When Old Men Die (25 page)

When we'd eaten, Dino wanted to go to his living room and watch
The People's Court
.
 
I told him that we needed to talk.
 
He sighed, but we stayed in the kitchen.

After I'd finished telling him everything that had happened, he said, "You could have called me from the hospital.
 
I'd have come after you."

He probably even meant it, though I don't think he would actually have done it.
 
He might have gotten Evelyn to do it, however.

"It doesn't matter," I said.
 
"What matters is what we're going to do."

"Let's go through the whole thing and see what we know for sure," he said.
 
"Or what we think we know.
 
Then we'll decide what we have to do next."

He meant that we'd decide what
I'd
have to do next, but there was no use in telling him that.
 
So we talked everything over and tried to sort things out.

We knew that Harry had disappeared about the time
Braddy
Macklin was killed, and we thought we knew that Harry had witnessed Macklin's death and somehow escaped.

We thought we knew that Macklin's killer was after Harry, and we were sure that Becker and
Zintner
were after him.

"You believe
Zintner
?" Dino asked.

"I believe he wants Harry.
 
I'm still not sure
why
he wants him."

"
Zintner
wouldn't go to the cops."
 
There was approval in Dino's voice.
 
"If Macklin was working for him, he'd want to settle the score himself."

"You sound like you believe him."

"I'd probably do the same thing.
 
And Becker didn't finish you off when he had the chance."

"Gee, that makes me like him even more than ever."

"You don't have to like him.
 
Just give him the benefit of the doubt."

I was giving Dino the benefit of the doubt by going over all this with him.
 
I'd decided that there were already enough suspects without having to distrust my oldest friend.
 
I hoped I wasn't wrong.

"If we take Becker and
Zintner
off our list of suspects, who does that leave?" I asked.

"The Hammer," Dino said.
 
"He's old, but he's probably still man enough to take out Ro-Jo."

"And why would Hobart kill Macklin?"

"Because they hated each other for over thirty years.
 
Because they were on opposite sides when it came to bringing gambling back to the Island.
 
With two guys like that, you don't need anything else."

I wondered
why
they were on opposite sides.
 
I wasn't satisfied that Hobart was opposed to gambling simply on moral grounds.
 
He didn't seem to me to be the kind of man who spent a lot of time worrying about the moral consequences of anything, much less gambling.
 
His own addiction didn't seem to be the real reason, no matter what he said.

"Hobart was at home last night, taking it easy," I said.
 
"Could he have killed Ro-Jo?"

"How long had Ro-Jo been dead before you got to Hobart's house?"

I couldn't answer that with any certainty.
 
Ro-Jo could have been dead for an hour or two by the time I found him, and after finding him I'd been out of things for a while, lying on the floor of the warehouse.

"I get the point," I said.
 
"Hobart could have done it.
 
He had plenty of time to kill Ro-Jo and then go home and make himself comfortable before I was able to get to him.
 
Who else do we have?"

"Alex Minor," Dino said.
 
"I wasn't paying much attention when you told me about him the other day.
 
I guess I should have been."

"I've been worrying about Minor," I said, wondering why he hadn't turned up.
 
"I thought he'd be following me around, but I haven't seen any sign of him."

"Then don't worry about him until he shows up.
 
Who does that leave?"

I mentioned Laurel Lytle.

"You think she's back in town?
 
Nobody's heard from her in years."

"I don't know where she is.
 
I can't find any trace of her, but I've got a few other places to look."

"Why would she kill Macklin?"

"I don't know.
 
It's just that she seems like the loose end in all of this.
 
Maybe there's something we don't know about their relationship.
 
Do you remember her daughter, Mary Beth?"

"She was a little older than us," Dino said.
 
"The guy with old man Lytle at the cemetery today, what's his name?"

"Paul," I said.

"Yeah.
 
He's Mary Beth's kid.
 
She left here right after high school and got married, but she's dead now.
 
That's all I know."

That wasn't much help, and it certainly didn't tell me
any more
about Laurel.
 
I'd have to do some more checking.
 
And there was something else I didn't know.
 
I was still unsure about who'd told Paul Lytle that I was looking for Harry.
 
I mentioned that fact to Dino.

"I thought you said it was
Zintner
."

"Not exactly.
 
I said that's what Lytle told me.
 
The more I think about it, the less likely it seems.
 
Zintner
wouldn't tell anybody anything unless he thought there was something in it for him.
 
If Lytle had called him, he would have tried to persuade him to use Becker.
 
That way
Zintner
would get paid for a job he was already doing."

"But not you," Dino said.

"I told Lytle that I already had a client."

"Yeah.
 
Well, if
Zintner
didn't tell him, we know who did."

Maybe Dino did, but I didn't.
 
It wouldn't have been Barnes; Lytle wouldn't have called him.

