But, no, she was referring to someone else.
Tal stepped inside and lifted an eyebrow to Greg LaTour. “Thought we had an appointment yester—”
“So where you been?” LaTour grumbled. “Sleepin’ in?” The huge man was finishing Tal’s cheese sandwich from yesterday, sending a cascade of bread crumbs everywhere.
And resting his boots on Tal’s desk.
It had been LaTour’s page that caught him with Mac McCaffrey. The message: “Office twenty minutes. Stat. LaTour.”
The slim cop looked unhappily at the scuff marks on the desktop.
LaTour noticed but ignored him. “Here’s the thing. I got the information on the wills. And, yeah, they were both changed—”
“Okay, that’s suspicious—”
“Lemme finish. No, it’s not suspicious. There weren’t any crazy housekeepers or some Moonie guru assholes like that controlling their minds. The Bensons didn’t have any kids so all they did was add a few charities and create a trust for some nieces and nephews — for college. A hundred thousand each. Small potatoes. The Whitley girl didn’t get diddly-squat from them.
“Now, them, the Whitleys, gave their daughter — bitch or not — a third of the estate in the first version of the will. She still gets the same in the new version but she also gets a little more so she can set up a Whitley family library.” LaTour looked up. “Now there’s gonna be a fucking fun place to spend Sunday afternoons…Then they added some new charities, too, and got rid of some other ones…Oh, and if you were going to ask, they were different charities from the ones in the Bensons’ will.”
“I wasn’t.”
“Well, you should have. Always look for connections, Tal. That’s the key in homicide. Connections between facts.”
“Just like—”
“Don’t say fucking statistics.”
“Mathematics. Common denominators.”
“Whatever,” LaTour muttered. “So, the wills’re out as motives. Same with—”
“The insurance policies.”
“I was going to say. Small policies and most of the Bensons’ goes to paying off some debts and giving some bucks to retired employees of the husband’s companies. It’s like twenty, thirty grand. Nothing suspicious there…Now, what’d you find?”
Tal explained about Dr. Sheldon, the cardiologist, then about Dehoeven, Mac and the Cardiac Support Center.
LaTour asked immediately, “Both Benson and Whitley, patients of Sheldon?”
“No, only Whitley. Same for the Cardiac Support Center.”
“Fuck. We…what’sa matter?”
“You want to get your boots off my desk.”
Irritated, LaTour swung his feet around to the floor. “We need a connection, I was saying. Something—”
“I might have one,” Tal said quickly. “Drugs.”
“What, the old folks were dealing?” The sarcasm had returned.
Tal explained about the Luminux. “Makes you drowsy and happy. Could mess up your judgment. Make you susceptible to suggestions.”
“That you blow your fucking brains out? One hell of a suggestion.”
“Maybe not — if you were taking three times the normal dosage…”
“You think maybe somebody slipped it to ’em?”
“Maybe.” Tal nodded. “The counselor from the Cardiac Support Center left the Whitleys’ at four. They died around eight. Plenty of time for somebody to stop by, put some stuff in their drinks.”
“Okay, the Whitleys were taking it. What about the Bensons?”
“They were cremated the day after they died. We’ll never know.”
LaTour finished the sandwich. “You don’t mind, do you? It was just sitting there.”
He glanced at the desktop. “You got crumbs everywhere.”
The cop leaned forward and blew them to the floor. He sipped coffee from a mug that’d left a sticky ring on an evidence report file. “Okay, your — what the fuck do you call it? Theory?”
“Theorem.”
“Is that somebody slipped ’em that shit? But who? And why?”
“I don’t know that part yet.”
“Those parts,” LaTour corrected. “Who and why. Parts plural.”
Tal sighed.
“You think you could really give somebody a drug and tell ’em to kill themselves and they will?”
“Let’s go find out,” Tal said.
“Huh?”
The statistician flipped through his notes. “The company that makes the drug? It’s over in Paramus. Off the Parkway. Let’s go talk to ’em.”
“Shit. All the way to Jersey.”
“You have a better idea?”
“I don’t need any fucking ideas. This’s your case, remember?”
“Maybe I twenty-one-twenty-foured it. But it’s everybody’s case now. Let’s go.”
She would’ve looked pretty good in a short skirt, Robert Covey thought, but unfortunately she was wearing slacks.
“Mr. Covey, I’m from the Cardiac Support Center.”
“Call me Bob. Or you’ll make me feel as old as your older brother.”
She was a little short for his taste but then he had to remind himself that she was here to help him get some pig parts stuck into his heart and rebuild a bunch of leaking veins and arteries — or else die with as little mess as he could. Besides, he joked that he had a rule he’d never date a woman a third his age. (When the truth was that after Veronica maybe he joked and maybe he flirted but in his heart he was content never to date at all anymore.)
He held the door for her and gestured her inside with a slight bow. He could see a bit of her defenses lower. She was probably used to dealing with all sorts of pricks in this line of work but Covey limited his grousing to surly repairmen and clerks and waitresses who thought because he was old he was stupid.
There was, he felt, no need for impending death to alter good manners. He invited her in and directed her to the couch in his den.
“Welcome, Ms. McCaffrey—”
“How ’bout Mac? That’s what my mother used to call me when I was good.”
“What’d she call you when you were bad?”
“Mac then, too. Though she managed to get two syllables out of it. So, go ahead.”
He lifted an eyebrow. “With what?”
“With what you were going to tell me. That you don’t need me here. That you don’t need any help, that you’re only seeing me to humor your cardiologist, that you don’t want any hand-holding, that you don’t want to be coddled, that you don’t want to change your diet, you don’t want to exercise, you don’t want to give up smoking and you don’t want to stop drinking your”—she glanced at the bar and eyed the bottles—“your port. So here’re the ground rules. Fair enough, no hand-holding, no coddling. That’s my part of the deal. But, yes, you’ll give up smoking—”
“Did before you were born, thank you very much.”
“Good. And you will be exercising and eating a cardio-friendly diet. And about the port—”
“Hold on—”
“I think we’ll limit you to three a night.”
“Four,” he said quickly.
“Three. And I suspect on most nights you only have two.”
“I can live with three,” he grumbled. She’d been right about the two (though, okay, sometimes a little bourbon joined the party).
Damn, he liked her. He always had liked strong women. Like Veronica.
She was on to other topics. Practical things about what the Cardiac Support Center did and what it didn’t do, about caregivers, about home care, about insurance.
“Now, I understand you’re a widower. How long were you married?”
“Forty-nine years.”