Arlene collapsed onto the chair recently vacated by Betty Smith. She looked awful. Tears had streaked her make-up. Fear and anger were fighting for control of her face. After the surprise Gaston had prepared it was difficult for her to retain her cool, in-your-face persona.
We gave her a few more moments to bring herself to the point where she could talk. I sat on the other of the two chairs, beside Arlene, with my pad and pen poised to take notes. Gaston sat opposite her.
After a pause, he leaned forward, looked her straight in the face and said very, very sternly, like a school principal talking to a badly behaved youngster, “Ms. Ford, you must pull yourself together. I shall not be offering you any sympathy even though I know that you’ve had a terrible shock. You’ve lied to me on more than one occasion. I must insist on the truth now. I’m prepared to talk to you here, but if you do not co-operate we’ll have to continue our conversation at the police station. If that is your preference I strongly recommend that you have a lawyer present. At the very least you will be charged with interfering with a police investigation and at the very worst you will be charged with murder. Do I make myself clear?”
Arlene looked at Gaston. It was clear from her stricken face that she finally understood that she was in real trouble and that lying was no longer an option. “Yes.” Her voice was barely a whisper.
“Do you intend to co-operate?”
“Yes.”
“Do you intend to tell me the truth?”
“Yes.” Another whispery croak.
“Do you understand what will happen if you continue to lie to me?”
“Yes.” This time there was a touch of asperity that made her sound more like herself.
“When was the last time, before today, that you were in this apartment?”
“A week ago.”
“What was the purpose of your last visit?”
“To collect my things — the few things that I left here that Hal allowed me to leave here, or that I plain forgot.”
“Am I to understand from what you are saying that you and Professor Hilliard were having an affair?”
“Yes.”
Arlene had regained much of her composure but she was much less hostile than during our previous meetings. Maybe the fact that she was resigned to telling the truth helped her to relax. It could not have been easy for her to lie so elaborately. Unless she was pathological it would have been difficult for her to remember all the details of the lies. She didn’t seem happy but she did seem to have come to terms with her predicament.
“Would you like a glass of water?”
“Yes, oh, yes please.” For the first time since I met her I saw Arlene Ford smile. She was grateful for even this small consideration.
“I’ll get it,” I said jumping to my feet, anxious to be helpful. “Would you like one, as well, Gaston?”
“Yes,” he said and smiled.
I went to the kitchen and returned with three large tumblers of water. None of us wanted to put the glasses on the polished coffee table so Gaston and Ford held onto their glasses and I set mine on the floor so I could continue to take notes.
“Please tell me about your relationship with the professor,” said Gaston.
“The whole story?” Arlene asked.
“From the beginning, if you please.”
“From the beginning,” she said softly, almost to herself. She sighed and started talking in a louder, clearer voice. “I already told you that I’ve known Hal for twelve years; since I started at the department. For most of that time our relationship was strictly professional. And since I worked for all the staff in the department I can’t say that I had that much to do with him. Even at the annual staff Christmas party he was kind of aloof, distant. He didn’t mix much. At least not with non-academic staff. So time passed and not much changed.”
“We’ve heard rumours that he had relations with some of his female students. Do you know if there is any truth to the rumours?” Gaston interjected.
“Maybe. I can’t be sure. He was incredibly discreet — believe me, I know — so I don’t know for absolute certain, but I heard all the rumours and I’m pretty sure that some of them are true. But not all. He was lonely and susceptible but he wasn’t crazy. He never did anything in his office, like some I could name, so I never actually caught him at anything. And I’m also pretty sure that he never tried anything with undergraduates. But he paid a lot of attention to graduate students and new faculty, like Jane Miller.” She pronounced Jane Miller’s name with some of that old Arlene Ford sharpness. I wasn’t sure if Gaston noticed the change in tone, but I made a note of it — just in case we had some final questions about her relationship with Professor Miller-More.
Gaston, too, seemed to be storing the information away, though without a pencil and paper in his case. Arlene was silent for a moment, then said, “Shall I continue?”
“One more question first. I have to be quite sure about what you are saying. You do believe, then, that Professor Hilliard had affairs with his graduate students, correct?”
“In essence, yes,” she responded.
“Is it possible that he was having an affair with Sarah Bloch?”
“Possible? Yes, it’s possible, but I doubt it.”
“So her boyfriend, Allan, is overreacting if he thinks something took place between Sarah and Hilliard?”
