I shrugged again. People can also insist on knowing all kinds of things. That doesn’t compel me to supply the information. “I understand Mr. Ayers was estranged from his brother. Yet, he conducted a wellness check at the marina a few days before Tim died. He left his card in the office. He must have had some concerns about his brother to make the effort?”

Felton didn’t answer. He was probably leaning back in a leather chair that cost more than the car I was sitting in, staring at the head of an ambushed moose hanging on his wall. “Why is this information of interest to you? Timothy Ayers’s death was an accident. The family is in mourning. What they do not need is to be badgered by a one-woman investigations agency out to make a name for itself.”

I pulled the phone away from my ear, looked at it. Mr. Robert V. Felton, Esquire, knows how to Google, too? Go on with your bad self, Felton. I pulled the phone back and narrowed my eyes, though he couldn’t see that. The driver behind me honked again, more insistent this time. “There are inconsistencies that should be explored,” I said. “I think the reason the family is so anxious to put this to bed is because they fear Tim may have killed himself, but there’s another possibility.” I listened, but Felton said nothing. “That possibility being that Tim Ayers got on someone’s bad side and they decided to do something about it.”

My words landed like an A-bomb, with Felton’s silence hanging in the air like a mushroom cloud. “If you dare to repeat such a scurrilous claim anywhere, believe me, you’ll regret it. You are not to contact Mr. Ayers again regarding this matter . . . or any other. Your ‘investigation,’ if that is what you’re calling it, stops now.”

I stuck my tongue out at the phone, but Felton couldn’t see that, either. “As Mr. Ayers’s legal representation, you, no doubt, know that no one in the Ayers family hired me.” I listened to Felton wheeze in and out on the other end of the line. “And, therefore, you cannot fire me.”

“Listen, here, whoever you are. You are to stop what you’re doing. Immediately.” His words came out in a low, snakelike hiss. Felton, apparently, was unaccustomed to having to threaten peons twice. “Am I understood?”

“You’re lawyer to the Ayers family,” I said. “Did you also handle things for Tim, even after he was cut off from the family money?”

I could have sworn the phone in my hand was heating up from all the fuming Felton was doing on his end. “Drop this. Drop it today, or I will bury you.”