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CHAPTER TWENTY

“Did she say exactly where they are or—?”

I’d concentrated on driving to get us here as fast as possible, so we hadn’t talked much on the way to Riddle Road.

Clara had used her phone to pull up a photo of Evan Ferguson from the time of the trial and showed it to me while we sat at a stoplight. He was attractive in a young, reedy, professorial kind of way.

Now, I broke off my question as we entered a reception area for the hospice center, where someone — erroneously — thought tweed couches and flowery curtains would mask the institutional foundation. I didn’t break off because of the décor, however.

I’d recognized I was on a collision course with a man coming out of a side hallway on our left.

He leaned forward as he came, a posture exaggerated by the fact that his shiny blue suit appeared to have borrowed shoulder pads from the 1980s.

The good news was it meant I first spotted his large head and its frothy, see-through hair, then his puffy upper torso like the water-logged prow of a ship, giving me time to avoid any contact with his lower body.

I pulled back with less than an inch to spare.

“Watch out,” he snapped.

He made a sweeping gesture toward me.

It was limited to a gesture because I’d stepped back, out of range, leaving him pushing against nothing and nearly losing his balance.

He snapped, “You pathetic, stupid—”

He broke off as he spotted Clara beside me.

And I realized his nastiness to me was merely his baseline when he said with true venom, “ You. ”

I swiveled my head to be sure Clara hadn’t been replaced by an alien. Maybe an evil dictator. Or the devil.

Nope.

Though she did not look her normal friendly self.

She said nothing — she didn’t have much time to before the man pushed his head forward toward her, which might have been more intimidating if the motion hadn’t pulled back the side of his jacket, revealing his paunchy middle, which appeared to be restrained by a layer under his shirt.

“You’re butting in where you’re not wanted again,” he said, with a higher percentage of spittle than anyone not reenacting Singing in the Rain — complete with umbrella — could like. “Leave the Dorrios family alone.”

A martial glint came into Clara’s eyes. Sometimes I forget that side of her. “I don’t take orders from you. I’ll do what I want. And in this case, it’s also what Robbie Dorrio wants, so you’re doubly wrong. As usual.”

She marched smartly past him.

That left me staring at the man across a small stretch of patterned carpet. His red face, puckered chin, and protruding bottom lip portended a toddler’s tantrum.

Crying or rage?

I didn’t want to be around for either.

So, I maneuvered around the man and replicated Clara’s departure as best I could.

It took me the rest of that main hallway, then around a corner before I caught up with her past a bank of elevators. I was able to catch up because she’d stopped at a reception counter that stretched across most of the hallway. No one was at it.

Beyond the desk, a door was closed, with a sign that said:

Please,

No loud noises.

Patients’ rooms

“Who was that?” I asked.

“Oh. That’s Emil,” she said, mostly back to her normal good-humored self. “He’s on the airport board.”

Something tickled at my memory.

Her tone didn’t make that sound like an exalted position. “Okay, he’s on the airport board, but... Why does he give the impression he doesn’t like you?”

“Because he doesn’t like me.”

I found that hard to imagine. “Why?”

“I asked questions at a meeting.”

“What did you ask? When he stopped beating his wife?”

She chuckled. “No. Wish I’d thought of that.”

“What kind of meeting? When? You never told me about this.”

“It was about expanding airport facilities and flights and I asked questions about them not living up to the current rules, so why should anyone trust him — which is what he said. Trust me . Don’t look over there at those pesky facts. I have different facts. Just trust me. ”

“I once heard an expert on sexual abuse say that’s the most common phrase to the victims — Trust me .”

Admiringly, she said, “You know the most interesting things.”

“Kit.” My great-aunt explained how I knew interesting things, sometimes horrifying things. “More broadly, repeating the same thing over and over softens up the landing spot in the other person’s brain for what else you say.”

She nodded. “Anyway, Emil didn’t like that I asked questions. Called me names.”

“For asking questions? What kind of names?”

“Said I was delusional. A lunatic. Part of fake news. Kept repeating that over and over. I’d try to show my proof from the board’s own material and he’d shout louder and louder.”

“But you’re not with the media.”

She snorted. “I said that, too. Facts didn’t sway him. He also said I was a liar or a plant by his political opponents or a provocateur — at least I think that’s what he meant. He pronounced it so strangely I couldn’t be sure.”

“He called you a liar? In a public meeting? What is the matter with this guy?”

“Yup. Yup. And a lot on the surface. The ultimate cause? No idea,” she said with considerably more cheer than I would have in her shoes. “And then he ordered someone to turn off my microphone and when that didn’t happen fast enough, he unplugged it himself.”

“Good heavens. Why did I never hear about this?”

She tipped her head. “It must have happened before you and Gracie started coming to the dog park. Or just after, but we didn’t know each other well enough that I’d tell you about it.

To be honest, it shook me a little at the start, I didn’t know how other people would react.

It wasn’t that long after Ned’s mom died and I was.

.. vulnerable. And, yeah, some people did steer clear of me and even made a few remarks. But I ran into Donna at Shep’s Market—”

I mentally boggled for an instant over Donna existing outside the dog park.

“—and she didn’t tell me to buck up or anything, but she asked right out if the people who were saying things — not giving me a chance to pretend no one was — were people whose opinion mattered to me. And she was right. They weren’t. Certainly Emil’s opinion doesn’t matter.”

“What happened?”

“After that meeting, they did follow the rules and decided not to expand the way they’d planned.

” She frowned. “Come to think of it, though, they’re starting to do the same things.

Anyway, that’s the short answer, believe it or not.

The long answer — well, that’s way, way too long for here and now.

Especially since we have other matters to attend to. ”

Which brought up another point I’d wondered about. “He’s a friend of the Dorrios?”

“He’s one of them. Derrick’s cousin.”

Emil Dorrio.

That was the memory tickle — Berrie had screeched the name over the fence. One of Dova’s big-shot connections.

“Cousin? The one Dova said gave Derrick an alibi?”

“Uh-huh.”

After this encounter, I better understood the disgust I’d caught from Jaylynn’s family when they mentioned him.

But at the moment I was struck by Clara’s reaction.

She tilted her head slightly in contemplation.

“I wouldn’t say he was anyone’s friend. He.

.. cultivates them. Apparently thinking that’ll reflect well on him.

” Her head tilt went the other direction in a visual rendition of On the other hand .

“Though he slips frequently enough that most people say he resents the heck out of that branch’s generational wealth and position. ”

“Could that connect somehow with Derrick’s death?”

With her head back on straight, her eyes popped open wide. “You think so? I don’t see how—”

“No, no. I’m not saying it does connect. I’m only asking if it could. He reacted so strongly to seeing you. If he’d seen any of your interviews about solving crimes and he had a guilty conscience...”

“Oh.” She deflated with disappointment. “I don’t think he has a conscience.

He was friends with that politician Henderson Nickell until we found out that stuff about him, then Emil tried to pretend they’d never met.

So it was probably only his self-preservation and self-aggrandizement in overdrive. He’s not a nice man.”

“No kidding. Would he have anything useful to contribute to what we’re looking into?”

Wistfully, she shook her head. “Probably not. I’d like to say he was the real murderer, but I’m afraid there’s no evidence.”

I suppressed a grin at discovering someone Clara really, truly disliked.