P Deutermann - The Cat Dancers

No one said anything for a moment, and then Bobby Lee leaned forward. “Do you think you two might have made it permanent?” he asked. “I don’t mean marriage, but-”

“Hell, I don’t know,” Cam said. “And now I guess I never will. But to answer your question, Special Agent, no, I did not kill Annie Bellamy. I don’t have expensive tastes or habits. I’ve basically got all the money I’ll ever need, and no one to support or leave it to. I drive a really old car and a used pickup truck. I live in a modest two-bedroom house out in the burbs. I don’t gamble. I don’t do drugs. I don’t lust after young boys or farm animals. The best part of what Annie and I had going was that that was all we had going, understand?”

McLain nodded slowly, and Cam saw the other people around the table relax. “Then we have to find out who did do this thing,” he said briskly, as if everything was settled. “Okay. I’ve talked to ATF-they’ll probably take the lead in the bombing investigation. Sheriff, we’ll need your statements, the evidence bucket-you know, the usual.”

Bobby Lee said they’d get any support they needed. McLain offered to merge his information with theirs, because in his opinion, Marlor was still the main suspect. Cam just sat there, bemused at how quickly McLain had moved on to other things after putting him through the wringer with a virtual accusation of murder. Bobby Lee gave him a signal and the two of them excused themselves and left the others to talk. They stepped out into the anteroom.

“Sorry about that shit,” he said. “McLain told me they’d talked to the lawyer, and that he did not know you. He wanted to see how you’d react. If it makes you feel better, he did say he thought it was bullshit, but he felt obliged to go through the motions.”

“Interesting,” Cam said. “He almost had me convinced. What do you want MCAT to do now?”

“Let’s do this: We’ll let the feds start their investigation, give them all our information, and make sure everyone knows they’ve got the ball. Then maybe we’ll work something out.”

Cam nodded. He knew they each had a big stake in what happened now. Cam’s was personal, the sheriff’s professional.

“Who’s going to arrange her funeral?” the sheriff asked.

Cam blinked. “I guess that’s on me,” he said.

A week after Annie’s funeral, Cam met with her estate lawyer, a Mr. J. Oliver Strong, who confirmed that she had indeed left all her assets to him, minus a few bequests to charity, her church, and her housekeeper. Cam asked how the process worked. Strong told him that as her executor, he would liquidate all the assets and eventually send Cam a check, less legal expenses and the taxes. It would take awhile-perhaps several months-to repair and then sell the real estate, but she had made a lot of money and had turned it all over to professional money managers, so the real estate wasn’t actually the biggest piece of the pie.

He asked if Cam wanted to get involved in the liquidation process, or if Cam wanted him to handle it. Cam said he did not want to get involved. He had only one question: When had this will been executed? Strong had apparently anticipated to his question, and the answer surprised Cam: The will had been executed a year after their divorce. The only changes since then had been the charitable bequests and the bequest to the housekeeper, and those codicils had been added three years ago. Otherwise, she’d never changed the will she’d made when she was first married to Cam. Strong said she’d also made a provision that when Cam retired from police work, he would get an income stream from her holdings. She had told Strong once that this was the alimony she should have paid a long time ago. Strong felt this provision was still operative even though she was dead.

As Cam drove back to headquarters, he wondered if he ought to tell the feds about the time line relative to the will. Screw, he decided; they probably already knew. But it sure as hell wasn’t as if he and Annie had gotten back together and then she’d changed her will to benefit him. Maybe this had all been Annie’s way of making up for her original infidelity. He tried to put that history out of his mind. One day, he’d get a check in the mail and that would be that. He suspected taxes would take a lot of the heft out of his windfall, but either way, he still would rather have had Annie back than any sum of money. The depth of that sentiment still surprised him. Past-due alimony. That was rich.

He stopped in a men’s room on the way up to his office and walked into a stall. He was getting ready to come out when two men came into the bathroom to use the urinal. They were talking as they walked in-about him. He recognized one voice as that of Lt. Frank Myers. He didn’t recognize the other man’s voice.

“Ten million fucking dollars?” the other man said.

“That’s the number I heard,” Myers said. “That Communist witch left him everything. Just like that. House alone is worth a couple mil, even with the new air-conditioning arrangements for the garage.”

“I thought she hated all of us, big and tall, fat and small.”

“Not Richter, apparently. You know they’d been married a long time ago, right? Story is, she’d played around a bit when she started making real lawyer money; he found out and dumped her.”

“Least he could do, I guess. She pay him alimony?”

“Who knows. She has now, though.”

There were sounds of flushing and then water running in the sinks. Paper-towel dispensers clattered.

“He ought to just pack it in, you know?” Myers said. “I was there that night. Whatever her public face was in court, she meant a lot to him, and now she’s in the ground. Fucked him up, I think. Maybe more than he knows.”

“Yeah, I hear some of the guys in MCAT are saying the same thing. Walking wounded. Goddamned women can do that. But he’d lose his pension, he resigned now.”

“And why would he give a shit about a Sheriff’s Office pension? He’s got real money coming. The annual interest alone on ten mil would be-what, seven, eight times his pension? And from what I’m hearing, MCAT is adrift anyway.”

“MCAT ought to get taken apart,” the other man said. Cam finally recognized the voice. It was Sergeant McMichael, of SWAT and Miranda fame. “Buncha fuckin’ cowboys, going around in civvies all the time, driving hot cars, soaking up all that overtime money. Pisses people off. All that flash, and usually just one perp in the crosshairs. What the fuck good is that?”

Cam didn’t get to hear Myers’s answer as they banged out the bathroom door. He sat there for a moment. The idea of quitting had never crossed his mind. He’d just assumed he’d go back to work, back to being the boss of MCAT, back to chasing bad guys. He was a cop. That’s what he did. What else would he do? But Myers was right about the money of course. Financially, he could walk out of here tomorrow and never look back.

He came out of the stall and washed up. He stared at his face in the mirror. He’d lost a little weight over the past two weeks and his face was still haggard. He needed a haircut. His uniform wasn’t as crisp as it should be. He’d been doing a lot of sitting around and staring into space, and he knew his people had been tiptoeing around him. Even Kenny had been keeping his distance, which was like losing a second friend. Cops weren’t supposed to have friends, but they did, in the sense that they came to depend on one another and to meld their minds and reactions, especially in dangerous situations. If friendship was trust, then cops had friends. But he still thought there might have been cops involved in what had happened. Not Kenny, of course, and certainly not in the bombing. But in the executions of those two robbers? He finished drying his hands, pulled out his cell phone, and put in a call to the estate lawyer.