Four

I felt guilty, but there it was: All I really wanted to do was go home. The whole time the police questioned me, I had to work hard not to picture my dog, my house, my little hand-hewn canoe sitting forlornly in my shed, just waiting for me to slide it out into the water and climb aboard. How I longed to be out on the water, paddling away the knots in my shoulders, breathing in the scents of peace and quiet and wilderness, falling into the rhythm that comes over me like a trance—wiping away all other pain, all other feelings except a oneness with myself and my Creator.

Instead, I sat in a spare office of Feed the Need in my itchy wool suit, describing for the fourth time exactly what had transpired from the moment I entered Wendell Smythe’s office until the moment the paramedics arrived. Even as I spoke, I felt overwhelmed with a pervasive sense of sadness and loss. I had spent no more than five or ten minutes with Wendell Smythe in total, but even in that short time I had found him to be a charming and vibrant man. The fact that his life had ended at some point during the one hour we were apart boggled my mind.

“So not only were you one of the last two people to see Mr. Smythe alive,” Detective Keegan said, “you’re also the one that came back and discovered his body an hour later?”

Detective Keegan was a short man, his aged but boyish-looking face topped by coarse, reddish hair that bristled out over his ears. Though I knew what he was insinuating, I wasn’t worried about being incriminated in any sort of crime here—if, indeed, a crime had even been committed. Wendell’s secretary, Gwen, had seen me leave Wendell’s office while he was still perfectly alive and well. She could attest to the fact that I hadn’t returned for an hour—as could any number of people in the Smythe offices, including Alan Bennet, who had found me working away at his desk.

As we talked, the detective seemed to figure out that I wasn’t someone of whom to be suspicious, but in fact quite the opposite—someone who could provide valuable information about the entire situation. Though the medical examiner still hadn’t identified the cause of death, it seemed as if the detective suspected foul play, particularly when I described the sounds from the bathroom and my subsequent pursuit of someone running from the office. All in all, we seemed to agree: Something just wasn’t quite right about the death of Wendell Smythe.

Luckily for me, having grown up surrounded by cops, I knew the lingo of an investigation, not to mention the fact that I was a licensed private investigator myself. I made sure to mention my lieutenant father and my detective brother more than once. I didn’t bring up my own experience in investigations or my law degree. You never knew how information like that might go over with cops; I thought it would be best to just coast along on my family’s laurels for the time being.