Murphy put his feet down and righted his chair. "Happy to."
Adkins pulled out five photos. Black-and-white professional head shots, like for corporate advertising. White, upscale, silver-streaked middle-aged men. Respectable-looking. Forceful. Composed. Out of work, Murphy figured, and wondered which one of them was the father of Sherilee's best friend.
"Nope," he finally said, considering each of them. "I'm afraid not. I don't suppose you want to tell me who they are."
"I'm sorry," Adkins said. "No."
"Yeah, that's what I thought."
Gathering the photos back up, Adkins took a moment to consider Murphy in silence. "Since you don't want to be bothered anyway, I guess it's safe to assume that you won't be pursuing this matter on your own."
"Not likely. Sherilee has me on a pretty tight schedule. I'd be happy to help with a composite if you want, though."
Adkins nodded, and creaked and jingled his way to his feet. "Thank you for your time. And please call me if you remember anything. Anything at all."
Murphy followed him up, hearing his own creaks much too loudly. "I certainly will. And good luck. Puckett's too nice a town for problems like this."
He held out his hand. Adkins took it, but only so he could rotate the grip to get his hand on top. That kind of cop. Murphy let him. He might as well let him think he was big dog. God knows Murphy wasn't going to convince Adkins that he didn't want to know what had Adkins so nervous. What, evidently, had the town fathers so nervous. What they were so anxious to protect that they'd sent Adkins out here with veiled threats and questions.
"Yeah. Well, call me if you need anything."
"I will."
"And remember," Adkins advised portentously as he once again took hold of his utility belt. "Leave the questions to us."
Murphy wanted to laugh. "Don't worry," he said with a big, choirboy smile. "I will."
* * *
Two hours later Murphy walked into the office Sherilee Carter had decorated like a quick trip to the Journalism Hall of Fame and blithely broke his word.
"It wasn't your friend's father who tried to shoot up the horse show," he told her as he leaned over to steal a handful of M&M's from the souvenir mug she kept from All the President's Men. Murphy couldn't help but think of how many people that damn movie had gotten into trouble. People who had gone into the business with visions of Woodward and Bernstein dancing in their heads.
And then, even worse, Sherilee had arrayed a whole rogue's gallery on the wall behind her head. Signed photos of David Halberstam, Peter Arnett, Neil Sheehan, Pete Hamill, watching him every time he came in the office like the ghosts of Christmas past.
Murphy's own photo had stayed on the wall only as long as it had taken him to walk in the door that first day. Even so, coupled with Sherilee's unbridled enthusiasm, the office still had the effect of making Murphy feel as if he were looking at pictures of himself in bell-bottoms and an Afro.
Although, come to think of it, in the good old days he had never once worked for an editor who came to the office in a baby-doll dress and pink bow barrettes. But when your father is the third-generation owner of the town paper, Murphy figured you could wear what you damn well pleased.
"How do you know?" Sherilee demanded, swinging around in her daddy's five-hundred-dollar brown leather chair, her short, chubby legs not quite reaching the floor.
Murphy waggled a finger at her. "Ah-ah-ah-ah, wrong answer. Your next statement was supposed to be, 'What makes you think I'd suspect my friend's father?'"
Sherilee blushed. "Okay... so what makes you think I'd suspect my friend's father?"
"Because you haven't talked about the shooting any more than anybody else in this town, which means you're terrified you know who did it. He didn't."
"So how do you know?"
"Adkins showed me pictures. I'd bet a month's salary it wasn't him."
"You don't know what he looks like."
"Middle-aged, well-groomed, hair going tastefully silver. Lumped in a group of four other, very similar men who all looked like they worked together as, maybe, hospital administrators."
Her grin was knowing. "Boy, you are as good as they say. Okay, if he didn't do it, who did?"
Murphy shrugged and settled a hip on her desk. "I half-expected you to know already, since everybody in town talks to you. Somebody had to recognize him."
"Not necessarily," she said. "The crowd that attends horse shows isn't really the old-timers. And from what I heard, most everybody out there was, like, watching the horse. So what do you do next?"
Murphy ignored every familiar face that smiled benignly at him from the wall and stood back up. "Nothing. Just thought I'd let you know."
That brought Sherilee right to her feet, which, behind the massive mahogany desk she'd also inherited from her father, made her look like she was playing grown-up. "I think not, Murphy! I mean, this is, like, our first big, breaking story together!"
"It's gonna have to break on its own, Sherilee. You didn't hire me to do hard news. You hired me for the dry-goods section, so dry goods is where I'm gonna stay."
She was sneering now. "And do what, considering we have a murderer loose in town?"
"An attempted murderer. And who knows? He might already have had second thoughts, been to confession and been absolved without our help. Nobody wants to know about it, and I don't either. I'd rather talk to that guy who seems to make everybody sing."
"Tony Bennett?"
"The guy whose daughter grabbed the gun."
"Joe Leary." Just like everybody else he'd talked to, the minute Sherilee mentioned the name, she smiled. "That's right. It was Timmie out there, wasn't it? Boy, I'll tell you. Coulda knocked me over when I saw her again. Does she look different or what?"
He'd been about to walk out the door. Sherilee's answer stopped him all over again. It seemed he was meant to get answers he hadn't asked for today, whether he liked it or not.
"Considering I don't know different from what, I can't say, Sherilee. Did you know her when she grew up here?"
"Well, she was older than me, but yeah, at least until she moved with her mom to St. Louis after the divorce. But Timmie always had, like, a new hair color, and I'm not talkin' like red or yellow. Green. Orange. Blue. Funny she should get conservative in L.A., huh?"
"Go figure. Any idea why she moved home?"
Sherilee's eyes opened a little more. "Sounds to me like you're more interested in Timmie than her dad, Murphy. This couldn't be love, could it? Like, two strangers in a strange land kind of thing?"
Murphy stiffened like a shot. "Bite your tongue, little girl."
"Well," Sherilee hedged, her expression unusually coy. "Since you swear you're not working on a real story, it's the only reason I can think of that you're asking so much about her. It couldn't have anything to do with the shooting you two shared up close and personal or the fact that for some reason you asked Betty McPherson over at Vital Statistics for death records."
"I'm trying to plan out my golden years," he assured her. "I'd hate to settle in a town with a short life expectancy. Didn't help much, though, since old Betty protected those records like her virginity."
"Oh, Murphy, you're so bogus."
"Don't call me bogus, Sherilee. Anything but bogus."