Chapter 38
The sun climbed up into a bright blue sky the next morning … and it was warm. Well, relatively speaking. It was warmer. Almost all last week the temperature had hung on a nail in single digits, but as Jojo and Conor went to talk to Charles Whitman’s brother Edward, it was nudging up above freezing.
“The ski resorts are not happy campers today,” Jojo said as she let Trident in the back door of Conor’s cruiser and hopped in the front seat.
“How so?”
She made a gesture to include the immediate world. “This! How warm it is.”
“It’s thirty-five degrees. That is not warm.”
“It is by snow skiing standards. The resorts can make artificial snow to replace the snow Mother Nature fails to provide, but only if it’s cold enough to keep that snow frozen. A day like today … the slopes are melting off.”
“So no skiing this weekend.”
“That freaky cold weather last week. That’s the only reason Royal Oaks could open up long enough …” She let the thought go. Long enough to get seven people killed.
The contact information Wilma Whitman gave Jojo and Conor for her husband’s brother, Edward, took them to a shabby farmhouse outside Rockwood. Parked in the gravel driveway was a run-down Chevrolet pickup truck.
When they stepped out of Conor’s cruiser, Jojo sniffed and made a face. “This place was once a pig farm,” she said in disgust.
“Why do you think that?”
“Can’t you smell that stink?”
Conor sniffed the air. “I don’t smell anything.”
“I bet you’re one of those people who can walk around with dog poop on your shoe and never …”
The images of cleaning Rascal’s pee off Conor’s shoe … Uncle Levi had loaned him a clean pair of socks … she didn’t want to go there.
Gratefully, Conor blew by the reference, and they walked in silence up the cracked sidewalk to the front porch. He opened the unlatched screen door and knocked firmly on the wood of the front door. “Mr. Whitman, this is the state police, and I’d like to talk to you.”
“About what?” came the response from inside.
Jojo could see that Conor was teeing up his “I can go and get a warrant” routine when the voice barked, “Oh, all right, come in, damn it.”
Conor turned the knob and the two of them stepped inside the house. Jojo’s olfactory nerves had been put on high alert by the lingering pig-farm stink, and she noticed that the house had an odor, too—crumbling wallpaper, maybe mildew in the drywall.
“In here,” Whitman called, and they followed the voice into the kitchen where Edward Whitman was seated at the table with what appeared to be the inner workings of a firearm laid out in front of him.
Whitman had a broad forehead, a hawkish nose and a heavy black unibrow above his dark eyes. The stubble on his cheeks was just past “fashionably unshaven” and though his hairline was receding, thick black hair hung down over his ears and into his collar. “What do you want?”
“We’d like to talk to you about your brother, Charles.”
“I got nothing to say about Charlie.”
“We spoke to his widow, and she said that her husband’s two brothers?—”
“Hated his guts. That about nails it.”
“We understand you were angry that your brother sold?—”
“A business that rightfully belonged to the three of us, so he could pay off his damn gambling debts. Look at this.” He gestured around at the room. “I live in a pigsty.”
Jojo almost nudged Conor but didn’t.
The man went on. “And he lived in a mansion. I’ve been waiting years to get my part when Papa died.”
“You believed you were entitled to some of that inheritance,” Conor said. It wasn’t a question.
“We all got the same genes, Charlie, Jimmy and me. Brothers. But Papa gave his whole fortune to Charlie.”
“Wilma Whitman said you threatened her husband,” Jojo said.
“I did worse than that. I punched a hole in his damn wall. When I found out what he was about to do, I went to his house, stood on his front porch, and yelled. I wanted all his damn fancy neighbors to hear that he was a gambler, that he lost his shirt and mine along with it.”
“Were you angry enough at your brother to kill him?” Conor asked.
“I just told you, I’d have choked the life out of him if I could have.”
“Did you kill him?” Jojo asked.
“Did I kill him?” The question stunned the man. “You think I’m the guy who laid up on the roof of one of them houses and shot people out of the chair lifts. You think I’m that guy?”
“Are you?” Conor asked.
Edward Whitman laughed, gestured at the table. “This right here is the only firearm I got. And as you can see, it’s not exactly in good working order.”
“So you don’t own a .30-06 rifle?” Jojo asked.
“No, I don’t own a .30-06 rifle. But even if I did, you don’t get it, do you? You really don’t get it.”
“Get what?”
“When I found out the deal’d been signed, that he really had sold off my whole future, I got stinking drunk. I wanted to get drunk enough to go over to his house and throw up on his fancy porch.”
He paused and shook his head. “But all I did was fall off my own porch.”
“And you’re telling us about this because …?” Jojo asked.
“Because this.” Edward Whitman got to his feet. Foot. He only had one on the floor. The other was in a cast that stretched from bare toes all the way up to his knee.
“Broke my ankle in three places. I can’t get around my own house without a cane and you think I climbed up to the roof of some house in the Highlands, used a rifle I ain’t got to shoot half a dozen people I don’t know.
That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard.” He sat back down and began working on the pieces of the firearm lying in front of him.
“On your way out, close that front door good,” he said without looking up.
“This place used to be a pig farm, and it still stinks.”