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“Suit yourself.” He plopped down in the chair, leaned forward with his legs spread wide apart, and interlaced his fingers. Then he loudly cracked his knuckles.
“All set?” Leo asked.
“Sure.”
“Before we start, we know Leeza told you that she told us about your gambling debt. She was looking out for you,” Sasha said.
“Well, it wasn’t her place. I would have told you.”
“Would you have, though?” Leo asked, genuinely surprised.
“Yeah.”
“You would have told us that you owed Rex a lot of money if you thought your wife didn’t know about it?”
A muscle in Paul’s cheek twitched, and he dropped his shoulders. “Yes. No. I don’t know. I might have—if I thought it was relevant.”
“Relevant to what?”
Paul frowned. “To catching whoever killed him. Say what you will about Rex, but we’ve been friends our entire adult lives. If I thought the fact that he lent me money was related to his murder, yeah, I’d have told you. But it wasn’t.”
“Really? You seemed highly agitated earlier when we were packing up to leave the farm manager’s house.”
“There was a dead man in the other room,” Paul said, enunciating each word. “I don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen a murder victim before. Let alone a good friend. So, yeah, it freaked me out. As if that wasn’t bad enough, then you drop the bomb that you think one of us might have killed him. Of course, I was agitated. I’m still agitated. I want to get the hell out of here. I want to take my wife and go home. But I can’t because we’re trapped in a storm with a killer while you and your wife play live-action Clue.” His face reddened.
Sasha chimed in, using a soothing tone, “That’s completely understandable. This is a terrible situation. When did you find out that Rex was dead?”
“When I heard Annette scream.”
“What were you doing when she screamed?”
“Looking for Rex, actually. I’d been up here to run an errand, and when I got back to our place, I couldn’t find him.”
“The errand was to fetch the ingredients for his drink, right?” Leo emphasized the word ‘fetch’to see how Paul reacted. He wasn’t disappointed.
Paul responded by clenching his fingers together until his knuckles turned white. “Yeah, I did Rex a favor and got his stuff.” He gritted the words out between his teeth.
“Pretty big favor,” Sasha observed mildly from her perch. “I don’t know that I’d have gone out into a snowstorm like this one to do something for someone perfectly capable of doing it himself.”
“Well, I did. That’s the kind of relationship Rex and I had.”
“Evidently.” She eyed him for a beat, then said, “Did he threaten to tell Leeza about the debt?”
Paul exhaled heavily. “‘Threaten’is a strong word. He encouraged me to tell her. But I already knew I couldn’t keep it from her forever.”
“And his encouragement wasn’t of the ‘you tell her or I will’ nature?” Leo probed.
“He might have said something like that, but I knew he was blowing smoke. He wouldn’t do that to me.”
“Wouldn’t he?”
“No.”
“I guess we’ll never know now, huh?”
Paul clenched his jaw but didn’t rise to the bait.
“Okay, so when you came up here to get the bitters, candied orange peel, and whatever else Rex needed, you ran into Hatty. Literally,” Sasha added.
