CHAPTER ELEVEN
Frank Doyle ran the Rusty Anchor, Cormorant Cove's one proper bar, a low-ceilinged place at the end of Wharf Street that smelled like spilled beer and forty years of fishermen's stories, and Marin had gone there mostly because Priya mentioned, almost in passing, that Walter Kessler had been seen arguing with Doyle outside the bar the week before he died.
"People are saying it got heated," Priya had said, wiping down the counter with more focus than the task strictly required. "Something about money. Sherry Coombs saw it from her car and told approximately everyone."
Doyle turned out to be a broad, weathered man in his sixties with forearms like a man who'd spent decades hauling nets before he ever poured a beer, and he answered Marin's careful questions with the particular bluntness of someone who had long ago stopped caring what people said about him.
"Yeah, we argued. Whole town probably knows by now, small as it is.
" He set down the glass he'd been drying.
"Wasn't about money owed to me. Was about money I owed him.
Walter helped me buy this place out, back when I was going through my divorce and the bank wouldn't touch me — quiet loan, off the books, no interest, because that's the kind of thing Walter did for people, and never once talked about it.
I'd been slow paying him back this year, business being what it is, and he came by wanting to know where his money was, because —" Doyle's jaw tightened.
"Because he said he might need it soon. Said he had some legal costs coming, maybe. Wouldn't say for what."
"Legal costs," Marin repeated. "Did he say anything more specific?"
"Said he might need a lawyer to make sure something 'held up proper' when he brought it forward.
That's the exact words, near as I remember, because I asked him to explain himself and he wouldn't, just said it wasn't my business yet, but it might be everybody's business soon enough.
" Doyle shook his head slowly. "I felt like garbage about that argument for a week before he died, and I've felt a whole lot worse since.
Man helped me keep my business, and the last real conversation we had, I was needling him about money like he owed me something instead of the other way around. "
It was, Marin thought, leaving the Rusty Anchor with the last of the afternoon light slanting gold across the harbor, exactly the kind of ordinary, human, entirely non-murderous explanation that made for a bad headline and a good alibi — a debt paid the wrong direction, a moment of guilt that had nothing to do with a dead man's real secret.
Frank Doyle, whatever his gruffness, had loved Walter Kessler in the specific, grudging way men like him loved the people who'd quietly saved their lives, and there was nothing in his weathered, guilty face that looked like it belonged to a killer.
Which left her, she thought, walking back toward the Inkwell & Anchor as the streetlamps came on one by one along Wharf Street, with a shorter list than she'd started with, and one name on it that kept refusing to move any further down the page.
? ? ?
She found Reyes waiting for her outside the shop, leaning against his truck with two paper cups of coffee from Ruth's, and something in his posture told her, before he even spoke, that he'd been thinking along the same lines.
"I talked to Doyle myself, this afternoon," he said, handing her a cup.
"Corroborates everything he told you, near enough word for word, and I pulled his bank records with a friendly nudge instead of a warrant, since he offered them up himself rather than make me ask twice.
The loan was real. The payments were real.
Whatever else Frank Doyle's guilty of in this life, and I suspect it's a fairly ordinary list, murdering the man who saved his bar isn't on it. "
"So we cross him off."
"We cross him off." Reyes leaned back against the truck, looking out at the darkening harbor.
"Which leaves Vance, and whatever Marjorie Fenn's not quite telling us yet, and whoever left the note on your doormat, which I still haven't ruled out being the same person, or a different one entirely, which is its own uncomfortable thought. "
"You think there might be more than one person involved."
"I think a scheme this old, this carefully built, probably had more than one set of hands on it thirty years ago, and I think it's entirely possible more than one of those hands is still nervous about what might surface now.
" He rubbed a hand over his jaw, tired in a way that went beyond the late hour.
"I keep coming back to the timing. Somebody knew Walter had real evidence, evidence enough to be dangerous, within days of him actually finding it.
That's not a rumor moving at the speed a town like this usually moves.
That's somebody close to him, or somebody close to the money, hearing something specific and acting on it fast."
"Denise Hartwell," Marin said slowly. "She's the closest person to the money there is."
"She's on my list. I don't love where that list is heading, if I'm honest, because a scared woman confessing something on her own terms is a very different thing than a scared woman being used, without her knowledge, as the reason somebody else decided a murder was necessary.
" Reyes finished his coffee and straightened up, and for a moment, in the gathering dark, he looked less like a detective working a case and more like a man carrying a weight he hadn't quite found the words for yet.
"Go inside. Lock the door properly this time, both locks, and don't open it again tonight for anybody you don't already trust with your life. I mean that."
"You're worried."
"I'm worried," he admitted, with none of his usual careful reserve.
"I've been worried since that note showed up on your doormat, and I haven't slept well since, and I'd like very much for that to stop being true sometime soon.
" He held her gaze a moment longer than the conversation strictly required. "Goodnight, Marin."
"Goodnight, Sam," she said — his first name, for the first time, and watched something warm and startled cross his face before he climbed back into his truck and pulled away into the dark, leaving her standing on the sidewalk with an empty coffee cup and a great many things she hadn't quite said yet either.