Лори Касс - Pouncing On Murder

So instead of the classic “What do you want?” question that I so desperately wanted to ask, I said, “Nice spot you have here.”

Duvall stared at me. “What?”

I kept on with my slow walk toward the end of the dock and said, “How long have you had this place?”

“None of your business,” Duvall said.

So much for opening pleasantries. I tried to widen my focus to include the empty boat lift that was on my left and anything it might offer me. The bench where Duvall was sitting was on an assemblage of dock sections that made up an L-shaped area. I searched for a weapon—a boat hook, an anchor, a rope, anything—but the only things I saw were the bench, Duvall, and Eddie’s box.

“Mrr,” the box said, and scarlet rage fell down upon me like a net.

“What do you want?” I asked, my teeth tight together.

“I want you to undo what you did.” Duvall snorted an unattractive laugh.

An Undo button for life. Now, that would be useful. I stopped about fifteen feet away from Duvall, well out of his reach. “It would help if you told me what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t play dumb with me,” he snapped. “You know perfectly well.”

Well, no, I didn’t. Not for sure. But I could guess. “Larabeth came to her conclusions on her own,” I said. “All she wanted from me were confirmations.”

“And you did what, just handed them to her?”

He snorted again and I got the feeling that snorting was a habit of his. A few years of that and it would be no surprise that his wife wanted to divorce him. Though it wasn’t until I’d started poking around that Larabeth had started putting the pieces together, she was a smart woman and would have figured out on her own that Cole was cheating on her. Maybe I’d jump-started the process, but if it saved her from having to listen to that condescending snort even once, I couldn’t say I was sorry.

Of course, he still had my cat. And I still needed to know—desperately needed to know—if he’d killed Henry and tried to kill Adam.

Duvall turned on the bench and faced me full-on. “Make this go away,” he said, “and I’ll give you back your cat. Although why you’d want this thing is beyond me.” He gave the box a shove with his foot, pushing it a few inches closer to the edge of the dock and eliciting another “Mrr!” from inside. “All he does is whine, whine, whine.”

He’d taken on a tone close enough to Eddie’s voice that made me think that my cat had said more than usual on the trip out here. Which brought me to another question.

“How did you know that I had a cat?”

Duvall snorted. “Everybody knows about the bookmobile cat. You can’t talk about the bookmobile lady and not hear about her freaking cat. ‘Oh, he’s so cute,’” he said in a high-pitched voice that didn’t sound like any woman I’d ever heard in my life. “‘Eddie is just the nicest cat there is.’” He dropped the fake voice. “Even if there was such a thing as a nice cat, this one wouldn’t be it, not the way he complains about everything.”

No cat liked to be grabbed and stuck in a box, but if Duvall didn’t know that by now, there was no hope for him.

“How did you know where I lived?” I asked.

“Where do you think you live, Chicago? You live in Chilson, for crying out loud. All I had to do was walk downtown and ask about the bookmobile lady with the cat. Everybody I talked to was so happy to talk about you, about your houseboat and your aunt with the boardinghouse.” He snorted. “Only up here would there still be such a thing as a boardinghouse. Doesn’t she know they stopped existing fifty years ago?”

Again, I pushed away the anger threatening to take over my brain, pushing away worry about Aunt Frances, pushing away worry about Eddie and whatever might happen in the next few minutes.

“Why did you lie to me?” I asked. “Up by Henry’s sugar shack. You said Felix Stanton had tried to talk Henry into selling last fall.”

“Really?” Duvall asked, sarcasm oozing from every letter of the word. “You can’t even figure that out? It was obvious you were poking into things that were none of your business. It was dead easy to give you a shove in the wrong direction and get you off my back.”

It was obvious to me that his ploy hadn’t worked at all, but whatever. I put my hands in my pockets and felt the reassuring bulk of my cell phone. I’d set it to record, and hoped its recording qualities were good enough to work through my pants. Speaking of phones . . . “How did you get my cell number?”

Duvall laughed and took a long swig out of what I could now see was a beer bottle. “You should really tell your library staff to be more careful,” he said, swiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “People like me might be calling and saying they’re an uncle who happens to be in town but doesn’t have your phone number.”

He was probably right; I should tell them to be more careful. Then again, did I really want to take away their willingness to help? Where did you draw the line? Where did you decide to take a stand?

“I can’t make your problems go away,” I said calmly. “And anything you do to me or my cat will only make things worse.” Especially my cat. I balled my hands into hard fists, enduring the pain of my fingernails digging into my skin. “Talk to your wife. Apologize. Tell her you’ll never do it again. If you’re sincere, it should all work out.”

“Don’t be stupid,” he said shortly. “She’ll never believe that I won’t have another affair. I promised after the last one to never do it again. She said she’d give me one last chance, and this was it.”

“Ah.” When I’d talked to Larabeth, that wasn’t the story she’d given me, but I could understand rearranging reality a little to save her pride.

Duvall upended the beer bottle into his mouth, emptying it of every last bit of alcohol. When he was done, he said, “Last night, after I drove all the way up here, she told me to pack my stuff and get out before she called someone else to do it for me. Then she took off.”

“Where did she go?” I asked.

“How would I know? That woman is too jealous for her own good. If she hadn’t been like this, I never would have cheated on her in the first place.”

I squinted at him, once again wondering how people could hold two opposing viewpoints in their heads at the same time and not blow up. I also wondered at a man who, after years of marriage, couldn’t make a guess as to where his wife had fled after an argument.

Then fear stabbed at me. What if he’d killed her?

Duvall flung the empty beer bottle into the water. Flagrant littering: another reason to put him in jail. “She called this morning,” he said. “I tried to talk with her, tried to reason with her, but she wasn’t having any of it, said that after she’d talked to you everything became clear.” He stared at me. “So now I want you to take it back. I want to stay married to Larabeth. She’s the best meal ticket I’ll ever get and she’s so busy running those stores that I hardly have to see her. All I have to do is get you to convince her I wasn’t up here that weekend with my friend.”

While I was relieved at Larabeth’s continued life, I was appalled at her husband. “You married her to get a free ride?”

He laughed. “Little Miss Naive, aren’t you? You’d think I’d marry a woman who looks like that for any other reason? I mean, honestly, look at me.”

I did look at him, and in the last vestiges of the day’s light, I didn’t see what he expected me to see, which was a handsome man in his mid-forties, a man full of confidence and appeal. What I saw was a grasping and desperate man who would stop at nothing to keep the life of luxury to which he’d grown accustomed.