He still wasn’t giving the food the attention it deserved, but at least he was eating the sandwich slowly enough that I stopped worrying quite so much that he’d choke.
“Thif if great,” he said. Under the circumstances, even Mother wouldn’t have rebuked him for talking with his mouth full.
“So why are you hiding out?” I asked him, when he’d slowed down a little.
“Someone took a potshot at me last night when I was getting out of my car,” he said.
“At the Caerphilly Inn?”
He nodded, still chewing.
“I didn’t hear about it,” I said. “Wait—I bet you didn’t report it to the police, did you?”
He shook his head.
“You told your employer?”
He shook his head again.
“You didn’t tell anyone?”
He swallowed the food he was chewing.
“I’m telling you now,” he said. “And I’m not opposed to telling your chief of police if you can let him know I’m here without giving away the show to anyone who has a police radio. But I’d really rather not let my employer know where I am. Make that former employer. I have a strict policy against working for anyone who tries to kill me.”
“Not that I want to argue with you, but is there a particular reason you don’t trust the Evil Lender?” I asked.
“Because I’m more than half convinced that it was someone in their employ who shot at me.”
I nodded.
“I’m betting they’re also the ones who blew up your car this afternoon,” I said.
He choked on a bite of pulled pork sandwich at that and had to be pounded on the back.
“They blew up my car?” he asked when he could speak again. “How? When? Was anyone hurt?”
“No one was hurt,” I said. “It blew up when the Shiffley Towing Service was hauling it off the parking lot of the Inn at a little past noon today. While I was waiting for the chief to interview me, I overheard one of the State Troopers speculating that it was an acceleration detonation device, but we won’t know until the State Bureau of Investigation finishes analyzing the debris.”
“Debris,” he said. “Not wreck or hulk—debris?”
I nodded.
“Maybe the rumor mill exaggerated the damage?”
I shook my head.
“I saw the explosion,” I said. “It was raining car parts. Tow truck’s not in such good shape, either. Debris. Charred debris.”
“Damn,” he said. “I was fond of that car. Two hundred and twenty thousand miles and still chugging along. More to the point, I’m damned lucky. I was considering sneaking back to get it at around three a.m., but I decided they might have staked it out.”
“It’s possible they didn’t rig it to blow up until after that.”
“Also possible if I’d tried it they’d be picking pieces of me out of that debris. And identifying me with DNA.”
I didn’t argue with him. He took another bite of his pulled pork sandwich and chewed thoughtfully.
“You saw the explosion?” he asked, when he’d finished that bite. “How’d you happen to be over at the Inn just then?”
“I went over to burgle your room,” I said.
He paused in the middle of a bite.
“Find anything interesting?” he asked.
“Only Leonard Fisher doing his own burgling.”
“He caught you?”
“No, I hid on the balcony.” I figured there was no need to implicate Caroline as well.
“Wrong room, then,” he said. “My room doesn’t have a balcony.”
“Actually, it’s more like a window ledge with a view of the loading dock,” I said. He nodded. “I could tell you what brand of toothpaste and dental floss you use if you want me to prove I was there, or you can take my word for it. I saw Fisher take all the papers you left behind—not that there were many of them, just copies of your weekly reports to him. And I hope you didn’t have anything interesting on your laptop. I couldn’t check myself because of the password protection, but I’m sure the Evil Lender can find someone to get past that. Why do you think someone from FPF shot at you?”
“Presumably because they think I’m a liability to them,” he said. “Or maybe even a threat. Wish to hell I knew why. Nothing I’ve run across in the past few weeks seems all that useful or interesting to me.”
“Actually, I didn’t mean what their motive was for doing it, but why you were so very sure it was them,” I said.
“I’ve got no evidence it wasn’t, say, some gun-toting local who resents my being here,” he said. “But every instinct I have says it’s FPF.”