I, Richard - Elizabeth George [22]
The investigator went to an old oaken office chair behind the desk, but he didn't sit. Instead, he opened one of the side drawers, and just when Douglas was expecting him to pull out a fifth of bourbon, he dug out a bottle of yellow capsules instead. He shook two of them into his palm and knocked them back with a long swig of Orange Julius. He sank into his chair and gripped the arms.
“Arthritis,” he said. “I'm killing the bastard with evening primrose oil. Give me a minute, okay? You want a couple?”
“No.” Douglas glanced at his watch to make certain Cowley knew that his time was precious. Then he strolled to the steel bookshelves.
He was expecting to see munitions manuals, penal codes, and surveillance texts, something to assure the prospective clients that they'd come to the right place with their troubles. But what he found was poetry, volume after volume neatly arranged in alphabetical order by author, from Matthew Arnold to William Butler Yeats. He wasn't sure what to think.
The occasional space left at the end of a bookshelf was taken up by photographs. They were clumsily framed, snapshots mostly. They depicted grinning small children, a gray-haired grandma type, several young adults. Among them, encased in Plexiglas, was a military Purple Heart. Douglas picked this up. He'd never seen one, but he was pleased to know that his guess about the source of Cowley's limp had been correct.
“You saw action,” he said.
“My butt saw action,” Cowley replied. Douglas looked his way, so the PI continued. “I took it in the butt. Shit happens, right?” He moved his hands from their grip on the arms of his chair. He folded them over his stomach. Like Douglas's own, it could have been flatter. Indeed, the two men shared a similar build: stocky, quickly given to weight if they didn't exercise, too tall to be called short and too short to be called tall. “What can I do for you, Mr. Armstrong?”
“My wife,” Douglas said.
“Your wife?”
“She may be…” Now that it was time to articulate the problem and what it arose from, Douglas wasn't sure that he could. So he said, “Who's the son?”
Cowley reached for his Orange Julius and took a pull on its straw. “He died,” he said. “Drunk driver got him on the Ortega Highway.”
“Sorry.”
“Like I said. Shit happens. What shit's happened to you?”
Douglas returned the Purple Heart to its place. He caught sight of the graying grandma in one of the pictures and said, “This your wife?”
“Forty years my wife. Name's Maureen.”
“I'm on my third. How'd you manage forty years with one woman?”
“She has a sense of humor.” Cowley slid open the middle drawer of his desk and took out a legal pad and the stub of a pencil. He wrote ARMSTRONG at the top in block letters and underlined it. He said, “About your wife…”
“I think she's having an affair. I want to know if I'm right. I want to know who it is.”
Cowley carefully set his pencil down. He observed Douglas for a moment. Outside, a gull gave a raucous cry from one of the rooftops. “What makes you think she's seeing someone?”
“Am I supposed to give you proof before you'll take the case? I thought that's why I was hiring you. To give me proof.”
“You wouldn't be here if you didn't have suspicions. What are they?”
Douglas raked through his memory. He wasn't about to tell Cowley about trying to smell up Donna's underwear, so he took a moment to examine her behavior over the last few weeks. And when he did so, the additional evidence was there. How the hell had he missed it? She'd changed her hair; she'd bought new underwear—the black lacy Victoria's Secret stuff; she'd been on the phone twice when he'd come home and as soon as he walked into the room, she'd hung up hastily; there were at least two long absences with insufficient excuse for them; there were six or seven engagements that she said were with friends.
Cowley nodded thoughtfully when Douglas listed his suspicions. Then he said, “Have you given