Chapter 8 #3
“Protect and serve,” I said, smiling.
Who was this man? Someone who could sail like he was born on the water, had lived all over the country, had no family, and would make a house call to an old woman just to change a battery.
I had more questions than I had answers, and the man of mystery was starting to wear on me, especially with Bea’s envelope of information sitting in my drawer.
I’d read a study once that a man could pretend he was someone else completely for up to two years before the facade started to crack and lies came to the surface. Maybe that’s why he rarely shared information with me. If you kept it to yourself, you couldn’t get caught in a lie later.
“You’re thinking heavy thoughts over there,” he said, and I realized I’d been staring into another of Henry Wainwright’s boxes without removing anything.
“Just thinking about the case,” I lied.
We kept working. A few boxes in I came across a card from James and Edie Everett tucked in a bundle of other correspondence with a rubber band around it.
Henry—
Come for supper Friday. We’re worried about you.
—James and Edie
The handwriting was easy and slanted to the left. I held it a minute and then set it on the personal pile.
“He came to the shop yesterday,” I said.
“Who?” he asked.
“Everett. Walt brought him by. He talked about Henry for an hour. They were close. As close as brothers, I’d say.” I tucked the card into the stack. “He’s not a fan of Milton.”
“I’ve met very few people who are.”
“But he was downright furious at the suggestion that Henry took his own life,” I said. “He said it never made sense, and he even asked Milton to see the body and told him Henry was left handed. He got shut down and Keats signed the death certificate.”
“Anger is good,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because if he’s still angry about it, he’s going to give us those records without dragging his feet. We need people who want this solved as much as Josephine does.”
“His grandson’s getting them down out of the attic for him and then he said we could have them.”
We kept sorting, and I sang “Black Coffee” since I wasn’t feeling nearly as enthusiastic as I had when we started out.
I opened the sixth box and looked inside, and then I immediately got to my feet and went into the dining room where I had Josephine’s portfolio and the police report.
The photocopies of the scene weren’t clear enough for me to see details, so I opened my laptop and brought it back into the living room.
“What’d you find?” Dash asked.
“His desk contents,” I said, pulling up the scanned images he’d sent me of the scene. “I just wanted to make sure that was what I was looking at. I recognized the lamp from the pictures.”
“Good memory,” he said.
I set the laptop onto the coffee table so Dash could see the image, and then I started pulling things out of the box.
Pens. A stapler. A roll of stamps. A jar of little black licorice candies. A leather day planner. Patient charts, a prescription pad, and a Merck manual. A stethoscope. An ID badge for Medical University of South Carolina. And then a smattering of business cards that had fallen to the bottom.
“Anything interesting?” he asked, picking up the day planner.
“Maybe he’s got a name in there of the woman he was seeing,” I said. “There’s a Rolodex in here too.”
I moved to the next box and saw it was full of books and medical journals, so I put the lid back on and moved to the next one. It was packed carefully, the contents wrapped with Bubble Wrap.
“I need scissors,” I said.
Dash pulled one of those utility knives from his pocket that did everything from opening cans to taking out hair extensions and handed it to me.
“You were carrying that in church?” I asked.
“I carry everything in church,” he said, pulling up his pant leg so I could see his ankle holster. “Always be prepared.”
“You were a Boy Scout?”
“Something like that.”
I pressed my lips together at the nonanswer and took my frustration out on the wrappings inside the box.
The first item I uncovered was a heavy brass desk lamp with a green glass shade.
“It’s the one sitting on his desk in the pictures,” I said, passing it to Dash and moving on to the next wrapped items.
I uncovered a brass blotter and a Tiffany clock before coming to the next item in the box. My skin tingled and I had a feeling as I lifted it and felt the weight in my hands. I slid the knife under the tape and removed the Bubble Wrap.
“Dash,” I said.
“Careful. Don’t touch it with your hands. Just hold it by the wrapping. You have any gloves?”
“Under the kitchen sink.”
He came back quickly wearing a pair of rubber gloves I used to wash the dishes, and he carefully took the leaded-crystal decanter out of my hands and set it carefully on the table. The stopper was still intact, though it had been emptied of the whiskey that had been in the picture so long ago.
“Surely after all this time you wouldn’t be able to find anything from this,” I said.
“You’d be surprised. If this had been a normal investigation the contents of the liquor would have been tested and the glasses dusted for fingerprints.
The killer might have wiped prints, but if they drugged Henry to get him compliant enough to hold a gun in his right hand and have a little help pulling the trigger, then the residue could still be on the inside of the glass or the decanter.
It’s a long shot, but it’s worth sending to the lab for testing. Are the glasses in there too?”
“Yeah,” I said, slicing open the wrapping of the two small items and letting Dash take them with his gloved hands.
He took the glasses, turned them once each in the light, and set them beside the decanter without comment.
“Let me get some paper sacks in the pantry,” I said. “Otherwise you’ll have to wrap them back up with the Bubble Wrap to transport them.”
I hurried to the kitchen and grabbed the paper sacks I kept folded just inside the door and brought them back to Dash.
He tucked all three pieces into the paper sacks and then labeled them in neat block lettering.
“I’ll drive these to the lab on the mainland first thing tomorrow,” he said.
I reached for the day planner. The leather had gone soft with carrying, the corners worn pale, and when I opened it the pages opened automatically to the bookmarked page. The last week of his life.
“It’s sad,” I said. “No one thinks when they’re filling up their calendar that this could mark the end of their life. That no other dates or events would come after.”
“Life is a fragile thing,” he said, sitting down on the couch next to me.
“The day Patrick died we’d just talked that morning about taking a trip to the French Riviera.
After he left for the golf course I started doing research, and I was trying to find a couple of weeks we could squeeze into our calendars.
I had a notebook filled with sites and hotels and excursions when I got the call that he’d been rushed to the hospital.
They didn’t tell me he was dead over the phone.
But I think I knew as I was driving to the hospital that he was already gone.
Sometimes I think I should take the trip anyway, so it’s not a stumbling block. ”