Thicker Than Water (A Leo Waterman Mystery) Read Free Page B

that Rebecca Duval hadn’t bothered todiscuss something like an indefinite leave of absence with her mother was absurd. Another quarter dropped into the Magic Fingers slot. The vibrating escalated to jackhammer proportions.
    “You been to the cops?” I asked.
    “They checked with the people at the medical examiner’s office. Said she arranged her own leave of absence.” She anticipated my next question. “Listed ‘personal’ as the reason.” She tore a hand away from the purse and waved it. “Even interviewed and hired a temporary replacement for herself. Other than that, the cops said she was an adult and entitled to go wherever she wanted to go. Said they didn’t have time to be out looking for people who left of their own volition.”
    “They’ve got a point,” I admitted.
    “Do I have to explain this to you?” She didn’t wait for me to answer. “Do I?” she shrieked. She sensed she was getting a mite shrill and pulled herself together.
    “Could she be pregnant or something?” I asked.
    “I’d have known,” Iris said, without hesitation.
    And she would have. And we both knew it.
    Once again I rooted around for an explanation and came up empty.
    “The relationship…,” I began. “I mean, before the night they had the fight and she walked out on him…I mean…how was it going? Were they…”
    “Like all relationships,” she hedged.
    “How’s that, Iris?” I wasn’t about to let her euphemize the question out of existence.
    I understood that this was hard for Iris. She’d given Brett Ward her personal seal of approval. To admit thateverything had gone less than swimmingly would be tantamount to admitting she’d been wrong…and we certainly couldn’t have that, now could we?
    To my astonishment, she came right out with it. “Rocky,” she said. “They’d been having some trouble lately.”
    “Trouble about what?”
    “What do couples argue about?” she shot back.
    “You tell me.”
    Her neck got stiffer. Her lips all but disappeared. “She wouldn’t tell me. She just said they were working it out together.”
    “Working it out how?”
    She swallowed hard. “I think they were seeing someone.”
    “Therapy?”
    “I think so.”
    “You know who?”
    “Whom,” she corrected.
    “A name,” I growled.
    She shook her head and looked away. “No idea,” she said.
    “I’ll make a couple of calls,” I said.
    “Find her,” she demanded. “Get out there and find her.”
    “I don’t do that kind of work anymore,” I said.
    “You don’t do any kind of work anymore?” she snapped.
    I refused to allow myself to be drawn into her spurious web of contention. “There’s nothing one man can do that the SPD can’t do fifty times better.”
    “Unlike you, Leo, the police have other things to do.”
    “Yeah,” was all I could think to say. “They do.”

    “Same damn thing we told the mother,” Marty Gilbert said.
    After all these years, Marty was still skinny. He’d been a beanpole in high school and taken quite a bit of goodnatured ribbing about it, but his thin genes were paying compound interest in middle age. While the rest of us fought love handles, Marty had put on maybe five pounds in twenty-five-plus years.
    As we spoke, he was seven months from early retirement and holding down the second shift watch commander’s desk at the East Precinct. Marty was no fool. No sense risking your ass on the street when you’re staring your twenty-five in the eye. He was gonna desk-duty his way out the door and right into that condo he and Peg had bought down in San Diego, so they could get out of the rain and be near the grandkids.
    “Rebecca made plans to leave. She left. Other than that it’s none of our business.” He allowed his hands to fall to his sides and made a resigned face. “And after meeting the mother…” Marty gave discretion its due and let the rest of it hang.
    I resisted the urge to chime in on the subject of Iris Duval.
    “I’m worried,” I said