“So Sheila had a habit of drinking too much at all those kinds of events?”
I blinked. “Jesus Christ, Edwin!”
“I’m just playing devil’s advocate, Glen. But you see how these things can turn bad in a hurry. I know and you know there’s a huge gulf between having a couple of drinks at Christmas and getting behind the wheel when you shouldn’t. But all Bonnie Wilkinson needs is a handful of witnesses from those types of occasions, where you might have been present, to start building a case.”
“Well, she’s going to have a hard time doing that,” I said.
“What about Belinda Morton?”
“Huh? Belinda was a friend of Sheila’s. What about her?”
“I made a couple of calls before you came over, one to Barnicke and Trundle, the firm that’s handling this for Mrs. Wilkinson, and they weren’t afraid to tip their hand to me, suggesting that we might want to settle this thing before we even get to court.”
“What are you talking about?”
“They already have a statement from Ms. Morton that when she and Sheila and another woman would go out for lunch, they’d get pretty looped.”
“So maybe they had a few drinks. Sheila always took a cab home from those. She usually took a cab to those, since she knew she might be having a few.”
“Really?” Edwin said. “So she’d go to lunch knowing full well she’d be having a lot to drink?”
“It’s not like they got drunk. They just had a good time at lunch. You’re making too much out of it.”
“It won’t be me who does it.” He paused. “There’s also this thing about marijuana.”
“About what?”
“Belinda has apparently said she and Sheila smoked it.”
“ Belinda said that?” This woman, who was supposedly my wife’s friend?
“So they say. They are, I understand, only alleging a single incident. A year ago, at the Morton home, in the backyard. Apparently the husband arrived and became quite perturbed.”
I was shaking my head in disbelief. “What’s she trying to do to us? To Kelly and me?”
“I don’t know. To give her the benefit of the doubt, she may not have appreciated the implications of her comments when she was making them. My understanding is it was her husband, George, who felt she had an obligation to be forthcoming.”
I slumped down in the chair. “That guy’s got a pole up his ass. Even if they could prove Sheila liked to have a glass of wine or a Cosmo at lunch, how do they go from there to proving that it’s my fault that she might have gotten behind the wheel drunk the night of the accident?”
“Like I said, it’s a stretch. But anything can happen where a case like this is concerned, so we have to take this seriously. Leave it with me for now. I’ll draft a response and run it by you.”
I felt my world unraveling. Just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse. “God, what a week.”
Edwin looked up from the note he was making. “What?”
“I still don’t know what’s going to happen with the insurance on that house that burned down. I got a guy working for me who’s going into financial ruin and keeps hitting me up for pay advances. Kids are calling my daughter Boozer at school because of Sheila’s accident, plus her friend’s mother died in an accident a couple of nights ago, and the woman’s husband is bugging me because of some phone call Kelly heard when she was over there for a sleepover. On top of all that, the Wilkinsons want to sue my ass off.”
“Whoa,” said Edwin.
“Yeah, no shit.”
“No, go back a bit.”
“Which thing?”
“Your daughter’s friend’s mother died and what?”
I told him about Ann Slocum’s death, and how Darren Slocum had come over demanding to know what Kelly had heard at the sleepover.
“Ann would have been that other woman at the lunches,” I added glumly.
“Well, this is interesting,” Edwin said.
“Yeah.”
“Did you say Darren Slocum?”
“That’s right.”
“Milford cop?”
“Right again. You know him?”
“I know of him.”
“That sounds ominous,” I said.
“There’ve been at least two internal investigations concerning him, that I know of. Broke one guy’s arm during an arrest following a bar fight. In the other incident, he was being looked into for some missing drug money, but I’m pretty sure that one was dismissed. There were half a dozen cops who had access to the evidence, so there was no way they could pin it on him.”
“How do you know this?”
“You think I just sit here all day and work on my stamp collection?”
“So he’s a bad cop.”
Edwin paused a moment before answering, as if there might be others in the room and he didn’t want to get sued for slander.
“Let’s say he’s got a cloud over him.”
“Sheila was a friend of his wife’s.”
“I don’t know that much about his wife. Other than that she wasn’t his first.”
“I never knew he was married before,” I said.
“Yeah. When someone was telling me about his troubles, it came up that he was married years ago.”
“Divorced?”
“She died.”
“Of?”
“No idea.”
I thought about that, then, “Maybe this all starts to fit. Him being a sketchy cop, his wife selling knockoff designer purses out of their house. I think they were bringing in good money with the purses.” I didn’t mention that it was probably all off the books. People in glass houses and all that.
