It Takes Two to Strangle by Stephen Kaminski Read Free Book Online Page A

shut up really quickly. Did you get any sense of why he couldn’t rat them out?”
    “No. If I was him I would have hired a lawyer to go after Lirim, but when I asked, Jim became really quiet really quickly.”
    “I think Jim was scared of something Lirim knew,” Gerry said. “It could be that Lirim was blackmailing Jim into keeping his mouth shut.”
    “If Lirim scratched him, could you get DNA from that scratch on Jim’s arm?” Damon asked.
    “I asked Margaret the same thing. She’s not sure whether we have the legal right to take a swab yet and doesn’t want to risk a conviction getting thrown out on a technicality. She put in a call to one of our attorneys but hasn’t heard back yet. If Jim did anything, he’ll have cleaned that arm until it’s raw by now.” Gerry scratched his own arm reflexively. “I don’t suppose you saw hydrogen peroxide in his shopping cart.”
    “No,” Damon said. “Just junk food. After being around carnival fare all day, you’d think that when he had the chance to go to the grocery store he’d buy something decent.”
    “Not everyone eats as healthily as you, my friend. The lab techs will check under Lirim’s fingernails. If Jim’s skin is under there, we’ll have something.”
    “Is anyone other than Jim on your radar?”
    “There’s the daughter, of course,” Gerry said and straightened up. “Even though she and Lirim were barely on speaking terms, we’re pretty sure she’ll inherit whatever he had. We have an officer who used to be an accountant looking into Lirim’s finances. And then there’s Tobin Corb. He and his wife Angela have been traveling with Big Surf for about three years, mainly working the Hall of Mirrors and Funhouse. It turns out that Lirim was fooling around with Angela right around the time his wife died. Tobin found out and a couple of the other carnival workers heard Tobin threaten Lirim at the time.”
    “Why didn’t Corb get another job and move away with his wife?” Damon asked.
    “Beats me. Maybe he wanted to stay close so he could strangle Lirim in the middle of the night.”
    “Good point,” Damon said. “Anybody else?”
    “Someone who left Big Surf about six months ago after Lirim fired him for skipping work repeatedly. He threatened Lirim on his way out of town.” Gerry yawned. “We have all of the temporary workers coming in tomorrow. Not that I think there will be much there, but I’m determined to cast a wide enough net so that the fish I’m looking for is in it.”
    That was why Gerry had been so successful throughout his career, Damon thought as he went to the kitchen to strain the spaghetti and take the bread from the oven. He’d work tirelessly to eliminate everyone associated with Lirim Jovanovic.
    The men sat down to a carboholic’s delight. “I wonder if Jim will fire Victor now that Lirim’s gone,” Damon said.
    “I would if I was him,” Gerry replied, swirling a forkful of spaghetti.
    “That would seem to make Victor a less likely suspect. He would have to know what would happen to his job if he killed Lirim.”
    “True,” Gerry responded, “but it still seems a little suspicious to me that Victor found the body in his bed before six in the morning.”
    Damon thought for a moment. “Any chance they were sleeping with each other?”
    “I doubt it. Margaret pressed that point with Victor and he almost choked he laughed so hard. He could have been overcompensating, but I doubt it. We asked a number of other carnival folks whether there could be anything sexual going on between Lirim and Victor and didn’t get a sense that there was.”
    “Maybe they met in the early hours to do their cash skimming.”
    “That’s what we figure. Of course, when I came to the fairgrounds to get the permits signed, they were in Lirim’s trailer alone with a stack of paperwork, so they may have been doing it in broad daylight. I gave a call over to the local office of the IRS and tipped them off that they should