team has just made it to one of the bowl games. Or that of a stockbroker who just sold short and made another million or two.
It was a fleck of white that caught my eye, something I had missed the first time. I pried the small piece of folded paper from his stiffening fingers, glanced at it and slipped it in my pocket. No help there, just a scrawled bunch of numbers. Then I picked up the newspaper and stuck it under my arm – save the trouble of buying one on the way home.
It turned out they were all the evidence there was. And all the evidence that was needed. At least for justice, if not for law.
The cook was in her sixties, slightly deaf, and had worked for Harrison less than six months. Yes, all the servants had met in the kitchen after nine and yes, it had turned into something of a kaffeklatsch that had lasted until eleven. Had she liked Mr Harrison as an employer? She shrugged and I gathered he was no better nor worse than a dozen others she’d worked for. I took down her address and phone number, asked her to keep in touch and to let the department know if she moved from the area.
Sally Fitzgerald was hardly more informative.
“You’ve worked for Mr Harrison for how long?” Slog work – no smart questions, no special insights, simple
“Fifteen years-” A moment of thought. “Closer to sixteen.”
“And you’re-?”
A flash of… what?
“Thirty-eight.”
Which made her twenty-two when she started. Not impossible but… a little young for a secretary. Maybe she’d been hired as something else. “Paid companion” as the tabloids might say. Harrison would have been in his late sixties, just becoming aware that life and love and lust were passing him by. By the time the arrangement had devolved to the hand-holding stage, she had become his secretary. On-the-job training.
And I could be doing her a deep injustice and have it all wrong. She was smart for her years, she’d gone to secretarial school, he was in the middle of acquisitions and mergers and she was just what the entrepreneur in him had ordered.
Curse me for being a dirty-minded, middle-aged man.
“He was a generous employer?”
“I never had any complaints.” Very cool.
“He was a fucking old miser,” Breall broke in, angry.
Sally glanced at him with just a trace of contempt. Very, very cool.
I raised an eyebrow and Breall said, “He only cared about money. It’s all the old bastard ever talked about.”
“What should he have talked about?”
Breall wasn’t about to forget his grudge. “I once asked him for an advance. My folks needed a loan, hospital stuff. He wouldn’t even listen to me.”
“And you’d worked for him for how long?”
Sally answered for him, a little acidly. “Six months.”
I kept my eyes on Breall. “I take it Mr Harrison wasn’t much of a sportsman – never talked about baseball or world soccer or anything like that.”
He gave me a fishy look – I was putting him on – then shrugged. I could have told him that the only game left for Harrison in his old age had been stocks and bonds and buyouts and they’re not something you can chat about with twenty-five-year-old chauffeurs. But the antagonism was pretty standard. Harrison had a lot of money and Breall had very little, if any.
Unfair.
I asked a few more questions, then gave them the same instructions I’d given the cook. Stay in touch and stick around.
What was important was not what they’d said but what they hadn’t. Breall was probably right. All Harrison had cared about was money. No hobbies had been mentioned, no parties, no guests, no friends, no relatives dropping by. An old man counting his coins and hoping he got to God knows how many millions before life foreclosed on him.
As for Sally, she had shed no tears, had looked neither bereaved nor distraught nor even unhappy at the loss of her employer of almost sixteen years.
I started for the door and Breall pointed to the couch. “You forgot your paper.”
I said “Thanks,” retrieved it and watched them as they walked out the door and down the walk. They weren’t holding hands but it almost seemed as if they were in lockstep. I stared until they disappeared around the corner of the house and wondered if they were going to his rooms or hers.
O’Brien had been waiting by his car. He was staring after them, too. “Quite a pair, aren’t they?”
“Why do you say ‘pair’?”
“For the same reasons you’re thinking,” he wheezed. “And I think we’re both wrong. No knives, no guns, no struggle and I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts Harrison didn’t eat anything that fatally disagreed with him. Somewhere between nine and eleven he bought the Big One.”
He suddenly frowned. “Look, Sam, trust me. He was alone that morning, nobody else was around, and there are no signs anybody hit him, stabbed him, shot him or strangled him. He died of old age – some people do, you know.”
“They pay me to be suspicious,” I said. “You find out anything different, you let me know.”
“You’ll be the first, Sam.” Then, curious: “What are you going to do?”
“Wait until they leave, then take out the garbage.”
It was an hour until Breall left in his Honda, Sally beside him. I’d spent the time sitting in my own car around the corner, reading the paper.
I was going to have to buy one, after all. The Local News section was missing.
Bummer.
I saw O’Brien three days later in his office. He had his feet up, his hands across his paunch, staring out the window at a pleasantly green and sunny spring day. His eyes were at half mast; I’d interrupted the start of his afternoon siesta.
“On your way out, tell Coral not to let you back in without notifying me first.”
“It’s always nice to feel welcome,” I said. I helped myself to a cup of lukewarm coffee from the Mr Coffee on the filing cabinet, then made myself comfortable in the battered easy chair facing his desk.
“I thought you were going to let me know all about Harrison, from his broken heart to the tattoo on his heinie.”
He yawned and opened his eyes wide for a moment, then swivelled around to face me.
“No tattoo and nothing to tell you about his heart that you don’t already know.”
“I made a guess,” I said. “I didn’t say I knew for a fact.”
“Sudden heart failure, Sam – I’ll send over an official report in the morning. Somewhere around ten in the morning the old pump decided to give up the ghost and it was all over in a second or two. Don’t think he felt a thing. Maybe a brief warning and
