Cat's Claw (A Pecan Springs Mystery)

He had represented Timms in a property dispute a few months before. McQuaid had been the investigator on the case, which involved the boundaries of a piece of very nice Hill Country land not far from where we live. Charlie needed to be told that Jessica Nelson, intrepid girl reporter, had learned about Timms’ arrest. He wasn’t going to like it, but he needed to know.
    But there was something even more important. While it might not be exactly kosher for me to spill the beans about Larry Kirk’s death, I felt obliged to tell Charlie about that, too. It wasn’t a state secret—the
Enterprise
knew about it, the whole neighborhood knew about it, and half the people in town would know about it before they went to bed. There was no reason Timms’ lawyer shouldn’t know and every reason he should, since his client was about to be arrested for burgling the dead man’s business.
    The office was closed for the day, but Charlie likes to be close tothe action. If he was still around, he might pick up. He did—on the first ring.
    “Lipman here.” He was not at his most congenial.
    “It’s China, Charlie. Listen, I wouldn’t be bothering you after hours, but I just got a call from a reporter at the
Enterprise
and I thought you ought to know about it. Somebody tipped her that George Timms is about to be arrested for breaking into Larry Kirk’s Computer Sales and Service a few days ago.”
    “Aw,
hell,
” Charlie growled. “How do they get stuff like that?”
    “Yeah,” I said sympathetically. “The free press is a damn nuisance, isn’t it? So don’t be surprised if there’s a reporter and a cameraman lining up outside the door when your client surrenders.” I paused, giving him a chance to put in a word or two of denial. He didn’t, so I went on. “There’s something else you should know, if you don’t already, Charlie. Larry Kirk is dead.”
    “Dead?” An audible gasp, then a roar. “
How? When?
”
    “Gunshot wound to the head. This afternoon. Ruby Wilcox’s sister found him in his kitchen. The first uniform on the scene called it in as a suicide. But I knew the guy personally and I have my doubts. I’m sure the police are keeping other possibilities in mind.”
    “Aw, jeez!” Charlie said. I flinched at the ringing smack of a hand slapping the desk, hard. “I am flat not
believin’
this!”
    “I know,” I said sadly. “I can’t quite get my mind around it, either. Kirk was one of the good guys, in my book, anyway.” I paused, and then decided to trade on our friendship. “I also had a hard time believing that George Timms would break into Kirk’s business, but I guess that’s true, huh?” I lowered my voice. “Just between us, why did he do it, Charlie? He needed to get his computer back, maybe? Something on it he’d forgotten about? Or maybe a little under-the-counter extortion?”
    Now that the surprise was wearing off, I was starting to conjure possibilities, and blackmail wasn’t out of the question. Most people keep private documents on their computers and some people probably spend a fair amount of time visiting questionable websites. Child porn sites, for example, where they download photographs. But they don’t think about these ugly things when the computer crashes or it picks up a virus or some kind of malware and they take it in for repair. Maybe there was something on Timms’ computer—websites, photos, documents—that he desperately needed to hide. Maybe somebody had discovered whatever it was and was demanding something in return for not spilling his dirty little secret to the public at large.
    “Absolutely not,” Charlie hooted. “And you know better than to ask that question, China.”
    Now I knew for certain. It was blackmail—or, more precisely, felony extortion. Which raised the question: was it Kirk who was blackmailing Timms? That didn’t fit with my experience of Larry Kirk, but extortionists don’t necessarily look like criminals. Extortion is a white-collar crime, and often a crime of opportunity. An otherwise decent guy, in temporary need of some cash (to meet his wife’s divorce demands, for instance), inadvertently stumbles onto something criminal on a customer’s computer. So this decent guy feels justified in shaking down the customer for whatever he can get, threatening to expose him if he doesn’t fork over. In Timms’ case, the threat alone might have been enough to push him into breaking into the place in order to get his computer