2
I thought about what Bennett Patchett had said when I returned to my house in Scarborough and sat down at my desk to make notes on our conversation. If Joel Tobias was beating his girlfriend then he deserved to experience some grief of his own, but I wondered if Bennett knew what he was getting himself into. Even if I found something that he could use against Tobias, I didn’t believe it would have much impact on the relationship, not unless what I found was so terrible that any woman who wasn’t clinically insane would instantly pack her bags and head for the hills. I had also tried to warn him that Karen Emory might not thank him for getting involved in her personal affairs, even if Tobias was being violent toward her. Still, if that had been Bennett’s sole reason for becoming involved in his employee’s business, his motives would have been sound, and I could have afforded to give him a little of my time. After all, he was paying for it.
The problem was that Karen Emory’s well-being was not the sole reason for his approach to me. In fact, it was a dupe, a means of opening a separate but linked investigation into the death of his son, Damien. It was clear that Bennett believed Joel Tobias bore some responsibility for the change in Damien Patchett’s behavior, a change that had led, finally, to his self-destruction. Ultimately, all investigations instigated by individuals and conducted outside the corporate or law enforcement spheres are personal, but some are more personal than others. Bennett wanted someone to answer for his son’s death in the absence of his son being able to answer for it himself. Some fathers, in a similar situation, might have directed their anger at the military for failing to recognize the torments of a returning soldier, or at the failings of psychiatrists, but, according to Bennett, his son had returned from the war relatively unscathed. That claim, in itself, warranted further investigation, but for now Joel Tobias was, in Bennett’s eyes, as much a suspect in Damien Patchett’s death as if he had steadied Damien’s hand as the trigger was pulled.
Bennett was a curious man. While he might have had a soft center, the exterior was like a crocodile’s plated carapace: Bennett was solid now, but he had served time. As a young man, he had fallen in with a group of guys out of Auburn who had taken down gas stations and grocery stores before progressing to the big time, and a raid on the Farmers First Bank in Augusta, during which a weapon was waved and shots were fired, albeit blanks. It hadn’t netted them a whole lot, about two thousand dollars plus change, and soon the cops had informally identified at least one of the members of the gang. He was hauled in, sweated for a while, and finally rolled over on the rest of his accomplices in return for a reduced sentence. Bennett, who had been the wheelman, was facing ten years and served five. He was no career criminal. Five years in Thomaston, a fortress prison from the nineteenth century, still bearing the mark of its old gallows as assuredly as if it had been burnt into the earth, had convinced him of the error of his ways. He had returned to his father’s business with his tail between his legs, and he’d kept out of trouble ever since. That didn’t mean that he had any great fondness for the law, and being ratted out by someone in the past meant that Bennett wasn’t about to rat out anyone else in turn. He may not have cared much for Joel Tobias, but hiring me instead of going to the cops was a very Bennettian compromise, I thought, as was asking me to investigate one man in the hope that it might reveal the truth behind the death of another.
Nothing is secret anymore. With a little ingenuity, and a little cash, you can find out a great deal about people that they might have believed, or have preferred to remain, confidential and protected. It’s even easier when you’re a licensed private investigator. Within an hour, I had Joel Tobias’s credit history laid out on my desk. There were no outstanding warrants against him and, from what I could see, he had never been in trouble with the police. Since he had been invalided out of the military just over a year earlier, he seemed to have worked hard, paid his bills, and led what, to all appearances, was a regular, blue collar existence.
One of my grandfather’s favorite words was ‘hinky’. Milk that was just about to go off might taste a little hinky. A tiny, almost inaudible noise in his car engine might lead to suspicions of undiagnosed hinkiness in the carburetor. For him, something that was hinky was more troubling than something that was outright wrong, simply because the nature of the flaw was undefined. He would know that it was there, but he would not be able to tackle it because its true face had not yet revealed itself. What was wrong could either be dealt with or lived with, but what was hinky would come between him and his sleep.
Joel Tobias’s affairs were hinky. His rig, with a sleeper, had cost him eighty-five thousand dollars when he’d bought it. Despite what Bennett had said, it wasn’t quite new when he picked it up, but it was as good as. At the same time, he’d also purchased a ‘dry van,’ or box trailer, for another ten thousand. He’d put five percent down, and was paying off the rest monthly, at a rate of interest that wasn’t excessive and might even have been considered pretty favorable, but he was still eating about twenty-five hundred dollars a month in payments. In addition, that same month he’d bought himself a new Chevy Silverado. He’d negotiated himself a pretty good deal on it: eighteen thousand dollars, which was six thousand off the regular dealer price, and he was paying that loan off at 280 dollars a month. Finally, the payments on the mortgage on his house in Portland, just off Forest and not far from the Great Lost Bear, as it happened, came to another thousand a month. The house had been his uncle’s, and had already fallen into arrears when it was left to Joel in his uncle’s will. Taken together, it all meant that Tobias needed to be taking in almost five thousand dollars each month just to keep his head above water, and that was before he paid for insurance, medical coverage, gas for his Chevy, food, heating, beer, and whatever else he needed to make his life comfortable. Add in, conservatively, another thousand dollars per month for all that, and Tobias’s annual earnings would have to be in the region of seventy thousand dollars after taxes. It wasn’t completely unattainable, given that, as an owner-operator, Tobias could expect to earn about ninety cents per mile, plus fuel, but he’d be working long hours to do it, and would need to put in the miles. In addition, he was probably receiving compensation for his injured hand, and maybe for his leg as well. At a guess, he was pulling down somewhere between five hundred and twelve hundred dollars tax free each month for his injuries, which would help some with his bills but would still leave him with a lot of cash to earn on the road. His credit rating remained steady, he hadn’t defaulted on any of his loans, and he was paying contributions into his IRA.
But according to Bennett, or the impression he had gained, Tobias wasn’t working all the hours God had given him. In fact, Tobias didn’t seem to have many financial worries at all, which suggested that there was money coming in from somewhere other than what he earned by driving, or received in comp; that, or he had money stored away, and was subsidizing his business from his savings, which meant that he wouldn’t be in business for very long.