Hearts of Sand(44)

“Have you met the Great Detective?”

“No,” Tim said. “I have been keeping up on the gossip. He’s apparently closeted himself in the records room of the police department and is reading through every scrap of paper he can find. The word is that our particular local police force isn’t much good at collecting evidence and analyzing it.”

“Have you had a call to go and talk to him?” Kyle asked.

“No, of course not,” Tim said. “Why would I?”

“They’re going to have to come along and talk to everybody who was involved in that other thing, even if ‘involved’ only means that they were part of the same deb party circuit as the principals. Didn’t the local police come and talk to you after the murder?”

“For a couple of minutes,” Tim said.

“They got me for a couple of minutes, too,” Kyle said. “But it’s all going to come back around. If I were you and I were going to worry about something happening to the clinic, I’d worry about the blowback from that.”

Tim watched him stand up, moving carefully so that he didn’t tip over books and papers and make something fall. Tim got the impression that Kyle was almost completely exhausted, that he’d had so little sleep for so long, he was about to fall over. For a moment, Tim was actually frightened.

“Are you all right?” he asked. “I know you’ve got perfect health insurance and you don’t come here, but if you need something—”

“I’m fine,” Kyle said, looking even less fine. “Do you still give the same answer, when people ask you why you do what you do?”

“The same answer?” Tim asked.

“I remember it from the first interview I read,” Kyle said. “Something in Latin, about—”

“Ad maiorem Dei gloriam,” Tim said. “‘For the greater glory of God.’”

“That’s it,” Kyle said. “At least it’s a reason.”

“You really are sick,” Tim said. “Do you have something I don’t know about? Because you look like you’re about to fall over.”

“I am about to fall over,” Kyle said. “I’ve been working late forever, and I’ve gotten to that age. I’m just overworked, and I don’t think any good can come of this.”

“Can good come of this thing with Chapin?” Tim asked. “She was murdered. Of course no good can come of it.”

“Well, somebody thought some good could come of it,” Kyle said. “It’s the only reason why anybody ever murders anybody else.”

“Oh,” Tim said.

“Listen,” Kyle said. “Why don’t we go somewhere off the premises? Somewhere no one can hear us talking? I think I may have a solution to your problem.”

“To the problem of the Health Care Access thing?”

“Exactly,” Kyle said. “Let me just hit a restroom and we’ll go somewhere and talk.”

3

Hope Matlock had ridden the train into New York dozens of times when she was in high school and college. It was one of the things they did as a group, over and over again, because it annoyed the hell out of their parents. She could remember herself on those trains, looking out windows as Westport and Stamford and Greenwich rolled by, mentally counting up her money in her head. She’d never had as much money as the rest of them. She’d always been afraid that they would want to go somewhere where she couldn’t handle the freight.

Today she had been worried about money, too, and she was right to worry. The trains were a lot more expensive than they had been thirty years ago. They were nicer, too, but Hope only cared about the expense. Everything in Manhattan had been more expensive, too, especially the buses and the subways. It hadn’t taken her long to realize that if the day didn’t work out, she wasn’t going to have enough to get back to Grand Central Station.

As it turned out, the day had worked out fine. It was quarter past six, and she was sitting in a Metro-North car, watching the towns go by again in reverse order.

The outskirts of Alwych began rolling by, the big red barn that was now a farmers’ market every Saturday afternoon in the spring and summer, the “smaller” houses with their postage stamp lawns where new people lived when they really couldn’t afford to live in Alwych. Hope waited to see the facade of Lanyard’s going by. Then she began to get up and move into the aisle, even though the conductor had yet to call the stop.

She knew better than to look into her pocketbook where people could see her. She was afraid that she’d held it much to close to her during the trip. The conductor came through and had to squeeze by her, which was embarrassing. The train began to slow and other people began to get up out of their seats. Hope shoved the embarrassment down her throat and made for the door.