“Wow,” he said, sniffling and coughing as he sat up. He looked around the office. “How’d I get in here?”
“You fainted. Are you alright?”
“Yeah. Fainting. It’s like, such a chick thing. Would you promise not to tell anyone, especially Quilla?”
“Promise. When was the last time you saw Quilla?”
He paused for a few seconds, scratching his head and scrunching up his forehead. “We went to Mr. Fowler’s to get the mortician magazines he wanted me to look at. We stayed there about ten minutes. No. Wait. That’s wrong. We went to Mr. Fowler’s after we went out to the cemetery.”
“What were you doing at the cemetery?”
“Checking out gravestones. By the thing where her Aunt’s body was found. Quilla said you and she went up there at night and checked ’em out, but she felt you guys might’ve missed something because of the dark. She’s got this idea that nobody’ll be able to solve her Aunt’s murder except her, so she’s putting a package together to give to a private detective she was gonna hire.”
“Where’d you two go after you left the cemetery?”
“Her laptop’s broken so we went to my house and she typed the names in alphabetical order. There were a bunch.”
I glanced at my desk and noticed the detailed printout of the names that Perry had given me when he showed up after Alphonse’s funeral. I reached for it. I was curious if they had managed to find some additional names that Quilla and I might’ve missed.
“Would you know how many names you two came up with?” I asked as I held Perry’s printout in my right hand. There were fifty-six names in two columns. Column A contained forty-five names that Perry labeled as Typical/Normal. Column B had the eleven oddly spelled foreign surnames that Perry felt could have been Americanized into shorter names.
“Not off the top of my head,” said Viper. He reached into his shirt pocket, removed a flash drive and glanced at my computer. “I can plug this in and pull up the list for you.”
“You always carry a flash drive with you?”
“It’s Quilla’s. Forgot to give it to her.”
Viper inserted the flash drive into the back of my computer. Within seconds I was looking at the list of names he’d typed up. They weren’t numbered, so I had to count. He stood behind me and counted, as well.
“I get sixty-four names,” I said.
“I get sixty-three,” said Viper.
“Let’s count together.” We did. Viper was right.
“You and Quilla found seven more names. Tell you what… ” I handed him my list. “That’s in alphabetical order too. You read the names from it and I’ll check them off on the computer screen.”
“This has two separate lists of names,” he said.
“Read the longer one first.”
“No problem.”
It took us only a few minutes to find the additional names. All seven were common and none rang a bell for me.
“What’s this other list?” asked Viper.
“Foreign names that might’ve been shortened to sound more American.”
Viper glanced at the list. “Some of these are really strange-sounding. And I thought having to go through life with a name like Petrovitch was bad.”
He laughed. I did too.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “This one name…” He stared at the sheet of paper. “I could swear I saw this…”
“What? Which name?”
“The fifth one from the top.” He handed me the list.
“Oberfuolner? You know this name?”
“I saw it.”
“Where?”
Viper closed his eyes and again scratched his head and scrunched up his face for several seconds, then a huge smile flashed across his face. “Ah! Yesterday. At Mr. Fowler’s.”
“Nolan’s?”
“It was over his fireplace. Hanging on the wall. It was one of those things. People with ancestors who go way back have them. Family… uh…family somethings.”
“Family crests?”
“Yeah! That name was part of a design with a couple of Crossed swords and some other stuff on it, but I remember the name because it was so weird-looking.”
I looked at the name again: Oberfuolner. I froze.
“What does it mean, Mr. Coltrane?”
“It’s either the biggest coincidence of my life or it means that somebody I’ve known since I was your age killed Quilla’s Aunt not to mention a couple of others. But more importantly, he may have Quilla.”
Viper stared at me. His face serious, concerned. Angry. I looked at Oberfuolner again and imagined it without the first four letters.
F-u-o-l-n-e-r
To myself I said, “Is this the Americanized version of Fowler?”
“Tell me everything you and Quilla talked about with Nolan when you were at his house yesterday.”
“Well… uh… mainly about me wanting to get into mortician business. Then Quilla talked about some of the ideas she had about who the killer was.” He looked up at me with compassion. “She told us about how your old girlfriend might be a victim. Sorry.”
“Did she say that in front of Nolan?”
“She said everything in front of Mr. Fowler.”
“Did he say anything?”
“He just listened.”
“Then you guys left?”
“Yeah. Well, I mean…I did. Quilla stayed.”
I wanted to throw up. “Why?”
“I had to go to my job. I work for my Uncle. Petrovitch Heating and Cooling.”
“Why did Quilla stay behind?”
“Nolan wanted to talk more about some of her ideas. He was very interested and said he wanted to help.”
“Jesus.” I stood up and walked out of my office. Viper followed, saying, “Where are you going?”
“To Nolan Fowler’s.”
“I’m coming too.”
“No. Stay here. If I don’t call you in forty-five minutes call Perry Cobb and tell him to go straight to Nolan Fowler’s house. Tell him I said Nolan is the guy.”
“Got it,” said Viper. “Mr. Coltrane? Are there any bodies in here now?”
“One.”
“Is there anybody else in here? Anybody alive?”
“Just you.”
I watched him gulp. There was fear in his eyes.
“Don’t panic,” I said. “It’ll be good practice if you get into the business.”
Chapter 22
As I sped to Nolan’s I found myself torn.
A part of me still viewed this as a terrible coincidence. I knew Nolan too long to let so little evidence make me think that he could be capable of harming anyone, let alone murdering someone. I wanted to call Perry and let him know that his Americanized list might’ve hit paydirt, but I felt that after eighteen years of working together, I owed Nolan the benefit of the doubt and the chance to explain. On the other hand, what if Nolan was involved in the killings? Or just Brandy Parker’s? Or what if he had done something to Quilla? If I confronted him what would he do to me?
I tried to figure out how to handle the situation. I couldn’t just show up at Nolan’s door and say I was in the neighborhood. I’d never even been to his house. The only reason I knew his address was from preparing his W-2 tax forms all these years. If Nolan was guilty and he saw me approaching he would have time to prepare. And if he wasn’t guilty and he let me in and I presented him with this extreme coincidence of his family’s original surname being on a grave near the mausoleum where Brandy Parker was found, how would it make him feel to know that I thought he might be a killer?
It would hurt him deeply. He had little enough human contact and I was one of the few. If he was innocent how would it affect our working relationship? And what would Lew Henderson have to say about it? Lew liked me a lot, looked at me as if I were a son, probably was going to hand over the business to me when he finally had enough. But he and Nolan went back thirty-five years. There was a history there and the loyalty that goes with three-and-a-half decades of almost daily contact. Lew would find himself in the middle. He would have to take a side and I wasn’t sure it would be me.