“Overreacting? I’ll say. Allan is the jealous type. You know the kind I mean. Every time he sees Sarah talking to a man, he thinks she’s making a date to meet him at a hotel. Allan is capable of believing almost anything. And he has a temper. Sarah is a lovely person and Allan is going to ruin the relationship with his possessiveness. You’ll see. I’ve known men like him. They’re only happy when they’re making some woman miserable.”
Gaston pulled Arlene back to her story. “I understand,” he said soothingly. “Please continue telling us about your relationship with Professor Hilliard.”
“At first I knew him in a kind of distant way. He was one of the professors in the department and I did some work for him. He was always polite but not much more than that. When Jane Miller came to the department as a teacher he took up with her. For a long time he kept the relationship pretty quiet. Usual behaviour for him. But slowly he and Jane became more open about things. I guess you could say that what started out as an affair turned into a real romance. It did him a lot of good, if you ask me. Made him more relaxed and approachable. While he was with her he would actually say more than hello and goodbye to me. We would sometimes have an actual conversation about whatever, politics, the weather, anything. I was pretty sure that this was the real thing and that they would get married or at least move in together. Everybody believed that and everybody was pleased at how positively the relationship changed Harold. Then the rumours about her doctoral dissertation began.”
“What kind of rumours?” I asked. I knew enough to know that the integrity of a doctoral dissertation is sacrosanct and that even the hint of a problem could destroy a career.
“Just that there were some irregularities. I don’t really know what. There was never more than that. She spent a term back at the university where she got her PhD, the University of Toronto, and that was that. By the time she got back the rumours had faded away. So I guess that there was nothing to them. But it was around that time that she suddenly dropped Hal and started seeing Fred More, whom she later married.
“The breakup just about destroyed him. One day he was happily in love and the next he was back to his old withdrawn self. Well, almost back to his old self. The difference was that somehow I happened to catch him in one of his few talkative moods. One day we were leaving at the same time and he suggested we go for a drink and dinner. The poor soul poured his heart out to me. I was so surprised I didn’t have much to say but I listened and I guess we both had too much wine with dinner. The wine loosened his tongue and my defences and we ended up here, in bed. The next morning I was furious with myself for slipping into bed with someone from work and having a one-night stand. I was determined to go back to our old relationship of hello, goodbye, politeness and nothing more. I wasn’t going to be one of his conquests. I fully intended to put that night behind me and out of my mind. It didn’t work out that way.
“I’m not sure why but we each found something that the other needed at that time. He needed a shoulder to cry on and then to have his fragile male ego restored. And I was tired of being alone. I may not have had an ideal relationship with Hal but it for a while it was better than nothing. And nothing is what I had before I took up with him. We’re the same in that we are both very private people and, all in all, live better without too many demands on us. So the one night stand became an arrangement that seemed to work. It lasted two years and it made me happy, and I thought he was happy too.”
“I gather from the way you’re talking that it wasn’t you who chose to end it,” Gaston said sympathetically.
“Oh, my God,” she said, reliving a bad memory. “No, it was Hal. Just like that, he told me that he was seeing someone else and that it was a serious, permanent relationship. I couldn’t believe it. I just went berserk. I cried and screamed and berated him and it did no good. He said his mind was made up and that he was sorry but it was over. I couldn’t believe it. I was being dumped and he was sorry? You can bet I told him what I thought of him. But it didn’t do any good. He listened until I ran out of steam and he even agreed with my assessment of him. He didn’t change his mind. It was over. Looking back on it I suppose that I have to admit that at least he was honest with me. He didn’t try to string me along or take the passive-aggressive route out — you know, slowly pulling away from me and engineering a break up by forcing me to confront him. It was quick, clean break, but it was incredibly hurtful. Apparently there was never any chance that I could have been a ‘serious, permanent’ lover. I was being dumped and insulted in the bargain. He just told me it would be best if I cleaned my stuff out of here and that we go back to being secretary and professor. I told him that two years had passed and that it wasn’t that simple. He said it would have to be. So I got my things together and left and spent a weekend at home in tears and tried my best to deal with it, with him, in some way so that I could restore my pride.”
“You said that you got your things out of here. What exactly did you mean by that? Did you have a lot of things over here?”
“Hardly. It’s not like we lived together or anything. There were just some odds and ends around, things I had forgotten, a sweater, cosmetics, things like that.”
