Goat hit the pause button. “See?”
“No,” admitted Trout.
“The pauses. First when you asked her if she was Homer Gibbon’s aunt. She lost about half a second answering. ”
“So?”
“So … why the hesitation? She knew that you were going to ask that, and yet she still stumbles over her answer. And then again when you asked when she saw him last. ”
“She shrugged. ”
“Okay, she shrugged. She should have had that answer on the tip of her tongue. ”
“Damn, kid, she’s dying of cancer and her only nephew was just executed yesterday. How smooth can a person be after all that?”
Goat spread his hands. “I’m just saying. In film, pauses mean something, they convey meaning. Same thing happens in conversation. Maybe not always as calculated as theater, but people uses pauses to convey a message or allow a person to stall in order to write a script for a specific message. ”
“And people call me cynical. ”
“You asked. ”
“No, keep going. What else?”
Goat played another fragment.
That was after he had committed several murders.
Alleged murders. He was never convicted for anything back then.
“See? She not only threw ‘alleged’ at you, she got kinda pissed that you didn’t use it. ”
“She’s related to him. ”
/> “No doubt,” said Goat. “But I don’t think that’s why she got pissed. ”
“Why, then? You think she thinks he’s innocent?”
“No … I don’t think she cares. That’s a family thing. Especially families on the edge like this. Kind of the ‘my country right or wrong’ mentality distilled down to a single family. People can fuck up and do all manner of harm, but at the end of the day if their name and your name are spelled the same, then there’s going to be some kind of … I don’t know … acceptance? Forgiveness? Maybe even allowance?”
“So … what’s your bottom line here?” asked Trout. “Why’s she being so dodgy?”
“How should I know? I read performance; you’re the writer … You build the story. ”
Trout grunted. He rounded a turn too fast and his BlackBerry slid out of the little tray below the dash. Goat picked it up.
“You got mail,” said Goat, showing Trout the flashing red light. “You got your ringer turned off?”
“Usually. I have two ex-wives and they have aggressive lawyers. I’ll subject myself to that shit later. ”
Goat grunted. “Looks like you have a zillion missed calls and one e-mail. ”
“That’ll be from Marcia. Probably the Volker stuff. We’ll be at Volker’s place in ten minutes, so read it for me. ”
Goat punched the keys and peered at the lines of text. “This is an hour old. Mmm … looks like a bunch of biographical stuff first. She says that Dr. Herman Volker was born in someplace called Panev?žys. No idea how to pronounce it. In Lithuania. ”
“That fits. I thought he sounded more Slavic than German. ”
“Father was German, but he was raised in Lithuania. Always into medicine. Worked as a lab tech as a teenager, went to medical school. Did residencies in psychiatry and epidemiology. Went into the Soviet army as a doctor. Then he’s off the radar for a while, but get this … he surfaces again as a field surgeon with the Russian forces in Afghanistan, and while he’s there, he defects to U. S. personnel. ”