Lethal Guardian by M. William Phelps Page B

said he was tired of people playing with him.” When Myers asked Charlie who he thought had made the complaint to the DEP, Charlie muttered, “Buzz made the complaint.”
    After speaking to Mike Magliano and Laurence Myers, John Turner and Reggie Wardell drove over to Blonders early in the morning on Monday, March 14, and informed Susan Nance, one of Charlie’s employees, that they needed to speak to Charlie right away.
    Forty-year-old Nance, a loyal friend to Charlie for years, who had also known Buzz pretty well, said, “He’s not here.”
    “We need to talk to him,” Turner said. He didn’t actually say that Charlie was a suspect, but Susan clearly got the impression that Turner and Wardell weren’t there to buy a refurbished alternator for one of their cruisers.
    “I’ll tell him when he gets back.”
    Susan was Charlie’s eyes and ears when he wasn’t around. Not only did she wait on customers, but she answered phones and kept things honest when Charlie took time off.
    Charlie hadn’t left for his skiing trip on Saturday, as many had originally thought. He left early on Friday morning. He and his wife had spent the day driving to Lake Placid, New York.
    After Turner and Wardell left Blonders, Susan Nance phoned Charlie at the condo he’d rented and told him what was going on.
    “Buzz is dead, you know?” Nance said.
    There was a brief pause.
    “Get the fuck out of town,” Charlie said. “No fucking way.”
    When Charlie hung up, he turned to his wife and stared at her in quiet disbelief.
    “What’s wrong?” she asked.
    “Buzz Clinton is dead.”
    “What?”
    “Can you believe it?”
    For perhaps the first time in his life, Charlie Snyder was fully satisfied with the person he had become. He lived simply now: New England Patriot games on Sundays and shooting darts with his pals at the local pub after work during the week. With his boyhood red hair grown out into a hue of blond, halfway down his back, Snyder kept it pulled back in a ponytail these days. He wore reading glasses and crunched numbers for his business and waited on customers most of the time. His voice was scratchy and a bit hoarse. When his employees spoke to him, they addressed him with the respect and authority he had earned throughout the years. What had once been a place where every derelict and drug addict in town came to loiter and get high, Charlie said later, Blonders had become a sort of a safe haven in recent years. Ever since Charlie had entered into recovery himself sometime ago, he’d turned Blonders into a place where people could hang out and feel safe.
    “We always had a pot of coffee on,” he recalled. “People could come in and just sit and talk about what was going on in their life.”
    Before he was murdered, Buzz was one of those people.
    Charlie had not only hired Buzz to work for him, but he’d gotten to know Kim and the kids. He felt bad for Buzz when things didn’t go his way and was friendly with Buzz’s mother, Dee Clinton. Over the years, Charlie noticed how Dee had always gone out of her way for Buzz, helping him wherever she could. But when Buzz failed to follow her rules, she’d cut him off. Tough love. Being in recovery, Charlie understood that it was the only way to reach someone sometimes—especially a family member.
    “She wanted to see Buzz do the right thing, and it hurt her when he didn’t. I was, in a way, her eyes and ears when she wasn’t around. I, too, wanted Buzz to make something of himself.” Furthermore, Charlie said, Buzz wasn’t someone who had to watch his back. “If someone would have asked me to make a list of twenty people to possibly be murdered, Buzz’s name would not have been on that list. Not even close. He was a hustler, sure. But he didn’t rip people off. He had people who cared about him, and he cared about people. The kid tried to put food on his table, and he didn’t have a full-time job. His mother and father helped out where they could. But he did what