Deadly Gamble

Chapter 16 (Part 2)

The Detweiller driveway was full of cars. Josh's was nearest the garage door, blocked in by three others. Relatives or friends?

I tapped on the door, but the hum of voices inside was loud enough that no one heard. Finally I tried the knob myself and just went in.

Josh sat on the sofa, a pretty blond girl of about fourteen wrapped around one arm. He didn't seem to be paying a lot of attention to her. A middle-aged couple had pulled two kitchen chairs into the living room and sat facing Josh. After pausing to gape at me for a second, they resumed talking in hushed tones. The man wore a dark suit and tie and had a Bible in his hands. Josh shot me a "rescue me" kind of look, but I wasn't about to get into that. I sidestepped the little group, heading in the direction I assumed the kitchen would be.

It, too, had been commandeered by the church ladies. Two of them, in polyester pantsuits, had laid out a spread on the kitchen table that would feed twenty easily. They had a ham, two plates of fried chicken, potato salad, green beans, and various Jell-Os in several colors. Not to mention two sheet cakes baked in disposable metal pans. The two women smiled at me but I caught them looking at my empty hands. I ducked out the way I'd come.

No one was especially paying any attention to me, so I slunk across the hall into the master bedroom. The thought had come to me, driving across town this morning, that Jean's death could be tied to Gary's because of something she knew. Gary's business dealings were a little on the dim side, to say the least. What if Jean had found out something about somebody and they knew that she knew . . . I wondered if Gary kept any files or papers at home.

The bedroom drapes were pulled, making the room cool and gloomy. I pushed the door shut, guiding it with both hands, turning the knob so it wouldn't make any noise. Alone, I was like a kid in a toy store. What to touch first?

The room was neat by Jean's housekeeping standards. The bed was made. Maybe she was like me, hating to crawl back into an unmade bed; the sheets and blankets have to be smoothed out or it feels icky. The rest of the bedroom was more in keeping with her neatness criteria for the other rooms.

There was no file cabinet with a drawer labeled "Illegal Stuff" so I had to go into this blind. There were two night stands, a dresser, and a chest of drawers. It was anybody's guess. I picked the nightstands first. The first one held an assortment of feminine articles, including a romance novel, three sheets of pink stationery with frayed edges, an emery board, and a diaphragm. I pawed through the contents clear to the back, and only came away with a dusting of powder from some long ago broken compact. Wiping my fingers on my jeans, I went for the second stand.

This must have been Gary's. Two copies of Playboy and a nail clipper. Below the drawer there was an open space, ostensibly for books or perhaps an object d' art. In this case it was crammed with papers. Quite a few were old racing forms and newspapers, shoved into the space with no apparent method of organization. Others were sheets from yellow pads, spiral notebooks, or whatever was probably handy at the time. I recognized Gary's heavy slanted writing on most of them. I began to flatten them out to see if there was any theme to the whole mess.

Just then, I sensed movement from the other room.

"Now, son, I want you to know that you can call on Mrs. Luthy and me just any time you need to. We're here in the Lord with you, in your time of sorrow." The preacher was making his closing statement. Their voices were just the other side of the wall from me. Apparently they were standing at the front door.

"That's right, son," a female voice joined in. "And we'll look for you in Sunday School this week."

I jammed the handwritten papers into my bag and zipped it shut. The racing forms and newspapers went back into the night stand. Judging by the layer of dust on everything, I doubted that Jean had gone through this stuff but there could be a clue here somewhere. Right now I had to get that door open before anyone figured out where I'd gone. I reached for the knob.