I saw the blood rise in the back of his neck as he snapped, 'Dale, you seem to have some kind of hair across your ass in regard to me. Why is that?'
By shifting a little, I could see her face in the rearview mirror. Her eyes narrowed and she said, 'I do believe you're imagining that, Timothy.'
'Hey, do you think I have some vital parts missing, or what? I am not imagining that no matter what I say to you, you are sneering and sarcastic, and you talk like I'm some kind of half-wit. Which I am not. Now, 'what exactly is the problem?'
For a long moment she just watched the road and drove, and said nothing. Then she said coolly: 'You really don't remember me, do you, Timothy?'
'No, Dale, I am not aware that we were ever acquainted.'
'Well, you should be aware.'
'Oh,' he said, 'let me think. What could it have been? Now, did we sleep together once in the seventies? Were you ever a man?'
She made a face that said, 'Oh, please.'
'If you think,' Timmy said, 'that I'm the one who gave you anal herpes, be assured that you are mistaken. I've never had it.'
'He's right about that, Dale,' I said.
She looked for a brief instant as if she might crack a smile, but her control was sure and none appeared. She said, 'I want you to think about it, Timothy. It was not a friendly encounter. If you think hard, it will come back to you.'
'Oh, we're going to play games now. Swell.'
She said, ' 'Swell.' There's a word you rarely hear anymore. 'Swell' goes a long way back. That it's currently most often used sarcastically, as you used it just now, only adds to the word's quaint perdurability.'
I had resumed massaging his neck and paused now to check the pulse behind his right ear. It was up.
I said, 'Maybe, Dale, since we're all going to be spending a good bit of time together on a matter of current great importance, it would be best to clear the air on this other matter. Don't you think?'
She said nothing as she turned off Main and onto Maple Street.
'After all, you and Janet and Timmy and I are financial partners in this investigation,' I said. 'Based on long experience, I can tell you that when clients squabble, trouble ensues in an investigation. My professional advice is to get this business out into the open and see if you can't get it behind the both of you.'
Dale pulled into the Osborne driveway and parked alongside a big patch of bright blue delphiniums that looked like the Emerald City. She turned to Timmy and enunciated the words, 'April-1987.'
He looked at her, mystified and clearly irked. 'I haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about,' he said. 'Perhaps you're confusing me with Ronald Reagan. Did you ever have a run-in with Ronald Reagan in 1987? I'd love to have been a fly on the wall at that encounter.'
'You're not too far off,' Dale said, and got out of the car and strode into the house.
9
Just after nine, I pulled into Chester Osborne's cul-de-sac on Summit Hill Road, a woodsy residential drive on a high hill overlooking Edensburg. The light was nearly gone from the murky sky, but it hadn't cooled off much and the August night air was only a little less dense than gumbo.
I had my car back, and Janet and Timmy had driven down to Albany to visit Skeeter and pick up some of Timmy's and my belongings so that we could all move into Ruth Osborne's house together for a time. Our purpose was mutual protection. Dale would be there too, and she had agreed to quit sniping at Timmy for the duration of my investigation. She did insist that a 'shoot-out' at some convenient later date was inevitable. Timmy told me he was almost convinced Dale was batty, but he conceded that something about her was starting to become very dimly familiar.
Chester and Pauline Osborne lived in a two-story mock-Tudor house built on a shelf of fill on the downslope side of Summit Hill Road. The house looked freshly painted and stuccoed, and the height of the arbor vitae rising out of the bark-mulch beds that bordered all the walls of the place suggested it had been put up in the early eighties. The cul-de-sac had been newly tarmacked and was brilliantly floodlit. His-and-her Lexuses were parked in the driveway, one glistening black, one glistening teal.
When I had phoned earlier, Chester said he was disturbed to hear that Janet had felt the need to hire a private detective-June had undoubtedly been on the horn pronto following our late-afternoon encounter. Chester told me he was interested in hearing about my
'unnecessary' investigation, and why didn't I drop by for drinks after dinner? My own dinner, a couple of burritos, had been consumed at a picnic table outside Taco Bell. And while I wasn't sure which after-dinner drink was going to be appropriate, I had more pressing matters to take up with Chester Osborne, the stockbroker older brother with the history of violent outbursts.
'You found your way up here,' Osborne said in a businesslike way. 'Good for you. Well done.'
'I followed your directions,' I said. 'They were clear.'
'There's nothing worse than vague directions,' he said with such finality that I decided not to bring up Chechnya. Leading me across the foyer, Osborne said, 'We'll go in the study.'
He was tall and stiff-backed in a gray pinstriped suit and silk tie with tiny blue digital clocks on it. Pleasantly large-featured in the by-then-familiar Osborne way, he carried himself with an assurance that suggested Janet's self-possession. Although something in Osborne's cool, blue, mildly bloodshot eyes hinted at a turbulent interior more like Dan's. Whether June's wackiness would also show up in the mix, I couldn't tell yet.
'Make yourself comfortable,' Osborne said, indicating a striped-silk wing chair that looked as if it had been designed for anything but comfort. 'Brandy?'
In some of the venues my line of work had taken me into, 'Brandy,' was more likely to be the name of a transvestite I was questioning than a beverage being served, and in that respect Chester Osborne's study represented a notable change. I said, 'Yes, please.'
The study, like the foyer we'd come through and the living room I'd briefly glimpsed (the back of a woman's blond head had been visible above the back of a couch), had wall-to-wall gray carpeting and the kind of furnishings more commonly found in investment bankers' offices: shiny formal chairs upholstered in silk or leather, heavily lacquered wooden sideboards, and desks whose design was vaguely, but not exactly, French provincial-more French Provincial Decorating Product. The watercolor of a mountain lake with a canoe on it hanging over Osborne's desk was identical to the watercolor of a mountain lake with a canoe on it hanging in the foyer.
'Looks good,' I said, accepting a snifter half full of an amber fluid of considerable clarity. 'No need to run this stuff through cheesecloth.'
Ignoring that, Osborne stared at me for a long moment, and then said, 'I spoke to my sister June earlier.'
'I supposed you might have.'
'June told me she ran into you today.'
'Yes, this afternoon, at your mother's house.' I sipped some of the brandy, which was not Fine Brandy Product, but the genuine article.
'June is a bit of a dingbat,' Osborne said gravely, 'but don't get the idea that I am.'
'Okay.'
He gave me an appraising look that was not friendly. Then he said, 'I didn't like that talk about murder. June said you and Janet and Dale Kotlowicz were speculating about my brother's murder and what might have been an attempt to kill Janet-some crap about a Jet Ski attack June doesn't always get her facts straight, but she reported, to me that there was talk connecting these incidents to divisions within the Osborne family over the sale of the Herald. I didn't like that.'
I said, 'It was a theory that came up.'
'Well, I don't like it. It's too close to slander.' Osborne gazed down at me with his bloodshot eyes. He was still standing beside the bar a few feet from me, holding a snifter that he had not drunk from.
