“I’m just thinking out loud. Okay, let’s assume Conrad told her. But he didn’t have to have told her the truth. Let me ask you this: Who knew there was a copy of this so-called book on a disc?”
“Me, Ellen, and Derek, of course. Maybe his girlfriend Penny. Maybe her parents. Conrad figured it out, and there’s Illeana.”
“The onetime actress. Did you ever see her in
“No,” I said.
“Only thing she ever made during her short career that got her any attention, and that was mostly because she showed her tits. You can rent it at Blockbuster.”
“I’ll pass,” I said, eating through the whipped cream so that I could find my pie.
“What do you make of this Illeana?” Barry asked.
“A wolverine,” I said.
“Only met her once or twice, at things out at Thackeray. But she and her husband don’t want to talk to me. Too far down the food chain.”
“Cut grass for a living and see what happens.”
“Yeah, okay. So the reason I ask about her is, we got an ID off the dead guy in your shed, who your new buddy Drew put down, and his name was Morton DeLuca. From New York. And while we haven’t found his partner yet, we suspect he might be a guy named Lester Tiffin. They work together a lot, or so the NYPD tell us.”
“Tiffin?” I said.
“Yeah.”
“Illeana’s last name is Tiff.”
“Yeah, I know that. She shortened it.”
“This guy, is he related to her?” I asked. “An ex-husband, a brother, or something?” I tried to put it together. “She brought in hired help-family-to get the disc back? Didn’t know Conrad already had it?”
“You’re getting ahead of me here. I’m going out there today to talk to them, to Conrad and Illeana. Not a word about this Tiffin guy to anyone, hear me? I probably shouldn’t even have mentioned it, but I’ve kind of fucked you around of late.”
“No shit. That’ll be fun, interviewing the college president and his wife.”
“That’s why I get the big bucks,” Barry said, washing his pie down with coffee. He reached for a napkin from the chrome dispenser, but there were so many jammed in there it shredded when he took it out. “Shit,” he said, and pulled out a handful. He dabbed at the corners of his mouth.
“I looked up the Brett Stockwell thing,” he said. “That kid who went over the falls. Like you asked.”
“Okay.” I was surprised he remembered.
“Not that much in it. He fell, hit his head on the rocks below, snapped his neck, would have died instantly.”
“But it was ruled a suicide.”
“There was no note, if that’s what you’re asking. But there were no obvious signs of foul play, either. No one saw anything or heard anything. They think it happened in the evening, maybe not that many people around here, although the walkway over the falls is a pretty popular spot for joggers and cyclists and what have you. A lot of interviews were conducted, with his mother, teachers, even Chase, and it seemed like maybe he was a bit of a troubled kid. Intense, moody. And creative. That doesn’t necessarily mean suicide, but some of the indicators were there.”
“Was there anything in the report that says he couldn’t have been thrown over the railing, pushed over?”
“No. I suppose it could have happened that way, but there’s nothing that specifically rules out aliens coming down and tossing him over, either.”
“So that’s it,” I said.
“Pretty much.”
“What? There was something else?”
“There were fibers, just a few, on the railing. There are these concrete pillars spaced out along the bridge over the falls, then metal railings between them. On one of the concrete pillars, there were a few threads.”
“From what?”
“A shirt, a blouse, something. But it didn’t match anything the Stockwell boy was wearing. But those fibers could have been there awhile. Nothing to suggest there’s anything connecting the two.”
I thought a moment, then said, “Here’s how it looks to me, Barry. Conrad Chase read that kid’s book. Was really impressed with it. Realized the kid was a literary genius in the making. So maybe he offered to buy it off him, so he could pass it off as his own. Or maybe he decided to steal it outright. Either way, the Stockwell kid must have objected, or if he didn’t even know what Conrad had done, he was going to be pissed when the book came out and he saw that it was his. So Conrad had to deal with that situation. He had to kill Brett Stockwell. I think he threw that kid over the falls. I think he killed him. I don’t know what he had to do with the Langleys, but it seems pretty likely that this all has something to do with those two goons coming to our house the other night. But the thing I’m most sure of is, he killed Brett.”
“Be nearly impossible to prove,” Barry said. “Even if you’re right, that he ripped off the kid’s book, and that could be proven somehow, it wouldn’t be evidence that he threw Brett over the falls. The best you could hope for is that, if the business with the book came out, he’d be ruined professionally.”
That would be something, at least.
