Донна Эндрюс - Delete all suspects

m Donna Andrews

continued reading, he nodded. Tim even knew Whitlow's on Wilson, the bar where Eddie had been drinking until 11:30 Wednesday night.

The last sentence said that the police were looking for a dark blue or black sedan. No license plate, no description of the driver. Didn't sound promising.

Tim took a sip of tea and studied his would-be client's face while he gathered his thoughts. She seemed like a perfectly nice old lady. Rather like what he remembered of Granny Pincoski. Mrs. Stallman's white hair had a bluish tint that he suspected came from regular visits to the beauty parlor rather than nature, and he doubted the slightly tousled curls happened by themselves either. She wore trifocals, but behind the thick lenses her gray-blue eyes were sharp and alert. He suspected they might twinkle when she wasn't so stressed. Granny Pincoski had been short and stout rather than tall and thin like Mrs. Stallman, and Gran would have been wearing a dark, flowered dress and a cardigan rather than a navy-blue polyester pants suit, but he sensed a similarity in character beneath the external differences.

She didn't look as upset as Gran would have if he were in critical condition, but then not everyone reacted to stress the same way. Mrs. Stallman looked determined—almost fierce— and a little excited.

Probably fired up over the very bad idea of hiring a PI to poke into what the police would consider their business, Tim thought, with dismay. He took another sip and tried not to wince as he swallowed several soggy tea leaves that had floated into his mouth with the bitter liquid.

"So they haven't caught the perp?" he asked. He wasn't sure police used the word perp in real life, but he figured it sounded suitably authentic to his clients, who'd probably watched the same TV shows he had.

She shook her head.

"Mrs. Stallman," he said. "I still don't understand why you think what happened to your grandson was deliberate,

and more important, even if it is, I can't take on a case that the cops are still investigating."

"Of course not/' she said. "I don't want you to investigate the hit-and-run. The cops can do that. I want you to investigate his business."

"His business?"

"He's in some kind of trouble," she said. "I don't know what—he doesn't tell me things like that. Things that would upset me. But he's been worried about something. Acting strangely. Getting odd phone calls. Strange visitors. I've noticed that for the past several weeks."

"He lives here with you?"

"In the basement," Mrs. Stallman said. "He lives there and runs his business from there."

"What kind of business?"

"I don't know." She looked slightly sheepish. "He's explained it, but it's over my head. Something to do with computers."

"Ah," Tim said. He nodded solemnly, to cover a moment of panic. If it had something to do with computers, chances were it was over his head as well.

"It seemed like such a good idea for both of us," Mrs. Stallman said. "I couldn't afford to stay in the house by myself. I'm the only family Eddie has, and he needed a place to live and a place to run his business. A perfect solution. I try to give him his privacy, you know, and he keeps such odd hours that I sometimes don't see him for days on end. Things really were going quite well until recently."

She frowned for a few moments and then started violently when a phone rang elsewhere in the house. From the basement, Tim realized.

"Do you need to get that?" he asked.

She shook her head.

"It will only be one of his customers, complaining about some problem I don't even understand, much less know how to fix," she said, with a hint of panic in her voice. "I cant

figure out what his business does, or why it would make someone want to hurt him, but I'm sure it has. I can't even keep it running while he's in the hospital, and I have to, so it won't fall apart. If something happens and he can't come back to it—"

She buried her face in her hands for a few moments. Then she took a deep breath, squared her shoulders, and looked up at him.

"You could figure it out," she said, standing up and walking toward the fireplace. "I understand that you can't investigate the hit-and-run. But you could look into his business. Find out what it is, and how I can keep it running. And find out where his money is, before those shady friends of his find it. For all I know it could be one of them who killed him. Tried to kill him."

Killed him. She doesn't expect him to make it, Tim thought. Mrs. Stallman picked up something from the mantel.

"That's Eddie," she said, handing him a framed photo.

High school yearbook photo, Tim guessed. Eddie's thin, boyish face stared back at him with a familiar mixture of anxiety and resignation. Tim remembered the sense of doom he'd felt when having his own senior photo taken—a photo almost sure to be horrible, and one he'd have to live with the rest of his life. At least that's how it seemed at the time. In the picture, Eddie looked as if he felt the same way.

Bad idea, identifying too strongly with the subject so early in the investigation, he reminded himself. Got in the way of seeing things clearly. Assuming he even took the case.

"As long as you understand that it's the business we're investigating," he said. "And if we find any evidence relating to the hit-and-run, we have to take it to the police."

"If you find one scrap of evidence abSut the hit-and-run, you bring it to me," she said, her voice so fierce it startled him. "I'll take it to the police," she added. "I can get to them more easily—and besides, I want to see their faces."

Delete All Suspects 17

I'll bet you do, Tim thought.

'But for now, we're investigating possible skullduggery with his business," he said aloud.

"Of course," Mrs. Stallman said. "Let me show you."

She turned and headed for the kitchen. She seemed calmer now that they were talking about the business.

Tim put the photo down on the end table and followed her through the kitchen and down a steep set of stairs to the basement.

"This is Eddie's stuff," she said, waving her hand in a wide arc.

From the size of the room he guessed the basement ran the length and width of the house. A small space immediately to his right, including the area under the stairs, was closed off into a separate room. Rooms, in fact; there were two doors. He spotted a bathroom sink through the nearer opening and suspected that the closed door beyond hid the furnace, water heater, and any other mechanical equipment the house needed. The rest of the basement was finished in knotty pine paneling—probably from the fifties or early sixties—and stuff. Boxes, piles of books and magazines, heaps of discarded clothes, and more computer equipment than Tim had ever seen in anyone's home.

Of course, he reminded himself, this wasn't just Eddie's home. It was also his business. Though it was hard to imagine anyone focusing on business in this untidy, cluttered space.

It wasn't even piles of stuff; more like a giant mound of paper with paths carved through it—one to the bathroom door and another, to his left, to an outside door. The tangle of bed linens mixed with books, magazines, and towels in the far left corner probably indicated that a bed lay beneath, or at least a mattress and box spring. Most of the left-hand wall was covered with cheap, battered bookcases, filled with a haphazard mix of worn paperbacks, thick computer manuals, and untidy stacks of paper.

The near right corner appeared to be a kitchenette. It contained a much higher concentration of dirty dishes and discarded food containers than the rest of the room, and Tim eventually made out the forms of a small refrigerator, stove, and sink beneath the debris.

Beyond the kitchenette, half of the right-hand wall was given over to a built-in bar; evidently, the basement had served as a rec room at one time. Eddie had appropriated the surface of the bar for his computers. Tim counted a dozen monitors, each surrounded by a tangle of mice, cables, keyboards, and various-sized plastic and metal boxes. Turing or Maude could probably identify the boxes in an instant as CPUs, disk drives, or whatever, and could tell him exactly what all the blinking lights and beeping noises meant. Tim could only look around in dismay.