I walked over and stood by the bench seat across the table from him. He didn’t look up.
“Mr. Kelly?” I asked. His eyes darted upward, but his head didn’t move.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“I’m Brady Weller,” I said. “I spoke with your wife a few hours ago. We’re supposed to meet at six P.M.” I looked at my watch. It was 5:46. “Looks like we’re both early.”
His face seemed to relax, but his eyes still looked a little nervous.
“Let’s get something to eat,” I said. “You hungry? I’m hungry.”
“No,” he said. “I’m okay.”
“We’ve got to eat,” I said. “It’ll look weird if we just sit here without eating anything.” I took a step toward the line of people at the order window. “Let me get you a cheeseburger.” He didn’t say anything; he barely looked up at me. “I’ll get you a cheeseburger,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”
I ordered two cheeseburgers all the way, two fries, a Sun Drop and a Cheerwine, both in the can. I carried the tray over to the booth where Kelly was sitting and divvied up the food before gesturing toward the two sodas. “You can have whichever one you want,” I said.
“Thanks,” he said, but he didn’t make a move for either of them, and he didn’t unwrap his cheeseburger. He finally picked up a french fry and put it in his mouth. I was starving, and I didn’t hesitate. I unwrapped my cheeseburger and took a bite, and then I emptied my little bag of fries on a napkin I’d opened beside my cheeseburger.
“So, Mr. Kelly,” I said, “I figure you know Wade Chesterfield.”
“Why are you looking for him?”
“I already told your wife,” I said. “His two daughters have gone missing, and somebody identified him as the last person seen with them. I’m looking for those two little girls.”
“I don’t know them,” he said.
“That’s fine,” I said. “I just want to know about Chesterfield. How long has he worked for you?”
“Maybe two years,” he said.
“And what does he do?”
“Whatever needs to be done,” he said. “Carpentry, painting, drywall.” He took a few french fries and popped them into his mouth. Then he opened the Cheerwine and took a sip.
“When’s the last time you saw him?” He looked at me for a second, and then he took another sip of his soda. He picked up a napkin and wiped his hands.
“Friday afternoon,” he said. “We were on a job.”
“Where was the job?”
“Calder Mountain,” he said.
I raised my eyebrows and took another bite of my cheeseburger. “That’s a pretty swank place. What kind of job was it?”
“Some guy’d just finished hanging drywall in his basement. He wanted us to mud it, tape it, come back and paint it when it dried.”
“Y’all didn’t hang it?” I asked.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because the guy had already done it.”
“He sounds like a pretty handy guy.”
“Not really,” he said. “The job was shit. The pieces were cut all wrong. That’s why Wade-” but he caught himself and stopped.
“That’s why Wade what?”
“Wade couldn’t stop talking about how bad the drywall job was,” he said. “And it was. I mean, the guy’d cut some of the sheets too long, and he’d used nails instead of screws. He’d beat that drywall all to hell trying to sink some of those nails.” He stopped talking and took his hands off the table and leaned back against his seat. “But that wasn’t the weird part.”
“What was?”
“The walls,” he said. “They were everywhere. It was like a maze down there: no outlets, no overhead lights. We had to run work lights so we could see. It was weird. Gave me the creeps as soon as we went in.”
“Did you ask the guy about it?”
“No way,” he said. “The last thing you want to do is tell a customer he’s done a bad job. That’s why I got pissed when Wade started messing with the walls.”
“Fixing them?”
“The guy had a few leftover pieces of drywall stacked on a pallet in one of the rooms. Wade wanted to fix the worst walls before we mudded and taped them.”
“And you didn’t want to?”
“No way,” he said. “That wasn’t our leftover drywall. I wasn’t going to use it without asking, and then do extra work I might not get paid for.”
“But Wade?”
“I went to get something out of the truck, and when I came back Wade had a pry bar and was jerking nails out of one of the walls.”
“And what did you do?”
“Nothing,” he said. “I didn’t have time to do anything before the drywall came down. It just exploded off the wall. Wade barely got out of the way.” He leaned forward and put his elbows on the table, and then he put his hands over his eyes and rubbed them. He looked at me. “That’s when we saw it.”
“Saw what?”
“The money,” he whispered.
“The money?”
“Shhhh,” he said, looking around to see if anyone had heard me. “Yeah,” he whispered, “money-stacks of it. It just came pouring out of the wall. There must’ve been thousands of dollars back there.” I couldn’t believe what he was telling me.
“And that’s why the guy had hung the drywall himself,” I said.
“That’s why,” he said.
“And that’s why he wanted you to finish it. To hide it.”
“Yep,” he said.
“What’s the guy’s name?”
“Broughton,” he said. “Tommy Broughton.”
Tommy Broughton: I almost coughed my Sun Drop up into my nose when I heard that name. Sandy and I had spent years dealing with him in one way or another; he was nothing but a small-time crook, but if Gaston County had had a hillbilly Mafia then Tommy Broughton would’ve wanted to be its Don Corleone. But he’d also spent plenty of time turning over evidence in investigations and trying to buddy up to the police. I’d always thought of him as one of those fat catfish swimming in the Catawba River, trudging along the bottom with his belly in the mud, his mouth open, feeding on whatever he came across. There was no way he’d earned that kind of money honestly, and even though he’d gotten this far he wasn’t smart enough to get away with an armored car heist, but he was stupid enough to hide money in his walls and then invite somebody like Wade Chesterfield to come over and admire his work. But I knew how dangerous stupid could be when stupid got scared, and Broughton scared easily.
“Had you met Broughton before this?”
“Yeah. A couple months ago at a bar he owns on Wilkinson. I did some work for him.”
“Was Wade on that job?”
“No,” he said.
“What’s the name of the bar?”
“Tomcat’s.”
I smiled and shook my head. “Tomcat’s? That’s cute. Find any money hidden in the walls there?”
“No,” he said, trying to smile. “Not there.”
“So, what did y’all do when you saw that money?”
“Me? I didn’t do anything. But Wade just freaked out.”
“How?”
“He started talking about how this could change our lives,” he said. “About how we could take the money and use the extra drywall to hide it. Said it would take Broughton forever to find out, especially if the rest of the walls had money in them. He said we could be long gone before he noticed anything.”
“What did you say?”
“I said, ‘No way.’ I wasn’t getting involved in something like that.”
“But Wade?”
“But Wade wanted to,” he said. “So he did, but I tried to stop him. I swear.”
What he’d just said made me stop and think, and I suddenly realized how quiet we’d been talking. I sat back and sized up Mr. Kelly: he was at least six feet tall, easily over two hundred pounds. I remembered the description on the back of Chesterfield’s baseball card: six-foot-one, 162.