part of his emotional problem. Not only had he lost his father, he’d lost a fortune.”
“If he’d been estranged from his father, as you also indicated last night, then why had he received three phone calls from the man in the last few weeks?”
I leaned back in my chair and looked at him. He wasn’t bluffing; I could tell that from his face. If he’d called a judge at home and gotten an order for the phone records, he could have had them easily enough by this morning.
“Interesting, isn’t it?” Brewer said, watching me.
“I suppose.” I kept my voice neutral. It was more than interesting, but I didn’t want Brewer to think I cared. Hell, did I even
“And the money?” Brewer said. “Those millions that were supposed to go to the son? Well, now that the son is dead, it appears that money goes right back to the widow. The same widow to whom you were once engaged.”
He spread his hands and pushed away from the table. “You know, if I were the paranoid sort, I’d be seriously questioning whether I could believe your description of what happened, Mr. Perry.”
“I hadn’t seen Karen Jefferson in years, Brewer. Call the Cleveland Police Department, ask around. Trust me, they would have checked our relationship out pretty thoroughly after her husband was murdered.”
“I will indeed be on the phone with Cleveland. But right now I’ve got you to deal with. And I want to know why in the hell you would have taken this job. Or—and this is the really interesting question—why in the hell you would have been
“I’m not a friend of the family. I’m a guy who’s doing a job.”
“Notification of death, that was your job?”
“I had to find him, too. Nobody knew where he was.”
“Except his father.”
I shrugged.
“Yeah,” Brewer said. “The father knew where the son lived, because he’d been in contact with the son. Or somebody from that house in Pepper Pike had been. And if the father has been talking to the son, well, shit, doesn’t it seem odd he wouldn’t have mentioned that to his wife? ‘Hey, hon, remember that kid I lost track of for a few years? Well, the boy’s living in Indiana now, works at an apple orchard . . . ’”
We sat in silence and traded stares for a few minutes, Brewer tapping that pencil off the table again.
“Last night you told me the dead guy had been estranged from his father, and that turned out to be untrue. Today you tell me you’ve been estranged from the soon-to-be-rich widow. I wonder if that’s true? I’m just thinking out loud, is all.”
“As flattered as I am to be included in your thought process, I’d really like to be on my way.”
“Like I said, don’t be in such a hurry.”
I stood up. “Release me or charge me with something, Brewer. Something a little better than operating without an Indiana PI license. Or get me an attorney and a telephone so I can start making calls to the media about how you’re holding me without charges.”
He sat there and looked at me, neither friendly nor unfriendly, just thoughtful. “You think we’re all a bunch of hicks, don’t you? Think I’m some redneck cop without a clue, bored of busting up meth labs in barns?”
“No, I don’t, Brewer. I actually think—had been thinking, at least—that you’re probably a pretty good cop. Pretty smart. But I hate to see a good cop and a smart man waste his time.”
He got to his feet and unlocked the door, held it open for me. I was halfway through it when he reached out and took me by the arm. It was a slow motion, almost gentle, but his grip was like a pair of forceps. His slender fingers closed around my elbow, his thumb finding a pressure point there and grinding against it. He held me like that and leaned his face sideways, looking up at mine.
“Last night you suggested I check the dead man’s thumbs for hammer impressions.”
“Did you?”
“Uh-huh. And they were there. I found that out, and I thought, shoot, that is one smart guy we’ve got sitting in the jail. Started to feel bad, you know? Then I began to wonder if it wasn’t
“I’m a detective, Brewer. It’s kind of ingrained in me by now.”
“Coroner tells me that the hammer impressions could have been left by someone placing the gun in the victim’s hand and using his thumb to pull the hammer back. Said it would have had to be done very fast, immediately after the shot was fired, but that it might be possible to leave those impressions and then freeze them when circulation stopped.”
I reached down and wrapped my fingers around his wrist, pulled his hand from my elbow, and then used my forearm against his chest to push him back. I moved just as he had—aggressive disguised as slow and gentle. He kept his eyes on me and didn’t attempt to resist. I turned away from him and walked through the little hallway to the next locked door. Then I looked back at him expectantly. After a moment’s pause, he walked down and unlocked this door, too.
“It’s been a blast, Brewer. Damn shame we’re never going to see each other again.”
“Oh, we most certainly will. I intend to be present at your murder trial.”
He had those eyes that never told whether he was kidding or serious.
8
The sun was a smashed ball of red in my rearview mirror when I reached Cleveland. I made one stop for lunch, as I’d missed out on a tasty jail breakfast, but otherwise stayed on the road and kept the speed up, not really caring if I got pulled over. When you’re a suspected murderer, tickets don’t mean a damn thing. Lincoln Perry, highway rebel. I needed to get a tommy gun, be ready to go down in a hail of gunfire if it came to that.
I came up I-71 into the city, heading for the west side, and home. When I got to Brookpark, though, I pulled off onto I-480 and started east. I was wearing the same clothes I’d had on the day before, unshaven and tired and stiff, but I wasn’t ready to go home just yet. After seeing a guy blow his brains into a pond and spending a night in jail, waiting for some cop to lock his fingers into my arm and call me a murderer, I had a few questions of my own. A detour to Pepper Pike seemed very much to be the order of the evening.
The house and all its windows were gleaming in the sunlight when I pulled into the drive, the glass reflecting a crimson glow back into my eyes. I got out of the truck and laid my hand against the hood, feeling the searing heat of an engine that had been driven long and hard. The longer you spend around a machine, the more human it begins to seem. Like that old Steve McQueen movie where he’s the engineer on the navy ship.
I walked up the path to the house and onto the porch with my head down, thoughts of McQueen and engines running through my head, and when I reached the door I saw it was already open, Karen looking at me with red- rimmed eyes.
“I heard you drive in.”
“Yeah?” I went in without waiting for an invitation, walked past her, and into the living room. I dropped down into the same couch I’d taken on my last visit and waited for her to join me.
She came in a minute later, after shutting the front door and fastening all the locks. I heard her do it—the snap of the dead bolt, the rattle of the security chain. I listened to that and thought about the way she’d rushed to the door at the sound of my truck and how she’d spilled the wine during my last visit when the phone rang. Pretty damn jumpy.
“They told me what happened,” she said. She was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, but they were the sort of jeans and sweatshirt that you pay three hundred bucks for in a store where all of the employees have their nails done weekly and none of them has ever purchased a rock album.
