Crunch Time

place.”

“What about Yolanda’s house burning down? And Ernest’s? The attempted break-in here, at our place? You think they’re related to Ernest being shot?”

“I do. I’m just not sure how.” He pulled me to him. I did not resist.

“But how are you working the case?” I whispered.

“Miss G. You heard Boyd. We’re interviewing people. We’re analyzing evidence. Our canvass of Ernest’s neighborhood didn’t turn up much. The shell casings are being analyzed. Maybe somebody else had been out there on that service road, shooting off a weapon, but I doubt it. Maybe the casings will come back to a gun we can prove belongs to one of the people we’re looking at for this crime.”

“People you’re looking at,” I repeated.

“Someone had a big motive for killing Ernest and burning down his house. Our theory is that Ernest had looked under one rock too many, and somebody wanted to destroy him and the evidence.”

“Okay.”

I did not feel as confident as Tom that we were, in fact, going to find out who murdered Ernest. Hermie Mikulski’s face popped into my brain. Had she seen the same man as Sabine Rushmore? Was it too late to call Hermie?

I slid away from Tom and reached for my cell phone.

“Miss G., what are you doing?”

“Just making one more call,” I said quickly, then hustled into the bathroom.

As I suspected would happen, I was immediately connected to voice mail. Either Hermie behaved like most civilized people and refused to answer the phone late at night, or she was still not home.

When I slipped back into bed, Tom did not ask me why I’d been making a call late at night.

Okay, so: I’d spoken to every person that Tom, Yolanda, or anyone else had mentioned in connection with Ernest and his investigations. I’d come up short. If anything, I realized painfully, I’d made things worse. I’d confronted Kris, and, after finding out from Penny Woolworth where Yolanda was staying, he’d bought the house across the street from us. If you had a lot of cash, you could do a real estate deal pretty quickly. Even if Kris hadn’t closed yet, he could have worked out a deal with Jack’s son to rent the place until he did. Maybe, as at the dinner party, Kris only wanted to flaunt to Yolanda that he had a new, pretty girlfriend. People reeling from a breakup could do weird things. Spending a lot of money on a house definitely fell into the rich-people-doing-crazy-stuff category. But was this a rich person doing a crazy thing, or was the rich person actually crazy? I sighed.

I’d questioned Charlene Newgate. If Charlene had been up to something, now she knew she needed to cover it up. I’d used Donna Lamar to help me dig into Sean Breckenridge’s extramarital activities, and she had inadvertently let him know what I was up to. I closed my eyes. I’d questioned the Juarezes, and they’d bought tickets to the fund-raising dinner, where Norman had confronted Humberto. If Humberto really did have the gold and jewels, did he now know to hide them? I wondered.

Tomorrow, I would go talk to Lolly Vanderpool, aka Odette. But I didn’t hold out much hope of that turning into anything substantive regarding the theft of the Juarezes’ gold and jewels. What would a tutor-turned-hooker know?

All the faces involved with Ernest and his cases swam up before my mind’s eye: Humberto, Sean, Brie, Kris . . . I was trying to figure this all out, how the people were connected. . . .

I felt like a failure.

Tom sensed I was still awake. He moved toward me and kissed my forehead. “Stop worrying.”

“If only it were that easy.” I paused, then said, “Thanks for dinner.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Do you mind talking about Ernest’s murder for a couple of minutes? Arch is in his room, and I can’t use his computer.”

“Go ahead.”

“Okay . . . so, Ernest picked up nine puppies, probably because he’d found the illegal mill that Hermie Mikulski had hired him to find. Right?”

“Okay.”

“A bald guy burned down Ernest’s house. Maybe the same bald guy tried to burn down our house, or to break in, before Arch stabbed him with your weeder. But . . . remember Sabine Rushmore had an encounter with a menacing bald guy at the feed store? He was buying a lot of puppy chow. When Sabine tried to be polite to him, he cut her off.”

“You told me,” he said patiently.

“You can talk to Sabine. But did I tell you that Father Pete saw Charlene Newgate, the temp service lady, with a bald guy at the Grizzly Saloon? How many bald guys are there?”

Tom reached over and turned on the light. He made a couple of notes in his trusty book, then firmly closed it and flipped the switch on the lamp. He said kindly, “It’s good to cover everything. I’m glad you brought these things up, Miss G.”

What I had not brought up was our conversation in the kitchen. Still, I’d fully expected that he would want to talk further about his desire for progeny, or, even better, make love that night. But he merely hugged me again, said he was tired, and turned away.

Great, I thought as I fluffed my pillow. A good marriage takes open communication and a willingness to give, the advice givers were always saying. Apparently, this was one more area where I’d failed.

The next day’s dawn brought a deep blue sky and brilliant sunshine. Melting ice gurgled and dripped down our gutters. With any luck, Indian summer’s lush grass would soon be poking through the snow. I lay in bed and realized that we hadn’t even had the first day of fall yet, much less winter.

I felt with my left hand to where Tom’s body had left an impression in the sheets. The linens were cold.

“Miss G.,” he said cheerily, startling me. He had showered and dressed, and now placed a steaming cup of latte on my night table. “Aren’t you the one who told me sloth was one of the seven deadly sins?”

“Thanks for the coffee and for reminding me of my wicked nature.” I smiled at him and glanced at the clock. Quarter to seven? “Where are you going so early?”

“Remember that thing I told you last night, about working the case? That’s where I’m going. What are you up to?”

“About a dollar fifty.” I grinned again. “How’s Yolanda?”

“Still in bed.”

I took a deep breath. “Well, we have Humberto’s dinner party tonight. I don’t suppose Yolanda and Boyd will go. But Ferdinanda promised to make spinach quiches.” I sipped the latte, which was delicious. “Do you remember that?”

“Yup,” said Tom. “She’s banging around in the kitchen already, making the rice for the crust, grating Gruyere, and who knows what all. I’ll tell you one thing, I cannot wait to see the inside of Humberto’s house, either. He must have a security system that rivals a nuclear installation.”

“You said his place was broken into a while back?”

“Last week,” said Tom, sitting on the bed. “Or so he claims.”

“What did the burglar take?”

“He won’t say. He demanded that we analyze his guards’ rum bottles from that night. We said we would if he would pay for the analysis.” Tom shrugged. “He agreed, and we found traces of temazepam on the bottles’ glass.”

“Rum bottles, plural? How many guards are we talking about?”

Tom inhaled. “Three. These are the same guys who alibied Humberto for the time of Ernest’s murder. Remember I told you about our guys smelling rum on their breaths? They couldn’t be very good guards if they drank on duty.”

“When Humberto was broken into . . . was there a security code, like, an electronic burglar alarm, too?”

“Yup. It had been turned off, then on again, while the guards were asleep. So somebody came in, we just don’t know who. Humberto is strangely silent on who had the code.”

“And he won’t tell you what was missing.”

“He will not. But I do have an interesting bit of information. The casings on the gun that killed Ernest? The