“And it was one of those things you thought we found that day in the café?” Gaston inquired.
“That’s right. I suddenly thought I might have left a small jewellery case. I couldn’t remember seeing it at home. But when I looked in my bag I realized I’d put it inside a zipper compartment and forgotten to take it out. So I knew you didn’t find anything of mine.”
“Were you angry with Professor Hilliard?”
“Angry? I was furious. I felt used and discarded like old clothes. I was hurt and angry and I just hated the son-of-a-bitch. I wanted to hurt him right back. I was trying to think of a way to make him suffer the way I was suffering. But before I could do that he died.” Arlene began to cry, as if she had just this moment heard about his death.
Gaston gave her a handkerchief and some sympathy. “I understand. You were hurt and you had no one to talk to. Take your time. I’m sure you’ll feel better now that it’s all out.”
There was the little matter of murder but I was sure that Gaston would get to it in his own sweet time.
We waited for Arlene to regain control of herself and then he asked her, “How long ago did this take place?”
“Not long, a couple of weeks ago,” she said between her sniffles and her tears.
“And do you know who he was seeing, with whom he had developed a ‘permanent relationship’?”
“That’s the really strange thing. At first I thought it was Jane Miller-More again. It’s nuts, I know, but after he dumped me I started to think really hard about things he did around the department. And I began to suspect that there was something going on between them. They didn’t spend any more time together than they ever had, but I imagined there was something conspiratorial between them. They would talk in this kind of strange way so that no one could be sure what they were talking about but they understood each other. It was almost a code. But they were always close friends, even after she married Dean More. Then I thought maybe he’d told her about his new relationship — confided in her as a friend — and that they were referring to some conversation they’d had about it, but you couldn’t be sure when this other conversation took place. And I have no idea who the other woman could have been. It sounds crazy, I know, but that’s the best way I can describe it. And I’m sure Jane knows more than she’s letting on.”
“I see,” Gaston muttered. “How do you feel about Professor Hilliard now?”
“I miss him. And I know it’s an awful thing to say about the dead but I wanted to tell him how he made me feel. I wanted to get it out of my system and get on with my life. Now I can’t.” Arlene had her emotions under control. She gave her eyes a final dab with Gaston’s handkerchief and twisted it through her fingers like linen worry beads as he spoke.
“But you hated him and you were angry and you felt betrayed by him. You know, these are the feelings that sometimes lead to murder. And then we regret what we did and try to hide it. But it never works out. The crime is based on anger and passion and too many mistakes are made and we always catch the murderer.” Gaston had leaned forward and was looking straight into Arlene’s wet eyes as he said this. He spoke softly almost hypnotically and she sat still, apparently mesmerized by what he was saying.
She was silent for a long moment and then she said, calmly, “I didn’t kill him. It’s not that I didn’t think about it. I wanted revenge. But I could only kill him once. You know what it’s like. You’re mad at someone and you wish they were dead but you don’t really — it’s just anger talking. That’s how I felt. And I know how it must look. But if I had killed him it would have been a crime of passion and I would have made mistakes in trying to hide it, wouldn’t I? And you’re smart enough, you would have found out by now. But you haven’t found one single clue that ties me to his death, have you?”
I had to admit that she had us there. What made us suspect her turned out to be things that tied her to his life, not his death. Gaston sat back on the sofa and regarded Arlene thoughtfully. I could see that he had developed some respect for her brain power and that he had no answer for her question. As things stood now his own logic proved that she didn’t do it. We’d need physical evidence to tie her to the crime and we didn’t have any.
“You are quite right, madame. But until we find the murderer I must suspect everybody and that includes you. My suspicions will only be lifted when I find the guilty party.”
And that goes double for me, I wanted to say, but didn’t. I, too, agreed with her logic, but I was still was not completely convinced of her innocence.
“I understand,” she said, getting to her feet. “So you had better get on with finding the guilty person. And I’d like to get back to work, if you’re finished with me.” She marched off in the direction of the bathroom and I could hear the water running. She returned looking refreshed and in control of herself. “You know where to find me if you need me and I’m assuming that our conversation today was private.” She gave me a hostile look.
Gaston spoke for both of us. “You can depend on our discretion. If you’re innocent we have no desire to harm you and nothing you’ve told us will leave this room. If you’re guilty, this conversation will be evidence in court.”
