“And you say you don’t have a twin brother?” Lowbock asked.
“No, sir.”
“No brother at all?”
“I’m an only child.”
“Half brother?”
“My parents were married when they were eighteen. Neither of them was ever married to anyone else. I assure you, Lieutenant, there’s no easy explanation for this guy.”
“Well, of course, no other marriages would’ve been necessary for you to have a half brother . . . or a full brother, for that matter,” Lowbock said, meeting Marty’s eyes so directly that to look away from him would have been an admission of something.
As Marty digested the detective’s statement, Paige squeezed his hand under the table, an admonition not to let Lowbock rattle him. He tried to tell himself that the detective was only stating a fact, which he was, but it would have been decent to look at the notebook or at the window when making such implications.
Replying almost as stiffly as he was holding his head, Marty said, “Let me see . . . I guess I have three choices then. Either my father knocked up my mother before they were married, and they put this full brother—this bastard brother—up for adoption. Or after my folks were married, Dad screwed around with some other woman, and she gave birth to my half brother. Or my mother got pregnant by some other guy, either before or after she married my father, and that whole pregnancy is a deep, dark family secret.”
Maintaining eye contact, Lowbock said, “I’m sorry if I offended you, Mr. Stillwater.”
“I’m sorry you did, too.”
“Aren’t you being a little sensitive about this?”
“Am I?” Marty asked sharply, though he wondered if in fact he was over-reacting.
“Some couples do have a first child before they’re ready to make that commitment,” the detective said, “and they often put it up for adoption.”
“Not my folks.”
“Do you know that for a fact?”
“I know them.”
“Maybe you should ask them.”
“Maybe I will.”
“When?”
“I’ll think about it.”
A smile, as faint and brief as the passing shadow of a bird in flight, crossed Lowbock’s face.
Marty was sure he saw sarcasm in that smile. But, for the life of him, he couldn’t understand why the detective would regard him as anything less than an innocent victim.
Lowbock looked down at his notes, letting the silence build for a while.
Then he said, “If this look-alike isn’t related to you, brother or half brother, then do you have any idea how to explain such a remarkable resemblance?”
Marty started to shake his head, winced as pain shot through his neck. “No. No idea at all.”
Paige said, “You want some aspirin?”
“Had some Anacin,” Marty said. “I’ll be okay.”
Meeting Marty’s eyes again, Lowbock said, “I just thought you might have a theory.”
“No. Sorry.”
“You being a writer and all.”
Marty didn’t get the detective’s meaning. “Excuse me?”
“You use your imagination every day, you earn a living with it.”
“So?”
“So I thought maybe you’d figure out this little mystery if you put your mind to it.”
“I’m no detective. I’m clever enough at constructing mysteries, but I don’t unravel them.”
“On television,” Lowbock said, “the mystery writer—any amateur detective, for that matter—is always smarter than the cops.”
“It’s not that way in real life,” Marty said.
Lowbock let a few seconds of silence drift past, doodling on the bottom of a page of his notes, before he replied: “No, it’s not.”
“I don’t confuse fantasy and reality,” Marty said a little too harshly.
“I wouldn’t have thought you do,” Cyrus Lowbock assured him, concentrating on his doodle.
Marty turned his head cautiously to see if Paige showed any sign of perceiving hostility in the detective’s tone and manner. She was frowning thoughtfully at Lowbock, which made Marty feel better; maybe he was not over-reacting, after all, and didn’t need to add paranoia to the list of symptoms he had recounted to Paul Guthridge.
Emboldened by Paige’s frown, Marty faced Lowbock again and said, “Lieutenant, is something wrong here?”
Raising his eyebrows as if surprised by the question, Lowbock said archly, “It’s certainly my impression that something’s wrong, or otherwise you wouldn’t have called us.”
Restraining himself from making the caustic reply that Lowbock deserved, Marty said, “I mean, I sense hostility here, and I don’t understand the reason for it. What is the reason?”
“Hostility? Do you?” Without looking up from his doodle, Lowbock frowned. “Well, I wouldn’t want the victim of a crime to be as intimidated by us as by the creep who assaulted him. That wouldn’t be good public relations, would it?” With that, he neatly avoided a direct answer to Marty’s question.
The doodle was finished. It was a drawing of a pistol.
“Mr. Stillwater, the gun with which you shot this intruder—was that the same weapon taken from you out in the street?”
“It wasn’t taken from me. I voluntarily dropped it when told to do so. And, yes, it was the same gun.”
“A Smith and Wesson nine-millimeter pistol?”
“Yes.”
“Did you purchase that weapon from a licensed gun dealer?”
“Yes, of course.” Marty told him the name of the shop.
“Do you have a receipt from the store and proof of pre-purchase review by the proper law-enforcement agency?”
“What does this have to do with what happened here today?”
“Routine,” Lowbock said. “I have to fill out all the little lines on the crime report later. Just routine.”
Marty didn’t like the way the interview increasingly seemed to be turning into an interrogation, but he didn’t know what to do about it. Frustrated, he looked to Paige for the answer to Lowbock’s inquiry because she kept their financial records for the accountant.
She said, “All the paperwork from the gun shop would be stapled together and filed with all of our canceled checks for that year.”
“We bought it maybe three years ago,” Marty said.
“That stuff’s packed away in the garage attic,” Paige added.
“But you can get it for me?” Lowbock asked.
“Well . . . yes, with a little digging around,” Paige said, and she started to get up from her chair.
“Oh, don’t trouble yourself right this minute,” Lowbock said. “It’s not that urgent.” He turned to Marty again: “What about the Korth thirty-eight in the glovebox of your Taurus? Did you buy that at the same gun shop?”
Surprised, Marty said, “What were you doing in the Taurus?”
Lowbock feigned surprise at Marty’s surprise, but it seemed calculated to look false, to needle Marty by mimicking him. “In the Taurus? Investigating the case. That is what we’ve been asked to do? I mean, there aren’t any places, any subjects, you’d rather we didn’t look into? Because, of course, we’d respect your wishes in that regard.”
The detective was so subtle in his mockery and so vague in his insinuations that any strong response on Marty’s part would appear to be the reaction of a man with something to hide. Clearly, Lowbock thought he did have something to hide and was toying with him, trying to rattle him into an inadvertent admission.
Marty almost wished he did have an admission to make. As they were currently playing this game, it was enormously frustrating.
“Did you buy the thirty-eight at the same gun shop where you purchased the Smith and Wesson?” Lowbock persisted.