“Tell me.”
“Well, I know he met Jana at Fire by the Lake, which is a little dive off Highway 69. Good fried shrimp, decent bar. Anyway, they must’ve had a couple drinks together, and Pike told Jana he was a handyman and voilà. Next thing you know he’s doing some fixer-upper projects for them.”
“Was Pike’s relationship with Jana anything more than professional?”
Burns rubbed the stubble on his cheek. “Son, I don’t want to speak ill of your sister.”
“Speak ill. It’s fine. I want to know everything I can about Pike.” He paused. “Did they have an affair?”
He chuckled. “I’m not sure I’d call it that. A bartender I know at Fire by the Lake. I think his name is Keith, but it may be Kenny, said that he saw Pike and Jana fogging up the window of Jana’s Mercedes after closing time.”
Jason thought it was odd that Burns also had a hard time remembering whether the barkeep’s name was Keith or Kenny. Isn’t that exactly what Jana said?
“Next thing you know, Pike’s working on the Waterses’ boathouse,” Burns said, holding out his hands. “Turns out that Pike did good work, and Jana spread the word about how ‘handy’ he was to have around to the other folks on the island, including yours truly.”
“Did Pike do any work for you?”
“Yes. Put a new roof on my boathouse. Built some shelves for my office and bar. And once my divorce was final and the boys were out of the house, he did some yard work for me.”
“Sounds like you were around him a lot. He seem like a killer to you?”
Burns’s mouth curved into a drunken smile. “Whoever seems like a killer? I mean, to me, Waylon was a good ole boy. Showed up on time. Did his job. Kept his mouth shut. Wasn’t a bit of trouble. He worked for several of my other neighbors, and he was fine for them too. No problems. No complaints. Now . . . did he enjoy tying one on when he was through working? I suspect he did—in fact, I joined him a couple of times myself at the Brick—but there’s nothing wrong with that. Hell, I’m tying one on right now.”
Jason thought about that. Burns was getting pretty loose. “If you don’t mind me asking, do you drink like this every day?”
He considered his glass. “No, but since Shandra left me, I probably drink more. As a car salesman, I’m on all day long. Seven in the morning to ten at night. You gotta do something to unwind, you know what I mean?”
Jason did. It was one of the reasons he’d ended up in the PAC. But Burns’s comment brought up an interesting question. “Why aren’t you working today?” he asked.
“I’ve taken a good bit of time off since Braxton’s murder. Had to answer a lot of questions from the sheriff’s office since I was next-door neighbors and knew Pike pretty well. And Braxton and I were best friends.” He looked out the window. “We’d been best friends for thirty years.”
“I’m sorry,” Jason said.
“It’s just, you know, Braxton and Jana and their girls. I mean, they weren’t perfect, but they were kinda like my family once Shan took off. I ate dinner over there a lot. Saw somebody in that family almost every day.”
“Did you see Jana much in the last six months?”
He stared at the table. “No. She was gone a lot.” He glanced up at Jason. “I know she and Braxton were having problems.”
“How?”
“Braxton told me.”
“What did he tell you?”
“That he was worried about her drug use.”
“Did he ever say he was thinking about filing for divorce?”
“Yeah,” Burns said. “The last time he mentioned that was the Sunday before he was killed. We played eighteen holes over at Goose Pond. Took my boat. When we finished up, we had an early dinner at the Docks.” He took a slow sip of beer, then eyed the bottle as he began to peel the label off. “That was probably the last time I saw him.”
“What did he say?”
“That he’d been to see a lawyer and she’d drafted up a complaint for divorce.”
Jason felt his stomach tighten. “Who was the lawyer?”
“Candace Gordon. A local. Her office is on Blount Avenue.”
“Did he say he was going to file?”
Burns chewed on a toothpick. “Yep. He said that he’d already told Jana the night before and that she’d stormed out of the house. He also said Jana was in a lot of financial trouble, and he wasn’t sure how he was going to get her out of it. That he was going to be moving money out of their joint accounts after the Fourth so that she couldn’t bankrupt him.”