Monument to Murder - Margaret Truman [72]
He knows!
Brixton collected his thoughts before pressing on. He decided to toughen his stance. “Look,” he said, “I know that you were Ward Cardell’s PR spokesman for years, and that his daughter, Mitzi Cardell, knew Ms. Watkins at the time of the incident. All I want to do is ask a few questions—of you and hopefully of her.”
“I’m not sure there’s anything I can tell you.”
Making progress, Brixton thought. He shifted gears. “Look, Mr. Felker, I know what went down twenty years ago with Louise Watkins. All I need is to fill in some holes. Whatever we talk about is off the record.”
Would the bluff work?
He heard a deep sigh at the other end. Finally, Felker said, “All right, but there’s little I can tell you.”
“Whatever you can will be appreciated, sir.”
They agreed that Brixton could come to the house that night at eight. “But please come alone,” Felker said before hanging up. “I don’t want anyone to know.”
Brixton realized the moment he’d clicked off the phone that he’d already made dinner plans with Flo. If he hadn’t forgotten her birthday he wouldn’t have felt so conflicted about canceling another date. An early dinner was out of the question. She seldom closed her shop until eight, often nine. Besides, she’d want to make a night of it, dinner at the Pink House, after-dinner drinks at some bar with music, and home together for a celebratory roll in the sack.
He put off calling her and later was glad that he had. She called at one that afternoon to say that she’d forgotten that she’d promised to attend a fund-raising dinner with her friend Marla, and would he, Brixton, be terribly hurt if they made it tomorrow night?
“I was really looking forward to tonight,” he said, not terribly proud of his lie but enjoying being able to milk it. “I just hope no one steals the broach before I get to give it to you.”
“You can always buy another,” she said airily. “Thanks for understanding, Bob.”
“That’s me,” he said, “Understanding Bob.”
CHAPTER 25
Before leaving the office that afternoon Brixton called the restaurant owner who was looking to have a couple of his employees scrutinized and made an appointment to meet with him the following day. He was tempted to pass on the assignment, wanting to devote his full time to the Watkins case. But he knew that would be folly. He now had three thousand of the ten thousand dollars that Louise had given her mother and pledged to himself that he wouldn’t take more unless absolutely necessary. Louise Watkins had sold her soul for the ten grand, and possibly lost her life because of it. If he didn’t come up with the sort of information the mother sought, he’d bow out before taking more of what he considered blood money.
He had dinner at Lazzara’s before heading for his meeting with Jack Felker, and told the owner of having retrieved his camera and recorder.
“That’s great,” Lazzara said.
“Yeah, except that somebody took the disk from the camera that had photos on it from my last assignment.”
“Of the cheating wife?”
“Right. Put this on my tab, Ralph.”
He was about to tell his friend that the man in the photos at the motel was running for mayor but decided that it was better kept to himself. He was sorry that he’d told Cynthia. What he didn’t need at that moment was to become involved in some sordid political dustup. The fewer people who knew, the better.
As he drove to Felker’s house he formulated the questions he’d ask, hoping they would result in useful answers. The problem was that he didn’t know at that juncture what he was looking for. Coming up with evidence that definitively cleared Louise Watkins of the stabbing, and nailing down that she’d been paid to take legal responsibility, would be a home run. But he was pursuing Felker on the remote chance that his boss’s daughter, Mitzi Cardell, had in some way been involved, and that Felker would both know about it and elect to admit it.
And what if he did admit that Mitzi Cardell was somehow involved, laid it out all nice and neat as a deathbed mea culpa?