Page 24 of The Bad Weather Friend

Harper’s attention shifted from the Lucite desk to Benny, and she studied his face at some length. In the traditional pattern of a conversation, it was her turn to contribute, but she didn’t speak.

At first, Benny thought something was wrong with his face—like a pimple on his forehead or a booger displayed in one nostril—but then he began to suspect that, to Harper, he was as transparentas the Lucite desk, which was far more disconcerting than the thought of a prominent booger.

He said, “What?”

“You need a lot of smoothing. But though you’re not fully blue, you’re close.”

Deciding to play her game even though he didn’t know what it was, Benny said, “Well, most people are fully blue or close, so I can’t take any pride in that.”

“Sadly, most people are only slightly blue or not blue at all.”

The doorbell rang.

“That’ll be Fat Bob,” he said.

“Bob,” she corrected.

BEFORE THE MONSTER

In the foyer, when Benny opened the door, Robert Jericho was as reassuring a presence as always he had been. He had probably been a reassuring presence when he was in kindergarten, though most likely not as big as he was currently. Charismatic people were born with charisma; it wasn’t something that could be learned or ordered from Amazon, a truth Benny had reluctantly accepted a year or so earlier.

Four inches taller than Benny and half again as wide, Bob came into the house, squinting at all the whiteness. “I always forget this is a sunglasses-required environment. How’s it going, Harper?”

“I’ve just been holding the client’s hand,” she said, “until you could get here. How was dinner?”

“Terrible traffic. I didn’t have time to stop. So let’s have a look at the kitchen,” Bob said, proceeding through the house with the majesty of an icebreaker crunching a navigable passage through the frozen Arctic Ocean. When he reached his destination, he grimaced. “White. While my pupils are shrinking to pinpoints, tell me about the mess you mentioned on the phone.”

“We cleaned it up,” Benny said.

“Good to know you haven’t become so obsessive-compulsive that the spotless vista before me is your idea of a mess. But I’d like a description so that I might suss out a motive.”

“Hunger was obviously the motive,” Benny said.

So powerful was Robert Jericho’s charisma that, by just raising one eyebrow, he was able to make Benny profoundly regretful that he, not being either a licensed detective or a male equivalent of Miss Jane Marple, had usurped the authority of suchan experienced PI. Benny provided the needed description of the mess caused by the mannerless intruder. When he finished, Harper Harper added a few details that Benny had forgotten.

“Hunger waspartof the motive,” Bob at once deduced, “but not purely that. He left a mess in order to intimidate you, Benny, not because he wants to bully you, but because he needs your cooperation for some reason and prefers to get it through intimidation rather than persuasion. He has an anger issue. However, the object of his fury isn’t you, but something larger than any one person. He has a strong personality and most likely is also physically powerful. He is impulsive, perhaps dangerously so. There was no father in the home when he was growing up. Or if there were two parents, neither of them was an adequate disciplinarian. He loves jam, but he has only contempt for saltine crackers. The jar of jalapeños, thrown into the sink and broken after he tried one, suggests not just that he dislikes hot peppers, but also that he fears them to an extent that he fears nothing else in this world. Finally, considering the volume of food consumed, it is reasonable to suspect that there are at least two of him.”

At the conclusion of that analysis, Benny was further mortified that he had been so presumptuous as to offer his poorly considered psychological profile of the intruder:Hunger was obviously the motive.

Of course, the detective’s conjectures were yet to be borne out by more than circumstantial evidence. When coming on a crime scene—or in this case the description of a crime scene that he had never observed himself—perhaps Bob was prone to pontificating as if every half-formed thought that occurred to him was an unassailable truth. Once all facts were known, maybe half or even 90 percent of his suppositions would prove to be incorrect.

Seeking some indication from Harper that Bob was fallible—a wink, a knowing smile—Benny gave her a knowing smile of his own. She appeared embarrassed for him and quickly looked away, down at the floor, shaking her head. Never had Benny seen a shaking of the head that conveyed such a richness of emotion—sadness, pity, and the keen frustration of a woman who was inclined to like him if only he could get his act together.

Just yesterday, he’dhadhis act together, had been a rising star among real-estate royalty, a respected guy whose text messages were quickly answered and phone calls returned. If only he was able to learn what he had done that had gotten him ostracized, he thought he could get his act even more together than it had been previously. No, he didn’tthinkhe could. Heknewhe could; heknewhe could.

Surveying the kitchen, grimacing as if he could see the mess that had been described, