W Is for Wasted

way. Have I made myself clear?”
    She got up without another word and left, slamming the door behind her.
    After I’d cleaned the office from top to bottom, I realized I’d probably gone too far with her. What difference did it make if he knew where to find me? True, I harbored the suspicion that he might have had a hand in Pete’s death, but he didn’t know that. As far as I was concerned, he had no power over me and he had no leverage, so what was there to sweat? If he had the gall to come knocking at my door, I’d tell him I’d tossed the pills. That settled, I retrieved said bottle from my shoulder bag, pulled the rug back, opened my floor safe, and locked the pills away.
    •   •   •
    Cheney called late in the afternoon, saying, “I have a one-hour dinner break. I’m buying if you want to join me.”
    He knew full well I wouldn’t refuse.
    I said, “You did talk to Sanford Wray, right?” I held the handset loosely, pen and paper at the ready in case I needed to take notes.
    “First thing this morning. Hey, we’re old friends by now. He asked me to call him Mr. Wray. That’s how tight we are.”
    “What’d he say about the gun?”
    “I’m not doing this on the
phone
. We’re starting to cook on this, I can tell you that. We picked up partial prints. Thumb and index finger.”
    “Oh, come on, Cheney. Don’t make me wait. I want to know what went on.”
    “I’ll pick you up in an hour. How do you feel about eating breakfast at dinnertime?”
    “I love the idea.”
    •   •   •
    I was home and waiting at the curb when Cheney came around the corner in his red Mercedes-Benz Roadster. I found myself mentally cocking my head. I was thinking about Robert Dietz and his red Porsche, wondering if Jonah Robb had a little red sports car as well. Cheney leaned across the seat and opened the passenger-side door. I slid into the black leather bucket seat and said, “Is this the car you had when I saw you last?”
    “That was an ’87. This is the ’88. A 560SL. You like it?”
    “I thought the other one was a 560SL.”
    “It was. I was so crazy about the car I got a duplicate.”
    He drove us out onto the wooden pier, the big timbers rumbling beneath his wheels. The restaurant was three blocks from my apartment but it wasn’t one I frequented. We ate at a table overlooking the harbor with its modest traffic in powerboats and fishing vessels. Not surprisingly, the restaurant was given over to a nautical theme: black-and-white photographs of sailboats, fish netting draped along the walls, distressed wood, buoys, and other maritime artifacts, including fiberglass fish reproductions—two marlins, three sharks, and a school of sailfish.
    As we ate, I wondered idly if you could classify men according to their breakfast preferences. Cheney was a pancake kind of guy; crisp bacon, breakfast sausage, eggs over easy. He piled it all together, poured syrup over the top, and cut it into a big nasty pile that he devoured with enthusiasm. He wasn’t a big man but he never seemed to gain weight.
    I ordered scrambled eggs, bacon, rye toast, and orange juice. When we finally pushed our plates aside and the waitress had refreshed our coffee cups, I said, “Are you going to volunteer the information or do I have to beg?”
    “I’m happy to tell you the story, but I’m taking out the filler. You know how it is, you show up at a guy’s door asking about a gun, there’s all this preliminary bullshit while they decide if they should hire legal counsel before letting you set foot on the premises. Okay, so the nitty-gritty. He answers the door. We introduce ourselves and I ask if he has a forty-five-caliber Ruger semiautomatic registered to him. This is me and Jonah by the way. He says he does. We ask where the gun is. He says his bed table drawer. We say we’d like to see the weapon if he has no objections. He says, ‘None whatever.’
    “So far this is going great, but just to be on the safe side, we clarify the request, letting him know he has the right to refuse. By now, he’s getting antsy. We reaffirm we have his consent to come in and take a look. He says, ‘What the hell is this?’ We tell him the Ruger might have been used in the commission of a crime, which he says is bullshit.”
    “I thought you were skipping the filler.”
    “This is important Fourth Amendment stuff. Something goes wrong, I don’t want him claiming we didn’t spell it out for him. So there’s more