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“Is Robbie one to keep cash around?” she asked, bending over for a quick look beneath the bed, checking for a stash or a body, finding nothing but dust.
“He’s unemployed. Where would he get any cash to speak of?”
Selling drugs. Selling himself. Fencing stolen goods. The list of unlawful cash sources rolled through Annie’s head, but she said none of it.
“What about any valuables? Watches, rings, neck chains—anything like that?”
“We gave him a nice watch when he graduated from high school,” B’Lynn said. “He sold it to buy drugs.”
On the dresser, a plastic dish held loose change and a matchbook from the Quik Pik convenience store on the south side of town.
“Is he a drinker?”
“He’s not supposed to be. I know he’ll have a beer now and again, but other than that, he doesn’t drink in front of me.”
“No DUIs on his record?”
“When he was eighteen he totaled his father’s Porsche. He was drunk and high. That prompted his first trip to rehab,” B’Lynn said as they moved from the bedroom to a bathroom the size of a phonebooth. She stood in the doorway while Annie checked the medicine cabinet. “He lost his license for two years the next time it happened, but it hasn’t happened since…that I know of.”
As young bachelor bathrooms went, this one was better than average in terms of cleanliness. It smelled of mildew, but so did the rest of the old house. A used bath towel hung over the shower curtain rod instead of being left in a crumpled heap on the floor. The toilet seat was up, but the bowl was flushed. The medicine cabinet held a razor, shaving foam, a bottle of Advil, a bottle of mouthwash. No hard drugs. Of course, Rayanne Tillis could have helped herself to any prescription bottles on a prior visit.
The tiny kitchen was suspiciously tidy. Someone had taken the trash out. There were no dirty dishes in the sink, no food left out on the counters. Nothing had boiled over on the 1970s vintage stove and been left to crust over. Junkies generally lived in squalor, their only concern being their next high.
Annie glanced at B’Lynn. “Is this the way he left it?”
“No,” she admitted. “I washed a few dishes and took out the trash last week.”
Took out the trash and any evidence that might have been in it.
“I wasn’t going to leave it and get roaches. This place is bad enough as it is.”
“You didn’t take any pills out of here, did you?” Annie asked bluntly. “Or drug paraphernalia?”
“No. Absolutely not. What good would it do me to lie about it?”
“None,” Annie said. “But that doesn’t stop people doing it.”
In her experience, people often preferred to hold on to a fairy tale about a loved one than admit a brutal truth, to protect the loved one’s reputation or simply to protect their own feelings. B’Lynn Fontenot didn’t strike her as one of those people, but at the same time, she was a mother wanting to believe her son was staying on the straight and narrow when he had run his life into a ditch again and again.
“I quit lying to myself about Robbie a long time ago, Detective,”she said wearily. “I’m sure as hell not going to lie about him to you. I want him back, whatever state he’s in. I’m not going to sabotage the effort by painting a pretty picture.”
“Good.”
They moved on to the front room of the house, a small living room with stained wallpaper, old linoleum, and furniture that stank of decades of cigarettes. There was a conspicuous blank spot on a console table where the television had been and a disconnected gaming station on the shelf beneath. There was nothing personal in the room, no photos, no mementos.
“I don’t see his laptop anywhere,” B’Lynn said. “It’s a silver MacBook.”
An item to list on the search warrant for whatever shithole Rayanne Tillis lived in, Annie thought. That was something, anyway. Or he might have made a habit of taking the laptop with him when he left the house, considering the neighborhood he lived in.
The house wasn’t giving her much else to go on. It hadn’t been tossed. There was no evidence of a violent struggle. There was no wall calendar with a big red circle around the date Robbie Fontenot had disappeared, no cryptic scribbled note with a phone number or a name on it. Those were things people Robbie Fontenot’s age kept in their smartphone instead of conveniently leaving them lying around the house for the cops to find.
It looked like he had simply gone out and not come back. Danny Perry had been telling nothing but the truth when he said the welfare check executed by himself and Detective Rivette had given them no cause for concern. The only interesting part of that story was that Rivette had shown up at all. A simple welfare check was not usually of any interest to a detective. Maybe Rivette was making more of an effort than B’Lynn realized.
“All right,” Annie said on a sigh. “Let’s go.”
“That’s it?” B’Lynn asked. “Aren’t you going to dust for fingerprints or something?”
“Aside from the TV thief, this doesn’t appear to be a crime scene.”