"Who?" I asked.

"You're not thinking," Dino said.
 
"Who else knew?"

Almost before he'd asked the question, I knew the answer, just as I should have known it all along.
 
There was only one person it could have been.

Cathy Macklin.

"You were blocking it," Dino told me when he saw that I'd tumbled.
 
"I could tell you liked her."

"Why would she tell Lytle that I was looking for Harry?" I said.
 
"What's the connection?"

"You're asking me?
 
How would I know?
 
You're the detective.
 
You figure it out."

I didn't want to figure it out.
 
Besides the fact that I felt as if I'd failed too often, there was another reason I'd stopped looking for people.
 
Too many times things didn't work out the way they should have.
 
Even when you made the right connections, even when you located the person you were looking for, you lost something along the way.
 
I'd found Dino's daughter, all right, but Dino and I had lost a friend.
 
Now it seemed that I might lose Cathy before I even got to know her.
 
And she was the one I'd decided to trust.

"I'll have to ask her," I said.

There were a couple of other things I could ask as well.
 
Like, how had Lytle known about the service at the cemetery that morning?
 
It hadn't been in the papers.
 
Even Cathy hadn't known until last night.
 
She must have told him, which meant that they'd had more than one conversation.
 
I didn't like the implications of that.

"Why don't you go talk to her?" Dino said.
 
"I think I'll stay here and watch TV.
 
I think Oprah's gonna have a pretty good show today.
 
You can let me know what you find out."

I told him that I would.

T
he sun was still shining when I drove to the Seawall Courts, but somehow the day didn't seem quite so bright as it had earlier.
 
I really didn't want Cathy to be mixed up in the murders of her father and Ro-Jo, but it was beginning to appear that she might be.

As I climbed the stairs to her apartment, I thought about her behavior at the cemetery.
 
It was almost as if she had been avoiding me.
 
Could the presence of Lytle have had something to do with that?

She answered my knock, and I was glad to see that she didn't look unhappy to see me.
 
I asked if I could come in.

"Sure."
 
She stepped back from the door.

She had been wearing a black dress at the funeral, but she'd changed to jeans and a flannel shirt.
 
She still looked good.

"I talked to Patrick Lytle at the cemetery this morning," I said.
 
"I'd like to ask you about him.

She brushed her hair back with her right hand.
 
"I thought that might be why you were here.
 
I wish he hadn't shown up this morning."

"You told him about the service?"

"Yes.
 
He asked me to call, so I did.
 
I should have known better."

"Why did he want you to call him?
 
Did he say?"

"He hated my father.
 
He wanted to see him put in the mausoleum.
 
That's all.
 
And that's why I shouldn't have called him.
 
No one should gloat at a funeral."

"Did you hate your father as much as Lytle did?"

"I told you the first time I saw you that my father didn't really mean much to me.
 
I hardly ever saw him at all.
 
I used to be bitter about that, and I guess I haven't gotten over it.
 
If I had, I wouldn't have called Lytle."

"Your father bought you this place," I said, referring to the motel.
 
"He must have had some feeling for you."

"If he felt anything it was probably just guilt.
 
He thought that by buying me something like this, he could make up for what he'd done to me and my mother, but he should have known he could never do that."

Maybe she was right about her father.
 
I wasn't in a very good position to know Macklin's motives, but liked to think I could understand her feelings about him.

"Let's get back to Lytle's call," I said.
 
"You told him that I was looking for Outside Harry, didn't you."

She looked at me steadily with those deeply blue eyes.
 
I couldn't see any guile or evasiveness in them.
 

"That's right," she said.
 
"I did.
 
Was there any reason I shouldn't have?"

I couldn't think of one.
 
I hadn't told her it was a secret.

"No," I said.
 
"Why did he call?"

"He'd heard about my father.
 
He wanted to tell me to be sure to let him know when the funeral would be held."

"How did Harry's name happen to come up in the conversation?" I asked.

"I can't really remember.
 
I think Mr. Lytle was asking something about the investigation into my father's death.
 
He wanted to know what the police were doing, and he asked if anyone else was looking into it."

"Didn't that strike you as curious?"

"Not really.
 
And at the time I wasn't in much of a mood to wonder about it.
 
I was wrapped up in my own problems.
 
I was feeling a little guilty myself, if you must know.
 
My father was dead, and I found I didn't really care very much."

I wasn't getting very far in my investigation, but that didn't matter to me at the moment.
 
I was at least finding out that Cathy hadn't done anything wrong and that she didn't have any ulterior motive for having told Lytle that I was looking for Harry.

I felt an odd sense of relief.
 
For a while there I had allowed myself to think that Cathy might even have had something to do with her father's murder.
 
Looking at her now and hearing her straightforward answers to my questions, I was sure that she was completely innocent of any involvement.