“Who?” Cap grinned, sliding a sideways look toward the tip jar.

“I’m not paying you.”

He shrugged, smug. “Your call.”

“What’d you and Eldon Reese have to talk about?”

“Reese? That windbag?” Cap chuckled. “He had another complaint, is all.”

I pulled my wallet out. “I want to satisfy my curiosity. How much to get a look at your back room?” I laid a hundred on the counter. Cap eyed it like a starving man might ogle a thick steak; he all but smacked his lips, but didn’t jump. He was much too wily for that. Not smart, just wily.

“You’d pay a C-note to look at an old storage room?”

Cap looked skittish, dodgy. I laid another hundred down. Slowly sweat began to form in the creases on his forehead, his ruddy face blanched. The jovial mood darkened. He leered at the money as if it were a naked woman with eyes only for him.

“Did I tell you I used to be a cop? Five years. Homicide.”

Cap took a step back as if putting air between us would keep me out of his business. “Knew I smelled cop when you came in that first time.”

I nodded. “In the absence of irrefutable evidence, the mind is left to think up all kinds of things. I’m thinking you’re hiding something back there. I want to know if that something’s connected to Tim Ayers. Drugs maybe, or something else. He stumbled onto it, and you and Reese took care of the problem.”

He tried to look unimpressed, but he was sweating too much for it. Still, he tried to play it cool. He was going down, but not without a fight. “You been watching too many cop shows, you ask me. It’s just a plain old room and it’s got nothing to do with you or that boat out there.”

I stood silently, watching Cap melt. “If I had to choose which one of you got Tim drunk and pushed him overboard, I’d have to go with you. Reese is a pest, but there’s not much ‘there’ there, if you know what I mean. You appear to be made of sterner stuff.”

Cap brushed a calloused hand across his brow to wipe the sweat away, then wiped his hand along the side of his dirty khakis. His chin lifted, and he sneered. “I’m done talking. You got no badge, which means you got no reason to be sniffing around. You just wore out your welcome, so sling your hook.”

I didn’t move. The money stayed where it was and Cap checked on it occasionally.

“How much would you say you weigh, Cap?”

He shot me a confused look. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

“It’d help me figure out how many cops, with badges, I’d need to call in to turn you upside down and shake that backdoor key off your belt.”