came to practices and he always walked home with her, every time.”
“No one called him a sissy?”
“No sissy can knock a fastball into next week.” He got a distant look on his face and I knew he wasn’t seeing me any longer. “Or throw a rope from third to first.”
Rope? What did a rope have to do with baseball? I made a mental note to Google it later. “What about on the other teams? Sam was such a good baseball player, weren’t some of the other kids jealous?”
“Oh, sure, but . . .” He stopped and looked at me. “You’re trying to figure out who killed him, aren’t you?”
It suddenly occurred to me that my feet needed a close inspection, so I bent my head and studied them with great intensity. He was angry. How could he not be, considering I was rooting around in his past, trying to shake out a reason for murder that might have originated decades ago, which didn’t make a lot of sense, really, but I had to try. “Well . . .”
“You think somebody from baseball hated him enough to kill him?” Incredulity sent his voice high.
I sighed. “Not really. I mean, how could sports be reason enough for murder?”
A flicker of something crossed his face. “People can get pretty uptight. Remember what happened at that second hockey game?”
I winced away from the memory of women whacking each other with their purses. “Your daughter hit my baby girl!”
“Your baby girl is twenty pounds heavier than my daughter!” Whack. Whack.
“Sam hasn’t played ball in years,” I said. “Lots of people carry grudges, but this seems a little extreme.”
“Hmm.” Todd rubbed his chin, leaving behind a small streak of black grease. “There was this one time. The pitcher beaned one of our guys and our guy charged the mound. Everybody was yelling, and before you knew it, the benches were empty and it was a real slugfest. I’m sure Sam got in a few good ones, he had a long reach.”
“When was this?” My ears perked up.
He grinned. “I think we were maybe eight.”
The small spurt of adrenaline faded away. If a bunch of eight-year-olds going at it hammer and tongs was what Lois hadn’t quite remembered, this particular path of investigation was coming to a quick end. “No other fights?” I heard my own hopefulness and backtracked. “Not that I want there to be, but you never know what someone will get angry about.”
“Ain’t that the truth,” Todd said, gesturing at the car with a jerk of his thumb. “Who would have thought my wife would get so mad about me spending five thousand dollars on a paint job?”
If there was ever a question that didn’t need answering, that was it.
“Other fights, though.” He shook his head. “I can’t remember one.”
“No grudges?”
“How could anyone have had a grudge against Sam? It’d be like hating Santa Claus.”
There was a tiny rip in my heart. Todd had pegged it: In another thirty years, Sam would have made the perfect Santa. By then he’d have had a nice belly, his hair would have turned white, he could have grown a lovely beard, and his laugh . . . oh, his laugh.
Todd cocked his head. “You can hear it, can’t you? He had that ‘ho, ho, ho’ thing down.”
“He sure did.”
We stood there, hearing the last echoes of Sam’s laughter ripple through us, then fade away.
“If you find out who killed him,” Todd said hoarsely, “you let me know first. Got that? Tell me first.”
Not in a million years. But I nodded, then said good-bye. At the top of the stairs I glanced back. He was still standing in the middle of the garage, one hand gripping the dirty rag, the other hand holding tight to absolutely nothing.
The evening had turned from dusk to full dark while I was talking to Todd. Streetlights had popped on everywhere, and I was going to be late picking Jenna and Oliver up from Marina’s. I glanced at my watch. If I hurried I’d be only a little late.
Mothering instincts satisfied—or at least muffled to a distant throbbing noise that resembled the unceasing noise of the ocean—I walked briskly down the sidewalk and headed to the next name on the list.
Gerrit Kole leaned back in his high-backed leather chair and shook his head. Gerrit was an attorney and single and ambitious; the only reason he wouldn’t have been at the office at a quarter to six in the evening was because he’d gone to pick up a take-out dinner.
“There’s no reason,” he said, blowing out a sigh. “No reason at all for anyone to have killed Sam.”
I sat perched on the edge of a companion chair and tried to keep from sliding off the front. “You’ve thought about this, haven’t you?” I asked. Gerrit’s troubled look was miles away from his typical expression that life was good, and if we all worked as hard as he did, that we, too, could own a BMW convertible for summer, a Cadillac SUV for winter, and a Harley-Davidson just for fun.
“Sam and I grew up together,” he said, as if that explained it all, and I supposed it did. People didn’t use that phrase lightly—at least people in Wisconsin didn’t—and it often translated as “we were closer than most brothers.”
“No ideas?” I asked.
He tapped a pen against his leather blotter. “I’ve spent hours I can’t afford working on this. After I couldn’t think of a provable reason, I looked for something that couldn’t be proved. Nothing.” He stopped midtap. “You talked to Todd Wietzel?”
“No ideas there, either.”
Gerrit grunted and went back to tapping. “For a few days, I wanted to think Larry Carter had done it. Larry never got any decent playing time, thanks to Sam. He’s a guy who can hold a grudge, Larry.”
My ears twitched. Was this, could this possibly be, a Clue?
“But then I went to talk to him,” Gerrit said. “Turns out Larry saw the news about Sam’s murder on a hospital TV. He’d broken his ankle playing hockey the night before. Got three expensive screws in his ankle.”
I made a mental note to talk Jenna out of playing hockey ever again. “Well, I’m sure the police will find the killer,” I said.
Gerrit made a noncommittal noise, and I noticed that his hands were clenched into fists so tight that the tendons drew pale across his knuckles. “Not too soon, I hope,” he said quietly. “There’s a debt to be paid.”
My breath caught and I had to force my lungs back into action. Violence begets violence; it always had. And violence against an innocent begets violence at a geometric rate. There was no use warning Gerrit to leave it alone, no use telling him revenge does no one any good, no use asking him to consider what a course of revenge would do to his career.
He knew all that. Knew it and didn’t care.
I rose. “Take care of yourself, Gerrit.”
But we both knew he wouldn’t.
Chapter 12
“Conclusions?” Marina thumped her elbows on her kitchen table and put her chin in her hands. “I got mine. What are yours?”
Every name on my list was crossed off. Squinting, I studied my notes. “All of the guys I talked to were former teammates of Sam’s. Todd played with him—”
Marina unstuck one hand from her chin and made rolling motions. “Conclusions, I beg you! Yon youths will waste of hunger ere they get fed if you go through every frigging minute of every conversation.”
I drew breath to disagree, but looked at her wall clock—a recent present from her Devoted Husband, which had to be one of the most annoying clocks on the planet—and realized she was right. It was almost seven o’clock. If I didn’t get the kids out of there soon I’d have to hear the noise Marina’s DH had programmed: the sound of the kitchen smoke alarm going off. Seven times. One o’clock was the microwave beep. Two o’clock was the garage door
