The man’s eyes got wide. I couldn’t tell if the workman was grateful or enraged. He opened his mouth but at first no sound came out. Even his vocal cords were torn over my deed.

“Tremolo,” he said. “Tremolo Dasher, Reynolds’s half brother. Um . . . how did you know to go to my mother’s house?”

“I’m a private detective,” I said, taking a business card from my breast pocket. “My client’s a man who said that he witnessed a stabbing. After looking into it for a while I came up with your brother.”

“Where is this man?” The tone of his words expressed his mood clearly. He was furious at everything, looking for anywhere to vent that rage.

“Dead.”

Frustration was so strong in Tremolo that he shuddered, crushing my card in an involuntary fist.

“If the man hired you is dead, then why you here?”

“You know the kind of business your brother’s in.”

“I never had anything to do with that.” He might as well have added, I was the good son.

“I’m not sayin’ you did. But lookin’ into findin’ him I came across some, uh, some unsavory sorts. I need to find answers or I might end up bein’ the next one need a hospital.”

“I wanted him to go straight,” Tremolo said through gritted teeth. “I asked him to come work with me.”

“Doin’ what?”

“Construction support. I worked for this guy Pitman runs a whole fleet of heavy-duty equipment. I even got Renny to work at one of our sites for a while. After he met that girl I thought he was on the way to goin’ straight.”

“What girl?”

“Mona. Mona Steel, sumpin’ like that.”

“But something pulled him back into the game, huh?” I was treading water, waiting for the wildebeest to come a little closer.

“One day he didn’t show for work and the next thing I know I get fired, and then, then he’s like this.”

“How long ago was he working with you?”

“Why?”

“Tryin’ to develop a timeline to figure out who might’a done this.” He didn’t seem to like the explanation so I added, “You wanna find out, don’t you? You want justice for Reynolds, right?”

“He quit over three months ago,” Tremolo admitted. “Him and his buddy.”

“Who’s that?”

“A guy named Plennery, Dennis Plennery.”

Reynolds Ketch chose that moment to die. The machine he was attached to emitted a high-pitched sound like an electric scream. The nurses hurried Tremolo and me out of the room. Attendants and doctors were rushing down the hall and then past us to get to Ketch.

“Mama. Mama!” Tremolo called through the door.

I felt bad for mother and son, but I had other business to attend to.

In a phone booth on the first floor of Mercy General I consulted the detective’s greatest tool of the day—the phone book.

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