I’d have stuck to you like gum on your shoe.”
“Huh. Is that where gumshoe comes from? I’d never thought of it that way.”
“I believe it refers to rubber-soled shoes, which make less noise. So we just missed out on being called galoshes .”
“Small mercies,” said Rybek. “As for the accounts, I’ve seen inflated bills from some of our contractors, large and small. I only raised them once with Donna, in a jokey way, and that was during my probation period. She accidentally included an invoice from one of our courier companies, misfiled with plans for a reorganization of the customer displays. I found it, handed it back to her, and said I’d get a couple of kids on bikes to make deliveries for a quarter of the price. She thanked me for my input but advised me to mind my own business. I didn’t bother to point out that she’d made it my business by misplacing the paperwork to begin with. I didn’t think it would go down well.
“And on the cash side, even when we had quiet weeks, we didn’t really, or not on paper. That’s what surprised me, if only for, like, thirty seconds. I could understand a business underdeclaring to hide money from the IRS but not overdeclaring, until I remembered Devin Vaughn. If the feds arrest me for involvement in money laundering, I suppose I can always claim brain impairment and behavioral disinhibition due to my working environment.”
I wouldn’t have wanted to spend an evening at Rybek’s condo listening to his choice of music, but if drollness ever became an Olympic sport, he was a shoo-in.
“But there’s less of that now?” I asked.
“Yeah, now we’re not overdeclaring, but the opposite. For us, cash is king and it goes out as soon as it comes in. BrightBlown is doing better than okay, but that doesn’t mean some other part of the Vaughn empire isn’t. Cannabis is making up the shortfall.”
He gazed at me sadly.
“You know how they say confession eases the soul?” he asked. “I’d like to interrogate that view. I may just have implicated a friend in a kidnapping and my employer in criminal activity, and I don’t feel happy about either.”
“I’m still not going to talk to the police,” I said. “What I have is a rumor that Wyatt Riggins may have been involved in the removal of four children from Mexico, and the possibility of poor accounting practices at a largely cash-only business. The second is none of my concern. As for the first, I’m being paid to establish Riggins’s whereabouts, and one task may feed into the other. Have you been completely straight with me?”
“About Wyatt and BrightBlown? Absolutely.”
“Then I’ll keep your name out of it, whatever happens. But if you hear anything else, especially if Riggins gets back in touch, I’d appreciate you letting me know.”
I passed him a business card.
“Try not to use that for a roll-up,” I said.
He fingered the card dubiously.
“I prefer higher-quality material. Did you run these cards off yourself? Because I swear, we have a better grade of paper in the employee restrooms. What now?”
“You spend a few days out of town, just as Donna Lawrence instructed—or more than a few, if she’s willing to cover the tab. Getting rid of you was a way to buy time, but would only ever be a temporary fix. I’m not even sure why she brought up your name. I think she might have panicked; that, or she was worried Zetta might already have mentioned your friendship with Riggins.”
“It’s a mess, isn’t it?” said Rybek. “Even before Wyatt reappeared, I’d been considering working somewhere else. There’s a startup outside Bangor that looks promising. It’s honest, as far as I can tell. Then again, compared to where I am right now, Enron was aboveboard.”
“I didn’t know anything about Devin Vaughn’s ownership of BrightBlown until this week, when my lawyer informed me of it,” I said. “He got the story from a client, who also heard rumors that Vaughn is overextended financially, which may be forcing him to blur the lines between his legitimate and criminal interests. If those rumors are in the air, you can be sure law enforcement won’t be far behind. BrightBlown may soon come under intense federal scrutiny.”
“Shit,” said Rybek.
“In addition, Donna Lawrence’s actions indicate that it may have been Vaughn who sent Wyatt Riggins to Mexico as part of a snatch team to abduct or retrieve those children. If that’s why Wyatt disappeared, the operation has started to go bad. It can only mean someone has come looking for the children and, by extension, whoever took them.”
“Double shit,” said Rybek.
And if those people came hunting for Wyatt Riggins but failed to find him, they might instead apply pressure to those who knew him, which would put Zetta Nadeau in their sights, not to mention the man seated opposite me. The look of worry on Rybek’s face implied he had reached the same conclusion.
“Being advised to skip town to avoid private investigators is not conducive to a contented life,” he said, “but skipping town to avoid disgruntled Mexicans might be. I feel an extended vacation coming on, one that could shade into permanency. I may have been wise to talk to you after all.”
“Wisdom comes with age,” I told him. “Like arthritis. One last question: Did Wyatt own a gun?”
“I asked him the same thing,” said Rybek. “He said he kept one at home and one taped under the driver’s seat of his car, but I wasn’t to say anything to Zetta—not that I would have, even if she and I had gotten on better.”
“What was the problem?”
“A lack of common interests, Wyatt apart. She doesn’t smoke and doesn’t like the Chili Peppers.” He shook his head in sorrow. “I can understand the first, but the second?”
We left Dunkin’ and walked to our cars. Rybek paused beside his Daewoo. I urged him to get rid of it in favor of a less conspicuous ride. He might also want to avoid using his credit card for a week or so.
“I have enough cash to keep my girlfriend and me going for months,” he said. “BrightBlown isn’t alone in knowing how to work the system. What about my cell phone?”
“If you’re serious about not returning to BrightBlown,” I said, “get a new number, but be sure to share it with me. Look, we may be overreacting. Wyatt could have been talking through his hat after a long night, and his upping sticks may have nothing to do with Devin Vaughn or Mexico. There may be no children, in which case there’s no threat.
“On the other hand, if what he revealed to you was true, he’s left a spoor that leads here, and questions may be asked of anyone who’s been in contact with him. Questioning comes in two forms. You’ve just been on the end of the first kind, and you don’t want to experience the second. But even if Wyatt Riggins is a fantasist, my information on BrightBlown is solid. Devin Vaughn’s house of straw is shaking. You don’t want to be under it when it collapses and a torch is applied to the wreckage.”
“If Vaughn was involved with the abduction,” asked Rybek, “and he knows Wyatt has run, won’t he be worried?”
“Probably, but Vaughn has men and guns. Also, if he tries to hide, especially with his other difficulties, he puts the larger operation at risk. His allies will sense fear, and his rivals will taste blood in the water. Whatever part Vaughn played in that Mexican grab, he has no choice but to let the consequences work themselves out and hope whatever gamble he’s made pays off.”
“One last thing,” said Rybek. “If you’re looking for Wyatt, and these people, whoever they may be, are also looking for him, doesn’t it mean your interests and theirs may—”
“Coincide?” I finished for him.
“I was thinking ‘conflict.’?”
“Either way, the answer is yes.”
“I hope you got paid in advance.”
“Perhaps I’ll name you in my will in return for your cooperation, so you feel invested in the outcome.”
“You know,” said Rybek, with feeling, “everything being equal, I’d prefer if you didn’t name me at all.”