Okay, so it had taken her a while. But Maggie was paying attention now.
"Someone ran you off the road? Alex? You know what I'm thinking? Oh, why am I even asking? Of course you do."
"Yes, sweetings, I have already deduced as much myself. But let us begin at the beginning, shall we? Henry, if you would please tell us about your evening at the bowling lanes?"
"That's what I was trying to do, until you guys started asking questions, stealing my chocolate. But I promised you a freebie, remember? A slice, not the whole cake. Not for free."
"You have a freebie for us, Henry?" Maggie asked him.
"Yeah, I do," he said, his eyelids narrowing as he looked at her. "Heard some guys talking in the bar. But, remember, you're not going to like it. The dead guy? He was maybe banging your mom. Or maybe your sister? One of 'em. All I caught was the name."
"Maureen," Maggie said hopefully. It would be bad enough, people knowing about Maureen. But her mother? That would be really, really bad.
"No, that's not it."
"Reenie?" Maggie suggested, this time desperately.
"Nope. Why don't I just tell—"
"Alicia?" Maggie asked. Squeaked.
"Jeez, if you'd just hold onto your undies, I'd tell you. Erin. The name was Erin."
"Steady, sweetings," Alex said, reaching over the seat to put his hands on her shoulders.
"If that bastard wasn't dead, I'd kill him myself," Maggie declared through clenched teeth and suddenly numb lips. No wonder her sister hadn't been home in years. "Man, when I moved to New York I must have screwed up Bodkin's personal scorecard, huh? And forget I said screwed."
Novack seemed oblivious to Maggie's pain, her Trauma of the Day. "So that's the freebie. I say anything else and it's going to cost you."
"And do you have anything else to say?" Alex asked, still rubbing Maggie's stiff shoulders.
"That's not the point. I'm talking generally here," Novack said, burrowing all of his chins beneath the collar of his jacket. But then he sat up straight, grinning. "You said you wanted to know everything, right? Everything that happened last night? You still want that?"
"I want to pretend I'm an orphaned only child," Maggie said, blinking back tears. But she had to stop this; there was no time for a personal pity party, although a long letter to Erin, once this was all over, was probably in order, damn it. "Okay, okay, how much will this cost me?"
"I don't know," Novack said, sounding unsure of himself for the first time since he and Maggie had "bumped into" each other. "What's the going rate for private detectives, anyway?"
"I don't know, Henry," Maggie told him, rallying. "But the going rate for guys in go-carts is twenty bucks an hour."
"Twenty bucks an—plus expenses?"
Alex chuckled in the backseat.
"Expenses? What expenses?"
"Well, I was at the lanes for about five hours or so, and the pizzas were twelve bucks a pop ..."
"Pizzas? As in plural pizzas? Oh, hell, all right. Let's make it an even two hundred for the night, okay?"
"Cash?"
"I'll tap my card later at an ATM."
"What kind of later? Later today, or later this week?"
"Later today, unless you make me really mad. Which you're doing. Now start talking."
Novack was nothing if not obedient, at least where the prospect of getting paid to talk was concerned.
He'd gone to the bowling lanes at around seven o'clock, when the leagues first began, and did what Maggie and Alex had told him to do. Be inconspicuous, while keeping his ears open. He walked from alley to alley, sitting down sometimes, pretending to look for a ball at others.
And listening. He did a lot of listening.
The topic of conversation, wherever he stopped to listen, was always the murder. The murder, and Evan Kelly's arrest for that murder.
"Oh, and somebody's got a pool going," he told them. "It's pretty much five-to-three odds that your dad gets life without parole. Sorry."
He went on to tell them that he'd found the alley where the Majesties were practicing, and stood behind a pillar so nobody could see him—
Okay, so Maggie wasn't really good at turning a laugh into a cough, but she gave it her best shot ...
—And heard the team talking about the murder, and the New Year's tournament that was coming up in a few days.
The redheaded guy, Novack told them, was having a small cow as he tried to get the new members of the team to understand that the bowling order would remain the same as it had been when Bodkin and Kelly had been on the team: the redhead first, some guy named Kelso next, then the lesbian—
"Henry, I don't think that's necessary," Maggie interrupted him. "And you're wrong. Trust me on this one."
Novack just shrugged and continued to list the bowling order. After the woman, the last one would be Barry Butts. And Barry Butts—"wild name, huh?"—hadn't liked that. He wanted to bowl second, not last. There'd been a near fight, but then the woman settled it, sort of smoothed things over. Novack figured the fun was also over, and since he'd just seen a guy walking by with a plate of nachos that looked pretty good, he took himself off to the bar for his own plate of nachos and a brewski. Light beer, of course, as he was trying to watch his calories.
"And that's it?" Maggie slumped in her seat. "Not much for two hundred bucks, Henry."
"There's more," he told her quickly. "In the bar? That's where I heard about your sister, I guess it was, and about some others. The guy with the red hair? Him? He came in with the other two guys, not the les—not the woman, and they were making jokes about the dead guy unzipping his pants all over town. The hothead? That Butts guy? He said he'd have paid the dead guy to take care of his wife for him. I laughed at that, and he looked over at me, all wild-eyed and mean all of a sudden, and asked me if I wanted to sit closer, so I could hear better. Then all three of them looked at me, all madlike."
"Ouch. Busted, huh? Next time you might want to try a cloak of invisibility ... pup tent of invisibility," Maggie said as Alex remained quiet in the backseat. He was probably thinking, and since Maggie couldn't think of a thing to think herself, that made her a little angry. Because he was probably thinking of some clue she'd missed. This was a thought that pretty much took the fun out of hearing that Lisa "She Stuffs" Butts's husband seemed to think the honeymoon was long over.
"Pup tent, huh? That's good, really funny, if I was a masochist. See, I know some big words, too. But, yeah, I guess they figured out I was listening to them," Novack agreed. "So I finished my chicken wings and left right after they did, picked up my go-cart—I chain it to stuff when I don't want to use it—and took off for the van. And got pushed off the road. Tapped right on the left rear fender and went, bam, into the ditch."
At last Alex said something. "Did you happen to see the driver of the car, Henry? The color of the car? The numbers on the license plate?"
"From where was I supposed to see any of that, huh? From the bottom of the ditch? He was a drunk. Blind drunk, because anyone else would have seen me. I've got reflectors, I've got lights. I got me. I'm not small, you know."
"Henry," Alex said sternly, "I thank you so much for all you've done, but you're now, as you Americans say, out of it. No more investigating, no more eavesdropping, nothing."
Novack shifted on the seat, once more sending the van's springs to protesting loudly. "What? You think somebody did that on purpose? You think somebody tried to—well, holy crap."
Maggie laid a hand on Novack's sleeve. "It could be a coincidence, Henry. But do we want to take that chance?"
Novack seemed to consider the question for a moment. "Well ... yeah, I think so. I mean, how much fun do you think a fat man has, anyway?" He turned as best as he could in his seat, to look back at Alex. "What do you want me to do next? Price has gone up, though, what with the hazardous-duty pay rules and all. Three hundred an hour?"