“It won’t be,” she said, then turned and walked out of the apartment.
Gaston and I looked at each other.
“That was quite a performance,” I opined.
“It was that, but I think that she’s telling the truth now, for the first time since this whole sorry mess began. I’m not ready to take her off the list of suspects yet but she’s not my first choice for guilty either. We’ll have to keep looking. She’s right about one thing. The physical evidence is inconclusive.
“Inconclusive, how?” I asked.
“Well, it is not yet clear to the medical examiner if Hilliard was killed by someone about his own size who struck him from behind while he was standing, or by a shorter person who got him while he was seated or perhaps bending over. One of my first cases had to do with a woman who was barely five feet tall, but still managed to kill her biker boyfriend. She did it by tossing him his pack of cigarettes so that they landed on the floor behind him. When he bent over to pick it up she clobbered him with a brick. It looked like he was murdered by someone bigger than he was — and he was big,”
“Wouldn’t strength have something to do with it? Wouldn’t the murderer have to be pretty strong to hit Hilliard hard enough to kill him?”
“Strength isn’t really the important thing here. It’s force. If the murderer was able to get a good swing the speed with which the fatal blow was delivered would be enough to kill. Size and strength don’t really matter if there is no resistance on the part of the victim. Remember, we concluded that Hilliard’s office was messed up as a result of a sloppy search not as the result of a struggle. He probably never knew what hit him.”
We both thought about that for a moment. I looked at my watch and realized that it was one o’clock. “Can I make a quick phone call?” I asked.
“Use the study,” he responded.
I checked my answering machine. There were no messages from Susan. That was a relief. But then I felt guilty about feeling relieved. And then for a brief moment I felt guilty about being so rude to her last night. And then I thought the hell with it and put her right out of my mind. I was free! I called the store to tell them not to expect me for a while and I rejoined Gaston.
At that moment I realized I was hungry, and apparently Gaston did, too, because he said, “Let’s get something to eat and review and plan our next steps.” As we were getting ready to leave, the buzzer from downstairs started ringing furiously and we heard the sound of the elevator.
“What’s this?” I exclaimed.
“Uninvited visitors. Follow me.” Gaston answered and quickly gathered up the empty coffee cups and the bag, turned off the lights, and made for the dining room. I was right on his heels and I made sure that the door stopped swinging the moment we were safely on the other side of it.
Gaston sat down at the head of the table and motioned me to station myself in the corner near the door so that if the intruder came into the dining room I could get between him and the door, blocking the only escape route.
We could hear a key turning in the lock. Our visitor, not expecting the door to be unlocked, inadvertently locked the door. He or she then shoved against the door and tried the key again. I was afraid that the intruder would realize that if the door was unlocked there must be someone inside the condo. Luckily this didn’t seem to occur to him. The key was turned again and then, with much knob-twisting and door-banging the visitor entered the apartment. There was silence for a moment. Then heavy footsteps (from their sound I concluded it was a man) moved through the living room and turned right. He went into the bedroom and slammed the door, making a lot of noise as he moved around the condo — obviously we were not dealing with an experienced thief. There was no sound from behind the closed bedroom door. Suddenly he emerged and clomped down the hall, past the dining room door. The study door opened, then slammed shut. This time we could hear him inside, yanking open the drawers of the file cabinet and the desk. He spent a little longer in the study than in the bedroom, but not much. A moment later he barged into the dining room and stopped cold, with a deer-caught-in-the-headlights look on his face, at the sight of Gaston sitting at the dining room table.
“Won’t you sit down, Mr. Gutmacher? Allan, isn’t it?”
Allan responded by hyperventilating and when he found his voice he let out a shriek of fear and surprise. “What, what?” He sputtered. “What the hell?” He looked around wildly and turned to run out the way he had rushed in. But I had placed myself in front of the door, blocking his exit. He took a step toward me and I gently shoved him backwards. He stumbled and almost fell.
“I believe you’ve been asked to sit down. So sit!” I commanded like a movie tough guy. I moved in on him and he had no choice but to flop into a chair.
His breathing was getting into the normal range and I realized that on both occasions I had run into this guy he was charging around out of breath. I wondered if he ever entered a room in the normally accepted fashion.
