Sleight Of Paw

26

I drove to the café. I was a little rusty shifting gears, but I only ground the transmission once and got safely through all the stop signs. I left the truck at the corner, near the alley where Agatha had died, so I wouldn’t have to ease my way out of a tight parking spot when my clutch skills were still rusty.

I’d seen Peter having breakfast a fair number of times at the café. If I was lucky, he’d be there and I could talk to him before I spoke to Eric.

Luck was on my side. Peter was sitting at the same table he’d been at the night Agatha had come into the restaurant. I shook my head at Claire and walked over to him. The leather aviator jacket was hanging on the back of his chair. I wasn’t wrong. It was definitely the jacket I’d seen at Agatha’s house.

“Why did Agatha fire you?” I asked. I probably should have at least said hello, but I was in a hurry.

He looked up at me. “Why would that be any of your business, assuming she did fire me?”

“Was it because you tried to talk her out of leaving all her money to Ruby’s boyfriend?”

“Again, why would that be any of your business?” he said. The only thing that gave him away was the briefest twitch at one corner of his mouth.

“It isn’t,” I said. “But I don’t want to see Ruby go to jail for something she didn’t do, and since I can’t come up with any other reason for you to have been at her get-out-of-jail lunch, I don’t think you do, either.”

He picked up his coffee, took a sip and set the cup down. Then he looked at me again. “Hypothetically speaking, if Agatha had come to me, wanting to leave her money to Justin Anders, I would likely have strongly advised her against making that change.”

“Agatha didn’t like to be told what to do.”

“No, she didn’t,” he said.

I stuffed my gloves into my pocket. “And if she went somewhere outside of Mayville to have a new will made—hypothetically, of course—someone would have had to take her. And maybe whoever that was figured out what she was going to do.”

His expression changed as he got what I was suggesting. He looked down at the table, his fingers squeezing the edge of the mug. “Can you prove it?” he asked.

“Not yet,” I said.

“How can I help?”

I shifted from one foot to the other. I needed to talk to Eric before it got busy. “You could call the lawyer Agatha went to see. You could ask if anyone there saw who drove her. And you could call Detective Gordon if you find out anything.”

“I could,” he said.

I hoped that meant he would.

I had to know about the jacket. “Why did you take the jacket?” I asked, gesturing to the back of the chair. “I know it was Agatha’s brother’s jacket. Were you that angry with her?” I waited for him to tell me it was none of my business.

He didn’t.

“I didn’t take the jacket. I asked David for it. The last time I saw Agatha—the night she died—she told me that old peacoat I was wearing wasn’t warm enough,” he said, his voice surprisingly thick with emotion. “She wanted me to go over to the house with her to get this jacket. I . . . I said no.” He swallowed hard. “I’ve wondered since then, Would she have even been anywhere near that alley if I’d gone?”

He shook his head and looked around for Claire. “I have to go. I have phone calls to make.” He gave me an appraising look. “Don’t do anything stupid, Kathleen,” he said.

I walked over to the counter. Eric looked like himself again. His hair wasn’t poking up every which way, his eyes were clear and the dragging tiredness was gone. His face went closed and tight when he saw me.

“I need to talk to you,” I said, deliberately keeping my voice neutral

“Susan told me,” he said. “I don’t have the time right now.”

“I was at the Drink last night,” I said. I didn’t add anything cutesy like, “heard of the place?”

The only thing in Eric’s face that shifted were his eyes. They narrowed and met mine directly for a change. He beckoned Claire over. “Cover for me, please. I need to talk to Kathleen for a minute.”

“Sure,” she said.

I followed Eric into his office, trying not to be too obvious as I looked around for Agatha’s envelope. I didn’t see it.

He faced me in front of the desk. “Kathleen, I know you know that I had a drink—well, a lot of drinks—the night Agatha died.”

“I don’t think you had anything to do with her death,” I said.

“But you think the person I was with did.”

“Yes, I do.”

He shook his head. “You’re wrong.”

“No, I’m not.” I shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other.

He shook his head again but didn’t say anything.

I squeezed my hands together for a moment; then I took a deep breath and said it. “It was Justin.”

The only thing that gave Eric away was the brief flick of his eyes toward the floor. It was enough.

“You and Justin go way, way back,” I said. “Back to when you were teenagers, back to when you were both drinking. Back before Agatha saved you.”

His expression hardened, his lips a tight, thin line.

“Justin was like you. He’d been sober long time, but something made him take that first drink again.” I stuffed my hands into my pockets. “I don’t know why. Maybe it was the stress of trying to get the camp off the ground. Maybe it was the loss of his funding. It doesn’t really matter why he started drinking again.”

