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“Come outside and sit down,” she said.
I followed her out onto the porch, and after I had sat down in a canvas chair, she sat on the corner of a wrought-iron table, with her legs apart, and looked down at me. I looked away through the screening at some blue jays playing in the birdbath on the lawn.
“I’m going to ask you to accept something,” she said. “I can’t help you out about Weldon. If I try to, I may hurt him. That’s something I’m not going to do.”
“Maybe it’s not yours to decide what degree of involvement you’ll have with the law, Drew.”
“You want to put that a little more clearly?”
I raised my eyes to hers.
“Earlier today I cuffed your brother to a D-ring in my office. It was for only a few minutes, but I hope the lesson wasn’t lost on him.”
“A what?”
“It’s an iron ring, like a tethering ring, inset in the floor. Sometimes we handcuff people in custody to it until we can move them into a holding area.”
“That was supposed to impress Weldon? Are you serious?”
I felt the skin of my face tighten.
“Do you know the kind of life he had growing up?” she said. “I won’t even try to describe it to you. But no matter how bad it was, he’d give whatever he had to me and Lyle. And I mean he’d take the food out of his mouth for us.”
I looked out at the lawn again.
“You’ve got something to say?” she said.
“I’m at a loss.”
“We perplex you?”
“Your family didn’t have the patent on hard times.”
She rubbed the heels of her hands idly on her thighs.
“You’ll never get my brother to cooperate with you by pushing him,” she said.
“What’s he into, Drew?”
“Forget the D-ring clown act and maybe one day he’ll tell you about it.”
“I should revise my methods? That’s the problem?”
“Stop acting like a simpleton.”
“You always knew how to say it.”
I could have pressed on with my questions, but Drew was not one to be taken prisoner. Or at least that’s what I told myself. I put my iced tea back on the table and stood up.
“See you around,” I said.
“That’s it?”
“Why not? You’ve been straight with me, haven’t you?”
I walked across the blue-green lawn through the shade trees and could almost feel her troubled, hot eyes on my neck.
I WENT BACK to the office and talked with our fingerprint man, who told me that trying to sort out the prints in Weldon’s home was a nightmare. There was no single, significant object, such as a murder weapon, for him to work with, and virtually every inch of space inside the house had been touched, handled, or smeared by family members, house guests, servants, meter readers, and a crew of carpenters that Weldon had evidently hired to refurbish several rooms. The fingerprint man asked me if I would present him with an easier job next time, like recovering prints from the Greyhound bus depot.
