Hot Start by David Freed

said about not owing each other explanations. He would’ve told her he wanted to spend more time together, to build on their relationship. He might’ve even told her that he loved her, but I knew none of it would’ve mattered. She was already gone. I doubted she was ever coming back.
    G IL C ARLISLE knew that his nephew, Dino Birch, had been taken into custody even before I’d left a message on his voice mail.
    “My sister calls and wakes me out of a dead sleep to tell me he’s been arrested, begging me to hire him a good defense attorney,” Carlisle said over the phone. “Then Dino calls. Swears he didn’t do it. Who the hell knows about people these days, kin included. You know what I’m saying.” As an afterthought, he added, “I didn’t mean you, Cordell.”
    “I didn’t know you still consider me kin.”
    “You were married to my daughter.”
    “We were divorced, Gil.”
    “But you were getting back together. That’s the important thing.”
    I didn’t feel like talking about Savannah and what had happened to her, to us. I’m sure he didn’t either.
    “Who’d Dino say was trying to frame him?”
    “He didn’t say, and I didn’t ask. We didn’t get down in the weeds very deep. He had two minutes to talk and he sounded pretty upset. I told him I’d—”
    Silence followed.
    “. . . Gil? Hello?”
    Nothing. I walked outside and sat down in the shade of Mrs. Schmulowitz’s back porch. Within seconds, Gil called me back.
    “Goddamned AT&T,” he grumbled. “They need to get more satellites up there in outer space and stop all this dropped-call crap.”
    He was somewhere over the Atlantic, jetting to a summit in Geneva with other petroleum industry executives who were all worried about the wildly gyrating price of crude oil on international markets. The way things were headed, Carlisle said, he’d barely have any financial reserves left within a year, another reason why he was reluctant to pay for his nephew’s legal counsel, especially if the prosecution’s case was a slam dunk, which is how they were making it sound on the news.
    I thought about sharing with him Congressman Pierce Walton’s possible involvement in the case, but I kept my mouth shut. The more I pondered it, the more I was inclined to believe that any notion of linking Walton to a double murder based on a pornographic snapshot of questionable authenticity was preposterous.
    “Don’t ask me because I won’t tell you,” Carlisle said, “but I’ve pulled a few strings to get you in to see my nephew. Hear him out, listen to what he has to say. If you think Dino’s innocent and he’s got a legitimate alibi, I need to know that. If you think he’s guilty as sin, I need to know that as well.”
    “What’s your opinion, Gil? You know him. Do you think he did it?”
    “Dino? Hell, son, truth be told, I can’t even remember the last time I saw him. My sister, Marleen, and her brood, drove up from Midland to my place in Aspen on vacation one summer maybe fifteen years ago. Dino’s her oldest. Good-looking boy. Tall. Was into dirt bikes and guns, as I recall. I took him skeet shooting. I do remember that. I know he was overseas for a while with the army. Not sure how much action he saw. How he ended up getting into this whole ‘save the whales’ deal is beyond me.”
    Carlisle was telling me how Marleen got divorced shortly after the Aspen trip, and how hard all three of her kids took it, none harder than Dino, when our connection began cutting in and out. Words grew sporadic, then sentences. Finally he was gone. I slipped the phone into the pocket of my jeans and walked out to the street in front of Mrs. Schmulowitz’s house, where I normally park my truck.
    Standing outside the two-story Tudor next door, with his suit coat hooked over his shoulder, chatting up Stan, the retired, neoconservative postal worker who lived there, was none other than local Congressman Pierce Walton. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen