Reunion at Red Paint Bay - By George Harrar Page 0,63
if it could be this Chambers fellow you’re looking for? “Why are you asking, Tom?”
“He left a note in his room.” The chief patted his jacket where the paper apparently resided. “Mentions your name.”
“Really? Can I take a look?” Simon put out his hand.
Garrity looked at it. “Sorry.”
Red’s wife arrived with the mandarin salad, a huge plate of greens, nuts, and apple. “Anything else I can bring you?”
“This is plenty.”
Garrity waited till she was out of earshot. The chief was always discreet. “Were you planning to meet anyone yesterday afternoon, Si?”
He speared a piece of apple. “I meet a lot of people every day.”
“How about this guy?” The chief pulled a picture from the same pocket that he had patted before. Simon wondered what other evidence might be hidden there. “The one in the middle,” Tom said, “with the mustache. That’s Paul Chambers.” There was Paul Walker, standing under the TWENTY-FIFTH REUNION banner, along with a half-dozen others, arms linked, like silly old friends. He was the only one not smiling.
“If he was at the reunion I guess I saw him, that’s why he seems kind of familiar. But he’s not from our class, unless he’s really changed a lot, including his name.”
“So you don’t recognize him?”
Simon tilted the chief’s hand up a little to catch a better light on the picture. His brain sped through the options, running down side streets into dead ends, doubling back, trying to find the right way forward. It would be easier if he could figure out how much Garrity already knew. That would take some probing while still being evasive, what any journalist could do. “I don’t understand why you’re asking all these questions, Tom. What’s going on?”
The chief pushed away his coffee, the cup still almost full. “We’re trying to piece together what this fellow was doing in Red Paint and where he is now. It would be a great help if you could tell us anything you know.”
“Like I said, he looks familiar, but with that mustache and the way his hair is, I’m not sure.”
“I’ve got kind of a puzzle here,” Garrity said. “The note he left in his room, that’s about the only lead we’ve got.”
No mention of Lenore Jenks, Simon noted. Was the chief withholding that information? “I’d like to help, Tom. Maybe if you told me what the note says …”
The chief thought a moment. “It says, ‘Simon Howe knows the truth.’ ”
“That’s all?”
“That’s all.”
“Huh,” Simon said, “that’s pretty bizarre.” But not totally incriminating, if that really was all that Paul had written. Suggestive, certainly, hinting at a connection, but perhaps all just in his mind, a fantasy.
“He left money in the envelope to pay for what he still owed for his stay,” the chief said, “so it seems he wasn’t planning to come back to the inn.”
Simon picked through the thicket of greens to find more pieces of apple. It was the type of thing one did to appear unfazed during the course of a conversation, act interested in something else. “You figure he was planning to commit suicide?” A comment from the side of his mouth, chewing on the apple.
“That’s one possibility. But his clothes are gone from his room. And we can’t locate his car.”
“That is a puzzle,” Simon said, and he meant it. Why had Paul cleaned out his room and moved his car prior to coming to the dock?
“So, any idea why he mentions you in the note?”
“No,” Simon said, and he wondered how one should say that word, with what speed and sureness, what steadiness of gaze, how often to blink, the total expression that would make a lawman believe you. He would like to try again, with more confidence in his voice this time, no thinking necessary. “I guess the guy could have read my name on my column in the Register. I get crazy letters sometimes. But maybe you should talk to Amy. I didn’t want to mention this, for confidentiality reasons, you know, so I can’t really say that he was a patient of hers, but you should talk to her.”
“He was a patient?”
The tenses again, always revealing, always dangerous. “He is missing, right, and Amy said—” Here he hesitated, as if struggling with the ethics of the situation. “—I really shouldn’t be talking about him at all, you know. You’ve got me in a difficult position, Tom. All I can say is that Amy had a patient who gave her some trouble, on Monday I think it