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Noah Heath wasa tall, brooding man, with heavy brow ridges, high cheekbones, and a rounded chin with a narrow cleft. He wore glasses with photochromic lenses that never became perfectly clear in dim light, giving his pale eyes a yellowish cast.
He’d taken a sauna, and then a shower, and was wearing boxer shorts and a tee-shirt when he decided that he could use a piece of toast; maybe two pieces. He had naturally dry skin and was rubbing lotion into his face as he walked down the stairs to the oversized kitchen.
Heath lived in St. Paul’s premier neighborhood, along Summit Avenue. The house was a bit of a pile, redbrick and clapboard and tile, with a long curving rosewood stairway that led down toward the front door. When Helen was alive, and they’d host a party, she’d always wait until most of the guests had arrived, and then make her entrance down the stairway, shimmering in the latest of her party dresses.
Until the day the staircase bit her in the ass. Ah, well. Shit happens.
His slippery, lotioned hand on the stairway handrail reminded him of Helen’s last trip down the stairs... He’d come home from a chicken dinner and found Helen at the bottom of the stairs with her neck bent at an infelicitous angle, her eyes open, blank and staring at the ceiling.
—
Heath had spenttime in the sauna thinking about Margaret Cooper. The hundred thousand, he thought, was pretty secure.He’d been hanging back, not wanting to hit her for the extra fifty thousand until the mourning was over. Was three weeks long enough to wait? A month might be better. This was all very delicate.
Could he somehow leverage his discovery of Helen, dead on the stairs, with Cooper’s discovery of Alex and her children, the shared agony, into a bigger bite?
He’d push her a bit: maybe... some kind of memorial to Alex and the children at the Home Streets project? Not a statue, or anything that elaborate or expensive, but maybe... a plaque? Or a plaque on a memorial fountain?
He was thinking about it, had popped up the toast and was scraping on butter when the doorbell rang. He glanced at the kitchen clock: ten after four. He wasn’t expecting anyone.
Carrying his toast to the front door, he peeked out a window panel and saw the man he knew as Bob Dahl standing there, bouncing nervously on his toes. Something about his face suggested bad news.
Heath unlocked the door, pulled it open and poked his head out. “Bob? Is there a problem?”
“Yeah, you might say that. We got hit by the cops this afternoon and I think they’ll be coming to see you,” Hinton said. “About your charity scams. They seem to know all about them.”
Heath had had nightmares about this moment; they’d begun shortly after he’d set up his first charity. In his nightmares it hadn’t been Dahl breaking the news, but two thuggish cops in bad suits. In some of them, they simply arrested him and dragged him away to be thrown in jail with foreign-looking drug dealers; in others, they were looking for a handout, or even a partnership, asking half of what he was making. Half! Ridiculous!
Heath stepped back from the door, staring in horror at Dahl, and Dahl asked, “You okay?”
“Are you sure?” Stupid question. He took another step back and Dahl followed him into the house and shut the door.
“Of course, I’m sure. I even heard of one of them, this Davenport guy, U.S. Marshal, killed a bunch of people. You can look him up on the Internet.”
“Davenport? What’d they say?”
“They were pushing me to talk about you, but I told them I didn’t know anything,” Hinton lied. “I was just a clerk, I said. I don’t think they bought it, they’ll be back. I told you about California. They had a warrant.”
“A warrant? Then why aren’t you in jail?”
“Because they didn’t want me, they wanted you,” Hinton said. “They wanted to turn me. They wanted me to say you had something to do with murdering Alex Sand.”
“Alex? That’s crazy talk,” Heath said.
“I told them that. I told them that we were relying on Sand to help with the Home Streets project, that him dying was a disaster for us. That we could only hope that Ms. Cooper would honor his intentions, but that was no sure thing. The problem is, they were asking a lot of questions about Home Streets and Big Grin and the other charities. About the finances.”
Heath wandered in a circle inside the reception area, running a hand through his hair. “Do you think... they knew anything?”
“Oh, yeah. They were asking me about the names of the Cuban surgeons with Big Grin. They asked how much you were going to skim from Home Streets. They asked about the other charities, too, about the fire, about your wife falling down the stairs...”
“My God! That was an accident!”
“Yeah, well, they’re cops,” Hinton said.
—
Heath was outof it, Hinton decided. He said, “Listen, Noah, you might not be as far up shit creek as you think.”
“Shit creek?” Heath said wonderingly. “My parents, my father, he was one of the prime movers in this town. I followed him...”
