Body Copy - Michael Craven [32]
The account people want to be rich. And it’s not like the movies or even Wall Street, where there’s a shot at getting rich overnight. It takes years of work and determination and luck. Years. People pointed the finger at Tyler Wilkes.
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What would he get out of it? Roger being dead doesn’t mean he would get any more accounts. He still has to win them. I mean, really. What good would killing my husband do Tyler Wilkes?”
“The cops thought he might be obsessed with your husband, jealous to the point of obsession.”
“Maybe. Tyler certainly isn’t respected, and I’m sure that makes him crazy. But if he was obsessed, all the investigating in the world isn’t going to help you or anyone else.
You can’t follow clues when someone has killed someone else because of a mental illness. There’s no rhyme or reason to it.”
“And in this case, there’s no evidence either.”
They sipped their tea. Tremaine thought, iced tea, it’s good, I don’t drink it often enough. But it’s kind of a pain in the ass to make . . .
Tremaine said, “Do you have any theories, Evelyn?”
“Yes,” she said. “I think it was a random accident of some kind. My husband was in the wrong place at the wrong time and somebody killed him and then deposited him at the agency to confuse people. It certainly would be easy to figure out who he was and where he worked. I just don’t know why anyone would want to kill him. He didn’t owe anyone money, he wasn’t into drugs, he didn’t have some life I didn’t know about.”
She was so sure of this. Tremaine said, “You mean he didn’t have affairs?”
“Yes, that’s what I mean. And I know that’s why you’re here, to ask me that. Everyone else did. And no, my husband did not have affairs. He came home every night.
Every night, unless he was out of town. The employees at 99
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Gale/Parker said he had crazy hours and they’d see him having a drink somewhere late at night. Well, guess what?
He’d just left work and was winding down before he came home. And he’d probably just called me.”
Tremaine thought, well, there was at least one night he didn’t come home. Laurie Donnelly had told him that.
And, man, this woman was defensive. And strong. She definitely wouldn’t have liked the way an affair would have made her look. She was protective of herself and her husband and that was understandable, but this was more than that. Evelyn Gale needed to look good in the eyes of others. And she needed to be right.
“Roger and I,” she said, “were married later in life. We didn’t have any kids, which some people use to stay together. We didn’t need that. We had a wonderful relationship. A loving, intellectual relationship. We loved to talk about books and movies and plays and business. We loved each other. He didn’t run around. He didn’t.”
Tremaine sat for a moment, took another sip of his tea, and said, “Let’s get back to Tyler Wilkes.”
“Okay,” she said. Her demeanor a little more relaxed now, she didn’t need to stand quite as tall on this subject.
Tremaine said, “Why do you think he was questioned so extensively? Sure, he copied your husband when he built his new agency. He openly revered the guy, was openly jealous of him. But the two never talked. There are no phone records, nothing. For all intents and purposes, they had no relationship.”
“I’ll tell you why, Mr. Tremaine. They had nothing else. That’s why I don’t know if you or anyone else can solve this case. Nobody had any real motive. And if Tyler 100
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Wilkes did it, nobody could catch him in a lie or force him to say something he didn’t want to say.”
“Nobody yet,” Tremaine said.
Evelyn didn’t respond; she just sipped her tea and looked down the hill at the other estates. Tremaine turned and looked, too. You could see lots of them, just sitting there, still and small in the distance.
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Tremaine pulled the Cutlass onto Rialto in Venice. He