The Second Mouse - Archer Mayor [12]
“The bad die last?” he queried.
“I don’t know about that, but he’s alive and they’re not, and he did his level best to belittle his son when he was alive and make Michelle’s life a living hell afterward.”
“He must be a happy man now,” Joe suggested.
“If there is a God,” she answered bitterly, “he’ll burn that house down just to teach the bastard a lesson.”
“You ever meet him?”
“Newell?” She pursed her lips. “No, which is probably a good thing. As far as I know, he did all his torturing long-distance.”
“We found eviction notices,” Joe mentioned leadingly.
“Yeah.” She dragged out the word. “Michelle said she’d force him to throw her out bodily. Sad part is, that’s exactly what would have happened. She didn’t have a leg to stand on.”
“Did she have any plans? She sure hadn’t packed her bags.”
Linda Rubinstein tilted her head back and stared at the porch’s ceiling. “God help me, I’d offered to move her in here.”
“Really?”
“Yup. Adele was ready to help me by paying a little rent, from what resource, I don’t know. She’s on welfare as it is. We were going to give it a shot, anyhow.”
Joe mulled that over, fully aware of how dynamics like what she’d just outlined could go horribly wrong.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “A really bad idea. The way I looked at it, though, that’s all the poor woman had done her whole life—make the wrong choices. And yet they’d worked out in the end, kind of. So maybe we’d get lucky. It was worth a try.”
Joe looked at the floor for a moment, gathering his thoughts. “It’s always worth that,” he agreed. “Do you have any idea what Archie’s father wants to do with the place?”
“Sell it, as far as I know,” she answered. “It was only an asset to him, nothing sentimental.”
“And yet he let his son use it.”
Rubinstein made a face. “And charged him rent, and used him as a free Mister Fix-It, and whined about what a loss he was taking. Archie and Michelle always said there was no way they could’ve had such a nice place without the old man. Maybe, but I never thought it was worth it. Not with the baggage he threw in.”
“How anxious was Newell to get Michelle out?”
She hesitated before answering, eyeing him carefully. “That’s a loaded question, isn’t it?”
He hitched a shoulder. “Not intentionally.”
She laughed shortly, reminding him of the New Yorker in her again. “Don’t bullshit me. You’re asking if he might’ve killed her.”
He decided to deal with that straight on. “I’m asking if he was angry enough—and, from what you know of him, capable of it.”
“You know something you’re not telling me.”
She was a good poker player, egging him on to show his cards. Sadly, he had nothing to hold back. “Don’t I wish. I didn’t bore you with the details, Ms. Rubinstein, but technically, I belong to a major-crimes unit, and this case is so low-profile I’m not even supposed to be connected to it. I happened to be in the neighborhood when the first cop you talked to caught the assignment, and I dropped by out of curiosity.”
That didn’t move her. “You’re here now,” she said knowingly.
Now it was his turn to play her. “I’m here now because the other guy thought you and I might hit it off. He’s feeling sorry for me because my girlfriend and I broke up.”
Her face went bright red. “Oh.”
He laughed. “Sorry, but you walked into that. I’m not sorry he did it, by the way.”
Happily, she joined him. “Thank you. Joe, right? I’ll make sure to give you a call when I’m back in the market.” She made a show of fanning her face, cooling it off. “Okay, you win. No, I didn’t get the feeling that Newell was homicidal about wanting his house back. Just greedy, insensitive, and pissed off. And as for being capable of it, I have no idea. I never met the man and only heard about him through the two of them. But to me he sounded like a bitch-and-moaner—someone to make my own mother envious. Which also means, I guess,” she added, raising her eyebrows, “that you can never tell when a guy like that finally gets enough and snaps—like in one of those road rage situations.”
Joe nodded and rose to his feet.