I walked to the steps leading to the parking lot and started down, my thoughts swirling with visions of Phillip’s beaten face, the bald-headed thug, and the drug sting I’d just witnessed. I was tired. I wanted to go home and take a shower and crawl in bed and let this excess of reality recede a little bit.
On the way home, I swung onto Marilee’s street. Jake Anderson, the trauma-scene cleanup guy I had called, was in the driveway next to his big white van with a bio-hazard icon on its side. He and a couple of other men in blue haz-mat suits were just loading their equipment into the truck. They had taken off their headgear but still wore vinyl gloves to their elbows.
I pulled up behind them and stuck my head out the window. Jake grinned and pulled his gloves off and tossed them into the back of the truck.
“All done, Dixie. It’ll smell like cherry syrup for a while, but you can go in.”
“Okay to take a cat in?”
“Sure.”
“Thanks, Jake.”
I backed out, knowing the house had been cleaned and sanitized the same way operating rooms are cleaned. Ghost might not like the lingering odor of ozone or the final deodorant fog, but he would be safe from any biological pathogens that are the natural aftereffects of a murder. I turned the corner onto Midnight Pass Road, and at the Graysons’ street I saw Sam and Rufus out at their mailbox. I turned and drove to the curb beside them and parked. Sam looked up from a stack of mail with a questioning look, then smiled.
I got out and squatted beside Rufus and exchanged kisses while Sam looked on like an indulgent father.
When I stood up, I said, “Sam, I hope you and Libby haven’t lost faith in me because of the things Carl Winnick has been saying.”
“Oh good grief, Dixie, of course not! You know, Libby and I were just talking this morning about that, and we think he’s off his rocker. His wife drinks, you know. She and Libby belong to the same Great Books club, where they talk about Virginia Woolf or somebody, and she says Olga Winnick has always had a nip or two before they meet. Her husband’s on the radio yapping about how wholesome he is, and his wife’s a lush.”
“I guess you know about their son being attacked.”
Sam shook his head. “It makes me sick that I didn’t know the boy was lying out there when that man ran by. I thought he’d been trying to break in somebody’s house. I never dreamed he had just attacked somebody.”
“The detective told me Rufus may have saved Phillip’s life.”
Sam leaned to scratch Rufus behind the ears. “You hear that, boy? You’re a hero.”
Rufus wagged his tail and grinned modestly, basking in the pride Sam and I were lavishing on him.
I said, “Sam, before you and Libby left last week, did you put a piece of brass pipe at the curb for trash pickup?”
“Yeah, a piece left over after they got the carousel horse up. Why?”
“The cook at the Village Diner works part-time for somebody on this street, or at least she did until last week. She said that she picked up a piece of brass pipe in somebody’s trash last Thursday night.”
“There was a piece of galvanized steel, too, the pipe they used for lining the brass.”
“She didn’t mention that, but she said a man drove into the driveway and took the brass pipe away from her. He was pretty nasty about it, and she’s hurt and angry. Do you have any idea who he might have been?”
“Drove in this driveway?”
“That’s what she said. She said he drove a black sports car, but she didn’t know who he was.”
“I don’t know anybody who would have done that, Dixie.”
“Do you know anybody who drives a black Miata?”
“I don’t think so. Can’t think of anybody.” Sam was standing like a soldier at attention. “Does this have anything to do with that killing? Do you think that’s what the killer used? My brass pipe?”
“I don’t know, Sam. It just seems odd for somebody to make a big scene over a piece of pipe that was left at the curb for trash pickup one night, and then the next morning a dead man is found in a neighbor’s house with his head bashed in.”
Sam winced. “God, that must have been awful for you, Dixie, finding that body.”
Apparently, he didn’t know I’d found Marilee, too.
I said, “Not as bad as finding Phillip beaten up. That was the worst.”
I gave Rufus another hug and got back in the Bronco. “I’ll see you, Sam.”
He and Rufus watched me drive away, both of them with sad expressions on their faces.
At the meandering driveway to my place, I started to make the turn and then straightened the wheel and drove straight ahead. There was one more thing I had to do before I went home.
The Crab House doesn’t open until five o’clock, so there were only a few cars at the far end of the lot, probably belonging to cooks or staff. I parked by the front door and crunched over loose oyster shell. The door was locked, and when I rapped on it, a young Latino with liquid black eyes and a scraggly attempt at a goatee opened it a crack and peered out.
“We’re not open,” he said.
“I know, I’m here to see your manager. One of your employees has been badly hurt.”
His eyes rounded and he looked uncertainly over his shoulder.
“I don’t know,” he said. I wasn’t sure if he meant he didn’t know what to do about me, or if he meant he hadn’t understood what I’d said.
“I have to come in,” I said.
He shrugged and opened the door wider, stepping aside with a shy smile as I passed him. A slight blond man in the waiters’ uniform of black trousers and white shirt was putting little vases of flowers on the tables. He saw me and stopped what he was doing, looking at me with a question on his face.
“Can I help you?”
“Are you the manager?”
“He’s not here right now. Did you want to apply for a job?”
“No, I wanted to tell him—you—something.”
I walked closer to him and saw a name tag reading RAY. I said, “Ray, Phillip Winnick was beaten up Sunday morning on his way home.”
“Who?”
“Phillip, the young man who plays piano.”
“Oh my God! Phil?”
“I found him near his house early yesterday morning. He was in pretty bad shape. He’s in the hospital now.”
He sat down at a table and stared up at me, the implications of what I was telling him playing over his face.
I took a chair across from him and said, “Do you know who Phil leaves with when you close?”
His face tightened and he shook his head. “Nobody here would have done that. Nobody who knows Phil would have done that. Everybody who knows him likes him.”
“I’m not suggesting that the person he leaves with was the one who beat him up. I’d just like to talk to him, find out if he saw anybody around when he dropped Phil off.”
The door opened and the bartender from Saturday night walked in, going straight to the bar and beginning to set out bottles and glasses. He was a tall, bookish-looking man with rimless round glasses and a frieze of short beard around his cheeks and chin. Except for shirtsleeves that bulged with muscles, he reminded me of a chemistry teacher I’d had in high school setting out Bunsen burners and vials of smelly chemicals.
Ray got up and went over to the bar and spoke quietly to him. The bartender turned and looked at me with a frown, then recognized me. He put down the towel he was using to polish a wineglass and came over to shake my hand.
“I remember you,” he said. “You’re Phil’s friend. I’m Dennis.”
“Dixie Hemingway, Dennis. The reason I’m here is that Phil’s been beaten up. I want to find out who did it.”
Twenty-Six
Ray said, “I was just telling her nobody from here would have hurt Phil.”