Maya was staring at me, so I made my way over to her.
“I am so sorry,” she said, “but Mr. Hampton asked me to make sure you leave.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “I don’t want to cause you any problems. I just wanted to ask—”
I was about to launch into a few questions about Nate—shots in the dark, mostly, hoping I’d get lucky. But then the door opened, and the salesman in the sports coat and the striped shirt maneuvered the young couple inside. He had his hands on their shoulders, and he was talking so loudly that, even from across the room, my ears were ringing. His volume rose even more, though, as he delivered what sounded like the punchline to a joke: “And the man says, ‘You have to keep your worms warm.’” Without missing a beat, he looked over at Maya and me and shouted, “Maya, let’s get Robby and Nina something to drink.”
The young couple exchanged pained glances, although that might have had more to do with the fact that the salesman had a death grip on their shoulders.
“Excuse me,” Maya said.
It all came together in an instant: who Nate Hampton was, and what he wanted—the DEAL OF THE MONTH plaques, his face in every advertisement, the instant groveling when Mrs. Carlson had gotten angry. I wasn’t a psychiatrist or a psychologist or a therapist. If you asked Keme, I wasn’t even allowed to use the microwave without adult supervision (although that was one time, and I only forgot the spoon because I was so excited about the hot fudge). But you spend enough time writing about people, thinking about people, trying to get inside their heads, and you learn a thing or two. Plus, it doesn’t hurt to have a mom who checks herself into psych wards for fun.
I nodded and asked, “Do you mind if I use your phone? My battery is almost dead.”
“Oh sure. You press this button to dial out.” And then, with an apologetic smile, Maya hurried to get Robby and Nina something to drink. I was guessing they’d like a big helping of cyanide.
I gave the phone’s complicated array of buttons a quick study. And then I picked up the receiver and pressed a button. The Muzak overhead cut off, and my voice echoed over the sound system.
“Hi, everyone. My name is Dash, and I’m excited to wish you a happy Halloween from Hampton Automotive. We’ve got some tricks and some treats for you today. Our first treat is going to be a dramatic reading about Mr. Nate Hampton and the Hastings Rock Sewage Improvement Fund—he loves tricks, and I’m going to share one of his best ones with you.”
That was as far as I got before Nate Hampton—who cared about approval and validation and awards and being liked (and who also probably had a healthy interest in not going to prison)—burst into the showroom. The color was high in his cheeks, and his eyes were glassy as he stared around the room. Maya was staring back. Robby and Nina were staring back. The salesman seemed to have forgotten whatever he was saying (probably another joke), and it looked like Nina might try to make a break for it.
I cocked my head at Nate in question.
“Sorry about that, folks,” Nate called with a quite frankly unbelievable attempt at good cheer. “Dash loves playing jokes on us. Excuse me for a minute.”
I gave my tiny audience a rueful smile and hung up the phone.
“What are you doing?” Nate asked in a furious whisper as he came toward me. “Are you out of your mind?”
“Why don’t we talk about that?”
Nate shot another look at the salesman and the hostages—er, customers. “Hurry up,” he said and stalked off.
Instead of heading for his cubicle, though, he led me through a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY. Behind us, excited conversation broke out, but the door swung shut, cutting it off. A short hallway connected with a pair of restrooms, a cramped kitchenette, and what appeared to be storerooms. Above a toaster oven, a poster showed a smiling Nate Hampton and THE ABC’S OF HAMPTON AUTOMOTIVE: ALWAYS BE CLOSING. I caught a whiff of Totino’s pizza and despair.
Spinning to face me, Nate asked, “What do you want?”
“I want to talk to you about Gerry Webb’s murder.”
“I don’t know anything about that.”
“But you can see why I’d find that hard to believe, right? I saw Gerry’s files. I know he was blackmailing you.”
Nate flinched. He couldn’t quite meet my eyes as he mumbled, “It was a misunderstanding. I didn’t—I wouldn’t—”
“I don’t care about the embezzlement. Well, I do, but I’m not here to talk about that. How much were you paying Gerry?”
“Huh?”
“The blackmail. How much was he taking you for?”
“I wasn’t paying him.” And then, as though I were a little slow, he said, “He wanted help with the zoning and the permits for his development.”
That explained one thing: how Gerry had gotten permission to build on sacred land.
“That’s all?” I asked.
“That’s all? Man, do you know how hard that was? I busted my hump making it happen. Ruined my reputation in town, too. Half the people around here think I was getting kickbacks from Gerry, and the other half think I’m out of my mind.”
“That must be hard,” I said. “But once you got him the permits, what did Gerry start squeezing you for?”
“Nothing. I already told you.”
“Then why did you attack him at the surfing competition?”
A hint of color rose in Nate’s cheeks. “He told me he’d let me invest in the development. After I’d fixed everything, though, he told me he already had a partner, and he wasn’t interested in adding someone else. I tried to let it go, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I just kept thinking and thinking. And then I saw him at that stupid competition, and—I didn’t even know what I was doing. It was like somebody else was doing it, you know?”
I wasn’t sure I believed all of that, but I believed part of it. Somebody as desperate for validation as Nate would have to work himself up to that level of aggression; it would take a lot to force him out of the patterns of placating and pleading I’d seen from him today. The real question, though, was what had happened after the surf challenge. Had that attack at the beach been an isolated incident? Or had Nate whipped himself into a frenzy again after his public humiliation?
“How long has Gerry been blackmailing you?”
“I don’t know. A year. A little more. He showed up here one day. He introduced himself, told me he had an eye on some land, wanted to talk to me about a business opportunity. I told him no way—getting on the bad side of the Confederated Tribes is a sure way to piss off pretty much everybody in town. I thought that was the end of it. The next time I saw him, he was at my front door showing me—”
“Showing you what?”
“You know. Papers.”
