9

Just after nine, I pulled into Chester Osborne's cul-de-sac on Summit Hill Road, a woodsy residential drive on a high hill overlooking Edensburg. The light was nearly gone from the murky sky, but it hadn't cooled off much and the August night air was only a little less dense than gumbo.

I had my car back, and Janet and Timmy had driven down to Albany to visit Skeeter and pick up some of Timmy's and my belongings so that we could all move into Ruth Osborne's house together for a time. Our purpose was mutual protection. Dale would be there too, and she had agreed to quit sniping at Timmy for the duration of my investigation. She did insist that a "shoot-out" at some convenient later date was inevitable. Timmy told me he was almost convinced Dale was batty, but he conceded that something about her was starting to become very dimly familiar.

Chester and Pauline Osborne lived in a two-story mock-Tudor house built on a shelf of fill on the downslope side of Summit Hill Road. The house looked freshly painted and stuccoed, and the height of the arbor vitae rising out of the bark-mulch beds that bordered all the walls of the place suggested it had been put up in the early eighties. The cul-de-sac had been newly tarmacked and was brilliantly floodlit. His-and-her Lexuses were parked in the driveway, one glistening black, one glistening teal.

When I had phoned earlier, Chester said he was disturbed to hear that Janet had felt the need to hire a private detective—June had undoubtedly been on the horn pronto following our late-afternoon encounter. Chester told me he was interested in hearing about my

"unnecessary" investigation, and why didn't I drop by for drinks after dinner? My own dinner, a couple of burritos, had been consumed at a picnic table outside Taco Bell. And while I wasn't sure which after-dinner drink was going to be appropriate, I had more pressing matters to take up with Chester Osborne, the stockbroker older brother with the history of violent outbursts.

"You found your way up here," Osborne said in a businesslike way. "Good for you. Well done."

"I followed your directions," I said. "They were clear."

"There's nothing worse than vague directions," he said with such finality that I decided not to bring up Chechnya. Leading me across the foyer, Osborne said, "We'll go in the study."

He was tall and stiff-backed in a gray pinstriped suit and silk tie with tiny blue digital clocks on it. Pleasantly large-featured in the by-then-familiar Osborne way, he carried himself with an assurance that suggested Janet's self-possession. Although something in Osborne's cool, blue, mildly bloodshot eyes hinted at a turbulent interior more like Dan's. Whether June's wackiness would also show up in the mix, I couldn't tell yet.

"Make yourself comfortable," Osborne said, indicating a striped-silk wing chair that looked as if it had been designed for anything but comfort. "Brandy?"

In some of the venues my line of work had taken me into, "Brandy," was more likely to be the name of a transvestite I was questioning than a beverage being served, and in that respect Chester Osborne's study represented a notable change. I said, "Yes, please."

The study, like the foyer we'd come through and the living room I'd briefly glimpsed (the back of a woman's blond head had been visible above the back of a couch), had wall-to-wall gray carpeting and the kind of furnishings more commonly found in investment bankers' offices: shiny formal chairs upholstered in silk or leather, heavily lacquered wooden sideboards, and desks whose design was vaguely, but not exactly, French provincial—more French Provincial Decorating Product. The watercolor of a mountain lake with a canoe on it hanging over Osborne's desk was identical to the watercolor of a mountain lake with a canoe on it hanging in the foyer.

"Looks good," I said, accepting a snifter half full of an amber fluid of considerable clarity. "No need to run this stuff through cheesecloth."

Ignoring that, Osborne stared at me for a long moment, and then said, "I spoke to my sister June earlier."

"I supposed you might have."

"June told me she ran into you today."

"Yes, this afternoon, at your mother's house." I sipped some of the brandy, which was not Fine Brandy Product, but the genuine article.

"June is a bit of a dingbat," Osborne said gravely, "but don't get the idea that I am."

"Okay."

He gave me an appraising look that was not friendly. Then he said, "I didn't like that talk about murder. June said you and Janet and Dale Kotlowicz were speculating about my brother's murder and what might have been an attempt to kill Janet—some crap about a Jet Ski attack June doesn't always get her facts straight, but she reported,to me that there was talk connecting these incidents to divisions within the Osborne family over the sale of the Herald. I didn't like that."

I said, "It was a theory that came up."

"Well, I don't like it. It's too close to slander." Osborne gazed down at me with his bloodshot eyes. He was still standing beside the bar a few feet from me, holding a snifter that he had not drunk from.

I said, "Any questions of slander could keep a couple of law firms' meters running indefinitely, but I'm more interested in finding facts, Chester. The police think a drifter killed your brother, and I'll be looking into that shortly. There is some evidence that somebody is trying to kill Janet, and with millions of dollars hanging on her vote on the Herald's sale, any prudent investigator is going to consider a connection. Of course, as an experienced investigator, I know enough to keep an open mind and I'll follow any trail of evidence wherever it may lead. Do you have any idea, Chester, why anyone might want to kill Janet?"

He stared down at me, still holding, but not drinking, his brandy. "No. I don't," he said. "You'll have to ask Janet about that. Or Dale Kotlowicz."

"Why Dale?"

"Dale and Janet are dykes—husband and husband. You didn't pick up on that?"

"Oh, sure."

"They have their private lives, which I know very little about and which I try not to think about. If someone is trying to kill either one

of them, that's what I would look at, the lesbian angle. What I would not do is, I would not go poking into the Osborne family's business affairs, if I were you. You won't learn anything useful in your investigation, and you're liable to make some people mad who are people it would be better for you not to get mad."

"You, for example?"

"Me, for example."

Violent history or no violent history, what a twit he was. I said, "What are you, some kind of small-bore mobster, Chester, and you're threatening to smash my liver with a tire iron? Or do you talk like that because you spend too much time watching old Louis Calhern pictures on the Nostalgia Channel? Either way, I'm unimpressed."

He flushed and glared hard, and it occurred to me that Osborne was going to fling his drink in my face. But he maintained control—I had a feeling he devoted much of his energy in life to maintaining his emotional and physical equilibrium—and after a moment of what looked like bitter reflection, Osborne said, "And I'm unimpressed with you, Strachey. You think you've got me pegged as some small-town, country-club blowhard, but your impression is too limited to do you any good, and I'm not going to correct it. That's because, for one thing, I'm not given to psychobabble. For another thing, who or what I am is none of your goddamned business. And for a third and very important thing, you've got a lot of gall coming into my house and insinuating that I would kill anybody, let alone my own brother or sister. It's not an accusation I feel I need to dignify with a response. Now, I asked you up here for a briefing on this investigation you're supposedly conducting, and you agreed to fill me in, so let's stick to that. It's possible, but not likely, that someday you'll be experienced enough in life and wise enough in the ways of the world to understand my background as Tom Osborne's son. But in the meantime, I would be very careful about any assumptions you make about me, if I were you."