The Stranger(62)
“I’m hoping you can help me.”
“You like buffalo wings?”
Adam nodded. “Sure.” Supposedly, Bonner had been a genius before his illness, but wasn’t that what they always say about someone with serious mental health issues? “You want me to get you some from Bub’s?”
Bonner looked aghast. “Bub’s is shit!”
“Right, sorry.”
“Ah, go away.” He waved a hand at Adam. “You don’t know nothing, man.”
“Sorry. Really. Look, I need your help.”
“Lots of people need my help. But I can’t be everywhere, now, can I?”
“No. But you can be here, right?”
“Huh?”
“In this lot. You can help with a problem in this lot. You can be here.”
Bonner lowered his bushy eyebrows to the point where Adam couldn’t see his eyes. “A problem? In my lot?”
“Yes. See, I was here the other night.”
“For the lacrosse draft,” Bonner said. “I know.”
The sudden recollection should have startled Adam, but for some reason, it didn’t. “Right, so anyway, my car got sideswiped by some out-of-towners.”
“What?”
“Did some pretty serious damage.”
“In my lot?
“Yeah. Young out-of-towners, I think. They were driving a gray Honda Accord.”
Bonner’s face reddened at the injustice. “You get the plate number?”
“No, that’s what I was hoping you could give me. So I can file a claim. They left at approximately ten fifteen.”
“Oh, right, I remember them.” Bonner took out his giant notebook and started paging through rapidly. “That was Monday.”
“Yes.”
He flipped more pages, his pace growing more and more frantic. Adam glanced over Bonner’s shoulder. Every page in the thick notebook was filled from top to bottom, from far left to far right, with tiny letters. Bonner kept turning pages at a furious clip.
Then suddenly, Bonner stopped.
“You found it?”
A slow grin came to Bonner’s face. “Hey, Adam?”
“What?”
Bonner turned the grin toward him. Then he did the gerbil wriggle again and said, “You got two hundred bucks on you?”
“Two hundred?”
“Because you’re lying to me.”
Adam tried to look perplexed. “What are you talking about?”
Bonner slammed the notebook closed. “Because, you see, I was here. I would have heard your car getting hit.”
Adam was about to counter when Bonner held up his palm.
“And before you tell me it was late or it was noisy or it was barely a scratch, don’t forget that your car is sitting right over there. It’s got no damage. And before you tell me you were driving your wife’s car or some other lie”—Bonner held up the notebook, still grinning—“I got the details of that night right here.”
Caught. Caught in a clumsy lie by Bonner.
“So the way I see it,” Bonner continued, “you want that guy’s license plate number for another reason. He and that cute blonde he was with. Yeah, yeah, I remember them because the rest of you clowns I’ve seen a million times. They were strangers. Didn’t belong. I wondered why they were here.” He grinned again. “Now I know.”
Adam thought about saying a dozen things, but he settled on the simplest: “Two hundred dollars, you say?”
“It’s a fair price. Oh, and I don’t take checks. Or quarters.”
Chapter 30
Old Man Rinsky said, “The car is a rental.”
They were in the hi-tech breakfast nook. Rinsky was all in beige today—beige corduroys, beige wool shirt, beige vest. Eunice was at the kitchen table, dressed for a garden party, having tea. Her makeup looked as though it’d been applied with a paintball gun. She had said, “Good morning, Norman,” when Adam came in. He had debated correcting her when Rinsky stopped him. “Don’t,” he’d said. “It’s called validation therapy. Let her run with it.”
“Any idea who rented the car on Monday?” Adam asked.
“Got it right here.” Rinsky squinted at the screen. “The name she used was Lauren Barna, but that’s a pseudonym. I did some digging and Barna is actually a woman named Ingrid Prisby. She lives in Austin, Texas.” His reading glasses were on a chain. He let them drop to his chest and turned around. “The name mean anything to you?”
“No.”
“Might take a little while, but I could run a background check on her.”
“That would be helpful.”
“No problem.”
So now what? He couldn’t just fly off to Austin. Should he get the woman’s phone number and call her, and say what exactly? Hi, my name is Adam Price, and you and some guy in a baseball cap told me a secret about my wife. . . .