“Yes. It is.”
“Well, you must know that he didn’t have a very good relationship with the people at Valley Forest Estates. It was in the paper, letters and articles.”
“Yes, we were aware of that. Do you know anything about that beyond what’s been in the papers?”
I hesitated. Sure, Don Greenway was angry that day. But it’s one thing to get a little hot under the collar, and another thing altogether to whack a guy in the head so hard his brains leak out. And not only that, if I sent homicide cops after Greenway, would I ever get my leaky shower fixed?
“One day,” I said slowly, waving my hand in the air like it wasn’t that big a deal, “when I was over at the Valley Forest Estates offices, I saw Spender and Don Greenway get into quite an argument.”
“Greenway.”
“He’s the head of the company, I think. We bought this house from him. Our street’s even named after him.”
“What was this argument about?”
I told him. Flint made some notes in his book, flipped the cover over, and slipped it into his jacket.
“Do you think,” I said, hesitantly, “that you could not mention that I told you this, if you’re talking to Mr. Greenway? He’s, uh, supposed to fix some things around the house here, and he might not be so inclined to do it if he knew I was, you know, ratting him out.”
Flint’s eyebrows went up a fraction of an inch. “Ratting him out,” he repeated.
“Yeah. Isn’t that what you call it? Or squealed? Is it squealed?”
“Ratting him out is good,” said Flint, who showed himself out.
I MIGHT NOT HAVE MY police terminology down pat, but I knew the words to describe how I felt: freaked out.
My friend Jeff might have found a dead guy, but I’d found a dead guy who’d been murdered. Surely this beat a guy who just got his head stuck in a storm drain and drowned. And yet I didn’t feel even the slightest bit full of myself. What I felt was scared.
By how long had I missed encountering Samuel Spender’s killer? Just because I’d seen him have an argument with Greenway didn’t mean that had anything to do with his death. What if Spender had been the victim of some nutbar who would have been just as happy to kill me if I’d come along a little earlier? And what if that nutbar was still roaming around the neighborhood, which, up to now, had always been a crime-free paradise?
I needed someone to talk to about this. I tried Sarah at work.
“Dan. City.”
I hung up. I was not talking to that asshole again. I walked to the front window, where Detective Flint was still sitting in the front seat of his cruiser, making some more notes before pulling away from the curb. Across the street, Earl’s truck caught my eye. He was home.
He’d want to know about this.
The pickup was backed up to the garage, which was open, and the door from the garage to the laundry room was propped open. Earl was either loading up the truck or taking things into the house. It made no sense to ring the front doorbell, so I entered the garage, mounted the two steps to the laundry room door, and called in, “Earl?”
No answer. Maybe he was lugging plants or something through the kitchen and out the sliding glass doors to the backyard. Most of the houses in this neighborhood had the same basic floor plan; you could go blindfolded into one you’d never been in before and find your way around.
I took half a step into the laundry room, called his name again, and noticed that in the space where I would have expected to find a washer and dryer, there was nothing. How long had Earl lived here? I guessed he was the kind of guy who liked to hang out in laundromats.
A gust of warm air went past me into the garage. The house was hot. Humid, really. “Earl?”
I heard some banging about in the basement. He was making enough noise that he couldn’t hear me. I took a few more tentative steps into the house and could see moisture dripping down the insides of the windows. The basement door was only a couple of steps away, and I stood in its frame, feeling the warm humidity drifting up from there.
“Earl?” I shouted over the banging.
And then it stopped, abruptly. There was a moment’s silence, then Earl’s voice: “Who is it?” There was an edge to his voice.
I walked halfway down, to the landing where the stairs turned. “Earl, it’s okay, it’s Zack. I just had this detective over to my place, asking about that guy-”
“Don’t come down here!”
But by then I’d reached the bottom step and could see that Earl’s windows were not fogged as a result of some manufacturing defect.
He was on a short ladder, stripped to the waist, working on a string of lights suspended across the room, dangling a few inches below the unfinished ceiling. There was a network of temporary ductwork that looked like dryer hose, but ten times as thick. I could hear ventilation fans, and the glare from the dozens of light fixtures was nearly blinding. It took my eyes a few seconds to adjust, but when they did I was able to focus on what appeared to be hundreds of long-leafed plants that took up nearly every square inch of floor space. I’ve never been much of a horticulturalist, but I knew enough to know these were not prize-winning orchids.
I don’t know much about guns either, but I recognized what Earl had in his right hand, pointed straight at me.
“Jesus, Zack,” Earl said. “You ever heard of fucking knocking? And what’s this about a detective?”
8
AS I LOOKED ABOUT THE ROOM, dumbstruck, Earl hurriedly pulled on a shirt and then ushered me up the stairs to the kitchen. He got two beers out of the fridge and motioned-actually, more like directed-me to take a seat at the table. He set his handgun on the table where I could have reached it if I’d wanted to. I didn’t.
“What’s this about a detective, Zack?” Earl asked. He did not look amused.
I was having a bit of trouble collecting my thoughts. “A police detective, he just left my place.”
“What was he asking?” Earl took a nervous swig of his beer. “Was he asking about me?”
“No. He was asking about that guy they found down by the creek.”
“Are you sure? You’re sure he wasn’t asking about me?”
“No,” I said, more emphatically this time. “I’m telling you the truth. It was about the guy in the creek.”
Earl nodded, slowly, but he was still eyeing me warily. “I heard about that. On the radio.”
“Yeah, well, it did kind of make the news. It was that guy with the petition, who talked to us the other day.”
Earl downed some more beer. “Okay. I remember him. You found him?”
I nodded. “The cops say he was murdered. So they had a lot more questions for me, since I came across him when I was out for my walk.”
Earl was shaking his head, like he wasn’t listening to me. “Shit. Thank God it was about that and not me. I’m running a business over here and can’t afford to have the cops finding out about it. So, why are you over here then, if it wasn’t about me?”
“I just came over here to tell you about it. Thought you’d be interested. Looks like maybe I caught you at a bad time.”
Earl took a deep breath, let it out slowly. He ran his hand lightly over the gun. “So, Zack. You gonna turn me in?”
“Jesus, Earl.” I finally twisted off the cap of my own beer and had a swallow. “It’s so fucking hot in here.”
“There’s a lot of humidity in a greenhouse kind of operation,” he said matter-of-factly. “That’s why I keep a lot of beer in the fridge. And bottled water, soft drinks, that kind of thing.” He got out his cigarettes, some Winstons, tucked one between his lips and lit up. “I notice you didn’t answer my question.”
“What question?”
“About whether you’re going to turn me in.”
“Look, Earl, it’s not like I’m worried about the pot, exactly. I mean, everyone’s doing it, I gather, not that my own kids are.”