“Maybe he lives better than he is off.” I sipped. No matter what they put in place of sugar it always tastes like barbed wire left to steep. “I don’t guess you told any of this to the police.”
“I would’ve, if they asked. Why should I cover up for a squirt like Orson Childs?” He spoke the name with an effete accent.
“No reason, except they might look at it as motive for murder. You made a deal to save Mark’s life, Childs reneged, so you decided to repossess.”
He paused in mid-guzzle, swallowed. “Jesus, that’s cold.”
“It should be. I just took it out of your refrigerator.”
“I mean what you said. So why’d I wait four years?”
“Murder plots have been known to stew a lot longer than that.”
He drank off the second half and flipped the can toward the basket. It wobbled but didn’t fall off, as some of the others had. “Do I look like somebody who’d wait that long?”
I drove away from there, yawning bitterly and hoping Barry Stackpole’s lights would be out so I could go home and go to bed. But Barry lived without sleep, a journalistic vampire who that season had sublet lodgings downtown, five minutes from each of the city’s three legal casinos. He had a theory that the owners were building a Mafia outside the Mafia, with no ties to what the gaming commission interpreted as organized crime, but with all the benefits attendant. He might have had something, at that; the owners were exclusively male, and the mob is not an equal opportunity employer. Traditional gangsters had taken one of his legs, some fingers, and put a steel plate in his skull, so he was less than reasonable on the subject of thugs incorporated. In that vein of mind he’d hacked into every hundred-thousand-dollar bank account between Puget Sound and Puerto Rico. Thirty minutes after I dropped in on him and his computer arsenal, I found out Orson Childs had been selling off his family’s stock for five years, trying to bolster investment losses and personal indulgences, from Childs’ Plaything to a racehorse named Lightyear that couldn’t hold its own beside a California redwood. I promised Barry a case of Scotch and left him to his obsession of the season.
The rest was as glamorous as it gets. I caught a few hours’ sleep in my hut on the west side of Hamtramck, got up at the butt-crack of dawn with black sludge in a thermos, and camped out across the street from the Childs house in Grosse Pointe. That morning happened to be trash collection. I was out of the car the second Truk wheeled the household refuse bin to the curb and started back up the drive, puffing smoke from one of the cigarettes I’d given him.
I worked fast, because the trash truck was snorting its way up Lake Shore Drive, the collectors evaluating the inventory for personal aggrandizement before feeding it to the crusher. I found what I wanted among the empty single-malt bottles and plain garbage, put it in my trunk, and went home to hose off and change. Rich people are never available before 9:00 anyway; not even rich people who aren’t really rich, mathematically speaking. In America, even the broke are divided into classes.
Truk let me in with no expression on his face to indicate he knew me from anyone else who came to the door. He didn’t even glance at the red and blue gym bag I was carrying. After a little absence he came back and led me through a room I hadn’t been in and outside to a flagged courtyard where Orson and Clarissa Childs sat in fluffy white robes drinking coffee; Mrs. Childs’s out-of-focus gaze said there was as much Kentucky as Colombian in her cup.
The houseman faded and I set down my bag, which clanked when it touched the flagstones. Childs, looking up from the Free Press, glanced back at it, then at me. Portrait shots of the shooting victims bordered a grainy picture of the murder scene on the front page.
“Anything new?” he asked. “There was nothing on the radio that wasn’t there last night.”
“There wouldn’t be. The press doesn’t know yet about the kidney.”
The woman started, spilling coffee on the table. Childs folded the paper and laid it on the vacant chair. “It didn’t have anything to do with what happened. I assume you’ve been talking with Worden.”
“What happens to Mark’s trust fund now that he isn’t around to collect it?”
“It goes to his heirs and assigns. Before you go any further, you might want to consider the penalty for slander.”
“What lawyer would press the case after your retainer check came back from his bank?”
The couple locked gazes. He blinked first. She set down her cup with a double click.
Childs said, “You should be having this conversation with Worden. He’s an angry man and simple. His thought processes are easy to predict when he thinks he’s been cheated. Not that there is anything to whatever he told you. Buying organs is shaky from a legal standpoint.”
“So’s murder. His shotgun tests clean. How about yours?”
“I don’t own a shotgun.”
“Not anymore. You decided to get rid of it after you used it on Mark and then his roommates to make it look like he wasn’t the only target.”
He lengthened his upper lip. “Evidence?”
“Me, for starters. I’m a witness.” I leaned down, unzipped the bag, and took out one of the pieces I’d retrieved that morning. The barrel had been cut into eight-inch lengths, then split down the middle. When I laid it on the table, Mrs. Childs squeaked, got up, and half ran inside, holding a hand over her mouth. I let her. “If I’d known this was what you were slicing up last night, it would’ve saved me a dive in your dumpster. No wonder you jumped when I walked in on you.”
Childs turned his head slowly from side to side, as if he were trying to get out of my shadow. “Assuming that’s where you found it, what’s it prove? You can’t trace scrap.”
“You know a lot less about shotguns than you do about metalwork. Cutting up the barrel’s a waste of time; it’s smooth, leaves no striations on the pellets. In order to connect the weapon to the murder, all the cops have to do is match the firing pin to the marks on the shells found on the scene.” I was holding the bag now. I took out the heavy Browning receiver and laid it on the table. The incriminating evidence was intact.
He stared at it while I let the bag drop with the rest of the pieces inside.
“Planting that high-grade pot was smart,” I said. “It should have been coke or heroin, but maybe a man in your circumstances doesn’t know how to go about finding them. Smart, and stupid: It diverted the investigation, but it put it in the hands of a narc named McCoy, who’ll have all the upper-end dealers in the area in his data bank. The one you bought it from will turn you if it means ducking four charges of homicide.”
“It’s true,” he said. “I don’t know much about dope or shotguns.”
“Don’t say anything, Orson. All you did was buy marijuana.”
I turned around. Clarissa Childs was standing in front of the door to the house with the twin of the chopped-up Browning raised to her shoulder. The barrel looked as big as a culvert.
“He wasn’t lying to you, Mr. Walker,” she said. “Orson has never fired a shotgun in his life. My first husband taught me how to hunt. I’ve been putting game on the table for years.”
I thought about the revolver in my belt. She read my mind. The shotgun twitched. I held my hands out from my body,
“Clarissa—” Childs began.
“I said don’t say anything!” She kept her eyes on me. “Nothing that ever came from Hank was any good. His son was defective; even his kidney didn’t fix what was really wrong with Mark. After everything Orson and I did for him, he turned his back on his education and ran away. Why should he fall into money when we’ve got three mortgages on this house?”