Mallets Aforethought by Sarah Graves Page A

their whereabouts over the last day or so.
    It was the sort of delay a Maine cop might be flexible about. But I didn’t think Wade was talking about delay.
    “Right.” He read it in my face. “Cops weren’t even being particularly aggressive. It was more like if someone’s name came up they wanted to rule him out. And you know, a lot of guys who have work boats also have second mortgages on their houses, keep the boats running.”
    It was yet another reason why Hector was so unpopular, that he held many of those mortgages himself. And every year he got his greedy mitts on a couple of those houses.
    “So that’s why the cops had so many guys’ names,” Wade said. “They already went over to Hector’s place, the door wasn’t locked, had a gander at Hector’s big black book. But like I said, most of the fellows were cooperative.”
    The book was famous. If your name was in it, you owed Hector money. “But George,” Wade went on unhappily, “was different.”
    “Sure, and the cops had
his
name because I told Colgate about him,” I said bitterly. “Me and my big mouth.”
    Wade shook his head. “Didn’t matter. Other people mentioned George, too. They didn’t want to, but Colgate got it out of them somehow.”
    Yeah, he was good at that; small comfort. I ran hot water on the plates in the sink.
    “But anyway,” Wade went on, “that’s not what I meant. What’s different is, George said no.”
    A saucer slipped from my hand and broke. “He . . . but why?”
    George didn’t have any gear that might have been vulnerable to the storm’s aftereffects. Weeks earlier at Will Bonnet’s prescient suggestion he’d moved his own boat, fitted only to haul a few dozen lobster traps in season, to a more protected mooring out at Deep Cove.
    “I don’t know. All I know is that he isn’t saying where he was for the last forty-eight hours or so. And he isn’t saying
why
he isn’t saying. His lip,” Wade finished grimly, “is zipped.”
    Oh, brother: motive, method, and now what probably looked to the cops like opportunity. And once they get those three items corralled in a single suspect, cops don’t go racketing around looking for
other
suspects.
    Not on your tintype. The fact that in Maine life was all you could get for premeditated murder—and if you fed someone strychnine, how could you say it wasn’t planned?—was no consolation.
    I dropped the saucer pieces into the trash. “So then what happened?” I asked Wade. “And how do you know this stuff, anyway?”
    He’d already said it wasn’t part of what he’d overheard, and I didn’t think it would’ve been included in old-shooting-buddies small talk, either. “Colgate told me,” he replied.
    My uh-oh bells jangled like an alarm clock. “I see. Just out of the goodness of his heart he told you this?”
    Wade shot a glance at me, then let it pass: the notion that maybe Colgate had been playing him for some reason.
    “No. He wanted me to try getting George to reconsider. He’s giving George time to think it over. Pretty decent of him.”
    My estimation of Colgate crept up a notch. He’d unnerved me with his interrogation skills back at Harlequin House, but in his place I’d have done just the same.
    Or tried. “Not much time, though,” Wade cautioned. “It won’t even be up to him, soon. His bosses start asking hard questions, he’ll have to get George’s statement completed.”
    “That’s a fine kettle of fish,” I said, annoyed. “George and his stiff-necked . . .”
    Pride, I was about to finish, still hoping that was it. He’d been the same way about Ellie’s money, back when she’d had some; her small inheritance, so carefully invested, had evaporated in the accounting scandals that had helped pop the Wall Street bubble.
    But just then I heard the boys coming downstairs so I didn’t continue. Tommy talked with customers at the Mobil station every day and we didn’t need this all over town right off the bat.
    “Everyone