“Well, so, that’s still nine and a half hours,” I protested. “Time enough.”
“He lived with two roommates. Both of them told the police that the three remained up far past the turn-in hour. They played cards by flashlight until almost one o’clock in the morning. That would leave only a meager six and a half hours to complete a seven-hour drive and two murders.”
“Maybe the roommates lied. People lie, you know. They lie all the time, even to protect a murderer.”
After sipping his coffee and savoring it, Mr. Yoshioka said, “I wonder how a nine-year-old boy can have become such a suspicious soul so young.”
“I’m almost as close to ten as to nine.”
I gazed down into my mug. A distorted reflection of part of my face floated on the coffee, a gargoyle peering up at me, as though the full truth of myself could not be seen in an ordinary mirror but only indirectly, as in the undulating surface of the coffee.
Spooked, I said, “When you told me you believed me about the dream, I thought you really did.”
He smiled. “I did believe you, Jonah Kirk. For reasons that I explained. And I still do believe your dream showed you the truth.”
“You do?”
A moment before he spoke, I saw that, in his way, he had been teasing me. “One of the two roommates was a young man named Felix Cassidy.”
43
Felix Cassidy. Fiona Cassidy.
“How can you be sure they’re related?” I asked.
“Mr. Yabu Tamazaki is a most thorough man. He did some research beyond what he was able to find in the Daily News morgue. Felix and Fiona Cassidy are twins. Not identical twins, of course, fraternal twins. Interestingly, like Lucas Drackman, they are now orphans.”
Until this point, I’d had the impression that Mr. Yoshioka, though allowing himself no expression, was on the verge of a smile, as if it pleased him to watch my reaction to his revelations. But now, although his face remained placid, I sensed that his mood had become solemn, darker.
“Like Lucas Drackman, Felix Cassidy was seventeen then and is twenty-five now. Two years later, when Mr. Cassidy and his sister were nineteen, their parents, who lived in Indianapolis and who were also people of means, died in their sleep of carbon-monoxide poisoning caused by a furnace malfunction.”
He watched me, waiting for a response. Considering that he had called me a suspicious soul, I figured he expected me to be skeptical of the circumstances of those deaths. “It was murder.”
“Curiously, police were initially reluctant to conclude that these were accidental deaths. They took more than a year to reach that conclusion. Perhaps you should be a detective.”
“I’ll stick with the piano. Bad guys hardly ever shoot at a piano man.”
“I am pleased that you are not just a particularly suspicious young man but also prudent.” He got up to fetch the coffeepot. “May I refresh yours, Jonah Kirk?”
“I was already kind of nervous even without coffee.”
“Do not expect that I will offer you a martini instead.”
I hesitated. “Thank you, yes, I’ll take a little more.”
When he returned to his chair, he said, “Felix and Fiona inherited everything, but they would not seem to have been under suspicion. At the time of the deaths, he was in New York City, and she was in San Francisco. Their alibis were ironclad.”
“Where was Lucas Drackman?”
“That would have been interesting to determine. But two years had passed since the Drackman murders. The Cassidy deaths were not in the same state. No one would have thought to make a connection. But that is not the end of it.”
“The end of what?”
“Perhaps, by virtue of the time we have spent together, you have inspired me to become no less suspicious than you. And now, because of me, poor Mr. Yabu Tamazaki at the Daily News has become no less consumed by suspicion than the two of us. He may never be the same. Do you recall that Lucas Drackman had two roommates at the academy?”
“Yes.”
“The second was Aaron Kolshak. His family lived in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Did you know Wisconsin is called America’s Dairyland?”
“No, sir.”
“Did you know that Milwaukee is called the Machine Shop of America because of its industrial capacity?”
“I didn’t know that, either.”
“I imagine it must be stressful to be a citizen of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and have to do your part every day to ensure that the state and city live up to those honorable titles. Mr. Aaron Kolshak’s father died when Aaron was eleven, perhaps from the stress. The boy became something of a delinquent, and his mother sent him off to the academy in Mattoon, Illinois, when he was thirteen.”
“I guess the family was wealthy, huh?”