He was wearing almost the same clothing as he had the day he had insisted on joining our interview with Sarah Bloch, the same or similar grey trousers and the same heavy black shoes — which accounted for the racket he made stomping around Hilliard’s apartment. His shirt was blue and he was wearing a red tie with a faded blue pattern of some sort, little crowns which had weakened into polka dots, I think. He had exchanged his blue blazer for a beige wind-breaker — a concession to the more relaxed standards of breaking and entering. As before, he carried a folded section of the National Post. Again, the sketch of David Frum peered at me from Gutmacher’s windbreaker pocket.
“What are you doing here?” Gaston asked.
“None of your fuckin’ business,” Allan responded belligerently.
“Actually it is my business,” Gaston told him. “It’s my business to catch murderers and I think I may have caught one. What do you think, Sam?”
“You may very well have. I think I know what our friend is doing here, what he is looking for.”
“Who the hell do you think you are? Dick Tracy?” Allan asked sarcastically.
I sat down on the side of the table between him and Gaston and said, “I think I’m helping Detective Sergeant Lemieux solve a murder. I think we found the murderer: a hot-headed guy who goes charging into places in a jealous rage. You probably bashed Hilliard on the head because you thought he was interested in your girlfriend. I also think that you tore Hilliard’s office apart looking for something and when you didn’t find it you came up here to search his apartment. What are you looking for? Something to do with Sarah?”
He clutched the newspaper in his right hand and jabbed it at me, the picture of David Frum the tip of his paper sword. “I don’t have to tell you anything,” he spat.
“But you do have to tell me,” Gaston said in a calm voice that seemed to further infuriate Allan Gutmacher, who began to shake his head and laugh sardonically, presumably to indicate that we were way off base. “Listen to me. We know you lied to us earlier. Mr. Wiseman checked your story. You and Sarah may have met at the metro station and walked to school together on most mornings but you didn’t do it the morning Hilliard was murdered. You got into the department first. You saw Hilliard was in his office and that there was nobody else around. You were angry at him for making a pass at Sarah and in a fit of jealous anger you killed him. Or maybe you had some other reason to hate the professor. Believe me, whatever it is, we’ll find out. We’ll investigate everything you’ve done in the last ten years if we have to in order to prove that you killed the man. Now what have you got to say for yourself?”
“You can’t prove a damn thing!” he said.
“Oh yeah?” I pointed out. “Then how did a key that was missing from the dead man’s pocket get into your hands? Isn’t that what you just used to open the door of this apartment?”
Allan’s eyes darted wildly. The he sat down heavily on the sofa and covered his face with his hands, apparently realizing that he might be looking at a murder charge. At the very least he was caught breaking into the deceased’s home and searching for something. He sat up straight and placed both hands palms down on the table.
“I didn’t kill him,” he stated. “I found the body. But I didn’t kill him.”
“Tell us what happened,” Gaston prompted.
“It was like you said. I waited for Sarah but she didn’t show up. It happens sometimes and I didn’t think much of it. Sometimes she gets there ahead of me and instead of waiting she goes on ahead and I meet up with her at the history department. So I bought coffee and walked to campus. When I got to the department I put the coffee in the common room and I noticed that Hilliard’s door was ajar so I went down to see if she was there. But I didn’t really think she was because I didn’t hear any voices. Normally if there is someone around they make noise, you hear typing or someone talking on the phone or pacing around or something. But the place was so quiet I wondered if something was going on. I walked down the hall to Hilliard’s office and looked in. And there he was lying on the floor in a pool of blood.”
“So you returned to the common room and calmly had a coffee with Sarah?” I asked.
“No, not calmly,” he said, looking at me resentfully. “When I got to the common room Sarah was just coming in. I told her what I had found and we decided to let someone else find the body. We didn’t want to have anything to do with it.”
“What did Hilliard’s office look like?” Gaston asked.
“You saw it. You know what it looked like. It was a mess.”
“I saw it after you left. I want to know what it looked like when you found the body.”
“I didn’t touch anything. It was a mess, I’m telling you.”
“Listen to me,” Gaston said sternly. “How you answer my questions will determine whether or not I arrest you for murder right here and now. Do you understand?”
Allan nodded and said, “His office was like it always was. Neat. The guy was a bloody fanatic. Except that this time he was dead on the floor and there was blood everywhere.”
“And you say you touched nothing.”
“That’s right.”
