Haunted in Death (In Death 22.50)

"With everything from eternal damnation to public flogging. My mother doesn’t deserve this, Lieutenant. She’s done nothing but choose poorly in the husband department, which she rectified. At least I carry the same blood as Hopkins." His mouth went grim. "If you think along those lines."

"Do you?"

"I don’t know what I think any more." He came back into the living area, dropped onto a candy-pink sofa heaped with fluffy pillows. "At least I know what to feel now. Rage, and a little terror."

"Did you report any of the threats?"

"She asked me not to." He closed his eyes, seemed to gather some tattered rags of composure. "She’s embarrassed and angry. Or she started out that way. She didn’t want to make a big deal about it. But it just kept up. She handles things, my mother, she doesn’t fall apart. But this has just knocked her flat. She’s afraid we’ll lose the school, all the publicity, the scandal. She’s worked so hard, and now this."

"I want you to make a copy of any of the transmissions regarding this. We’ll take care of it."

"Okay. Okay." He scooped his fingers through his disordered hair. "That’s the right thing to do, isn’t it? I’m just not thinking straight. I can’t see what I should do."

"You contacted the owner of a shop called Bygones. Care to tell me why?"

"Bygones? Oh, oh, right. Mr. Buchanan. My father sold him some memorabilia. I think maybe Buchanan was one of the backers on Number Twelve. My father mentioned him when I gave him the five hundred. Said something like Bygones may be Bygones, but he wouldn’t be nickel-and-diming it any more. How he’d pay me back the five ten times over because he was about to hit the jackpot."

"Any specific jackpot?"

"He talked a lot, my father. Bragged, actually, and a lot of the bragging was just hot air. But he said he’d been holding onto an ace in the hole, waiting for the right time. It was coming up."

"What was his hole card?"

"Can’t say he actually had one." Cliff heaved out a breath. "Honestly, I didn’t really listen because it was the same old, same old to me. And I wanted to get him moving before my mother got wind of the loan. But he said something about letters Bobbie Bray had written. A bombshell, he said, that was going to give Number Twelve just the push he needed. I didn’t pay much attention at the time because he was mostly full of crap."

He winced now, drank again. "Hell of a thing to say about your dead father, huh?"

"His being dead doesn’t make him more of a father to you, Mr. Gill," Peabody said gently.

Cliff’s eyes went damp for a moment. "Guess not. Well, when all this started happening. I remembered how he talked about these letters, and I thought maybe he’d sold them to Bygones. Maybe there was something in them that would clear my grandfather. Something, I don’t know. Maybe she committed suicide and he panicked."

He lowered his head, rubbed the heel of his hand in the center of his brow as if to push away some pain. "I don’t even care, or wouldn’t, except for what’s falling down from it on my mother. I don’t know what I expected Mr. Buchanan to do. I was desperate."

"Did your father give you any indication of the contents of the letters?" Eve asked. "The timing of them?"

"Not really, no. At the time I thought it was just saving face because I was giving him money. Probably all it was. Buchanan said he hadn’t bought any letters from my father, but I could come in and look at what he had. Waste of time, I guess. But he was nice about it - Buchanan, I mean. Sympathetic."

"Have you discussed this with your mother at all?" Peabody asked him.

"No, and I won’t." Any grief seemed to burn away as anger covered his face. "It’s a terrible thing to say, but by dying my father’s given her more trouble than he has since she divorced him. I’m not going to add to it. Chasing a wild goose anyway." He frowned into his glass. "I have to make some arrangements for - for the body. Cremation, I guess. I know it’s cold, but I’m not going to have any sort of service or memorial. I’m not going to drag this out. We just have to get through this."

"Mr Gill - "

"Cliff," he said to Eve with a weak smile. "You should call me Cliff since I’m dumping all my problems on you."

"Cliff. Do you know if your father kept a safety deposit box?"

"He wouldn’t have told me. We didn’t see each other much. I don’t know what he’d have kept in one.

I got a call from some lawyer this morning. Said my father’d made a will, and I’d inherit. I asked him

to ballpark it, and the gist was when it all shakes out, I’ll be lucky to have enough credits to buy a soy

dog at a corner cart."

"I guess you were hoping for better," Peabody commented.

Cliff let out a short, humorless laugh. "Hoping for better with Rad Hopkins would be another waste of time."