I wanted to move, to walk around, but the office was too small. “Eric,” I said. “Agatha died alone in the alley just down the street. She didn’t deserve that. No one deserves that.”

I couldn’t keep the frustration out of my voice. “And Ruby doesn’t deserve to be blamed.”

His jaw clenched.

“Eric, please,” I pleaded.

He stared past me and I waited, the silence stretching out between us. Finally he looked at me. “Yes, I was with Justin. And yes, he did start drinking again. He thought . . .” Eric stopped for a moment. “He thought he could control it. He thought he could drink and not get into trouble.” Anguish was etched into every line on his face.

“It doesn’t work like that,” I said.

Eric slowly shook his head.

“You met him at the Drink.”

He nodded. “I walked down here and called a cab.”

“Why?”

“I didn’t want Susan to know where I was going, or that it was Justin I was meeting. It seems stupid now.”

“Justin was drinking?”

He nodded.

“And what about you? What got you started?”

He swiped a hand over his face and leaned back against the edge of the desk. “I ordered a Coke and I tried to talk some sense into Justin. He kept saying he could drink and not have it mess up his life. He said he’d been drinking for a couple of months and he’d kept it under control.”

He rubbed his palm over his mouth as if he were trying to rub the words away. “I went to the can. When I came back I must’ve picked up the wrong drink.” He stared at his feet. “I had the drink and I knew . . . I knew but somehow I didn’t . . . I couldn’t put it down, and Justin was talking the whole time about how he could keep it together, and I thought about all the times I’d seen him in the past two months and he’d seemed normal and it did look like it was working.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “And I took the second drink. And then I couldn’t stop.”

He looked away, and when he looked back his voice was stronger. “We ordered another round. And then another. And then . . . And I don’t remember much after that.”

“You have no idea how you got home?”

“I woke up on the cot here. It was maybe two a.m. I . . . stuck my head in the sink and ran cold water over it, and I walked home.”

“Did you talk to Justin?” I asked.

“Yes. He came in not long after Agatha’s body was found and the police were everywhere.” Eric threaded his fingers through the back of his hair almost, as though pulling it out by the roots. “He said we had a few drinks, we talked about old times and then we walked down here.”

“Walked?”

Eric nodded

“That would’ve taken an hour at least,” I said. “Are you sure Justin didn’t have Ruby’s truck?”

“I’m not sure of anything, Kathleen.”

“There’s something else I need to ask you,” I said.

“What?”

“You did argue with Agatha about the envelope the night she died, didn’t you?”

He nodded. “You saw us.” He pointed toward the main part of the diner. “What you didn’t see was we fought about it again. She was outside later that night. I got her to come in again to get warm.”

“Why did you argue? What did you think was in the envelope?”

He put both hands on the surface of the desk on either side of himself. I could see he was struggling with how to answer.

“Eric, what was in that brown envelope is really important. Anything you tell me is going to help.”

He looked at me warily. “You know, don’t you?”

“Yes.” I said. There didn’t seem to be any point in dancing around it.

Whatever he saw in my face seemed to convince him he was right. He studied his feet for a moment. “Last week—Monday, I think it was—I picked up Susan after work. I overheard Agatha having an argument with Ruby about the envelope. About the baby.”

He tipped his head and looked at me. “My old man took off when I was about thirteen. I have no idea where he is. Hell, he could be dead, for all I know. Harry Taylor wants to know this child. I told Agatha she was wrong. I thought she should give him that chance, give both of them that chance.”

He sighed. “She wouldn’t consider it. We were standing right here. I tried to grab the envelope and the corner tore.”

The piece Hercules had found. I couldn’t help feeling let down that he didn’t have the entire envelope.

“She was angry. She told me she was disappointed in me.” He gave me a twisted smile with no warmth in it. “And what did I do? I went and got drunk. She would have been even more disappointed if she’d known that.”

“You made a mistake, Eric, and you fixed it and you’re still fixing it. I think Agatha would be proud of you for that.”

“I’m not drinking,” he said.

“I know. Susan said you’ve been doing the meetings. What about Justin?”

“I don’t know. I’ve only talked to him that one time. I have to stay away from him if I’m going to stay sober. But . . . but I’m pretty certain he’s still drinking.”

He wiped his hands on his jeans. “If he is, everything he has, his whole life, is going to be destroyed.”

I just nodded. I didn’t say what I was increasingly convinced of. That Justin had already destroyed someone’s life.

Agatha’s.