“That’s a lie, and a pointless one. Whatever you touched will have your fingerprints on it. You tore the office apart looking for something, yes?” Gaston reached under his jacket and pulled a pair of handcuffs from his belt. He placed them on the table as a reminder of what Allan could expect if he was not totally honest.
Allan’s head sagged forward, and he said, almost inaudibly, “Yes.”
“What were you looking for? I’m asking you for the last time.”
“Anything that would inadvertently tie me or Sarah to a murder we didn’t commit. That’s the truth.”
“Why would there be anything in the office that would tie you to the murder, if you didn’t commit the crime?” I burst in. “Anything that tied you to the murder would hardly be inadvertent, would it? You weren’t studying with Professor Hilliard. But Sarah was … you were afraid that she might have got to the history department ahead of you. Am I right? And that Hilliard made another pass at her and she bashed him on the head to defend herself?”
“Yes, goddamn you. But Sarah didn’t do it. She got to the department after me.”
“But you couldn’t know that at the time you were in Hilliard’s office. So you pulled Hilliard’s office apart looking for anything that might incriminate Sarah and stole his keys, right?” Gaston asked.
“It was easy to identify the keys I needed. Once when Sarah was working with Hilliard she was supposed to meet me but she phoned and said she had to go over to his office with him to borrow some historical journals. I was over in two minutes to make sure I went with them. Sarah was mad at me but she knew what I thought of the guy so she just let me go along. He seemed kind of pissed off, of course, but I didn’t care. I noticed that fancy key he had when he opened the door. After that I checked from time to time to see if a key to his apartment ever showed up with Sarah’s keys. It was a good thing for him that never happened. Anyway, I knew which ones they were. I figured that if I only took the keys to this building and left his key ring no one would notice.”
“So, I can expect that your fingerprints will be all over the office? How were you planning to explain that?”
“That wouldn’t prove anything. I’ve been in and out of Hilliard’s office a thousand times. So has almost every other graduate student in the history department not to mention the faculty.”
“Perhaps, perhaps,” Gaston said. “We’ll see when I get a report from the crime scene unit.”
“What would you have done if you had found something that pointed to Sarah?” I asked.
“Destroyed it,” Allan answered bluntly. “I love her and I want to protect her.”
“So you do believe she might have killed Hilliard?” Gaston looked at him curiously. “You love her enough to try to cover up a murder you think she committed? Bizarre form of love, if you ask me. It seems more likely that you killed Hilliard on the impulse of the moment, because you feared that Sarah was getting more interested in him than in you. You’re not much of a planner. You act impulsively. You come barrelling into Hilliard’s condo without checking to see if it’s empty or under surveillance; for all I know you went charging into his office with the same disregard for consequences and killed him. For all we know you trashed his office covering up the traces of your own crime rather than trying to protect Sarah.”
“Yeah? Well, bullshit. If that was the case why would I bother to come here at all? There’s no reason for me to check out his apartment if I killed him. I only risked coming here to protect Sarah. Just in case. I’ve been waiting three days for your cops to go away so I could get in.”
We were quiet as we thought about Allan’s last point. I had to admit that it was a good one. At that time we had no hard evidence that he had done anything except act like a fool and that was not against the law.
“I don’t fully believe you,” Gaston told him. “But I don’t have enough to hold you so I’m going to let you go for the moment. Do not get in the way of the investigation again. Go about your business and be sure to keep out of my way. If I find you poking around again I promise you that I’ll arrest you for something — tampering with evidence, interfering with an investigation — something. You may only have to spend a day or two in jail but believe me when I tell you that it won’t be an experience you’ll enjoy. Do you understand me?”
“Yeah,” Allan answered sullenly. Allan did not seem to appreciate the break he was getting. I was hoping that Gaston would arrest him and throw his arrogant, sullen ass in jail.
“Now give me the keys and clear out of here,” Gaston told him, “and don’t let me catch you interfering in this investigation again.”
Without a word Allan slid the keys to Gaston, got up and left the apartment. I followed him into the living room to make sure he left and did not make a detour into the bedroom to hide until we left.
Gaston followed me into the living room and said, “Well, that was unpleasant, wasn’t it? You don’t really get to see people at their best during a murder investigation.”
My stomach growled reminding me how hungry I was. “Lunch,” I reminded Gaston.
“Right. But let’s go somewhere decent for a change.”
We left the apartment, taking our garbage with us, and headed off to find a good restaurant. Good thinking has to be supported by fine cuisine.