I could only shake my head. I’d never heard anything about Leo lunching on a precise number of potato chips, but I knew Ma Brumsky, and Robinson’s story sounded right.
“Leo said his mother figured he’d take four bites per half of sandwich, and that this way, he’d have one chip per bite.”
That did it for Robinson. He started hugging his ribs because he was laughing so hard.
I laughed hard, too. “A young master indeed?”
“Absolutely, and that’s why I’ll always think of him as a nice young kid with two sandwiches and sixteen potato chips.” His face turned serious. “Why won’t you tell me why the not-so-young master is all of a sudden so interested in Snark Evans?”
I lied by shrugging.
“And how, after all these years, Snarky’s thieving could tie in to Tebbins’s death?”
“I’m not sure of anything.”
“I’ll call Leo myself. I can get the number, you know, even if it’s unlisted.”
“He’s away,” I said.
“Where?”
“Vacation.”
He licked his lips. His nervousness had returned. “Remember the last time, I told you Leo got sick that summer?”
I nodded.
“It was just a few days before Snarky left,” he said.
“What are you saying, Mr. Robinson?”
“Bruno; call me Bruno.”
“You think that Leo faked being sick so he could quit your garage?”
“Now you got me wondering about everything.” He wiped sweat from his forehead. “Not one damned thing could have happened that summer that would be worth killing over. Not one damned thing.”
“Tell me you’re positive that Tebbins was killed by a homeless man.”
The outer door opened. “Robinson?” a woman’s voice shouted. “You in here?”
I recognized the woman’s voice.
Robinson jumped up and hurried out of his office to meet her.
“You’ve got to stay on top of those bastards…” The woman’s voice dropped away. Robinson must have told her someone was in his office.
A minute later, the outer door opened and closed again, and Robinson came back, carrying a topcoat. “I need to leave.”
“J. J. Derbil?” I asked, getting up.
“Smart as hell, or at least thinks she is. She’s ten times more dangerous than her fool brother.”
I stopped us at the hall door to throw down a wild card. “I hear there are problems with that new McMansion.”
His face went pale. “We’re not used to new construction, is all.” He led me through the empty office to open the outer door. “I think you can forget Snark Evans. Besides…”
“Besides?” I asked, stepping into the hall.
“Now that Tebbins is gone, I don’t know who’s left besides me who would even know about him,” he said, “except…”
“Leo,” I said, walking toward the stairs.
Twenty-three
Robinson beat it down the hall ahead of me. I went into the zoning office, smiling.
An attractive blond woman, a bit younger than me, turned from some papers on the visitors’ side of the counter.
Her hands were trembling. “May I help you?” she asked.
I recognized the voice. Again.
“J. J. Derbil?” I asked. “Elvis’s sister?”
“I tell people we’ve got different genes, Elvis and me,” she said squeezing one of the papers in front of her. Apparently I’d not completely masked my surprise.
“You must have gone to private schools, away from Rivertown.”
“Finishing up at Harvard, undergrad and MBA. What do you want?”
“I want to talk about a building.”
She took a deep breath. The trembling had stopped. “Dek Elstrom?”
“Yes.”
“Make an appointment,” she said, moving around the counter to her office.
“I’m curious about that big house that’s going-”
That was as far as I got. She went in her office and slammed the door.
Bingo, bango, bongo; I’d mentioned the new house to Tebbins, Robinson, and now J. J. Derbil. Each time, I’d set a head to bobbling.
I went up the stairs and out into a world that felt even more tense, tired, and unsure. The temperature was around freezing, not quite above, not quite below. The sky was gray and vague and dribbling big flakes of snow mixed with tight drops of rain. Three men were dead-Tebbins, Arnie Pine, and the guy Leo shot-people were jittering about a house, and nobody seemed sure of anything.
I drove to Leo’s block, hoping for good news of the flowing concrete variety. For an instant, I saw it. The wood forms had been lowered into the hole and set up on top of the footings, ready to make the basement walls. A floor could come then, to cover the man I’d buried under too little gravel.
Except there was a crowd. A hundred people milled about in the snow and the dirt and the muck that wasn’t quite either. Some of them belonged there, construction men in thick jeans and canvas coats and high rubber boots who should have been down in the hole, readying the foundation for a pour, instead of standing around, spitting and smoking and stomping their feet to keep warm.
It was the others that dried my throat. Women in sensible long dark wool, housewives from the neighborhood, had been drawn from their houses and now stood talking in tight clusters, shifting uneasily.
They were all looking at the same thing. Two Rivertown lieutenants in tan trench coats, their gin-joint complexions reddened even further by the cold, were stretching yellow police tape across the front steps of the vacant bungalow.
I drove down to Leo’s, parked, and reached behind the passenger’s seat for my peacoat. Pulling it out, I saw faint smears of blood and mud on the dark wool that I hadn’t gotten out earlier. I stuffed it back behind the seat, pulled up the collar of my blazer, and walked back to the crowd. I told myself I looked normal, mildly curious, and not at all like someone who’d buried a body less than fifty feet from the cops pulling the yellow tape.
Jenny was on the sidewalk, talking to a woman. Robinson was there as well, twenty feet behind her, talking to a man in a dress coat and a hard hat.
Jenny noticed me coming up. She shot a quizzical look at my blazer. I shrugged like it was a balmy day in May. She said something to the woman and came over.
“Where’s your peacoat? You’ll catch your death.”
“I’ve built up a defense, living in the turret. What’s going on?”
“I just got here. Any word on Leo?” she asked, by way of not answering.
“I just talked to him. I was alarmed over nothing.”
“Where was he?”
“What’s the ruckus here?” I asked in as even a tone as I could manage.
“See those steps?”
“Police tape is always hard to miss.”
“Look harder.”
I did. “I see concrete steps.”
“See those little stains on the edges of them, halfway down? Rusty red?”
I saw. Now it was like they were outlined in neon, bright and red even in the gray of the day. I shook my head like I was confused.
“I see nothing.”
“Bloodstains, maybe,” she said, watching my eyes.
“I suppose, or paint.”
“That woman I was just talking to? About three o’clock this morning, her husband came out to go to work. He thought he heard something coming from the new construction. He dismissed it as being the wind; no one’s out in this neighborhood that time of morning. He drove to work, thought nothing more of it until he got home. Then he looked across the street, and in the daylight, he could see those little rusty red stains. He crossed over for a better look. Then he called the police to tell them he’d just spotted what might be blood.”
“Rivertown cops confirmed that?”
“They don’t have the expertise, as you well know. The sheriff’s crime scene team is inside the bungalow now, looking for other evidence.”
“Unusual, for Rivertown cops to call in the sheriff,” I said. “They like to control everything here.”