While leaving the booth, the two detectives didn’t bother delivering the money for their check to Matty at the cash register. Instead, they left enough to cover their coffees and a very stingy tip on their table. I was not favorably impressed. Not only were these guys cops, they were cheap cops at that.
The booths in the bar date from a much earlier era. They’re Naugahyde cocoons that were built with privacy in mind. I don’t much like them because the servers can’t see inside them without standing directly in front of the table. The problem is, I don’t want to pony up the big bucks to tear them out and start over.
That afternoon, Amanda, one of my cocktail waitresses, was manning—well, womaning, I suppose—my usual bartending shift. She looked up questioningly as we came into the room. I shook my head, letting her know to leave us be. These guys had already spent the better part of two hours occupying one of my booths, with only two cups of coffee to show for the trouble. If they thought I was going to treat them to something else, they were mistaken.
I was not in a good mood. Faith had left me in a world of trouble when she left me years earlier. This sounded like same song second verse.
“What do you want?” I asked. “And should I have an attorney present for this discussion?”
“It’s just a friendly chat,” Jamison assured me. “No need to be all hot and bothered.”
“I am hot and bothered,” I told them. “In fact, I’m downright pissed. My wife left me, wiping me out financially in the process. She ran off with my best friend, cheated me out of my share of the proceeds of our condo, left me in a world of hurt for not paying taxes, and now she’s telling the world I’m the one who killed her? Please. If I were going to knock her off, I would have done it years ago—before she let our condo go into foreclosure and before I had to declare bankruptcy just to get out from under the mountains of credit card debt she ran up.”
“You sound angry.”
“You’re damned right I’m angry. Now what do you need from me to get this straightened out? Besides, in cases like this, isn’t it always the husband who did it? What about her current husband? What about Rick Austin, her ex-husband and my ex-best friend, who also happens to be a wife-stealing bastard? What about him?”
“Our records indicate that Richard Austin and Katherine divorced three years ago when she first came to Vegas. The timing involved in the move would suggest that she came to Nevada and established residency for the purpose of obtaining a quick divorce from Mr. Austin.”
“Well well,” I said. “Fair enough. What goes around comes around. Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. So let’s cut to the chase. How about telling me what happened?”
“Her husband, Cliff Melcher, reported his wife missing on the morning of October sixteenth when he returned home from a business trip. Her body was found two days later in her wrecked Cadillac Escalade, crashed into a gully northeast of Searchlight. The M.E. tells us she died of blunt force trauma that isn’t consistent with injuries due to a car crash. She was already dead when the car went into the wash. So far we have no known suspects, but we’re currently investigating all her known friends and associates.”
“Including her former husband?”
Jamison nodded.
“Does that mean I’m a suspect?”
“At this point you’re a person of interest,” Jamison conceded. “One of several, in fact.” He paused long enough to pull a tiny notebook and the stub of a pencil out of his jacket pocket. The gesture served notice that our friendly chat was no longer friendly—not in the least.
“Do you mind telling me where you were that weekend?”
There was no point in lying. I had no doubt that these two guys already knew exactly where I was the middle of October.
“I was in Las Vegas,” I said, an admission that I had the opportunity to commit the crime. The cops already knew I had plenty of motive. “I was there for a convention—Bouchercon.”
“What is that exactly?” Jamison asked. “And would you mind spelling it for me?”
I dictated the spelling and then explained, “It’s a convention for mystery writers and readers.”
“Which are you,” he asked, “a writer or reader?”
“A reader so far,” I admitted, “but I’d like to be a writer someday.”
“A mystery writer?”
“Yes.”
“As in a murder mystery writer?” From the way he verbally underscored the word murder in the question, I could tell exactly what he was getting at.
“I don’t know of any other kind,” I told him.
I did, actually. There are a lot of different kinds of mysteries, and I’ve read them all, from cozies to police procedurals, from thrillers to true crime, but it’s usually always murder. Right that moment, however, I didn’t feel like giving Detective Jamison an overview of crime fiction. He didn’t strike me as the kind of guy who spent a lot of his time reading books of any kind, much less mysteries.
“What do people do at this convention?”
“Chat with each other, listen to authors,. go to panels, visit the booksellers, get autographs.”