Whiskey Beach(34)
Hester gave him a satisfied smile. “There now. That’s my grandson.”
“Where’s your walker?”
Her face reset into haughty lines. “I retired it. The doctors put enough hardware in me to hold a battleship together. The physical therapist works me like a drill sergeant. If I can tolerate that, I can damn well get around without an old-lady walker.”
“Are you still hurting?”
“Here and there, from time to time, and less than I was. I’d say, about the same as you. They won’t beat us, Eli.”
She, too, had lost weight, and the accident as well as the difficult recovery had dug more lines into her face. But her eyes were as fierce as ever, and he took comfort in that.
“I’m starting to believe that.”
While Eli talked with his grandmother, Duncan pulled his car to the curb, studied the house through the long lens of his camera. Then, lowering it, he took out his recorder to add to his notes for the day.
He settled in to wait.
Seven
PART OF THE JOB WAS BOREDOM. KIRBY DUNCAN SLOUCHED in his nondescript sedan, nibbling on carrot sticks. He had a new lady friend, and the potential for sex convinced him to drop ten pounds.
He’d managed two.
He’d moved the car once in the past two hours, and considered moving it again. Instinct told him Landon was probably settled in for a while—family dinner most likely as Duncan had snapped shots of the mother, the father and most recently the sister with husband and toddler in tow.
But his job was to sit on Landon, so sit he would.
He followed the job into Boston—an easy tail even with traffic—to the building that housed Landon’s lawyer. That had given him an opportunity to do a casual walk-around of Landon’s car. Nothing to see there.
Some ninety minutes later he’d followed Landon around the Commons, then tailed him to a high-priced salon, waiting while Landon got a trim. Not that Duncan saw much difference for the fifty-plus the snip cost.
But it took all kinds, Christ knew.
Landon made another stop at a florist, came out loaded.
Just a guy running a few errands in the city before he paid a visit to family. Ordinary crap.
In fact, as far as Duncan could see, all Landon did was ordinary crap, and not a hell of a lot of that. If the guy killed his wife and got away with it, Landon sure wasn’t out celebrating.
His report, to date, ran pretty thin. A few walks on the beach, the encounter with the sexy housekeeper and the woman who’d given Landon a solid squeeze—and turned out to be the married mother of three.
He figured there was some heat between Landon and the housekeeper, but he couldn’t connect them prior to Landon’s return to the house at the beach.
Still, his background check showed him Abra Walsh had a history of hooking up with violent types, which would make Landon the perfect match—if he bashed the wife’s head in, which Duncan had come to doubt. Maybe Landon was her current choice, he thought, but current was key as he couldn’t find one crumb to start a trail cozying the two of them up before the murder.
Even the thin report he had didn’t hold with the client’s insistence Landon was guilty, or with the certainty of Duncan’s old friend Wolfe, one of Boston’s finest, that Landon had snapped and bashed his cheating wife’s brains in.
The longer he watched, the less guilty the poor bastard looked.
To draw out information, he’d tried the direct approach, as with the sexy housekeeper, and the more circular style with the clerk at the B&B and a couple others. Just commenting on the big house on the bluff, asking, as any tourist might, about its history, its owners.
He’d gotten an earful there about a fortune built initially on booze, from pirate plunder to distilleries to running whiskey during the bad old days of Prohibition. Legends of stolen jewels hidden for generations, family scandals, the expected ghosts, heroes, villains right up to Eli Landon’s scandal.
His most entertaining source had been the pretty clerk in a gift shop who’d been happy to spend a half hour on a gloomy, preseason afternoon gossiping with a paying customer. Gossips often stood as a PI’s best friend, and Heather Lockaby had been plenty friendly.
She felt terrible for Eli, Duncan recalled. Deemed the dead wife a cold, unfriendly snob who couldn’t even take the time to pay visits to Eli’s elderly grandmother. She’d gone off track with Hester Landon’s fall, but he’d reeled her back easily enough.
According to the loose-tongued Heather, Landon hadn’t lacked for female companionship during his summers and breaks at Whiskey Beach, or during his teens and twenties in any case. He’d liked to party, to suck down beers at the local watering holes and ride around in his convertible.