“Yes.” I chewed on that for a while. I wasn’t surprised, but it was hard to accept.
“That’s not good news?” She asked tentatively. “Well, it is what it is. It puts a friend of mine into pretty hot water.” “I’m sorry to hear that. There was one last thing about Bruce Wingate that I thought you might like to know he’d brushed his teeth just before he died.” “How long before?” Like the feather, it was one of those tiny tidbits that were either uselessly distracting, or on which an entire case could hinge.
“A half hour at the most. I discovered it because he had a small smudge of something white at the corner of his mouth, which I had analyzed.”
“That’s interesting,” I muttered. “I thought you might like that.”
“Well, it means one of two things: Either Wingate brushed his teeth before he went to bed every night, which means he died about a half hour after that, or he brushed them especially because he was meeting someone he wanted to favorably impress.” “Someone he thought he might stand close to, or even kiss,” Hillstrom added.
I was silent for a moment. That opened up possibilities I hadn’t considered. “You’re very good at this.” She chuckled.
%141 We talked about Wingate and Fox a bit more, going over known aterial, looking for possible new avenues, and then finally gave it up.
I turned off the light after I hung up and just sat there in the dark, ming it over again and again in my mind.
Bruce Wingate fights with Fox, loses, and takes it out on Rennie.
hen what? Fox and the entire household die in a presumably accidenI fire, only Fox is dead before smoke gets in his lungs, the woman and zds are on the other side of a locked door, a spent 9-mm cartridge is und at the top of the stairs, and Bruce Wingate admits later to having ned a gun of the same caliber.
Then, the next day, Wingate takes an inconclusive lie detector test d won’t let his wife take one at all. Conclusion? The Wingates are up to their chins in this. Only ingate is now dead. Who could have set up a meeting with Bruce ingate and killed him? And why were there so many footprints found the scene? If Rennie did kill Wingate, who were the other two people? And what motivation did Rennie have to do in Wingate?
I had difficult time believing it was because of a punch in the mouth.
I shook my head, remembering Smith’s satisfaction at finding the ots, the clothes, and the knife. I also recalled the sour feeling in my when I’d heard him tell the troops to pick up Rennie for Wingate’s urder.
Just as well I didn’t get an invite to their little powwow might ave raised more questions than they wanted to hear. I knew Spinney wasn’t entirely happy with what they had against ennie, and for all I knew, maybe Smith wasn’t either. He didn’t like e. I was Potter’s man and an outsider to boot. But his going by the ook with Rennie didn’t mean he was ignoring other possibilities. You ab at what you can in this game, nailing down what loose ends you’ve before going after new ones. Smith was a cold piece of work, it was ue, but it was a piece that seemed to work well, without cutting rners.
So who else wanted Wingate dead? Sarris? If Wingate did torch e building, revenge might certainly be due. Of course, Sarris would probably have someone else do it, which then brought up the possibility any one of dozens of men. Or women, for that matter, as Hoard had ointed out. Certainly the fact that there were as many as three people resent when Wingate was killed argued in favor of Sarris and his oup.
Then there was the mysterious Julie Wingate, the reason Bruce d Ellie had come up in the first place. Was their relationship so far ne that she’d murder her own father? She could have mailed the note her father, arranging a rendezvous, and then killed him when he %142 showed up.
Could Ellie and Julie have been in cahoots? Ellie’s sleeping pill story was almost certainly a lie. Bruce Wingate was no charmer; maybe this was an elaborate scheme for the two women to finally get rid of him, the ultimate in mother-daughter bonding. But if so, why leave the envelope in the wastepaper basket?
I laughed at myself in the dark. Jesus. Besides, none of those theories explained why all the evidence pointed at Rennie. Good old Rennie, with your ass in a crack. What have you been up to?
I thought back for the umpteenth time to our teenage years. You never do know what your friends will become. Charles Manson no doubt once played tag and pigged out on Hershey’s kisses. But I had always thought Rennie and a dozen other people I’d known would grow up pretty much as they had. They’d move around a little, they’d grow fat and bald, but they wouldn’t offer too many surprises. And that’s the way it had turned out-except, apparently, for Rennie.
I heard footsteps on the landing outside, followed by a knock on the door. “It’s open.” The light from the landing backlit Spinney’s gangly silhouette. I leaned forward and lit my desk lamp. We both squinted at each other.
“You get a lot done this way?” “Secret of my success. Have a seat.” He crossed the room and took the chair by my desk. He was carrying a folder, which he placed delicately on his bony knees. “Thought you’d like to know what we’ve dug up.” I raised my eyebrows at him. “Does Smith know you’re here?” He allowed a half smile. “He said you’d get a report.” He opened the folder. “I’ll skip the stuff you already know.
The fire is still legally an accident, nobody saw a thing, and nothin’s going’ nowhere fast. But,” he raised a finger for emphasis, “we are chipping away at it. Remember the 9-mm casing, which could have come from anywhere, despite Wingate’s having owned the same kind of gun?”
“Sure.” “Well, the print we lifted from it belongs to Bruce Wingate. It ‘puts him at the scene,’ as they say, for the first time.” “It puts his print at the scene.” He gave me that loopy, wide grin. “Right. We kicked that around, too, especially since he says he lost the thing.”
“Which he may or may not have.” I remembered what I’d been kicking around in my head just minutes earlier. “If he didn’t, then he might have been there and fired it. But if he did lose it, then anything’s possible.” “Like the daughter.” %143 I shrugged. “Sure, the daughter-or the wife. What do we know? aybe Ellie tried to kill Julie and frame Wingate, or kill Wingate and ame Julie, or killed Fox on purpose or by mistake, or tried to kill erself and missed.” Spinney was laughing. “All right, all right Apple dug up a lot ore on Edward Sarris. Want to hear it?” “Sure.” Spinney blinked a couple of times to focus on his notes.
“He’s pretty bland, really. Used to be a college professor, wrote a book about me of his back-to-nature ideas, dropped out and formed the roots of is outfit in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Did pretty well, and then me up here because things were getting too crowded and tense down uth.” “How so?” “He was a real pain in the butt to the town government, constantly gging them about what they were doing. He’d show up at council Ieetings and raise hell. It was legal but it caused problems.
They started going after him for code violations of one kind or another, and e’d stall ‘em with lawyers. But that was about it-no big deal. They ink he finally left more because of his success than because of any assles with the town.” “Where’s he get his money?” “They give it to him.
That’s part of the deal. When you join up, ou hand over every dime you own, along with all your material ossessions. He keeps the cash and sells the rest. Then he’s got the estaurant, which has almost no overhead since all the workers are olunteers, and he’s got a mailorder business for all the natural foods ey grow for nothing. He gets into a jam every once in a whileelatives of Order members try to sue because of the money angle, one tate agency or another sticks its nose into labor relations, or the vital tatistics law, which he just ignores, or health and sanitation. Things ke that.