“End of Days, huh?” He laughed. “Now there’s a book I can surely relate to. My life’s resembled the End of Days for years!”
This time, I chuckled. His weathered face did look like it had witnessed its share of reversals in its time. “Bet it has.”
“Well, can’t stay and chat all day…” He winked. “There’s fortunes to be made, right, man…”
“Take it slow.” I waved.
“Always, brother. Any other way?” He started down the path again, when suddenly an idea popped into my mind.
“Hey, ” I called to him, “what’s your name?”
“Dev.” The dude grinned. “But most people call me Memphis. From Tennessee.”
“Can I trust you, Dev?” I asked.
“Trust me? ” The vagrant’s haggard face lit up like a lamp. “Like a bank, dude. These days, probably better.”
“So how’d you like to earn a fifty from me?”
“Fifty bucks? ” The guy came back over and said under his breath, “Do I have to kill anyone? Can’t let down my partners with any time in jail.”
The idea seemed a little crazy- I mean, look at the guy, I thought-but if Sherwood wouldn’t give me a car to watch over Charlie’s, why the hell couldn’t I find a set of eyes on my own?
“No, you don’t have to kill anyone. All perfectly legit. Promise.”
I told him I was worried about someone who was badgering my brother and how the police wouldn’t help me out. I described Susan Pollack’s blue Kia and gave him my brother’s address. I told him I just wanted him to watch out for it.
“I guess I could do that.” He shrugged. He looked at me in a strange way, then nodded. “Fifty bucks, huh?”
“Here’s thirty now,” I said, “the rest when you report back.” I reached into my pocket and dug out a few bills, handed them to him, probably more than he saw in a good week. I shrugged. “It’s not a fortune, but maybe it’ll get you out of town.”
“Oh, I find my way out of town from time to time,” he said with kind of a smile. “Was out of town just last week.”
“Oh yeah?” I said, a little surprised. “Where was that?”
The guy stuffed the bills in his pocket and said, eyeing me, “Michigan.”
Chapter Forty-Two
S herwood was making his way through an enchilada outside his favorite taqueria the next day when his cell phone rang. It was Carl Meachem, from the Las Vegas PD. “I located those records,” the detective said. “That suicide you were looking for. Greenway.”
Sherwood put his lunch down in its wrapper on the hood of his Torino and took out a pad. “You’re my hero. Shoot.”
“I’m not exactly sure what you’re looking for…,” the Vegas detective said. “By the way, you knew he wrote a book on the Houvnanian murders back in the seventies, didn’t you?”
Sherwood purposely hadn’t shared what his interest was but answered, “I knew that, yeah.”
“Just making sure… Seems Greenway moved down here, North Las Vegas actually, in 1986. After his big book was published. I guess it did okay. They made it into a movie and he retired. We all should find a case like that, right? You remember, it had that guy who won an Oscar in it-”
“I was actually more interested in what happened the night of his death,” Sherwood said, cutting him off.
“Okay, yeah, right…” Sherwood heard the sound of pages being turned. “Let’s see, night of November 6, 1988… Seems Greenway’s wife was at a dinner for some women’s golf committee at their club. Says here she came home and found her husband facedown in the pool. Called 911. That was nine thirty-eight P.M. The EMTs arrive, looks like, around twelve minutes later… Nine fifty,” the detective said. “Not bad. Unable to revive him. They estimate the TOD as a couple of hours before. No sign of any foul play. The doors were all locked and the neighbors didn’t see or hear anything going on. Didn’t leave a note-but officers found a half-drained bottle of Absolut on the kitchen counter along with a bunch of assorted pills… Says here the victim had been depressed lately. His wife admitted they’d been having problems. Apparently, there’d been some financial setbacks as well…”
“Sounds pretty clear,” Sherwood said, acknowledging it with a twinge of disappointment.
“What the autopsy seemed to confirm… Victim died from deprivation of oxygen to the lungs. Four point one percent blood alcohol. Along with elevated levels of barbiturates and various muscle relaxers. Though, hmphff…” Meachem grunted.
“What?” Sherwood asked.
“It seems they still kept the case open for a while, nonetheless. As suspicious. Until they checked out a couple of other angles…”
“What kinds of angles?” Sherwood asked. He felt a tremor of hopefulness pick up.
Meachem flipped the page. “One was that Greenway’s wife apparently didn’t seem to think vodka was her husband’s drink of choice. She said he was always a scotch guy. ‘Johnnie Walker, all the way…’ ”
“And the other?” Sherwood pressed.
“The other, it says here”-Meachem turned the page-“was something the ME discovered. In the victim’s stomach. Must have been fairly recent to the time of death because it hadn’t degraded…”
“What did he eat?”
“Not eat,” the Vegas detective said, clarifying, “ swallowed. It was half of a dollar bill. There’s even a photo here…”
“A dollar bill? ” Sherwood dug into his wallet and pulled out one. “Which half…?”
But before the Vegas detective even replied, he knew.
“Which half?” Meachem replied curiously. “Let me see, the half with the pyramid on it; why? Anyway, it seems it never led anywhere. A couple of days later they called it death by suicide and let the matter drop.”
Sherwood couldn’t stop from grinning. He looked at his dollar. He almost felt light-headed. “ Sonovafuckingbitch! ”
The pyramid didn’t mean something, in itself. Except for what was directly above it. Something he’d seen a thousand times and never thought about twice. But now it meant everything.
An open eye.
Chapter Forty-Three
“G ot a moment, Phil?” Sherwood knocked on the door of his lieutenant’s office.
Phil Perokis pushed back from his neatly ordered desk and waved Sherwood in. “Sure. Come on in.”
Sherwood shut the door behind him. He’d run it all around, from every possible angle. Slept on it. Nursed it over a Maker’s Mark. A couple of Maker’s Marks. He hadn’t had more than a goddamn beer since the operation, but last night he just said, What the hell! The damn thing was eating away at him now. There was a lot that still didn’t add up.
But he’d woken up this morning with the conclusion that enough of it did.
It damn well did.
“You remember that jumper I was working on? The Erlich kid. He did a back dive off the rock.”
“I know, the gift that keeps on giving…” The lieutenant chuckled. Sherwood had told Perokis how the victim’s uncle kept on pushing him to look at the case again, and everyone knew how a couple of days back, the KSLO
