“Well, sure, fella. Sure someone knows. And that someone is Captain Emmett T. Groning of Stoneham.” He leaned back in his chair, left eyebrow cocked, and nodded at us, that Slim Jim rolling along his bottom lip.

If I lived here, I’d never commit a crime. Because to do so would put me in the box with this guy, and five minutes with Captain Emmett T. Groning of Stoneham, and I’d confess to everything from the Lindbergh baby’s killing to Jimmy Hoffa’s disappearance just to get locked up in a federal pen, as far away as possible.

“Captain Groning,” Angie said, using the same breathy voice she’d used on Poor Walter, “if you could tell us what caused Anthony Lisardo’s heart attack, why, I’d be much obliged.”

Much obliged. Angela “Daisy Mae” Gennaro.

“Cocaína,” he said. “Or yeh-yo as some call it.”

I was stuck in Stoneham with a fat guy doing his Al Pacino-as-Tony Montana imitation. Life didn’t get much better.

“He snorted cocaine, had a heart attack, and drowned?” I said.

“Didn’t snort it. Smoked it, fella.”

“So it was crack?” Angie said.

He shook his tiny head and his jowls made a flapping noise. “Your standard cocaine,” he said. “Mixed in with tobacco. What’s known as an Ecuadoran cigarette.”

“Tobacco followed by a hit of coke, followed by tobacco, then coke, tobacco, then coke,” I said.

He seemed impressed. “You’re familiar with it.”

A lot of people who went to college in the early to mid eighties were, but I didn’t tell him that. He struck me as the kind of guy who decided whether or not to elect presidents based on whether he believed they’d “inhaled” or not.

“I’ve heard rumors of it,” I said.

“Well, that’s what this Lisardo boy smoked. Had himself a groovy high going, man, but that high came a crashing on down in a real bummer way.”

“Word,” I said.

“What?”

“Def,” I said.

“What?”

“Never mind,” I said.

Angie’s heel ground into my toe and she smiled sweetly at Captain Groning. “What about the witness? The newspaper said Lisardo had a companion.”

Groning took his confused eyes off me and looked back at his computer screen. “Kid named Donald Yeager, aged twenty-two. Left the scene in a panic, but called it in about an hour later. We ID’d him from a jacket he left behind, sweated him in the box for a bit, but he didn’t do jack. He just went to the reservoir with his buddy, drank some beer, smoked some mary jew wanna, and went for a dip.”

“Did he do any coke?”

“Nah. He claimed he didn’t know Lisardo was doing it either. Said, ‘Tony hated coke.’” Groning clucked his tongue. “I said, ‘And coke hated Tony, fella.’”

“Terrific comeback,” I said.