“Wait,” I said as the two detectives started to walk away. “What about Twink’s nine a.m. appointment with the FBI?”
Marvin paused long enough to look back at me. “Not to worry,” he replied with a grin. “That’s been handled.”
Just then a cell phone began chirping. At first I thought it was one of theirs, but Nitz was the one who turned away to answer.
“Hello,” she said, sounding a bit uncertain. Then, a moment later, she added, “Oh, hello, Jared. I’m so glad to hear from you. Not under these circumstances of course, but yes. . . .” There was another pause, a longer one. “This afternoon at three? That’s wonderful news. Jimmy and I would love to meet you, but we’re not actually in Anchorage at the moment. . . . Yes, we’re still in Homer and will probably be here until at least tomorrow and maybe the next day as well.”
She and Jared were still talking as I keyed in Twink’s number. “You again?” she asked with typical brusqueness as she answered the phone.
“Yes, me again,” I replied. “Are you booked for later on this afternoon?”
“Are you kidding? After the last couple of days, I figured I deserved a day off. What have you got in mind?”
“Chris Danielson’s brother, Jared, is coming in on a flight from Seattle that’s due to land in Anchorage at three. Could you meet him at baggage claim?”
“What’s the flight number?”
“I don’t know. I can get it—”
“Never mind,” Twink barked. “I’ll figure it out. Where do you want me to take him?”
“Bring him here to Homer.”
“To the Driftwood?”
“Yes, please.”
“Still on your charge card?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“All right,” she allowed. “I guess I’ll keep on giving you the multi-day discount, but only on one condition.”
“What’s that?”
“Dinner at AJ’s,” she answered, “and this time I plan to stay long enough to eat my own damned sticky pudding.”
Chapter 38
That night, after once again feeding a kid who was evidently a bottomless pit where food was concerned, I was waiting with Jimmy in the lobby at the Driftwood Inn for Twink and the Travelall to deliver Father Jared Danielson door-to-door, airport to hotel. Nitz was still at the hospital. Fortunately for me, she’d brought Jimmy’s phone and charger along with his clothes on her panicked trip to Homer, and he was happily sprawled in a nearby chair, playing video games to his heart’s content.
As we sat there together in what now felt like companionable silence, I couldn’t help but think about how private investigators are portrayed on TV. Boob-tube PI dramas are always filled to the brim with fistfights, gunfights loaded with automatic firearms, and scene after scene of macho mayhem. It’s usually one death-defying act of derring-do after another. In all those scenes of never-ending drama, there are hardly ever any moments for quiet introspection.
A lot of what both cops and PIs do is boring—following one strand of inquiry or another just to see where it leads. When one thread dead-ends, you find another one to follow. Eventually those paths lead you from threads to dots and then from one small dot to another until you finally arrive at important ones. In this case those threads had involved paper chases rather than car chases—examining real-estate transactions and vehicle registrations until the puzzle pieces had finally come together in three separate homicides—two possibly provable and one not.
In addition, being a PI means showing up fully prepared to do whatever is necessary, which in this case meant looking after a middle-schooler who, without my being there, would have been either left to his own devices or stuck enduring two long nights in hospital waiting rooms.
The television and movie crime dramas seldom include stellar moments like the one I’d witnessed earlier in the evening when Danitza Adams Miller finally introduced her twelve-year-old son to his grandfather for the very first time. When Roger held out a frail, bony hand, Jimmy gave it a gentle shake. “I’m happy to meet you, sir,” the boy had said gravely. That one took my breath away.
As for Roger? At times he seemed somewhat more lucid than he’d been when I first met him on Saturday, but when an orderly appeared a few minutes later and deposited a food tray on his table, Roger had looked under the service plate’s cover and then dropped it as though it were hot to the touch.
“What’s wrong?” Nitz asked.