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“And that’s why you left her?”
He nodded. “I asked her not to have the baby. She refused. Even when we found out the laughing gas at the dentist might have hurt the fetus. She wants to use the baby to get me back. But… I don’t want to be with someone who’s been lying to me for twenty years.”
“When did you start thinking Larry Wilkes might not have killed your brother?”
“A few months back. Around the time I started thinking Pete was gay.”
“Who do you think killed your brother?”
“My wife.”
I was not expecting that. “Why do you think your wife killed him?”
“Because she’s lying. Because she’s always been lying. And because she sent an innocent man to prison.”
“Larry asked her to lie at the trial.”
“He did?”
“His attorney didn’t think he’d have a chance if the jury knew he was gay.”
“She used that lie to get close to my family, to get close to me.”
“That may be so, but it doesn’t mean she killed your brother.”
He seemed unhappy that I’d said that. I decided to leave motive alone—I didn’t think she had one—and move on to opportunity. “Did she have a connection to Andy Showalter?”
“Well, we were all at school together.”
“You went to school with hundreds of other kids too.”
“Yeah. He kind of stuck out though.”
“Do you have any reason to think he’d have gotten the gun for her and then lied about it? Any reason to believe she had that kind of influence over him?”
“No.”
“Larry and Pete had a signal to let each other know it was safe to come over. That’s why Larry went over that day. Do you think she might have known what the signal was?”
“What are you talking about?”
“If it was safe to come over, they’d call the other one and let the phone ring twice. To let them know.”
“Oh. Yeah, that happened a couple of times. I teased Pete that it was some girl too afraid to talk to him.”
I nodded, then said, “Whoever killed Pete signaled Larry to come over. Probably so he’d get caught and take the blame for your brother’s death. Do you think Anne knew everything she needed to know in order to do that?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t think she killed your brother.”
He looked disappointed again. Then his mother was at the front door calling his name. “Paulie. I need help with your father.”
He said one more thing to me. “Please stop asking questions. Please just go away.” And then he went inside.
Well, I wasn’t going to just go away. I was going to go talk to his ex-wife. She and I had a whole lot of things to talk about. She lied at Larry’s trial. A lot. If I could get her to recant her testimony that would be one thing in his corner.
Climbing back into the frog car, I drove directly to Anne Whittemore’s apartment in Bellflower. When I got to her front door it was open, so I knocked on the screen door. Inside, the TV was blaring. Music videos. It might have been Hootie and the Blowfish, but I’m not an expert. Not my kind of music. I knocked again and the teenage girl I’d first seen with Anne came into focus. She glared at me like I’d ruined her day.
