"What was this argument about?"
I told him. Flint made some notes in his book, flipped the cover over, and slipped it into his jacket.
"Do you think," I said, hesitantly, "that you could not mention that I told you this, if you're talking to Mr. Greenway? He's, uh, supposed to fix some things around the house here, and he might not be so inclined to do it if he knew I was, you know, ratting him out."
Flint's eyebrows went up a fraction of an inch. "Ratting him out," he repeated.
"Yeah. Isn't that what you call it? Or squealed? Is it squealed?"
"Ratting him out is good," said Flint, who showed himself out.
o o o
I might not have my police terminology down pat, but I knew the words to describe how I felt: freaked out.
My friend Jeff might have found a dead guy, but I'd found a dead guy who'd been murdered. Surely this beat a guy who just got his head stuck in a storm drain and drowned. And yet I didn't feel even the slightest bit full of myself. What I felt was scared.
By how long had I missed encountering Samuel Spender's killer? Just because I'd seen him have an argument with Greenway didn't mean that had anything to do with his death. What if Spender had been the victim of some nutbar who would have been just as happy to kill me if I'd come along a little earlier? And what if that nutbar was still roaming around the neighborhood, which, up to now, had always been a crime-free paradise?
I needed someone to talk to about this. I tried Sarah at work.
"Dan. City."
I hung up. I was not talking to that asshole again. I walked to the front window, where Detective Flint was still sitting in the front seat of his cruiser, making some more notes before pulling away from the curb. Across the street, Earl's truck caught my eye. He was home.
He'd want to know about this.
The pickup was backed up to the garage, which was open, and the door from the garage to the laundry room was propped open. Earl was either loading up the truck or taking things into the house. It made no sense to ring the front doorbell, so I entered the garage, mounted the two steps to the laundry room door, and called in, "Earl?"
No answer. Maybe he was lugging plants or something through the kitchen and out the sliding glass doors to the backyard. Most of the houses in this neighborhood had the same basic floor plan; you could go blindfolded into one you'd never been in before and find your way around.
I took half a step into the laundry room, called his name again, and noticed that in the space where I would have expected to find a washer and dryer, there was nothing. How long had Earl lived here? I guessed he was the kind of guy who liked to hang out in laundromats.
A gust of warm air went past me into the garage. The house was hot. Humid, really. "Earl?"
I heard some banging about in the basement. He was making enough noise that he couldn't hear me. I took a few more tentative steps into the house and could see moisture dripping down the insides of the windows. The basement door was only a couple of steps away, and I stood in its frame, feeling the warm humidity drifting up from there.
"Earl?" I shouted over the banging.
And then it stopped, abruptly. There was a moment's silence, then Earl's voice: "Who is it?" There was an edge to his voice.
I walked halfway down, to the landing where the stairs turned. "Earl, it's okay, it's Zack. I just had this detective over to my place, asking about that guy -"
"Don't come down here!"
But by then I'd reached the bottom step and could see that Earl's windows were not fogged as a result of some manufacturing defect.
He was on a short ladder, stripped to the waist, working on a string of lights suspended across the room, dangling a few inches below the unfinished ceiling. There was a network of temporary ductwork that looked like dryer hose, but ten times as thick. I could hear ventilation fans, and the glare from the dozens of light fixtures was nearly blinding. It took my eyes a few seconds to adjust, but when they did I was able to focus on what appeared to be hundreds of long-leafed plants that took up nearly every square inch of floor space. I've never been much of a horticulturalist, but I knew enough to know these were not prize-winning orchids.
I don't know much about guns either, but I recognized what Earl had in his right hand, pointed straight at me.
"Jesus, Zack," Earl said. "You ever heard of fucking knocking? And what's this about a detective?"
Chapter 7