“Enough to say, he’s a sneaky bastard. He plays dirty pool and pulls dirty tricks. I thought he might be the one in cahoots with you on this house business.”
“I’m not in cahoots with anybody, and I don’t know the district attorney. What’s his name?”
Looking directly into her eyes to test her reaction, he said, “Rusty Dyle.”
“I remember a Sheriff Dyle from when I was little.”
“Mervin. Now deceased. Rusty is his son. Ever run across him?”
“I wouldn’t have had occasion to.”
“Hmm.” He continued to watch her closely. She seemed curious, interested, but didn’t appear to be lying.
“You want to know about that night I was arrested?” he said. “It was Rusty who put the weed in my car. I can’t prove it. I don’t know how he managed to do it without my knowledge, but I’m certain he was behind it.
“I don’t know if he bribed those two deputies who arrested me, or if he tipped them anonymously, but it makes no difference. He saw to it that I got caught with enough evidence to make it look like I was dealing. I wasn’t. God as my witness, Arden.”
Looking startled, she angled back in her chair.
“You don’t believe me?”
“No. I do. It’s just, that’s the first time you’ve called me by name.”
Her name had been constantly pinballing inside his head for the past couple of days, so it surprised him now to realize that he hadn’t addressed her by it. But he didn’t comment on it. What was he supposed to say? That he’d sighed her name, moaned it, in more than a few lurid fantasies?
She indicated his cheekbone. “That looks more serious than a scuffle.”
He drew a breath, let it out. “It was.”
“Does it hurt?”
“It’s a dull roar. The whiskey helped.”
She pushed her glass across the table toward him. “You’re welcome to the rest.”
“No, thanks. I’ve done all the bingeing I’m going to do tonight.”
“Well, you did have a bugger of a day.”
“Jail, you mean?”
She nodded.
“I was left to stew for several hours. Wasn’t that bad.”
“Did you post bail?”
“No, Rusty had a change of heart. Declined to press charges.”
“That was decent of him.”
He scoffed. “Decent, my ass. It was self-serving.”
“In what way?”
“I don’t know yet,” he said grimly. “But I’m sure I’ll find out.”
“Dirty pool.”
“Count on it.”
He wondered if now was the time to tell her that he suspected Rusty of being the party surveilling her house every night. If he did, though, she would press him to explain why he would think that. He couldn’t tell her without wading into the deep end. He could get in over his head real fast.
And he would be inviting more trouble for himself and everyone around him if he pointed the finger at Rusty, and the accusation was later proven to be false.
For a while neither of them pursued the topic, then Arden said, “Back to that night before Easter, were you locked up?”
“For the next several nights, in fact. I wasn’t arraigned until Wednesday of the following week. They kept me in a holding cell. Old-fashioned. Off to one side of the squad room. Uncle Henry came as soon as he was notified and tried to bail me out. They gave him the run-around. He was beside himself.
“For my part, I was livid, because I knew Rusty had set me up. I already had one strike against me. Who would believe me over the sheriff’s son? I spent that first night thinking up ways to eviscerate him. Finally I exhausted myself and fell asleep.
“The next morning, I woke up to a lot of chatter and activity. The squad room was buzzing. Human body parts had been discovered by early-morning fishermen in the root system of a grove of cypresses on the lakeshore. The remains were eventually identified as Brian Foster’s.”
“The man my father allegedly killed.”
“Yeah.”
He couldn’t tell her how anguished he’d been to hear about that gruesome discovery. He’d had a discomfiting intuition that the dismembered parts would turn out to belong to one of his accomplices.
That was, one of the two other than Rusty.
“All day Sunday,” he said, “there was a lot of coming and going in the squad room. Sheriff’s deputies. Game wardens. State troopers. Organized chaos. Nobody had been reported missing, so they didn’t know where to start to identify the victim. Had this been a terrible accident? Or a homicide? Easter ended with nothing concrete to report. No clues.”
“What about you?”
“Me? I was fed, let out to use the bathroom, but otherwise ignored.”