Roughstock (A Gail McCarthy Mystery) by Laura Crum Read Free Book Online Page B

had drawn Detective Holmquist to that conclusion.
    "I don't want to piss you off," I began tentatively, "but how do you think your purse got out on that deck?"
    Joanna looked at me oddly; she wasn't crying anymore and seemed composed. Still I crossed my fingers that I wouldn't bring on another onslaught of anger or tears.
    "I think Jack took it out there," she said finally. "That detective must have asked me that six hundred times, and I've thought and thought and that's the only thing I can think of. I had the purse at dinner, and I think I had it when Jack and I sat down at a table to play blackjack. After that I don't remember it. What I think happened is that I left it when I went off to try another dealer. Jack stayed at the first table-he was winning and I wasn't-and I think he must have seen my purse and taken it with him when he left. After that, I guess he went out on that deck for whatever reason, and was still carrying my purse when he went."
    That sounded reasonable. Now for the tricky part. "Why did you stay out on the deck for five minutes?"
    "That's the other thing that detective wanted to know. I guess someone noticed me go out and come in. It sounds stupid, but I'd been looking for Jack a long time by then, and I thought he'd ditched me for someone else and just left. I was, well, upset."
    I could imagine.
    "When I went out on the deck I wasn't even really looking for Jack. I just wanted to be alone to cry."
    "Did you see anything out there, anything at all?"
    "No. No one. Not Jack. Not my purse. I might not have noticed the purse, though, if it were sitting in some inconspicuous spot. It was black, and I wasn't looking for it at the time. But I know I would have spotted a person."
    If the purse had been there, I thought, unnoticed by Joanna, then Jack had already been shot and pushed over the railing. "So, after you had your cry and went back into the casino, then what?"
    "That was when I noticed I didn't have my purse. I went back to the restaurant, and then to the first table I'd gambled at, but it wasn't either one of those places. And by then I had just had enough. I told the man at the main desk about my purse, called a cab, and came back here. And that's it."
    We stared at each other, all the unspoken hostility of yesterday vanished for the moment. Joanna stood up and looked at me with more animation in her face than I'd seen in awhile. "Don't worry about me, okay? I think I'll take a shower and clean up and try and go to that last set of lectures this afternoon. That's what I came here for, after all."
    "Yeah, me too. Joanna ..." I had my hand on the doorknob at this point, but I felt the need to say something to her, something that would bring about a renewed sense of closeness between us. Try as I might, I found I couldn't do it. Like an exhausted marriage, our old friendship seemed empty of meaning. I could find nothing to say except a stilted "I'll see you this evening, then."
    She smiled an affirmative and I let myself out of her room, wondering if this was how all relationships died, worn out and feeble. Would Lonny and I eventually come to this point? It struck me that I was singularly ill prepared to answer that question. I wasn't sure I knew what real intimacy was, let alone how, or whether, it always ended.

 
    SEVEN
    I left Tahoe the next day. Lonny and I managed to achieve a sunny morning of perfect skiing on the storm's fresh powder, then followed each other home across the Central Valley in the afternoon. He peeled off in San Benito County to have dinner with a rancher he knew; I'd refused his invitation to go along on the grounds that I was already exhausted and needed to be up well before the crack of dawn on the following morning.
    Exhausted was the right word. I was mentally and physically beat. Between skiing, and then driving for five hours with Jack's murder constantly on my mind, I felt like a vegetable.
    Knock it off, Gail, I ordered as I took the Soquel exit off the freeway and