He stopped me again. “Have you stayed close to any of those people?”
I shook my head.
“So you weren’t at that Kerouac Thingy-dingy the other night?”
“Good gravy, no. I haven’t gone for years.”
“So your relationship with Sweet and his friends is pretty much ancient history then?”
“Well, yes. I suppose so.”
I could tell from the way Grant was nibbling on the ice in his water glass that he was disappointed. “Exactly when was the last time you talked to Gordon Sweet?” he asked.
“It could have been six months ago-or maybe a year.”
“That memorable, was it?”
“It was just the usual small talk when you bump into someone. ‘How you doing?’ ‘You’re looking good.’ That kind of thing.”
“And was he looking good, Mrs. Sprowls? He didn’t look troubled or frightened? Preoccupied with something?”
“Well, Gordon was always preoccupied with something,” I said. “He was a very smart man and there was always a lot going on upstairs. But I don’t have any memory of thinking something was wrong.”
He put another spoonful of ice in his mouth. “You went to the memorial service, right?”
I nodded, wondering how he knew.
“You have a chance to talk to anybody?”
I told him who’d I talked to, Effie, Chick, Gwen and Rollie.
“Any of them say anything interesting?”
“Just the stuff everybody says. What a great guy Gordon was. How they’re going to miss him.”
“Nothing relating to his murder?”
“Well, Effie did say maybe Gordon was digging where he shouldn’t have been.”
Grant showed a smidgen of interest in that. “Was that her maybe or your maybe?”
“I’m pretty sure it was her maybe.”
“So you didn’t get any sense that she knew something?”
“Not really. But you do have to wonder if his dig had anything to do with his murder, don’t you?”
The waitress brought our drinks. Grant had ordered a Diet Pepsi. I’d ordered hot tea. He watched me squeeze the goodness out of my teabag and I watched him take his straw out of the wrapper. I figured if he wasn’t going to ask me another question, then I’d ask him a few of mine. “You don’t have any suspects then?”
He bent the tip of the straw at a convenient angle and took a long suck of his Pepsi. “Every murder comes with a shitload of suspects, Mrs. Sprowls. Pardon my Vulgarian.”
I waved off his apology. “But nobody you’re going to arrest in the next day or two?”
He adjusted the angle on his straw and sucked again. “This one could take a while to unravel.”
“What about that graduate assistant, Andrew Holloway III?” I asked.
One of Grant’s big eyebrows arched higher. One went flat. “What about him?”
“Dale said the kid found both Gordon’s body and his car. Fifteen miles away from each other.”
Grant stared at me for an uncomfortably long time. He was not thrilled that I knew that much about the graduate assistant, which meant he was not thrilled that Dale knew that much. Clearly somebody back at headquarters was going to get his ass chewed out for leaking that. “That’s really all I know,” I assured him.
“Let’s try to keep it that way,” he said.
The meatloaf sandwiches and sides of au gratin potatoes arrived. Like everyone who’s ever eaten at Speckley’s, we raved about how good it was all the time we were stuffing our faces. “I’m sorry I can’t be more helpful,” I said.
He put down his fork. Folded his fists under his chin. “That’s not the only reason I wanted to see you.”
I put my fork down, too. Fidgeted with my napkin. “Oh?”
“Let me ask you this-If you weren’t that close to Professor Sweet anymore, why did you go to his memorial service?”
It was a good question. One I’d asked myself. I fumbled my way through a number of answers: “I guess because he was such a nice man. And I had so many good memories of him. And to tell you the truth, I was curious to see who else might show up.”
My use of the word curious made him wince, as if he’d just swallowed one of those bitter little gnats that buzz around over-ripe bananas. “You’re not going to involve yourself, are you Mrs. Sprowls?”
“Involve myself?”
“You did a great job with the Buddy Wing thing. We never would have found the real murderer without you. We’re very grateful. But that little snoopfest of yours was just a one-time deal, right?”
“Well, of course it was a one-time deal.”
My assurance resuscitated his appetite. “That’s good to hear,” he said through a mouthful of slippery potatoes. “Because this case may have to be on hold for a while. And I don’t want you out there causing trouble. For me or yourself.”
“Heavens to Betsy, don’t worry about that-what do you mean on hold for a while?”
“Not exactly on hold. But we only have so many detectives. And only so much time. And we’re up to our boxers in this Zuduski thing.”
He was talking, of course, about the murder of Paul Zuduski, younger brother of Congresswoman Betty Zuduski-Lowell. He’d been missing for six weeks when his badly decomposed body was found in an abandoned factory on the south side. He’d been shot several times and duct-taped inside a Persian rug. He’d worked in his sister’s Hannawa office, helping solve the everyday problems of her constituents.
“The good congresswoman is putting tremendous pressure on the mayor,” Grant said. “And pressure on the mayor means pressure on the chief. Which means pressure on yours truly. But don’t worry, Mrs. Sprowls, we’ll get the sonofabitch who killed your friend sooner or later.”
Of course I wasn’t going to involve myself. No matter how many unanswered questions were eating away at me. No matter how upset I was that Detective Grant was putting Gordon’s murder on the backburner while he figured out who killed the congresswoman’s little brother.
Of course if I remembered something that might be important, I’d share that with the police. And if, as the head librarian of The Hannawa Herald-Union, I came across something interesting in my files, why, yes, I’d certainly pass that along. But involve myself? No way in hell was I going to involve myself.
Chapter 4
Saturday, March 17
I knew right where to find Eric Chen-in the cafe at the Borders bookstore in Hannawa Falls. Eric spends every Saturday and Sunday there, from the minute the store opens until the manager sweeps him out at closing time, playing chess with the city’s other dust-collecting geniuses. They’re quite a bunch, I’ll tell you. I suppose there are fifteen or twenty of them. Ethnically they’re a real box of Crayolas: Whites, Blacks, Asians, Latinos, Iranians, just about one of everything. And almost all of them have an advanced degree in some difficult subject. They gather around the little tables like starved squirrels around a walnut tree. They play game after game after game. Fast, noisy games. They chatter and groan and slap their foreheads. They bang their chess pieces down and pound their timers. They giggle in Farsi and screech Shit! in Chinese.
Eric was sitting right in the middle of this mayhem, locked in battle with some unshaven old fart in a bowling shirt. I sat at an empty table and waited for him to notice me. When he did, I wiggled my fingers at him. He gave me the international finger signal for “just a minute.” He played-and lost-three more games before joining me. “You know,” I said, “if you and your little friends stopped wasting your brains on that worthless game, you could have half of the world’s problems solved in about five minutes.”
Eric was cradling a big, half-empty bottle of Mountain Dew in his arms. “Is there a compliment in there somewhere?”
“Actually, no.”
“Good,” he said. “I don’t think any of us could take the pressure of being admired.” He pulled out a chair with his foot and slumped into it. He held his Mountain Dew bottle up to the light and shook it until the carbonation bubbles were swirling like the snow in one of those worthless glass balls. “So, what brings you to Borders, Maddy? Trolling for a well-read man?”