Something Missing (11 page)

In most homes, Martin would have been able to walk past the stairs into another room, customarily a dining room or den, but since the Claytons had designed the home themselves, a coat closet stood where an entrance to another room was usually positioned. Though this might also make a decent hiding place, the door to the closet was also closed, and Martin couldn’t risk the sound of it swinging open and shut.

Still frozen in the southeast corner of the living room, Martin watched as Alan Clayton strode across the kitchen, opened the refrigerator door, and stuck his reflective head inside. He sensed that there were only seconds in which to act. If Alan Clayton turned even slightly, Martin’s frame would fill his line of sight.

With beer in hand, Alan Clayton closed the refrigerator door, popped the tab on the can, and turned directly toward the living
room. “Hey!” he shouted loud enough to send a second streak of fear through Martin’s body as he lay crouched behind the sofa along the south wall of the room. There was just enough space for a person to navigate between the sofa and the south wall, and Martin had ducked into the space with just seconds to spare, stomach pressed to the ground, shoulder jammed against a gold-plated lamp, willing himself to be small and compact as possible.

This was actually a very good hiding spot. If Alan Clayton’s intention was to visit his wife upstairs, he would likely walk right past Martin without noticing him. Only by taking a severe turn to the right or looking over his shoulder while passing the sofa would he discover Martin’s location.

“How’s it going?” Cindy Clayton responded breathlessly to her husband’s call, the first time Martin had ever heard the woman’s surprisingly soprano voice.

“Good!” Alan replied from somewhere in the living room, probably less than ten feet from the intruder hiding behind his sofa. The voice was so loud and so close that Martin couldn’t believe that he hadn’t been seen yet and then began to wonder if he had been spotted and was now being stalked by the homeowner.

“When are we leaving?” the man shouted.

“In an hour or so,” his wife replied. “I’m going to run for another twenty-five minutes and then get ready, okay?”

“Fine,” Alan replied in a cheery voice but then growled so that only Martin could hear, “Then why the hell did I need to be home by five?”

“Did you need to shower?”

Even without a wife, Martin recognized this statement for what it was. Cindy Clayton was telling her husband to shower, framing the command as a question.

“Yeah, I’ll shower,” Alan Clayton replied without much enthusiasm, and Martin breathed an infinitesimal sigh of relief.
With one homeowner on the treadmill and another soon to be in the shower, his opportunity to escape was likely near.

The sound of the television, the voice of two men arguing about the state of American tennis, followed by the billowing of the fabric covering the rear of the sofa, caused Martin to quickly rethink this assumption. Though there might be a shower in his near future, Alan Clayton was settling in for some television, less than three feet away from Martin’s prone position. In fact, in turning his head and looking up, Martin could see the back of Alan Clayton’s bald head, almost within arm’s reach. The two men were literally inches apart.

Martin’s situation had suddenly become even more dangerous. Though his hiding spot had made it difficult for anyone ascending the stairs to see him without looking back, someone coming down the stairs and turning into the living room would undoubtedly spot the strange man crouching behind the sofa. If Cindy Clayton came down the stairs to check up on her husband before Martin was able to move, he would almost surely be spotted.

Violence was the first, albeit uncharacteristic, solution that entered Martin’s mind. With the element of surprise on his side and a relatively large, metallic lamp within reach, Martin felt that he could probably knock the considerably larger man unconscious and escape before Alan Clayton ever knew what hit him. The more he thought about it, the more he became convinced that it was possible. He envisioned himself reaching over and silently unplugging the lamp from its socket (thankfully it was off), rising to his knees, head down, gripping the lamp’s thin stalk with both hands, and then swinging in one swift, violent motion. If his aim were true, the base of the lamp would connect with Alan Clayton’s skull and, if not render him unconscious, certainly stun the man long enough for Martin to effect his escape.

Martin was not an aggressive man and had only once in his life committed any act that might be considered violent, and so his decision to spare Alan Clayton’s skull was likely the result of his natural aversion to violence. But what finalized this decision was twofold.

First, despite his precarious position and potential for discovery, Martin continued to think of Alan Clayton as a client rather than an adversary, and so harming him in any way was unacceptable. After all, the client had done nothing wrong. Though it was probably his fault that the upstairs toilet lid had been left open that day, Alan Clayton was acting like any client should. Martin knew that the man was expected home by five o’clock that day, and so he had simply complied with his kitchen calendar. His actions were both scheduled and predictable, so if anyone was to blame for Martin’s current predicament, it was himself alone. Martin knew that it had been a mistake to reenter the house in the first place. He had violated one of his most important rules. There was no reason for Alan Clayton, a loyal and dependable client for years, to suffer as a result of Martin’s failure. Though a bit of a slob and not the kind of guy Martin would normally befriend, Alan Clayton was also the man who wrote to his mother in Nevada at least once a week and always included a $100 check with a message on the memo line reading
Have some fun on me, Mom!

He might be disgusting by Martin’s standards, but he wasn’t a bad guy.

But it was the lack of hair atop Alan Clayton’s head that truly sealed his decision. As Martin visualized the attack, he also visualized the result of the blow, and on a bald-headed man, this vision was not pretty. Had Alan Clayton been blessed with a full head of hair, Martin’s imagination might have been able to ignore the deep gash and spurting blood that would surely result from the head wound that he intended to deliver. But with a
skull shaved perfectly bald, the result of the blow would have been impossible to ignore. Though he doubted that he would permanently harm or kill Alan Clayton, the exposed damage that would be left behind was too much for Martin to contemplate.

With a violent solution cast aside, Martin began pondering other possibilities and accepting the notion that he might soon be found. Only once before had he been discovered by a client, and that incident had occurred long before Martin had turned professional.

