Page 36 of Wham Line (The Last Picks #10)

“About a year. It was a stroke. She looked like she was totally healthy, and then she was gone.”

Bobby’s face tightened.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

Jethro shrugged. “She was a good mom.” He fell silent, and the muffled cries of gulls came to us from a distance.

“She had life insurance, so the house and everything, that was okay. But I dropped out of college, and I didn’t know what to do.

I was cleaning out some of her stuff and found a bunch of old pictures, and he was in there.

They looked happy together.” He plucked at the quilt absently. “I guess I wanted to know.”

“How did you get in contact with him?” Bobby asked.

“I read about him. I found the name of his company. I found an address, and I showed up one day. He was busy, you know, but I told his secretary my name and my mom’s name, and then Mal came out to talk to me.

I don’t know what I was expecting. He had no idea what to do.

He shook my hand.” Jethro gave a little laugh.

“I could tell he was real happy, and I…I hadn’t been expecting that.

He took me into his office, and we talked, and I told him about Mom.

He said how sorry he was, and how much he’d cared about her, and he was sorry it hadn’t worked out.

He wanted to know if I was okay. He kept asking me that.

Everybody talks about him like he’s this monster, but he wasn’t like that at all, not with me.

When he figured out I wasn’t in school and didn’t have a job, he asked me if I wanted to work with him.

” Jethro looked up, his eyes rimmed in red. “That’s it.”

“How long ago was that?” I asked.

“About six months.”

“Why did you lie?” Bobby asked.

“I didn’t lie. Nobody asked me if I was his son, and it’s not anybody’s business.”

“It’s the sheriff’s business,” Bobby said. “Particularly if you killed him.”

“But I didn’t.” Jethro’s gaze cut away. “I keep telling you that.”

I took a few breaths of lavender-and-Old English. And then I said, “You’re going to inherit everything, aren’t you?”

Jethro froze.

“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” I said, “but it’ll come out eventually.

How do you think it’s going to look that Mal’s son didn’t identify himself after Mal’s death, and not only that, but he inherits everything?

That’s a big motive, Jethro. And you can give me that story about going to sit out in your car that night, but that doesn’t hold water.

I’ve got an eyewitness who saw you going back into the restaurant at the exact time you claim you were quietly sitting in your car. ”

Jethro pushed himself up from the bed again. He folded his arms. “I think you should leave.”

“You’re not doing yourself any favors,” Bobby said.

“Do you know what I think happened?” I asked. “I think you did shoot Mal. I think you hated him because he’d abandoned you and your mom, and I think you played along with the whole reconciliation scenario until you knew you were going to get everything. Then you decided to get rid of him.”

“No, I didn’t,” Jethro said; it verged on a shout.

“I think you hid the gun somewhere, went back and got it, and instead of getting rid of it, you brought it back here because you already knew you needed to get rid of Sparkie. You were going to hold on to the gun so that you could use it to frame her.”

“That’s crazy!”

“But instead, Indira found it. You saw her break into your room. You saw her take the gun. And that made things even easier for you because now you had a suspect who had incriminated herself. You made an anonymous call to the sheriff’s office to tell them about the gun, and then you followed me around to make sure I didn’t get too close to the truth. ”

“None of this is true. I wouldn’t have hurt Mal! I never would have hurt anybody!”

“Then where were you when Mal was being shot? And don’t give me that story about being out in your car, because we both know it’s a bunch of horse-plop.”

(I didn’t exactly say horse-plop.)

Jethro set his jaw. He was trembling. A second passed. And then two. He blinked his eyes to keep the tears from falling.

And then the bathroom door opened, and Nalini stepped out.

“He wasn’t in his car,” Nalini said. “He was with me. He went out the front, like he was going to his car, and then he came in through a side door. We were—we were in one of the storage closets.” She tilted her chin, the gesture defiant, and in its own way, it reminded me of Indira. “Together.”

Bobby looked at me.

I said, “I was wondering what it would take for you to come out of there.”

Nalini blinked.

Jethro’s shoulders sagged. And he blurted, “You knew?”

“For heaven’s sake,” I said. “I have an eighteen-year-old living in my house, and his girlfriend practically lives there too. Do you think I’ve never heard somebody try to hide the fact that he has a girl in his room?”

Jethro looked at Bobby.

Bobby said, “It’s a lot.”

“One time,” I said, “she was wearing roller skates, and I don’t even want to know why.”

“Back on topic,” Bobby urged quietly.

“Right. Well. The point—”

“The point is that Jethro has an alibi,” Nalini said, crossing the room to stand next to him. “And I do too. We were together when Mal was shot. Neither of us had anything to do with it.”

“Or you’re in on it together,” Bobby said.

Nalini didn’t exactly have the same witchy energy as Indira, but let me tell you: that girl’s gaze could have melted stone.

Bobby, of course, was unfazed.

“What about the gun?” I asked. “How did it get into your room?”

“What gun?” Jethro asked. “I didn’t have a gun. I never touched a gun.”

“Your key,” Nalini said.

Jethro said one of those words that would have made Cheri-Ann run for the Old English. “My key! I lost my key that night. Or I thought I lost it. I had to ask Cheri-Ann to make me a new one.”

