Caught Dead by Andrew Lanh

experience, one you couldn’t get away from, lodged in the bone marrow, deep as death. Jimmy saw me as part of that past—his past. His dangerous rite-of-passage days.
    â€œWhat the hell you doing here?” Jimmy greeted me. The room smelled of thick cigar smoke and old tuna sandwiches and stale breath.
    â€œWhat are you doing here?” I asked back.
    He clenched his fists. “Got a goddamn deadline on this Aetna fraud case. Fact is, I was making no progress until a few minutes ago. Think I got the answer.” And again, “Why are you here?”
    I told him about Mary’s murder, the funeral, Grandma’s request that I investigate—he scrunched up his face—and I even told him about my dinner the night before with Liz. His frown deepened.
    He’s old fashioned. When you get divorced, you don’t go out to dinner with the ex-wife, just the two of you. You just don’t, even though he adores Liz. Now Jimmy never married because—well, “Nam ruined me for a good woman,” something that made no sense to me. But he has a lot to say about marriage. And everything else.
    He’s a big pile of a man, unshaven half the time, always sweating even in winter, mopping a grainy forehead with a gray handkerchief, a man poured into extra-large sweat shirts that ride up a tremendous belly. When he gets drunk on his celebratory rye-and-ginger highballs, his thinning blond hair stands on end, and he announces that he is the Polish Prince. Last year he didn’t talk to me for three days when I told him I thought Bobby Vinton had that title. Didn’t he watch late-night TV music offers? The Best of Bobby Vinton, the Polish Prince. Like the Best of Jerry Vale. The Best of Vaughn Monroe. On some sleepless nights, I sometimes wondered: Who are these people?
    Jimmy doesn’t give a damn about most things that don’t matter, and a lot about things that do. We get along great—my good friend. I’d trust him with my life. I don’t know if it would ever come to that, but I would. I don’t say such things lightly.
    â€œMurder?” he barked. “And you took the case?”
    â€œIt’s not a case. I’m just gonna talk to…”
    â€œI think you lost your mind. The money is in fraud, not murder. Murder is too messy.” He was getting ready to leave. “Turn off the air conditioner on the way out.”
    I invited him to dinner that night at Zeke’s Olde Tavern.
    â€œMaybe. You paying?”
    I nodded. I knew he’d be there.
    â€œI’ll close up in a bit,” I yelled after him. “Check the mail. Play with my computer.” That was his expression. When I became his associate, I computerized and streamlined his chaotic office, which he grudgingly accepted. He knew it was time, but he fought the idea. Nobody from Aetna or Travelers hires an investigator who keeps notes on slips of paper in his breast pocket. The man tucked important information in outdated Manhattan phone directories and then, forgetting, recycled them. He recorded crucial facts on the backs of gas station credit card slips.
    So now I could bring up files via Wi-Fi in a split second, information that used to cost him weeks of foot traffic, as well as favors traded with people in high and low places. “Holy shit” is what he usually says when I give him instantaneous access to personnel and personal files of people he’s investigating. Most of it is matter-of-fact online data available at the public library in Hartford.
    â€œGo play with your computer” is his way of letting me know whose office it really is.
    ***
    That night, after a dinner of steak and potatoes at Zeke’s, Jimmy and I lingered over coffee—me—and tepid beer—him. He didn’t want to return to the one-room efficiency he rented in the West End of Hartford, and he brightened when my landlady Gracie wandered in “for an early nightcap,”