“Delicious. I’ll get the coffee going.” Molly headed to the coffeemaker. “So what are you going to do?”
“Fry up a few potatoes, cut up some onion and green pepper, throw on a little-”
“I mean about Joe John.”
Cork pulled out the cutting board and a knife and began dicing the potatoes, skin and all. “I’ve been thinking about it. The only thing that makes sense is he was killed because he knew something about the brigade or about the casino or both. He cleaned the offices of Great North every night, so maybe he saw or heard or stumbled onto something he shouldn’t have. I’d guess, given what I know about the judge and Lytton, that the judge arranged to have Lytton take care of things.” Cork shrugged. “It’s all speculation. But one thing seems sure. Joe John was killed in cold blood.”
Cork took a small green pepper and an onion from the crisper and set them on the cutting board.
When the coffeemaker stopped dripping, Molly got a mug from the cupboard and filled it for Cork.
“Thanks,” he said. “Aren’t you going to have some?”
“I’ll fix a little herbal tea later.” She leaned her hip against the counter, crossed her arms, and looked sad. “It’s hard to believe. All of this is hard to believe in Aurora.”
“Happens everywhere,” Cork said. “Nature of the beast. Ouch!”
“What?”
“Cut myself.” He jammed his finger into his mouth and sucked.
“Bad?”
“No.”
“Wash it off in the sink. I’ll finish cutting.”
Molly took the knife. Cork ran water over his finger and saw a small clean slice near his nail. He pressed it with his thumb and in a moment the bleeding had stopped.
“I’ll live.” He smiled. “But I could sure use a cigarette. Mind?”
“Go ahead.”
He plucked the pack from his shirt pocket. “You know,” he said apologetically, “you put up with a lot from me. Why?”
“I thought I made that clear last night.” She tossed him a smile over her shoulder.
Cork looked at the cigarettes. Impulsively he crumpled the pack and dropped it in the wastebasket under the sink.
Molly paused with the knife in her hand. “Is that for real?”
“There are a lot of things that will be different about me from now on. I promise.”
He moved behind her, and as he held her, his face against her hair that was still damp from the shower, he gazed out the window above the sink. He could see the cabins that lined the way down to the lake. They were old cabins, but sturdy. Molly’s father had built them himself not long after Molly was born and only a short time before his wife ran off and left him to raise the baby girl alone. Cork supposed the old man had done his best as a parent. But he had a reputation as a drinker, and the girl he raised had had a reputation for wildness.
“Do you ever think of fixing up the cabins, opening up this place again as a resort?” Cork asked.
“Almost never,” she said. “I like the solitude. And besides, it’s something I’d never want to tackle alone.”
“Maybe I could help,” Cork said.
She turned in his arms, turned to face him, and she looked up seriously into his eyes. “I wouldn’t want to run the place alone either.”
Cork gathered himself together and came as near as he’d ever come to saying he loved her. He said, “Maybe you wouldn’t have to.”
Molly kissed him and held him for a long time in the sunlight through her window.
“You know, you don’t have a Christmas tree yet,” he pointed out.
“I never get a tree,” she said, pulling away gently and turning back to the cutting board.
“Why not?”
“When I was a kid my father used to promise all kinds of things at Christmas. He never came through with anything. Christmas means mostly disappointment to me.”
“Let me finish those potatoes,” Cork said.
“Finish your coffee,” Molly told him. “I can see the general direction you were taking.”
Cork sipped from his mug. “Would you get a tree if we went together?”
“I’d consider it.” She looked out the window a moment. “But only if we made our own decorations. You know, popcorn and cranberries on strings, paper chains, that kind of thing. I don’t want all the commercial crap. Blinking lights and shiny ornaments and that stringy, glittery stuff.”
“Icicles?”
“Yeah, those.”
“Whatever you want,” he said. “Let’s get it today.”
“When?”
“As soon as you’re off work.”
“All right,” she agreed. “And tonight we’ll make decorations.”
The telephone rang. Cork answered. He listened a minute, said thanks, and hung up.
“So?” Molly asked. She placed the cast iron skillet on the stove over a medium flame and dropped in a bit of butter.
Cork sat back and sipped his coffee. It was black and strong and good. A cigarette would have made it perfect.
“Ed says the address is the judge’s house,” Cork told her. “Makes sense. The judge signed all the documents, and I don’t imagine, given the probable nature of the enterprise, that he operated out of his Great North offices. Too much chance of someone stumbling onto something.”
“But I thought you said his house had been searched thoroughly by Schanno and his men.”
“Maybe they missed something,” Cork said hopefully. “I don’t know if there’s a connection between this GameTech business and Joe John’s murder, but it might go a long way toward explaining the odd behavior of a certain county sheriff lately. Sometimes an investigation’s like pulling on the loose threads of a sweater. Grab the right one and the whole thing unravels.”
“Will you talk to Schanno?”
“If I don’t find anything at the judge’s house, I may have to fall back on the direct approach-with Wally or one of the other consultants.”
“What about St. Kawasaki and-what did you call it? — Lazarus?”
“I intend absolutely to have a talk with him. He’s got a lot to explain. Also, I need to pick up a cassette player so I can hear what those tapes have to tell me.”
“Busy day,” she noted. “Sure you’ll have time to hunt down a Christmas tree with me?”
Cork watched her at the counter in her red robe, with her damp red hair. He watched her carry the cutting board to the stove and he smiled at the way her thick red wool socks had bunched around her ankles. As she spilled the diced vegetables and potatoes into the hot skillet, he said to her, “I love you, Molly.”
But the sizzle from the skillet was loud and she didn’t seem to hear.
37
Cork made his way through the snow, up the long slope of the judge’s estate. The broken pane on the side door had been covered with a bit of plywood that Cork easily pried loose. He reached in, unlocked the door, stepped inside. The cans he’d knocked over the night Russell Blackwater died still lay strewn across the kitchen floor. The smell of rotting garbage had grown worse. Cork made his way back to the judge’s study, where all the evidence of what the shotgun had done to the judge’s head still remained splattered on the map behind the desk, brownish now, more like mud than rivers of red. Cork started with the desk. He checked the telephone, a complicated thing with lots of buttons. Beside two of the buttons numbers were listed, one of which belonged to GameTech. He checked the drawers but found nothing that seemed relevant. He went through the judge’s mahogany secretary and came up blank there, too. He removed the books from the shelves, as Schanno had done, and, probably like Schanno, found nothing.
Including the bathroom, there were seven rooms on the first floor. Cork went through them all. If the judge kept any GameTech-related documents at his home, they weren’t downstairs. Cork headed up to the second floor. As he reached the top of the landing, he heard the front door open and quietly close. A shadow passed through a bar of sunlight across the floor, but he couldn’t see the figure who’d cast it. Carefully, he descended the stairway. From the kitchen came the squeak of a hinge like that of a little mouse. Cork crossed the bare wood floor, hoping the complaint of an old board wouldn’t give him away. He hadn’t thought to bring his Winchester, so he picked up a black metal sculpture of a perched hawk and cradled the heavy piece in his hand as he edged toward the kitchen doorway.