and answered, “no.” I waited, but there was no elaboration. Just, “no.”
“There’s more,” I told her finally. “I have evidence that Louis might have been killed standing up, and then laid out on the bed to make it look like he’d been there all along. Can you think of a reason someone would do that?”
Again, “no,” this time sounding smaller and more meek.
“We need to meet, Steph. Are you coming up to Jersey for the weekend?”
I got the impression she had her hand over the mouthpiece, but Stephanie came back very quickly. “I hadn’t been planning on it,” she said, “but it sounds like it’s important we see each other.”
“I have to finish the story by Monday for Snapdragon to print it on time,” I said. “That’s why there’s some urgency in the timing.”
“Okay,” Steph said, starting to sound more normal. “I’ll come up. Do you know the Hyatt Hotel in New Brunswick?”
“Sure. I can practically see it from my bedroom window.”
“I’ll be there tomorrow. I’ll call when I have a room number. We can meet there.”
Stephanie Jacobs in a hotel room—there was a time when that would have answered every prayer I’d ever care to offer up, if I was the prayer-offering-up type. Now, it was not quite as exciting as I would have hoped. It was, in fact, just a little bit scary. After all, the woman had come within inches of being arrested for killing her husband, and for all I knew, she had killed him.
But I didn’t think so.
Chapter
Twenty-Four
The dog continued his assault on the rug in my office, completely ignoring every other carpeted area in the house. I began to think he had a particular grudge against me, since I was the only one who hadn’t taken him for a walk yet. Warren loved a walk more than most other males like staying at home and watching the game on a plasma TV with the remote in their hands and a beer close by on the table. It’s the advantage of being a dog, I guess, that one’s pleasures are so simple.
Leah, at least, had fallen so completely in love with Warren that she was pleased to take him out when she arrived home from school on Friday. She said “hi” to Preston on the way in, having totally accepted him as a fixture in the house, and he tipped his painter’s cap at her and smiled as she walked by with Warren, making sure the dog’s tail didn’t brush against the black paint on the railing. Burke was nothing if not thorough.
Friday night my mother came to have dinner with her grandchildren, and in the process, to see Abby and me. She laughed at virtually everything the kids did, whether it was funny or not, chuckled when they were being especially obnoxious, and told the adults tales of incompetent internists and unscrupulous produce managers at the Foodtown. That is, the produce managers were at the Foodtown. I’m not clear on where the dopey doctors were, since I was only listening with one ear.
My mind was on Stephanie and Legs and Lester. Clearly, Lester had been in the room when the stabbing took place. He had been scheduled to visit the Gibsons that weekend, and his DNA, or that of the man whose hair he was borrowing, was found in the room. Someone had cleaned up some stains on the floor, which may or may not have been blood.
“. . . two for ninety-nine, when clearly it should have been labeled two for fifty-nine,” my mother was saying. Abby was doing a much better job of looking fascinated than I was, but Abby, generally speaking, is a nicer person than I am. And she wasn’t going to confront a murderer in a hotel room the next day. Or a non-murderer.
Meanwhile, back at the window, there was something about that last threatening phone call that had bothered me since I’d hung up the phone. I can’t say I had recognized the voice, but there was a certain familiar cadence to the sentence being uttered that I couldn’t deny. I’m very good at remembering sound—I have a “photographic ear.” I can remember lines of dialogue from movies I saw when I was a child, but my eye is not nearly as talented, and quite often, I forget what I’ve seen. Never, though, what I hear. So there was something about that sound, the syntax, the tone of voice, which I’d heard before. I just couldn’t quite place