“I’ll get to it next,” I said. “Kate, also known as Katie, is not as smart as her sister. She flunked out of Texas A &M, after majoring in partying, sounds like. In her teens, she had a couple of arrests for driving under the influence, and she smashed the windows on a boyfriend’s car when they broke up. Since then, she’s grown up a little, apparently. She works on the small ranch set up for the disabled children, she organizes fund-raisers for that ranch, and she shops. Oh, she did a stint as a volunteer at the zoo.”
That just sounded boring.
Chip Moseley was more interesting. He’d come up from the rank and file. His parents had died when he was little, and he’d gone into a foster home, which happened to be on a working ranch. He’d learned to rodeo and made a name for himself. Right out of high school, he’d gotten a job on the Joyce ranch. He’d gotten through one marriage and fell in with Lizzie. He’d worked his way up and taken night courses, and now he managed the cattle operations at the ranch and he’d been “dating” Lizzie for six years. Aside from a minor brush with the law when he was in his twenties, he was clean. He’d been arrested in a bar brawl in a dive in Texarkana. To my surprise, I recognized the name of the place. My mother and stepfather had gone there from time to time.
I was tired of reading by then. I flopped back on my pillow. Tolliver told me what was in Victoria ’s file on Drex, though I had surmised most of it after ten minutes in Drex’s company. The only male Joyce had been a disappointment all the way around. He’d gotten his high school girlfriend pregnant and they’d had a runaway marriage, followed by a divorce in six months. Drex supported the baby and its mother. Drex had joined the Marines right after he’d turned eighteen (take that, Dad!) and he’d made it through basic until he’d developed ulcers. Or maybe the ulcers he’d already had had gotten worse. Anyway, he’d left the service honorably, and gone on to drift around, doing this and that on his father’s big ranch. He’d also worked with the disabled kids from time to time, and he’d worked in one of his dad’s friend’s businesses for a couple of years in an office job. It wasn’t clear exactly what he’d done there.
“Probably not much, and probably not well,” Tolliver said. “I don’t think he’s ever gone to college.”
“I feel sorry for him,” I said. I yawned. “I wonder how old Victoria ’s mom is. I wonder if she can bring the kid up on her own. Who’s the dad? Did Victoria ever say?”
“I wondered if it was my father,” Tolliver said, and I froze in the middle of another yawn.
“You’re not kidding,” I said. “You mean it.”
“Yeah,” he said. “ Victoria was around a lot after Cameron disappeared, you know. But when I figured it out, the timing was wrong. I think he was already in jail by the time the baby was conceived. I never could figure out why women thought he was so attractive.”
“I sure don’t,” I said, with absolute sincerity.
“Well, good thing. You like men taller and thinner, right?”
“Oh, you bet, bay-bee. I love those string beans!”
Our hands clasped, and I snuggled closer to Tolliver on the bed. There was a little silence while we watched the rain hit the window of the room. The skies had decided to let go in earnest. I felt sorry for everyone who might still be out at the crime scene, and I decided they should be grateful to me for finding Victoria earlier, in time to get her body out of the culvert. I thought about the Joyce family, the kids who had grown up to be typical rich adults, as far as I could tell. They did some things that were quite good, but it was the bad things I was interested in. I thought it was significant that none of them had managed to sustain a happy marriage-though they were all in the prime age range, and one of them might make it yet. I was just about to shake my head over the truism that being rich didn’t mean being happy, when I had the unpleasant realization that Mark, Tolliver, Cameron, and I had hardly turned out to be fulfilled citizens, either. Cameron was in some unknown place, Mark had never had a serious girlfriend that I knew of, and Tolliver and I…
“Do you really want to get married?” I asked him.
“Yes, I really do,” he said without a second’s hesitation. “I’d do it tomorrow, if we could. There’s no doubt, is there? Do you have any worries about us being right for each other?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t. You’re sure far from the commitment-phobic guys in the magazines, Tolliver.”
“You’re not anything like the women in the men’s magazines, either. And that’s a compliment.”
“We sure know each other,” I said. “We’ve probably seen the worst of each other. I can’t imagine trying to get through life without you. Does that sound too clingy? I can try to be more independent.”
“You are independent. You make a lot of decisions, every day,” he said. “It’s just easier for me to make the practical arrangements. Then you do your specialty. Then we leave, and it’s my turn again.”
Somehow that didn’t sound completely even.
“Where’s Manfred?” he asked, suddenly, as if someone had poked him with a needle.
“Gosh, I don’t know. He told me to call him if I needed him. He didn’t say where he was going or what he was going to do when he got there.”
“He really has a crush on you.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“How about it? If I was to vanish, would you take up with the Pierced Wonder?”
He said that in a teasing voice, but he wanted a reply. I wasn’t foolish enough to actually ponder the question and answer it seriously. “Are you kidding? That’d be like having hamburger after having steak,” I said loyally. I admitted to myself that there were days when I sure craved a hamburger, and I didn’t doubt there would be times when Tolliver eyed other women with appreciation. If he could just keep that urge to the eyeing level, I could do the same. I knew who I loved.
“So, after reading the files, which one do you favor in the role of shooter?” he said more cheerfully.
“Any of them could have done it,” I said. “It’s depressing to think that. But faced with losing a substantial hunk of a fortune, I imagine any of them could have decided hell no. Even Chip Moseley. He’s got to have hopes of marrying Lizzie, after all these years of being together. And it wouldn’t be human, not to count on all that money. He’d have a better idea of the size of the Joyce estate than most boy-friends might have, since he runs the big ranch. I’ll bet he sees a lot of other financial papers, too, on the various Joyce businesses.”
“Yes, I’m sure he does. I’m inclined to dismiss the idea that it’s Lizzie, since she was the one who called you in. She had to know that there was a chance you were really able to do what you say you can, so if she was the killer, she’d never have risked it. She’d know that her granddad’s death-well, it wasn’t an out-and-out murder, but the snake triggered the heart attack and the snake wasn’t flying through the air by accident. Someone pitched it at him. Maybe they thought it would bite him, and that would be all she wrote, but instead Rich had a heart attack, which was even better. All the person watching had to do was prevent him from getting to his cell phone. Mission accomplished.”
“That was cold,” I said, “and the person able to do something like that is really vicious.”
“Do you think that the shooter was aiming at me, or at you?” Tolliver asked. “I realize there’s no real way to know, but that would sure be interesting.”
“Especially for you.”
He laughed, just a little, but it was a sound I’d missed.
A knock at the door interrupted me as I’d started to frame an answer.
We both sighed. “I’m tired of having people knock at our door and come in to tell us bad stuff,” I said. “We’re sitting targets, here in a hotel.” I didn’t know how it’d be any different if we had our own home, but somehow I felt it would be.