with the rake. It’s got to be smooth and even. Like a blanket.”
I looked up at him from my hands and knees, sweat dripping down my face, and resisted the urge to impale him with my rake. He was sitting on a lawn chair maybe ten feet from me, wrapped in an oversized parka that he shouldn’t have broken out of the closet for another two months, sipping a cup of coffee and glaring at my work.
“Listen,” I said, “you already used up a good portion of my patience making me rototill the damn garden. That’s something you do in the spring, Joe. Not the fall.”
“If you knew anything about winterizing a garden, you’d know that’s not true. You do it in the fall and again in the spring. Makes a world of difference.”
World of difference, my ass. I turned away from him, shaking my head, picked the rake up again, and knocked some more mulch around. Joe’s wife, Ruth, had produced the finest flower gardens in the neighborhood before she died. With her gone, he’d taken up the task, even though he’d never so much as glanced at the flowers before. Not surprisingly, Joe brought more intensity to gardening than most. Now, with his shoulder and arm far from functional, he’d recruited me to do his winterizing. I hadn’t minded the idea until he’d dragged the lawn chair out and made it evident that he intended to supervise.
“Have you even been listening to me?” I said.
“Yes. But it’s a lot easier to listen when you’re doing the work right.”
I went on spreading the mulch and talking, taking him through my experiences in Indiana and up to my encounter with Targent the previous night. His eyes implied that his focus was on the mulch, but he grunted occasionally, following along.
“So now I’ve got cops in Indiana and up here wanting to tie me to not one but two homicides,” I concluded.
“That’s a pretty solid day’s work, even for you. One homicide I would’ve expected, but two is overachieving.”
“I got the feeling the cops were pretty impressed, too.”
“And Karen?”
“Is she impressed?”
“No, I mean how is she holding up?”
“Not well. Or, maybe, as well as you could ask her to, considering what kind of family she married into.”
“You say that with such satisfaction.”
“Did I?”
“Uh-huh. And I hate to add bad news to your . . . You know, I don’t think you got those perennial bulbs deep enough.”
“What bad news?”
“I told you six inches, minimum, LP. You’ve got to go deeper to hold them through winter. Fall planting is all about depth.”
“I went six inches.”
“I don’t think—”
I sighed and turned around. “Joe? What bad news?”
He scowled at the flower beds again and then refocused on me. “Doesn’t affect you, really, but it’s not encouraging for Karen’s situation.”
“Explain.”
“Cal Richards called me the day you left for Indiana. Seems Targent asked him about you, wanted to get his take on whether you had it in you to work someone over with a razor blade.”
Cal Richards was a Cleveland Police Department homicide detective we’d worked with over the summer.
“Let me guess—Cal told them to slap the cuffs on me?”
“Nah, I think he must’ve been fresh off vacation or something, in a good mood, because he told them to quit wasting time looking at you. They assured him you weren’t a serious option. That may have changed after the suicide in Indiana, but that was what they told Richards.”
“Okay.”
“Richards told me—with the required threats of what would happen if I disclosed the information, of course —that Targent and his team are interested in some conversations Jefferson had with his broker or investment planner, whoever the hell his financial guru was.”
“Yeah?”
The breeze picked up, lifting Joe’s thinning gray hair off his forehead and blowing the steam from his coffee off the rim of the cup, whipping it away into an overcast sky. Joe’s tone was casual, but his face had changed, darkened and tightened.
“According to this guy, Jefferson was trying to determine how much cash he could put together, and how quickly. He wasn’t offering reasons, and he told his financial geek to mind his own business when the guy inquired, but he was interested in liquidating as much as possible, as quickly as possible.”
I frowned. “He was a corporate attorney. Could be he’d helped put something together that was getting ready to come down around him, thought his assets would be seized in the investigation.”
Joe grunted, but it wasn’t in approval. I’ve spent long enough with him to translate the grunts.
“If he was worried about some sort of investigation, don’t you think that would have come out by now? Someone would have stepped forward and said they’d been looking at the guy. And I don’t recall anyone being tortured with a razor blade and a lighter during the fallout from white-collar crime, do you?”
“Half of the mob’s activity could be considered white collar. But I do see your point. What’s your take, then?”
He shrugged and drank some coffee. “Handful of reasons for a guy to want to turn assets into cash overnight, LP. You suggested one, and maybe another is that he was planning to take off, run from something. But there’s no evidence to support that. So what’s left? What would you do with all that cash?”
I rocked back on my heels, hunkered down there over the garden like a catcher guarding home plate, and stared at him, getting the idea.
“A payoff,” I said. “You’re thinking someone was extorting him?”
He shrugged again. “That struck me as a possible motivation for the conversations with his financial guy. And if that
I thought about it, remembering her obvious fear, her nerves exposed like the bare ends of downed power lines, jumping and sparking at the slightest shift in the wind. Was it money? Was someone pressuring her for money?
“Don’t make too much of it,” Joe said. “I just threw it out there, that’s all. It was the only detail of any significance that Richards could offer.”
I knocked mulch off my gloves and removed them. Joe stood up and folded the lawn chair by bracing it against his thigh and using his good arm.
“I’d say it would be a fine idea for you to keep your distance from all this, LP.”
“A little late for that advice, but, yeah, it’s my plan.”
He scowled at the flower beds one last time and shook his head. Utterly unimpressed by my work but figuring that it would have to do till spring.
“You have therapy this afternoon?”
“Not till tomorrow.”
“Okay. Well, I’m going to head down to the office. Might make some calls to our favorite attorneys and see if they have anything new on their plates. Sometimes those guys can stand a reminder to send some business our way.”
It was something he could help with, something he could engage in, and I waited to see if he’d take the bait.
“Not calling around about Jefferson, I hope,” he said.
“No, I won’t do that.”
He nodded and then began to walk back to the house. “Thanks for the help with the yard. And good luck,
