As they take hold of the bench and tilt me left, a door opens and slams against a wall, reverberating through the tiled room.
“Sheriff Iverson says stop,” says a new voice.
“Stop?” says Farner. “Why?”
“I ain’t paid to ask questions like that. Sheriff says stop, you fuckin’ stop. Put him in the drunk tank.”
“This is absurd,” Beau Holland declares. “Iverson said I should stop? Has he talked to Claude Buckman?”
“All I know is Arthur Pine is on his way to talk to this guy. Right now.”
“The lawyer?” Farner asks. “That slimy bastard?”
“Judas is what he is,” says Holland.
“Get that fool dried off!” yells the deputy. “Throw him in the drunk tank like the sheriff said.”
Arthur Pine comes to the bars of the drunk tank alone. Even at this hour he’s wearing a suit, a brown pinstripe. It’s plain from his expression that he’d rather be anywhere but here. I’m sitting on a metal shelf bed jutting from the wall, and I don’t get up. Ten minutes after they brought me here, I started vomiting water and stomach acid. Most of it I managed to get into the toilet hole, but the rest is on the floor.
“Say what you’ve got to say,” I croak, and my ribs scream in protest. “I won’t be getting up.”
Pine watches me without saying anything.
“Your minions just waterboarded me.”
“I don’t know anything about that.”
“Fuck you, Arthur. My father’s in the hospital, probably dying, and I’m getting waterboarded by your Poker Club brownshirts.”
“Then why in God’s name did you hit Max with a hammer? Surely you knew something like this would happen?”
I carefully hug my ribs, trying to muffle the pain to a manageable level.
“Were you trying to get that video from him?” Pine speculates. “Seems like a waste, since we already have it.”
“Do you? Because I’d be damned surprised to learn that a survivor like Max Matheson gave you his only hole card.”
A flinch in Pine’s face tells me my guess hit home.
“I’ll let you in on a little secret,” I tell him. “I don’t care about Max’s video. Because he can’t use it.”
Now I have the lawyer’s attention. “Why is that?”
“Think about that tonight during sleepy time, okay?”
“If you didn’t attack him to get the video, then why? Surely you don’t think he really killed Buck Ferris?”
“Beau Holland killed Buck Ferris. Dave Cowart helped him. Maybe Russo, too.”
Pine moves to his left, trying to make direct eye contact with me. “What’s going on between you and the Matheson family? And why the hell did Sally kill herself? Or did Max kill her?”
“You don’t know?”
Pine sighs in frustration. “I know that whatever’s wrong at the heart of that family is tied to the cache. It wouldn’t have been put together except for whatever this thing is.”
I say nothing.
“Does it have something to do with you?”
“Max wouldn’t tell you?”
“Max hasn’t been particularly helpful.”
At last I look up and smile with a confidence I don’t feel. “You think I’m going to tell you things I didn’t tell Holland and his waterboarding team?”
Arthur Pine looks like he’s on the verge of telling me something, but he doesn’t. Instead, he studies me the way he might some animal of passing interest during a forced trip to the zoo.
“How long have you guys known about Sally’s cache, Arthur?”
He hesitates, then answers, probably figuring I have no way to record him. “Sally called one of us about fifteen minutes before she died. She revealed the existence of the cache at that time.”
Now I’m learning something of value. “Why would she do that?”
“I think she was going to kill herself, but she wanted to make sure the cache accomplished what she wanted it to.”
“Which was what? Destroy Max?”
Pine shakes his head. “No. Max knows something that would traumatize his family. Something personal—nothing business related. Sally told us we had to make sure he never reveals it. If he does, not only Max but also the members of the Poker Club will be destroyed.”
At last, I think. Arthur doesn’t have enough information to understand Sally’s plan, but I do. At some point she must have figured out that Max had fathered his “grandson” by their daughter-in-law. Sally probably knew it was rape, but rather than confront Jet about something so uncomfortable, she decided to take things into her own hands—to make sure that neither Paul nor Kevin ever learned the truth about Kevin’s paternity. By framing Max for her own murder, Sally could prevent him from playing any role in the boy’s life—or, God