The next morning I was in the office, back to normal, which was needing a shave, bleary-eyed, with a star-spangled hang-over and yet another resolve to quit drinking. I sent Willa out for some V8 and vodka, Buford’s hangover cure. I sat staring at the wall until she came back, whereupon I drank two coffee cups full of the potion. Drinking a hangover cure isn’t the same as drink-ing, I told myself.
I told Willa to call Oliver’s for a total on my tab and to send them a check.
“And no lectures on what I’m spending, either,” I told her.
“Some guys collect cars, others play golf. I count cigarette burns on the bar at Oliver’s.”
“How many are there?” she asked.
“Several more as of last night.”
“Get to work,” she said. “Earn your keep.”
I went into my office. Rodney was already there.
“I located that cell phone at an Italian restaurant in town, Uncle Stanley.”
“Did you call Overbee?”
“Yep. He called this morning and said to tell you the problem has been taken care of. Who’s Sanford?”
“The guy who takes care of problems. Let’s get to work.”
Rodney’s transcriptions of my notes onto the whiteboard were good. I had to make a couple of corrections, and they were due to my crappy handwriting.
“Here’s things to add,” I said to Rodney when he came in. “From memory. Put all this wherever it fits on the board.”
Rodney listened and transcribed my summary with dates and events posted on the timeline.
“Willa,” I called out to the outer office. “Would you go across the street and get me some breakfast? The V8 is starting to work.”
“Sure,” she called back.
Willa left, and I continued to recite things for Rodney to post on the whiteboard.
My cell phone rang. It was the pay phone at Ray’s Diner on the caller ID. Had to be Bunny.
“What?” I said.
“Stan, I’m sorry.” She was still kind of weepy.
“Apology noted. Have a good time on your date.”
I hung up the cell phone.
Willa came in with breakfast. “Was that what I thought it was?” she asked.
“Depends on what you thought it was,” I said.
“Sounded like you blowing off Bunny. That’s long overdue.”
“Willa, I don’t need Dear Abby just now.”
“Yes, you do,” she said with a firm tone. “You don’t want my advice, but here it is for what it’s worth.”
I started to interrupt, but she said, “Shut up and listen. She’ll beg you to take her back but don’t do it. Not right away. That’s what she’s counting on. Good old Stan, always there when she needs him, always in reserve. She’s keeping you in the bank for when times are slow.”
That was what Sammy had said.
“Willa—”
“She needs to learn that you never know what you have until you’ve lost it. I never appreciated my husband while he was here.”
Willa’s husband had died a while back.
“And quit getting drunk over it. That doesn’t get a woman
back. It sure doesn’t keep her. As you should know by now.”
“End of lecture?” I asked.
“For now,” she said.
I shook my head and turned back to the whiteboard.
“What’s left?” I asked Rodney.
“I think that covers it, Uncle Stanley. What are you going to do next?”
“I’m going to see if I can question the four suspects that live with Buford.”
“Can I go along and observe?”
“No. That doesn’t work. An interrogation team works in sync.
We know by instinct from working together what questions each other will ask and when. We know when one should step down and the other take over. We complement each other.”
“Sure. Good cop, bad cop. I know how that works. I watch TV.”
“You aren’t ready for that, and private investigation rarely uses those techniques anyway. We don’t work murder cases. The only reason we have this one is the cops think they got it closed, and we think they got it wrong.”
“What can I do?”
“Stay here at your computer and collect everything you can find on Sanford, Ramon, Missy, and Serena. I got no background on any of them except that Sanford used to be a lawyer with the mob, and Ramon is an illegal alien.”
Rodney was typing on his laptop, making notes.
“One more thing. Vitole was shaking down other guys in witness protection. Maybe one of them bumped him off. Get into the Marshals site, and do a search. Pull the names of witness protection clients who have relocated somewhere around here and are still alive. If we can point suspicion at any upstanding citizens like that, maybe we can create reasonable doubt for Buford.”