“Excuse me?”
“There was a point to your talking about the man who shot your predecessor?”
/> “Oh, yes, ma’am. Miss Peebles, the officer who found Gerald Vincent Gallagher was Officer Charles McFadden.”
“Who?”
“Officer McFadden, Miss Peebles. The officer Inspector Wohl sent to see you yesterday. And Officer Martinez is his partner.”
“Really?” she replied, genuinely surprised. “Then I certainly have misjudged them, haven’t I?”
“I brought that up, Miss Peebles, in the hope you might be convinced that we sent you the best men available.”
“Hummm,” she snorted. “That may be so, but they don’t seem to be any more effective, do they, than anyone else that’s been here?”
“They were working until long after midnight last night, Miss Peebles, looking for Walton Williams—”
“They were looking in the wrong place, then,” Martha Peebles said. “They should have been looking here. He was here.”
Shit, she’s right about that!
“Well, actually, we don’t know that,” David said. “We don’t know if whoever was here last night was Mr. Williams. For that matter, we don’t even know that Mr. Williams is even connected—”
“Don’t be silly,” Martha Peebles snapped. “Who else could it be?”
“Literally, anyone.”
“Captain, I don’t like to think of a total figure for all the things that have been stolen from this house by one of Stephen’s ‘friends.’ I don’t know whether he actually pays them to do what—whatever they do—but I do know that almost without exception, they tip themselves with whatever they can stick in their pockets before they go back wherever Stephen finds them.”
“I didn’t see any record of that, prior to this last sequence of events,” Pekach said.
“For the good reason that I never reported it. I find it very painful to have to publicly acknowledge that my brother, the last of the line, is, so to speak, going to be the last of the line; and that he’s not even very good at that, and has to go out and hire prostitutes.”
“Yes, ma’am,” David said, genuinely sympathetic.
“Is that the correct word? Or is there another term for males?”
“Same word, ma’am.”
“I suppose I would have gone on and on, closing my eyes to what was going on, pretending that I didn’t really care about the things that turned up missing…but this Williams man shows no sign of stopping this harassment—and that’s what it is, more than the value of the items he’s stolen—and that proves, it seems to me, that it is he and not any other burglar, who would take as much as he could haul off—”
“You may have a point, Miss Peebles,” Pekach said.
“But I am also afraid that he will either steal, or perhaps simply vandalize, for his own perverse reasons, Daddy’s gun collection. That would break my heart, if any of that was stolen or vandalized.”
Pekach’s eyes actually brightened at the word gun.
What the hell is going on here? There was not one damned word about guns in any of the reports I read.
“A gun collection?” Pekach asked. “I wonder if you’d be kind enough to show it to me?”
“If you like,” she said. “With the understanding that you may look, but not touch.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Well, then, come along.” She led him out of the library and up the stairs, past Saint Whatsisname Slaying the Dragon.
“There were some edged pieces,” she said.