Early Graves Read Free Page B

a hospital—with injections.”
    “Right.” Leppard sighed. “Sure, a drink. Thank you.”
    Bottles stood in sleek ranks on a counter. Dave looked at them and raised his brows at Leppard. “Bourbon, please.” Dave got glasses and ice. He poured Wild Turkey over ice cubes in a stocky Swedish glass for the lieutenant, and Glenlivet over ice cubes in a glass like it for himself. He took the bourbon to Leppard, who tasted it, opened his eyes wide, and said, “Now, that is something. Tell me, how do I go about becoming an insurance investigator?”
    “What you want to ask”—Dave cut butter onto a grill—“is how do I get hold of thirty percent of the shares of a big insurance company. And the answer is, be the founder’s only son—all right?”
    “I’ll start arranging that today,” Leppard said. He drank lovingly again, and frowned. “If people act the opposite of what you expect, can you ever get so smart beforehand you know what the opposite is going to be?”
    Dave shrugged. “Time and a long history of hit and miss help. And luck at the moment you need it.” He busied himself stroking mayonnaise onto slices of bread. He rummaged out a bottle of Dijon mustard and smeared some of this on too. He poked inside the refrigerator again, hefted out half a ham, cut thick slabs from this, laid these on the bread. He grated crumbly yellow cheese and piled this on the ham, closed the sandwiches, used a spatula to lay them in the sizzling butter on the grill. Now and only now, he shed the trenchcoat, hung it beside Leppard’s coat, and brought his drink to the table. “Someone had a reason for bringing Dodge to me.” He sat down opposite Leppard, lit a cigarette, tasted his Scotch. “It wasn’t to threaten me. I don’t know the man. I don’t have AIDS. So it wasn’t the killer who brought him.”
    “According to your theory”—Leppard reached across and drew a cigarette from Dave’s pack on the tabletop, and used Dave’s slim steel lighter to light the cigarette, and laid the lighter down again—“it was the opposite. Which means his mother brought him, right?”
    “You’ll have to ask her, won’t you?” Dave said. “If she exists, you’re the one who has to tell her that her son is dead. You have to do that, even if she already knows it.”
    Leppard shifted unhappily on his chair and sighed. Smoke blew out of his nostrils. He looked at the cigarette in his thick fingers. “You know, I haven’t smoked in three months? See what this is doing to me? I hate that. I hate that part worst of all. Telling the family.”
    “Be blunt.” Dave went back to the looming stove, took a look at the sandwiches, and turned them over with the spatula. His timing was right. The downsides were golden and crisp. The cheese was beginning to melt. “If you upset them, they may blurt things out they’d keep secret otherwise.”
    “I read the interrogation textbook,” Leppard said.
    “Forgive me,” Dave said. He came back to the table for another swallow of Glenlivet, a pull at his cigarette. He didn’t sit down this time. “I’m getting old. The old think nobody knows anything but them.”
    “I’ll have to ask the mother if she knows you.”
    “Of course. But don’t tell her I’m coming to see her.”
    “Maybe it won’t be a mother. Sometimes it’s a lover, a brother, a sister. Sometimes it’s nobody. Everybody in their life deserts them. Like it was the plague. Leprosy.”
    “You didn’t bring latex gloves.” Dave returned to the big, hulking stove, all white enamel panels and nickel-plated trim, and eyed the sandwiches. “But the M.E. did. In the beginning, didn’t the coroner’s crews refuse to pick up AIDS bodies? Do we call this progress?”
    “They threatened to fire them,” Leppard said. “So, you going out to Rancho Vientos tomorrow? It’s not your case.”
    “You going to stop me? He was sent to me. That makes it my case.” Dave pulled plates down from a cupboard, laid the