“What brings you out on this wet night?” I asked, curious. I could not remember Roger ever just dropping by unannounced.
“We have come to steal your car for your mother’s friend,” Ricardo said, planting a cold kiss on my cheek.
“Dad didn’t want Mom driving down the mountain in the rain tomorrow,” Roger said. “So he asked me to bring him up here tonight. I’m sorry it’s so late. I tried to warn you, but the call went straight to message.”
“You didn’t leave a message.”
“Sorry, no.”
“You called from your mobile?”
He nodded, and I asked him to dial my number, just to check the line, I said. He did, and his familiar number appeared on the I.D. screen; the earlier call wasn’t his.
“Sorry to intrude at this hour, dear,” Ricardo said. “When I saw the weather report, I put the prod to my boy and said, ‘Let’s go now.’”
“Probably the smart thing,” I said, imagining Linda, always a nervous driver, following Ricardo down the mountain in a deluge when they came to get my car for Gracie Nussbaum to use during her visit.
After fetching the extra set of car keys, we went down the back stairs and through the garage. I pushed the button to open the big doors, and the overhead lights came on as the doors rolled up.
“Honey, you going to be driving Mike’s truck?” Ricardo asked, eyeing the pickup skeptically.
“Sure. Be good for the truck to get driven,” I said. “It hasn’t gone farther than the feed store for over a year.”
“But it’s a big truck.” He was not persuaded that it was a good idea for me, little me, to drive it.
“Ricardo,” I said, hitting the button on my key fob to pop the trunk of my car, “I’ll be fine. You want to give me a hand?”
I led him to the wine cupboard and asked him to pick up one of the cases of Côtes du Rhône Jean-Paul brought over Saturday and put it in the trunk. I followed him, carrying tins of the pâté that Mom had enjoyed so much.
“What’s all this for?” he asked, studying the label on the pâté.
“Gifts for Mom’s hosts,” I said, handing him my car keys. “She can’t go to your house empty-handed.”
He smiled. “I like the way you think.”
Roger told him to go ahead, he’d be down the mountain right after him, but first he wanted a word with me.
After we waved good-bye to Ricardo, Roger and I stood in the open garage door, leaning against the truck’s tailgate, looking out at the night. There were patches of black sky behind the clouds, a sliver of moon. Rain was predicted to continue until midafternoon Wednesday, but those patches gave me hope of an earlier clearing.
“Are you checking up on me?” I asked.
“I am. How are you feeling?”
“Tired, Roger. Sore. Quite a day.”
“If you don’t want to drive Mike’s truck, you can have my car.”
“I thought it was in the shop.”
“I lied. Your shoulder might get more sore; I thought the truck might be a bit too much, so I brought the company car home so you could have mine if you want it. Let me know and we’ll switch them out.”
Moved by his concern, I thanked him, hugged him.
“Did you have a doctor look at your wound?”
“Not yet. I have an appointment first thing in the morning.”
“Go get some rest,” he said, giving my back a last pat.
I asked him, “Did you find out who followed me yesterday afternoon in Gilstrap?”
“Yeah. I ran the plates and called the sheriff up there to see if he could tell me anything about the owner, young man named Orel Swensen. The sheriff knows him, said Swensen got into some mischief as a teenager but that now he mostly stayed out of trouble; drinks a little beer on Saturday nights. He works on his father’s dairy farm in Gilstrap, a big commercial operation.”
“Never heard of Orel Swensen,” I said.
“Sheriff asked him why he followed you,” Roger said. “He said he wanted to make sure you got out of town.”
“Why?”
He shrugged, looked at me with a sly smile on his face. “Who’d you offend when you were up there, Mags?”
I told him about taping a conversation with Karen Holloway and about being confronted by her younger son, Harlan.
“Maybe he’s a friend of Harlan Holloway.” He smiled down at me, ever the tease. “And maybe he thought you have good legs.”
“That’s probably it,” I said.
“I should go,” he said, taking out his keys.
“Roger?”
He turned toward me.
“You know Joan Givens.”
“Sure.”
“Has she come to you to talk about Park Holloway’s illicit money-raising?”
“No. I only know what my beloved wife has passed along to me. She says Joan wants to go to the D.A. or something. The way I see it, Holloway’s fund-raising may have been unethical, but I don’t know that it was criminal.”
“Joan told me that he deposited checks in an offshore account.”
“That’s interesting,” he said. “Certainly has an odor to it. But it isn’t illegal, per se. IRS might be interested, though.”
“Has anyone mentioned any of that fund-raising activity to Thornbury and Weber?”
He dipped his chin in a little nod. “I told them it looked like Holloway was having some financial issues because he put the squeeze on campus donors, privately. They said looking into the finances of a murder victim is standard procedure.”
“Have they looked into it at all? Spoken with Joan?”
“I know they haven’t spoken with Joan or I would have heard about it. But Frick and Frack don’t share much with me,” he said. “They have this funny idea that I’m hardwired into the information pipeline at the college.”
I had to laugh. “Where did they ever get that idea?”
He grinned. “Beats me.”
“Roger, I’m a little worried about Joan,” I said. “She told me that before Holloway died she gave copies of a file of letters from angry donors to the Board of Trustees because she wanted Holloway’s activity to be exposed. But she also told me she could trust the Board only to do their best to make the problem go away. I thought that Joan could be protecting her donors by not pushing the issue further.”
“Protecting them from what?” he asked, dubious. “Embarrassment, scrutiny?”
“The way Holloway died,” I said, “how about a murder charge?”
He put a gentle hand under my chin and raised it so I was looking at him.
“That guy today really rattled you, didn’t he?”
“Hate to admit it, but yes.”
“What you’re doing, it’s called projection,” he said, smiling, dropping his hand from my face. “Instead of worrying about yourself, you’ve decided to worry about someone going after Joan.”
“It’s called experience, Roger. I read the donor letters. Some of them are pretty irate. If someone on Joan’s list was angry enough to take out Holloway, then Joan could be in some real danger.”
“That’s a stretch, Mags.”
“I gave her Thornbury’s card and told her I thought she should call him. Would you do me a favor and ask Frick and Frack if she did?”
“As soon as I get home I’ll do just that, but only because I have a feeling that if I don’t, you won’t get any sleep tonight.”
Chapter 19
“They’re here to arrest me, aren’t they?”
“They won’t do anything until after the funeral,” I said, stealing a glance toward the college gym’s exit doors where Detectives Thornbury and Weber stood, feet shoulder-width apart like soldiers at parade rest, unmoving yet seeing everything and everyone in the room.
Uncle Max reached forward from his seat behind us and clamped a hand on Sly’s shoulder as a reminder to keep his mouth shut.
Sly dropped his head and wiped his hands on his pants legs before he clenched them together. He was as thin as a splinter, but compared to the scrawny urchin I had pulled in off the streets a decade earlier, he was downright robust; I thought he looked handsome in his new blue suit.