The man whose office it was, Senior Investigator Ron MacGregor, got up from behind the desk to shut the door. MacGregor was unremarkable to look at, medium height, medium build, about as much red, thinning hair as you might expect on a man pushing fifty. A few freckles still stood out on his thin face and he had tired blue eyes.
MacGregor and I knew each other casually and accidentally. A good trout stream ran through the bottom of my land. I didn't fish it often, because from where I was it was nearly inaccessible. My land was vertical, ten acres spread down the side of a steep hill, with a few shelves like the one the cabin was on and just enough of a levelling out near 30 that a road could be coaxed out of it.
Only a fanatic would bother with the long, tricky climb down to the stream over boulders and slippery leaves, especially when about five miles south the stream flowed through county land with a well-kept path to it. I wasn't that kind of fanatic, but MacGregor was, and one April afternoon a couple of years ago when roadwork muddied the water downstream, I drove in to find one of my windows forced open and some expensive-looking fishing tackle in my kitchen. A note, written in an unfamiliar hand on paper torn from a pocket notebook, was stuck on the reel. 'Was fishing your stream,' it read. 'Sprained my ankle. Why don't you have a goddamn phone? Having enough trouble without this stuff. Eat the fish. I'll be by for the gear.' It was signed 'Ron MacGregor.'
I looked in the fridge. There were four beautiful trout in a creel. I took one out, wrapped it in newspaper, put it back on the shelf. Then I took the creel and the rest of the gear over to Antonelli's and checked the phone book. There were two Ron MacGregors in the county; I hit it the first time. 'Didn't want your fish to rot,' I told him.
'You the guy in Lou Antonelli's place? Why the hell don't you have a phone? It took me an hour to crawl up your goddamn driveway.'
'Get a phone, people start calling you,' I explained. 'You never know where it might end.'
I took him his fish and his gear, and we sat drinking beer in his split-level ranch for the rest of the afternoon.
Since then he'd fished my stream often. What he liked about my stream was the same thing I liked about my cabin: there was no one else around. What I liked about him was that he left his car at the top of the road and never stopped by to say hello without an invitation.
MacGregor sat back down. 'You want another cup of coffee?'
'No,' I said. 'That one was bad enough.'
I'd told my story twice, once briefly when MacGregor and his men arrived at Antonelli's, then in more detail here for the benefit of MacGregor, a uniformed trooper, and a tape machine. I'd told it patiently and completely, gave details as I remembered them, answered questions as I could. I left out only two things. I didn't say what the fight last night had been about—I didn't really know anyway— and, though I gave MacGregor the keys on the silver ring and told him where I'd found them, I didn't tell him whose I thought they were. When I was through, the trooper left, taking the tape to be transcribed.
With the door closed and the trooper gone, MacGregor frowned. He poked the eraser end of his pencil at my handkerchief, lying in the centre of his desk with the keys on top. 'Withholding evidence, Smith. That's a bad business.'
'I'm not withholding anything. I'm giving it to you.'
'Tampering, then. What if there were prints on these?'
'Then there still are. I've had them gift-wrapped, Mac. They were safer with me than they would have been with Brinkman's boys.'
MacGregor sighed with that weariness in a cop that a night's sleep or a month's vacation won't cure. 'That's true. It's the only reason I'm not going to chew your ass over this—now. What else have you got? The murder weapon, maybe?'
'Nothing else.'
'Why'd you pick these up?'
'I thought I recognized them. I wanted to see them in the light.'
'Oh? Private citizen wants to look at the evidence, he just scoops it up and walks off with it?'
'Private investigator, Mac. It's in my blood. I'm sorry.'
'And?'
I shook my head. 'I'm not sure.'
'What do you think?'
'I think that when I'm sure I'll tell you.'
MacGregor pushed at the handkerchief some more. 'You're pretty close with the Antonellis, aren't you?'
'Tony and I go back awhile. I rented his father's hunting cabin when I first started coming up here; when the old man died Tony sold it to me.'
'And Jimmy?'
'He was a kid when his father died, eight or nine. He used to spend some time with me, when I was up.'
MacGregor looked up from the handkerchief. 'I heard you were like another father to him.'
'I wasn't here enough for that, except one winter. I had troubles of my own around that time. The kid was good company. He didn't talk much.'
'And when he was arrested?'
'Which time?'
'You know what I mean. Last fall.'
I shrugged. 'He was looking at five to fifteen. He didn't deserve it.'
