The Girl With the Deep Blue Eyes

Three

The coffee Susie poured him was fresh, though not as strong as he’d have preferred. He settled in his chair across the desk from the sheriff and asked just who it was who wanted to dissolve a partnership.

“It’s not like that this time,” Radburn said, and stopped himself. “Except, come to think of it, it is.”

“How’s that?”

“Wife wants you to kill her husband,” he said. “So it’s a partnership, but of the domestic persuasion.”

“And she wants me—”

“Well, not specifically, since she doesn’t know you. At least I hope she doesn’t, because that would be a deal breaker, wouldn’t it? She’s expecting a dead-eyed assassin, and who shows up but her buddy Doak from the Tuesday Night Bowling League.”

“Wouldn’t work.”

“Her name’s Lisa Otterbein, but her maiden name’s Yarrow, and that’s what she uses professionally. And I suspect she’ll go back to it altogether once you kill George Otterbein for her.”

“And we know she wants me to do this because—”

“Because three nights ago she sat down across a table from a fellow named Richard Lyle Gonson. Know him?”

“I don’t think so.”

“If you were looking to hire a hit man, he’d be a natural to sit across the table from. Not because you think he’d take the job, but because he’d probably know somebody who would. Or somebody who’d know somebody.”

“He’s not Reverend R. L. Gonson, the Congregationalist minister.”

Radburn shook his head. “He’s done, as the saying goes, a little of this and a little of that. He mostly gets away with it, but he’s done a few bids, one of them federal. It’s getting on for ten years since the last time he got out.”

“He’s behaving himself?”

“Does the bear give up a lifelong habit of sylvan defecation? Best he can do is learn to cover it up afterward. Even so, I had him for receiving last year, right around the end of hurricane season.”

“But you couldn’t make it stick?”

“He had something to trade.”

“Ah.”

“That’s one way to cover up the pile in the woods. We got the chance to put away somebody who’d been giving us a lot more grief than Mr. Gonson ever did, and he saw the wisdom of having friends in law enforcement. So when Lisa let him know what she wanted, instead of telling her to go shit in her hat—”

“Or in the woods.”

“—he said he knew the very man to call.”

“And that man turned out to be you.”

“It did. Neither of those names ring a bell? George Otterbein? Lisa Yarrow Otterbein?”

He shook his head.

“George’s father started a restaurant-supply business. George inherited it and married money. Made a good thing of the business and invested some of the proceeds in local real estate. Rental properties, mostly, bringing in more money to go with the money he’s already got.”

“I’m guessing Lisa’s a second wife.”

“You New Yorkers, nothing gets past you. First wife was in one of those fifty-car chain pile-ups on 41. Foggy morning and one guy stops short and everybody hits him. Airbag deployed and Jo was unhurt, but somebody insisted she go to the hospital as a precaution, and while they were checking her they found something they didn’t like, and so they checked some more, and she had cancer cells in everything but her hair.”

“Jesus.”

“Two months later she was gone. No symptoms before the accident, and it’s hard not to think that if they hadn’t found it she’d still be alive today. Which is ridiculous, but still.”

Nothing to say to that. Doak sipped his coffee.

“You know the Cattle Baron? On Camp Road a mile or so north of Lee?”

“I’ve passed it. Never stopped.”

“That’d be the best policy if you chanced to be a vegetarian. Just hold your breath and drive on by. Steak and seafood’s what they’ve got on offer, and the steak’s dry-aged prime Angus beef. After he buried Jo, George got in the habit of taking his dinners at the Baron. He was partial to their bone-in rib eye, which I can recommend, assuming you’re not a vegetarian.”

“I’ll have to try it.”

“You might want to wait a couple of weeks. All goes well, they’ll have to find somebody new to show you to your table.”

“Lisa’s the hostess?”

“She showed George to his table every night, and I guess that wasn’t all she showed him, and as soon as Jo was six months in the ground they went and got married. He’d had three children with Jo, two girls and a boy, and the oldest was the same age as Lisa. Now there’s different ways kids will react to that sort of thing. Either the new wife’s an angel for offering their daddy a second chance for happiness, or she’s a gold-digging bitch. My experience, the more money’s involved, the less likely she is to get the benefit of the doubt.”

“Figures. She kept her job after they got married?”

Radburn shook his head. “Moved into his big house on Rumsey Road and set about being a woman of leisure. Spent some of George’s money redecorating, bought some antiques in Tampa and some art in Miami. That held her interest for the better part of two years, and then she turned up one night back at the Cattle Baron, greeting her old customers by name and showing them to their tables like she’d never left.”

“And the marriage?”

“I guess the honeymoon was over. If Lisa was working evenings, that had to cut into their together time. Far as anyone knew, they were comfortable enough with the new arrangement.”

“Until a couple of nights ago.”

“Until a couple of nights ago, when Rich Gonson and two other fellows came by to eat some meat and drink some whiskey. When Lisa brought the check to the table, she told him to stick around.”

“And he did.”

“Thought he was about to get lucky, according to him, but after his friends left and she sat down at his table, our girl was all business. ‘Of course I don’t know anybody in that line of work,’ he told me—”

“Meaning he does.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me. What he told Lisa was he’d have to make a few phone calls, and the first call he made was to me. So last night I told Mary Beth she was about due for dinner out, and we had us a couple of shrimp cocktails and split the big rib eye, and I paid the tab myself instead of expensing it to Gallatin County.”

“What a guy.”

“Left a good tip, too. And took a picture when no one was paying attention.” He found the photo on his iPhone, handed it across the desk. “Lisa Yarrow Otterbein.”

“Very nice.”

“She had long hair when she married George. I don’t know when she got it cut, but it was short like that by the time she was back working at the Baron. I understand a woman’s trying to tell you something when she cuts her hair, but they never gave me the code book. You ever seen her before? That you remember?”

He shook his head. “I’d remember,” he said.

“Then she’s probably never met you, either, so there’s no reason she won’t believe you’re Frankie from New Jersey. Of course, the accent may give you away. You’re starting to talk Southern.”

“I am?”

“On the phone this morning. ‘Have y’all got coffee?’ That how they’d say it in Jersey?”

“Maybe South Jersey.” He took another look at Lisa Otterbein’s picture. Lisa Otterbein, Lisa Yarrow, whatever she called herself. The haircut, he decided, was probably a good idea, whatever the psychological motivation behind it. The short hair drew attention to her facial features, and it was a face you wanted to study. Beautiful, but that was almost beside the point.

“Give me your email, why don’t you, and I’ll send you the photo. Otherwise I get the feeling I’ll never get my phone back.”