Read Book 04 - Old Tin Sorrows for Free Online Page A

hundred thousand marks each for the minority heirs. I knew guys who’d cut a hundred thousand throats for that kind of money. So there was a motive—assuming somebody was in a hurry to get his share.
    “Everybody know they’re in the will?”
    “Sure. The old man used to make a big deal of it. How if you didn’t toe the mark you blew your share.”
    Ha! “Cook mentioned a Candy . . . ”
    “Not him. He’s long gone. He wouldn’t have the balls, either. He wasn’t even human. Wasn’t in the will, either. Wasn’t one of the guys the old man brought home with him. He was one of the crew who managed the place while the General was in the Cantard.”
    “She mentioned a Harcourt who got in trouble for bringing girlfriends home.”
    “Harcourt?” He frowned. “I guess he got fed up with what he thought were chickenshit rules. He just took off about six months back. The old man cut him out. He’d know that. So there’s nothing for him to gain. Let alone we’d see him around here.”
    “We may have to back off and go at this from another angle, Sarge.”
    “Eh?”
    “What have I got to go on? Your feelings. But every time I ask you a question you make it sound more like there’s nobody who’d want him dead. And nobody who’d profit from it since everybody’s getting a cut anyway. We can’t hang up a solid motive. And means and opportunity are limited.”
    “You’re sneaking up on something.”
    “I’m wondering if maybe he isn’t just dying of stomach cancer. Wondering if maybe you shouldn’t hire a doctor instead of me till you know what’s killing him.”
    He didn’t answer for a few minutes. I was talked out. We walked. He brooded and I studied the grounds. Somebody had farmed the fields last summer. There was nobody in them now. I glanced at the sky. They’d thrown on a few more slabs of lead and added icicles to the breeze. Winter was coming back.
    “I tried, Garrett. Two months ago. Somebody leaked it to the old man. The doc never got through the front door.”
    The way he said “somebody” I guessed he knew who. I asked.
    He didn’t want to say. “Who, Sarge? We can’t pick and choose our suspects.”
    “Jennifer. She was in on the plot but she defected. She’s a strange girl. Her big goal in life is to win some gesture of love and approval. And the old man doesn’t know how. He’s scared of her. She grew up while he was away. It doesn’t help that she looks a lot like her mother. Her mother died—”
    “Cook told me that story.”
    “She would. That old hag knows everything and tells anyone who’ll listen. You ought to move into the kitchen.”
    We walked some more, headed south now, circling the house.
    Peters said, “Maybe we have a communication problem. The deeper you get in the more you’ll think the mess is imaginary. The old man has crazy spells. He
does
think people are out to get him when they’re not. That’s what makes this diabolical. Unless somebody sticks a knife in him in front of everybody, nobody’s going to believe he’s in danger.”
    I grunted. I had a friend, Pokey Pigotta, in the same line as me. He’s dead now. But once he’d had a case that worked that way. A crazy old woman with a lot of money, always down with imaginary illnesses and besieged by imaginary enemies. Pokey discounted her fears. Her son did her in. Pokey was haunted by that one. “I’ll keep an open mind.”
    “That’s all I ask. Stick with it. Don’t let it get to you.”
    “Sure. But we could shortcut everything if we could get a few experts in.”
    “I said I’d try. Don’t hold your breath. It was hard enough selling you.”
    We continued our circuit of the grounds. At one point we passed near a graveyard. “Family plot?” I asked.
    “For three hundred years.”
    I glanced at the house. It brooded down on us from that point. “It doesn’t look that old.”
    “It isn’t. There was an earlier house. Check the outbuildings in back. You can still see some of its foundations. They tore it down for materials to build the outbuildings after the new house went