Body Copy - Michael Craven [4]
Nina nodded and said, “Well, I’m glad you’re going to give it a try.”
“There’s almost always something that can lead you somewhere,” Tremaine said. “It might be very hard to pin-point, but it’s almost always there.”
Nina stood up and pulled a card out of her purse. She handed it to Tremaine and he looked at it, focusing on the name. Nina Aldeen. It had a nice sound to it.
“Call me or e-mail me when you want to talk,” she said.
“I really appreciate your taking this, and again, if you want to go on your trip, I can wait.”
“I’ll call you in a couple days.”
Tremaine walked Nina out. They both stood just outside the trailer, right where they had been when they first introduced themselves to each other.
Tremaine said, “So, was there another reason you wanted to look into this?”
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Michael Craven
Something happened in her eyes, and she waited just a second too long to talk.
“Another reason?”
“Yeah. You said the cops not doing anything about it was one reason. Is there another one?”
“I said that? I guess I meant . . .” She cut herself off and again paused before she spoke. Tremaine looked at her eyes. Something far away was in there, and he almost thought she was going to cry. But then he saw something else, a quick but fierce fight within her that showed she wasn’t going to let that happen.
She said, “I don’t know what I meant by that. I think it was just a figure of speech. But in thinking about it now,”
she took a breath, “I guess there was another reason. I guess I meant that some people in our family wanted to hire someone like you, but just couldn’t bring themselves to do it. Roger’s wife—his widow, Evelyn—or my mom—
they were too hurt by it all to open it up again. If that’s even really what they wanted to do. I guess I felt like I could be the one to take some action, you know? Even if it was just hiring someone. As sad, as tragic as it was, the murder I mean, I was less emotional about it than they were—you know?”
“Yeah,” Tremaine said. “I’ll talk to you in a couple days.”
And then he watched Nina turn and walk to her car with her arms crossed and her head pointed just slightly down.
12
C H A P T E R 3
The first person Tremaine needed to call was his old buddy at the LAPD, John Lopez, not just to thank him for the referral but to get some information from him on Roger Gale. But before he did that, he’d have to take care of something else, something fairly important to him: the Daily Jumble. That game in the paper where you unscramble the words, then figure out the clever little riddle at the end.
It’s very popular with the over-eighty crowd—Tremaine knew that. He would often say to himself, Jesus, Tremaine, you’re not even forty and you’re doing the Jumble every day like an old man. Start devouring Jell-O and yelling at the neighbors, and you’ll be an old man.
Tremaine liked to pretend the game helped keep his mind sharp, but he knew it was just a dumb puzzle that he was addicted to. Even more compulsive than his doing it Michael Craven
every day was the fact that he timed himself. His best time ever? Thirty-seven seconds, start to finish. It was almost pathetic that he was proud of that. Extremely proud of that.
Tremaine had planned to do the puzzle on the flight to Australia, but since that wasn’t happening, he had to do it right away, before the day got away from him. The Jumble wasn’t in the New York Times, so Tremaine produced his copy of the L.A. Times. Not a bad paper—a good one—but he only subscribed for the puzzle.
Now he was ready. Pencil, stopwatch, puzzle. Tremaine sat at his kitchen table, pressed start on the stopwatch, and got started. The four unscrambled words were myrig, teaga, tolbet, and whallo. The riddle was: What it takes to wear the latest designer