In many ways, the event had propelled him forward on his career path.

Martin had been nineteen years old at the time. He had been on his own for about four months, living with Jim in a two-bedroom apartment in Vernon, Connecticut. Working part-time at the Dunkin’ Donuts on Talcottville Road, he had had almost no disposable income and was often forced to eat elbow macaroni and Campbell’s soup for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Jim was attending the University of Connecticut, and his parents were paying his tuition. But other than the check that they sent to the college twice a year, Jim was also supporting himself. And with a full class schedule, he was under even worse financial constraints than Martin. Between the two of them, they could barely afford rent and electricity and had spent their first winter together without heat except on the coldest of nights.

Things became desperate in January when Dunkin’ Donuts began cutting back on Martin’s hours as business slowed following the holidays. Working less than twenty hours a week, he had been looking for other employment when the alternator on his 1978 Chevy Malibu failed, Jim came up short with his share of the rent, and their toilet became hopelessly clogged. Though he managed to repair his car and cover Jim’s rent that month (an
act of kindness that Jim had never forgotten), he was left with absolutely no money for groceries, including the Liquid Plumbr that he would need in order to clear the pipes in his toilet. With no other options, Martin turned in the only direction he could.

His parents.

Martin’s mother had remarried when he was seven years old, and so the stepfather that he would grow to hate more and more through the years was the only father that Martin had ever truly known. Martin remembered his biological father as a brave and strong man who had failed to act as such when thrown out of his house by a wife who had fallen in love with another man. He had left with his proverbial tail between his legs, and Martin was left with a stepfather whom he despised.

By the time he was a junior in high school, his stepfather (aided by his mother’s compliance) had managed to convey the message that upon graduation, Martin would be moving out, releasing his parents from any financial responsibility. Avoiding words, his parents had initiated their plan with a series of gifts designed to convey this message for them: a microwave oven for his sixteenth birthday, a set of towels at Christmas of the same year, and a vacuum cleaner and set of dishes on his eighteenth birthday. All of these gifts sent a clear message to Martin: You will need these things because you will be leaving us soon.

Despite his solid academic background, “college” was a word never mentioned in Martin’s home, and somehow he had managed to escape high school without a guidance counselor ever discussing the prospect with him. Perhaps Mr. Malloy had called Martin’s parents early on and received word about their unspectacular vision of Martin’s future. Or, more likely, Mr. Malloy, who also served as the school’s track and field coach, had spent all his time on athletes and student government members and had forgotten about the quirky little kid with good grades but little personality.

So in January, with the heat set at forty-five degrees and the cupboard literally bare, Martin went home for help. His initial plan had been to explain the recent string of bad luck to his parents and ask for assistance until he found more work. It was a Tuesday evening in February when he arrived at the front door of his parents’ house and found the windows completely dark. His parents were uncharacteristically out for the evening, and Martin couldn’t imagine where they might have gone. If anyone had a predictable schedule, it was his parents.

Martin turned and headed back toward his car when he realized that he still had a house key, and with a belly grumbling from a day’s worth of missed meals (apart from the doughnuts he devoured at work), Martin decided that it was time to eat.

It was odd to think of himself as a stranger in his childhood home, but as he fried eggs on a stove that his mother had used to cook his meals for more than eighteen years, the sense that he was an intruder intensified. Though it hadn’t occurred to him when he cracked his first egg, by the time the toast was brown and the eggs were well scrambled, he had begun to suspect that his parents, particularly his stepfather (though his mother would surely be standing beside her husband, silent and compliant), would not approve of his unsanctioned use of the kitchen and his consumption of their food. By the time Martin was buttering the last piece of toast, he had convinced himself of the severe reprimand that he would receive from his parents for the intrusion, and had decided to make every effort to escape before being noticed.

Not knowing where his parents were or when they would return made this process a stressful one for Martin. He began by rinsing off the dishes, initially forgoing the time it would take to apply soap but quickly realizing that if he did not take the time to wash the dishes thoroughly, his parents would determine on their own that someone had been in the house. Suspicion would
then naturally fall upon the only other person with a key. This stress-filled balance between washing quickly and washing meticulously served as the basis for many of Martin’s future business decisions.

He never wanted to be in a similar situation again.

With the dishes washed, dried, and replaced in the cupboards as close to their original positions as he could remember (another problem Martin would later rectify, through the use of digital photography), he turned his attention to the kitchen surfaces: the stove, the sink, and the small round table upon which he had eaten. Wiping these surfaces with paper towels that he then stuffed into his pants pockets, he had the entire kitchen cleaned and returned to what he hoped was its original condition in less than ten minutes. He was pleased with himself. He thought that the chances were good that his presence would go undetected.

Martin felt less confident about the food that he had eaten. Four slices of bread for toast, three eggs, and nearly a half stick of butter were impossible to replace without more time. He felt that the missing bread would likely go unnoticed, but he was less certain about the eggs and especially the butter. His mother loved to bake, and if she had recently cooked up something that required butter, she was likely to remember exactly how much was left. In addition, butter was not a product whose loss was easily attributed to someone else in the home. It would be difficult for his mother to imagine that her husband had gone through half a stick of butter on his own. After all, there’s only so much a person who doesn’t bake can do with butter.

In order to deal with this problem, Martin removed a whole stick of butter from the box in the refrigerator (leaving three sticks behind), and lopped off slightly less than a third of it before placing the rest on the butter dish. He stuffed the remaining butter in his pocket, reasoning that it was more likely that
his mother knew how much butter was on the butter dish than how many sticks were left in the box.

As for the eggs, there was nothing Martin could do except move three of them forward to the front row of the egg drawer, hoping that their loss would go unnoticed. Despite the missing food items, Martin felt that his chances were good that his visit would remain undiscovered.