“Why all the sneaking around?” I asked. “Why not come forward with your alibi? Why try to hide any of this? You’re both adults. Oh my God, Nalini, you’re not married, are you?”

Jethro goggled at me.

Nalini stared daggers.

Bobby cocked his head.

“I don’t know,” I snapped. “I’m brainstorming, and there are no bad ideas in brainstorming.”

“My parents are very strict,” Nalini said. “I’m not allowed to date. That’s why I have to be so reserved in my behavior around men.”

This time, I couldn’t look at Bobby.

I couldn’t look at anyone.

I had to silently count to ten and try not to think about Nalini and Keme, or Nalini and Mal, or Nalini and any warm-bodied adult male who happened to get within range of her tractor beam.

(Please don’t tell Bobby I said that; he knows I’m a nerd, but sometimes, even I think it might be too much.)

On the other hand, a detached voice observed in my head, the plus side is that Millie isn’t going to murder her now.

I glanced at Bobby.

“Did Sparkie know you were Mal’s son?” he asked.

Jethro dropped his gaze to the floor. “Um, I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?” I asked—with a definite tone.

“Maybe?”

“Jethro!”

“I don’t know! I mean, she came to Mal’s office a lot. She liked to talk—not just to me, I mean, but to everybody. After the first few visits, something seemed a little different. I caught her looking at me a couple of times.”

Nalini hissed. She must have done something with her nails because Jethro flinched and patted the hand holding his arm soothingly.

“Not—not like that. Like—I don’t know. I guess like she was actually seeing me, instead of treating me like another assistant who would be gone in a few months.”

It made a certain sense that Sparkie might have recognized the similarities. She had, after all, been married to Mal. And maybe, like Indira, at one point, she had even wondered if there would be a child.

Was that what she had meant when she’d told Larry she knew who the killer was? Had she recognized Jethro and assumed he had done it, for revenge or gain or some other reason?

“She didn’t ever say anything to you about it?” Bobby asked. “She never brought it up?”

Jethro shook his head.

“What about after Mal’s death?” I asked. “Did she talk to you? Check on you? Make sure you were okay?”

Frowning, Jethro gave a slower shake of his head. “Nothing like that. She just sent me that picture.”

“What picture?”

Jethro worked his phone out of his pocket, swiped a few times, and displayed it. I stood to get a better look.

It was a candid of Jethro, Larry, and Talmage.

The three of them huddled together. Talmage’s face was splotchy.

Larry looked sallow and grim. Jethro had a kind of numbed detachment that I now understood.

The background, with the reclaimed wood and the candles and the white tablecloths, was unmistakably Mizzenmast.

“Do you know when this was?” I asked.

“After Mal died,” Jethro said. “People kept coming over to talk about Mal. I kept having to remind myself they didn’t know he was my dad. They were only saying it because he’d been my boss.”

A low-grade buzz started in my chest.

“I don’t know why she sent it to me,” Jethro said.

Neither did I. The composition wasn’t any good. It had clearly been a quick, furtive snap taken with the camera on Sparkie’s phone. There was nothing particularly compelling about the emotions visible on the three people in the frame.

“Were you close to Larry and Talmage?” Bobby asked. “Did Sparkie think you’d want a picture of the three of you?”

“Not really,” Jethro said. “I knew who Talmage was, of course, and I talked to her on the phone when she called or Mal needed something, but that’s it. And I didn’t meet Larry until he came to talk to Mal about the TV show.”

It was like a static charge building in my head.

This was it. This photo was the last piece to the puzzle. And Sparkie had sent it to Jethro because he’d been playing boy detective, and she’d hoped—what? That if something happened to her, he’d figure it out?

I examined the photo more closely. Jethro’s hair was wet.

Damp spots on the jacket Mal had loaned him showed where he’d been out in the rain.

Talmage’s hair was escaping from under the chef’s hat.

She was twisting a dish towel between her hands.

Larry’s hoodie was dark with water. He had curled one hand in, as though protecting it, and when I zoomed in as closely as I could, I thought I could see a scratch.

His sneakers were a dazzling, Bobby Mai-approved white.

Did the scratch mean something? Had Larry tussled with Mal and somehow gotten himself injured in the process?

If so, it wasn’t anything close to proof—I had no idea how it was supposed to help us identify the killer.

Or was it something to do with Talmage? Was she hiding something in that towel?

Was it supposed to mean something to me that she was blotchy?

Or God, was I being a dope, and I was supposed to see something in the photo that incriminated Jethro?

Sparkie had told Larry she was going to try to blackmail the killer, and she had sent this photo to Jethro.

What was I missing? The water didn’t mean anything because Jethro and Larry had both admitted to being outside, and if they’d somehow managed to walk through a wet parking lot without getting wet—

And then it all came together.

Mal’s murder.

Sparkie’s poisoning.

Even why Bobby had almost died.

Outside, the gulls were screaming.

“I know who killed Mal,” I said as I sent myself the photo from Jethro’s phone.

The only warning was the squeak of hinges. I glanced over. Next to me, Bobby tensed.

Larry stood there, holding a gun. “Took you long enough.”