Dead Man's Puzzle by Parnell Hall Read Free Book Online Page B

Chief.”
    “Did he come in a car?”
    “He came right up the walk and knocked on the door.”
    “Did he come in a car?”
    “Damn it, I don’t know!” Cora said irritably. “There. You happy? I was cooking when he arrived, I was burning noodles when he left.”
    “Burning noodles?”
    “Don’t start with me, Chief. Sherry’s gone, I’m on my own. I’m not having an easy time. I’m not used to being on my own.”
    “You should get married again.”
    “Is that a proposal? I thought you had a wife and kid.”
    “What are you going to do when they get home?”
    “Eat.”
    “Are you staying there?”
    “No. Sherry can’t move in with Aaron’s folks. One of us has to go.”
    “You’re moving in with Aaron’s folks?”
    Cora grimaced. “Go ahead. Make fun. Just because you’ve got a murder you can’t solve.”
    “You can’t either. You didn’t even see a car.”
    “Bite me.”
    Harper frowned. “If it has to do with stock, what’s it got to do with a computer?”
    “Maybe it’s logged in the computer.”
    “Hmmm.”
    “Or the pooling agreement,” Cora said. “No one’s found his pooling agreement. If it’s written up in WordPerfect, you’d just have to print it out. Of course, then it wouldn’t be signed.” Cora sighed. “Damn. I wish Sherry were here. She knows this stuff. Like how you scan a document and save it as a TIFF or a JFIF or a JPEG.”
    “How many shares of stock are we talking about?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “What’s the company?”
    “Philip Morris.”
    “Oh, my God. Overmeyer’s an insider, blowing the whistle on the tobacco companies.”
    “Right. So they poisoned him with arsenic. They probably put it in his cigarettes. Can you smoke arsenic? I wouldn’t think so. Cyanide seems more likely.”
    “It wasn’t cyanide.”
    “You think I’m serious?”
    “I don’t know what to think. I’m still upset about Becky Baldwin. Coming in here with a cock-and-bull story.”
    “Cock-and-bull story?”
    “That Dennis is hanging around. I haven’t seen him. Have you?”
    “You think Becky invented that story to give her an excuse to drop by the police station just on the off chance you had a murder investigation?”
    “No. But suppose she knew about it. Suppose she overheard one of Barney Nathan’s nurses talking about it over lunch. That’s not hard to believe.”
    “It demonstrates a level of paranoia I wouldn’t have expected of you, Chief. Then again, if you really think I hid that gun . . .”
    “I didn’t say I thought you hid the gun. I said I thought you found the gun. Before you found it with me.”
    “That’s absurd.”
    “Why? Because it’s the sort of thing you wouldn’t do? Actually, it’s exactly the sort of thing you’d do. You may not have done it in this case. That just means you didn’t have the opportunity.”
    “Am I under arrest?”
    “No.”
    “Good. I didn’t think so, but you never know. So, what’s with the gun? You traced it yet?”
    “Almost.”
    “What’s that mean?”
    “We’ve narrowed it down.”
    “To what?”
    “West Virginia.”
    “Oh?”
    “The serial number matches a shipment of Smith and Wesson revolvers shipped to Rawley’s Hardware and Sporting Goods in the summer of 1948.”
    “Nice work, Chief.”
    “Thank you. This information might have been more helpful if Rawley’s Hardware and Sporting Goods hadn’t burned to the ground in 1963.”
    “After carefully registering every gun sale with the government?”
    “Yeah, wouldn’t that be nice.”
    “You mean they didn’t?”
    “No, they did. The records just don’t happen to include Mr. Overmeyer’s weapon.”
    “So it’s a dead end?”
    “At least a detour. At the moment, we’re tracing test bullets fired from Overmeyer’s gun against fatal bullets from unsolved homicides.”
    “How long will that take?”
    “You’d have to ask Dan.” Harper shook his head. “His last estimate was Christmas.”

Chapter 14
    Becky Baldwin