“If she was drinking so much, would she have cared?” I asked.
“Of course she’d have cared! Infidelity doesn’t sit well with the ladies. They’re apt to tear your head off.”
I heard a car pull into the driveway and I turned in time to see Cornell park his white pickup. As he came through the back gate, his three daughters made a run at him and piled into his legs, the pup bouncing along behind them like a basketball. Much squealing and hugging, punctuated by the dog’s shrill barks. Cornell extracted himself and headed in our direction, combing his hair with his fingers, tucking in the tail of his shirt where the girls had pulled it loose. He said, “Hey, Dad,” with some enthusiasm. To me, he said hi in a tone as flat as a tumbler of two-day-old Coke.
I introduced him to Stacey and the two men shook hands. Stacey said, “We’ve just been chatting with your dad about Charisse.”
Cornell seemed embarrassed by the subject. “Justine told me about that. I was sorry to hear.”
“Was she a friend of yours?”
“Well, no, but I’d see her at school. This was before she got kicked out and went over to Lockaby.”
“Did she have a boyfriend?”
“She never went steady with anyone I knew. She dated quite a few guys, various classmates of mine.”
“Who would you say offhand?”
Cornell thought about it briefly. “I guess Toby Hecht and George Baum. You might start with them.”
Stacey made a note of the names while Cornell peered over his shoulder and pointed. “That’s B-A-U-M, not B-O-M-B.”
“Got it. And how could I go about getting in touch with these birds? They still around somewhere?”
“George is your best bet. He sells new and used cars over in Blythe. Toby, I don’t know about. I haven’t talked to him in years.”
Ruel had been following the conversation, but now he rose to his feet. “You fellers will excuse me, I got to go see a man about a dog. Nice talkin’ to you.”
“Same here,” Stacey said, touching his head as though tipping his hat.
Ruel took off across the grass, heading for the house while Stacey was saying to Cornell, “How about Wilbur Sanders? You ever see her with him?”
Cornell shifted his weight. He reached in his shirt pocket and took out a pack of cigarettes. He shook one loose and lit it, glancing back to make sure neither Edna nor Ruel was watching him. “I’m sorry, but I don’t want to say anything bad about my wife’s dad.”
Stacey said, “We’re not asking you to tell tales. I’m sure he’s a fine man.”
Cornell didn’t seem prepared to go that far. “All I know is she doesn’t want to think ill of the man even if he’s gone.”
“Good point. She doesn’t want to think what, that Wilbur cheated on her mom?”
“Now I never said that. He put up with a lot.”
“You’re talking about Medora’s drinking? That’ll certainly throw a family into disarray. At the same time, people have been telling us Charisse was so interested in men, we can’t help but wonder was she interested in him?”
“I think I’ve said enough. If I were you, I wouldn’t mention this to Justine. She gets touchy on the subject.”
After that, Cornell stubbed out his cigarette, resisting any further attempts to probe. I watched Stacey come at the matter from a number of directions, but, try as he might, he couldn’t weasel anything more out of him.
Later, with Stacey at the wheel of the rental car, I said, “What was that about? Talk about resistance.”
Stacey shook his head. “I can’t decide if he was lying about something and doing a piss-poor job, or trying not to tattle and making a sore botch of that.”
“How could he be lying? He didn’t say anything.”
“Maybe you should talk to Justine—you know, woman to woman.”
I rolled my eyes. “Oh yeah, right. Like she’d break down and confide in me.”
“Well, she might. Meanwhile, I think we better go by the hospital and see Con. First day without a smoke, he’ll be climbing the walls.”
“What about you? I haven’t seen you light your pipe since you arrived.”
“I gave it up; part of the deal I made, hanging on to life.”
The CCU nurse we’d been dealing with the night before was off duty and wouldn’t be back on the floor until 3:00. Winsome as we were, the current charge nurse, Meredith Snow, couldn’t be persuaded to let us break the rules. I sat in the waiting area, with its bare end table and four upholstered chairs, while Stacey went in to Dolan’s room for the requisite ten-minute visit. In the absence of magazines, I amused myself by cleaning all the woofies, loose hair, and tatty tissues from the bottom of my shoulder bag. In the process, I came across the Quorum phone book that I’d been toting around for days. I sat and thought about the tarp, wondering how to figure out where Ruel bought his. As the entire phone book, white and yellow pages combined, was about the thickness of a modest paperback, I tried the obvious, looking under “Tarpaulins” first. There were two subheadings: “Renting” and “Retail.” I wasn’t sure anyone would rent a tarpaulin to wrap up a corpse, but I suppose stranger things have happened. Dolan’s theory about the killer involved haste and improvisation, so it was always possible a rented tarp was the closest at hand. Ruel didn’t rent his, but someone else might.