“Invite me over for a drink. You and Stacey and I can sit down and talk about old times while I pick your brain.”

A pause while he took another puff. “What have you come up with so far?”

“I’m not telling you without an invitation.”

Dead silence.

“Be here at three,” he said, and hung up.

Chapter 23 - Friday afternoon, April 15, 1988

23

Friday afternoon, April 15, 1988

Con Dolan’s house was on a narrow side street on the east side of town. It hadn’t occurred to me that he might have information to share. Cheney Phillips hadn’t mentioned him, and since Dolan was retired, I had no idea he had a hand in the case. I parked in front of a large brown clapboard bungalow with long horizontal lines, open porches, mullioned windows, and widely overhung eaves. Dolan came to the door, cigarette in hand, wearing bedroom slippers, baggy chinos, and a T-shirt under a flannel robe cinched at the waist like an overcoat. He motioned me into the house and I followed. I’d never had occasion to visit him at home, and I was making a secret study of the place.

“Sorry I went off on you,” he murmured.

“Think nothing of it. I didn’t,” I said, netting a smile.

Dolan’s housemate, Stacey Oliphant, sat in the living room with a small battery-operated fan that he directed at Dolan’s burning cigarette. This place couldn’t have been more different from Stacey’s rented apartment, which I’d visited when he was being treated for cancer. He’d been told he was dying and he was in the process of vacating the premises. I’d found him disposing of the bulk of his possessions and packing up the rest for delivery to the Salvation Army. I walked in on him shredding family photographs, which made me shriek. It seemed sacrilegious to destroy the images of his kinfolk and I’d begged him to give the pictures to me. I didn’t know most of my relatives anyway so his would serve. I adopted them as my own, the odd assortment of unknown faces from times gone by.

Once he’d rid himself of all the paraphernalia, his intention was to kill himself before the cancer put him in a position where he had no choice. Con Dolan was vigorously opposed to the plan, in part because his wife, Grace, had taken a similar route before the disease had a chance to mow her down. But Stacey had been given a reprieve, which took the subject off the agenda for the foreseeable future. In the meantime, he and Dolan ended up sharing a place, which suited them both, even with the occasional snit.