The Hunt Club_ A Novel - Bret Lott [19]
Mom let out a heavy breath. I couldn’t see her behind me, only imagined her eyes on the lighted numbers above the doors, her mouth shut tight.
“Did you hear anything at the club night before last?” the blond one said. “Anything out of the ordinary?”
I was looking at the numbers now, too. “No,” I said. “Nothing.”
“Your uncle is blind, is that correct?”
“You boys must work nights for the Psychic Network,” I said, and Mom let out a small laugh.
They didn’t look at her, didn’t blink. “How is it you discovered the body?” the blond said.
I slowly shook my head, saw Unc only yesterday morning, telling me to stop.
“I didn’t find it,” I said. “Unc did.”
“And how did that happen?” He crossed his arms.
I said, “He smelled it.”
“He what?”
I looked at him. “He’s blind, and he smelled it. That’s why he told me to stop.”
The black-haired one cleared his throat. “We’d like to know what you saw once you discovered the body. If there was anything out of the ordinary.”
“What’s ordinary about a dead body is all I want to know,” Mom said. They looked at her behind me. “It’s out of the ordinary just to see something like that. So you’re asking him what else there was about it? Isn’t it enough my boy saw it in the first place?”
“Now, ma’am,” the black-haired one said, “we’re just trying to find out as much as we can about what happened. That’s all we’re here for.”
“You got three more floors to go before we’re out of here, and you’re out of our lives, so hop to it.”
“Ma’am,” the blond said, “we’ll ask as many—”
“Lee,” the black-haired one said, quiet, and this Lee stopped.
The black-haired one knelt, put his hand on the wheel of my chair. I could smell his aftershave, heavy and dull. “What did you see?” he said.
“His hands,” I said. “That’s pretty out of the ordinary. And that cardboard sign. That’s it.” I looked at my hands in my lap, and the skin on them, and waited for what was coming next: Have you seen the good doctor’s wife?
“And you heard nothing,” he said.
“Nothing.”
“Did your uncle act strange in any way earlier this week? Or at any time in recent weeks?”
“One more floor,” Mom said.
Unc hadn’t acted strange. Not until yesterday morning, when he told me he’d wanted to kill the man himself a long time ago. And last night, when he’d told me he didn’t want us in on any of this, whatever the hell that meant.
“No,” I said. “Same old Unc.”
“Did you talk about anything at all either before or after the body was discovered?”
I looked him in the eye, almost dared him to try and find what I was leaving out of what I was about to tell him.
I said, “We talked about the stands the night before, took a drive over to them Friday night, looked around. Saturday morning, after we found the body, we talked about the dogs and keeping them off it, off the body. And we talked about police stuff, like making everybody sit in the weeds on the opposite side of the road, walking single file, that stuff, so the scene wouldn’t be wrecked.” I stopped, took a breath at that place where I could have told him the fact he’d talked to Constance Dupree Simons only Wednesday. “And he told me the person’s name, Constance, who was married to that doctor. The one who wrote the cardboard sign, near as anybody could tell. He told me they were going to get married, Unc and that woman, a long time ago.” I paused, shrugged. “That’s it. Then we went back to the body, and that’s when it—”
For a second I saw only that dead man, those skinned hands lifting his gun up, aiming for that buzzard.
The doors opened. “End of interrogation,” Mom said, and wheeled me right out. The black-haired one didn’t have time even to stand up.
Then we were in a long white hallway, headed for glass double doors down at the end.
“One more question, ma’am,” the blond said. “Just one more,” and I heard him moving quick up beside us. He took hold of the rail on the chair, pulled us to a stop. The chair wheeled around to him for his grabbing on, and here we were, this big officer looking down at me.
“Now, you look here,” Mom said. Then the man moved his