hell would want to?”
I picked a newspaper out of his wastebasket and started leafing through it professionally, starting with the comics first.
O’Brien looked at me over the top of his glasses. “Don’t you have an office of your own you can waste time in? Or did you drop by to tell me something?”
I hesitated, struck by a headline, but not exactly sure of why I had hesitated.
“The saga of the secretary and the chauffeur,” I said. “Or, to be more accurate, the tale of the secretary – no pun intended.”
O’Brien leaned forward, suddenly interested.
“And?”
“Harrison had no relatives, no deep philanthropic interests, he hadn’t contributed a dime to his Alma Mater in years so it was unlikely he remembered it in his will. And as a matter of fact, he didn’t. Guess who his ‘great and good friend’ was who inherits?”
“Our gal Sal.”
I nodded.
“Very sharp; those afternoon naps help. His attorney let me see his Living Trust. Sally doesn’t have to wait for probate, she can cash in right away.”
“What happened to attorney – client privilege?”
I yawned; the chair was too damned comfortable. “Come on, it’s a small town, everybody knows where the bodies are buried and besides, he owed me a favour.”
O’Brien looked thoughtful.
“So she had motive.”
“She didn’t seem heartbroken that Harrison had shuffled off.” I looked expectant. “I was hoping you could tell me how.”
“How she did it? She didn’t. Nobody did. God pulled the rug out from under him and that was that. Judging from the smile on his face, it wasn’t all that bad.”
I stood up and started to drop the newspaper back in the basket beneath his desk, then stopped and stared at the headlines. Damn. Our modern society. If they recycled the news every few days, nobody would ever notice. I’d been hitting on three-day-old headlines.
Then I remembered where I had seen them before and sat back down.
“You got the rest of this?”
“In the trash basket, help yourself. Coral’s on a work slowdown, she only empties it once a week.”
I pawed through the papers and found the missing news section for the paper on Harrison’s desk. I had to leaf through it twice before I realized what I was looking for.
Then I figured I knew how. I also doubted there was any jury on God’s green earth that would send Sally Fitzgerald or Mike Breall to the slammer.
I went back to the Harrison mansion the next day, along with O’Brien – I hadn’t told him much and he was dying of curiosity – and a couple of uniforms just in case.
Sally had let her hair down – a nice cascade of blonde – and changed out of her suit-like uniform into something looser and more appealing. For mid-thirties, she was doing very nicely. Breall had ditched his chauffeur uniform and looked more like an ageing delinquent than he had the day before. His personality fit his appearance – surly, apprehensive, defiant and if he had been any younger, I would have called him snotty.
I looked at Sally and said how sorry I was she had lost such a good friend and employer.
“I’ll live,” she said.
She was handling her grief real well, I thought.
“Mr Harrison died of natural causes,” I said.
That cheered them both up, though Sally still looked uneasily at the two uniforms by the door. I stared at Breall.
“How badly did you hate Mr Harrison?”
“I told you I thought-” He caught the warning look from Sally and shot a quick glance at the uniforms. “Not that badly.” Then, blurting: “I thought you said he died of natural causes?”
“Falling down a flight of stairs can be an accident,” I said. “Unless somebody pushes you. And for a guy with a bad heart, walking up behind him and yelling ‘boo!’ might qualify you for a homicide rap.”
A frown. “I didn’t-” And then he caught another look from Sally and shut up. He could drive a limo and he must have been good in bed, otherwise I couldn’t understand why Sally put up with him. But then, she hadn’t planned to for very long.
I took the piece of crumpled paper out of my pocket and pushed the yellow tablet to the front of the desk. I crooked my finger toward Breall and he reluctantly walked over.
“Do me a favour, Mike, and write the following numbers on the paper.” He hesitated, then picked up the pencil. “Thirty-six,” I said. “Fifty-four, twelve, eleven, forty-five and twenty-two.”
He slowly printed them out and I compared them to the figures on the paper. The handwriting experts could probably prove they matched up.
Now it was Sally’s turn.
“Would you call Mr Harrison a gambler?”
She shook her head. Cool but wary.
“Not at all. He was very shrewd in making investments-”
“But it amused him to play the state lottery, didn’t it?”
She froze. “I… really don’t know.”
“Oh, I’m sure you do,” I said. “He never left the house so you would’ve had to buy the lottery tickets for him. You or Mike. There were a lot of discarded tickets in the trash.’
Her face was a mask.
“I bought him anything he wanted. I might have bought him some tickets.”
I wasn’t paying much attention to either she or Breall – that was the uniforms’ job. I opened up the drawer where Harrison had kept his pills. Three tickets; I had spotted them when I’d first checked for his pills but hadn’t thought anything of them. One of them had all the numbers that Breall had written down.
I sighed and leaned back in the chair, fanning the tickets between my fingers, then opened the three-day old section of newspaper that I’d found in O’Brien’s office.
“When Harrison found that the Local News section was missing from his newspaper – the section that always prints the lottery results, the section you removed before giving him the paper, Mike – he asked you to find out the winning numbers. Sally knew the numbers on his tickets – she had seen them when she refilled his prescription. She gave you a set of six, you copied them down and gave them to Harrison. What was the jackpot? Fifty-five million? Harrison was a businessman so he always went through the financial pages first, before he indulged himself and checked the numbers you gave him against his lottery tickets. Of course, he didn’t have the winning numbers. He just thought he did.”
I looked up at the now-pale Breall. “Harrison thought he’d finally hit the Big One and the excitement was too much for his heart.”
Sally was acid.
“That’s not much of a case.”
“You were with him for sixteen years, Sally, you probably knew his medical condition better than he did. For a heart patient, good news can be as bad as bad news. Harrison had to avoid stress – and you hit him with a ton of it.”
“The old bastard died happy,” Breall chimed in, bitter.
“Shut up,” Sally said dully. “They can’t hold us.”
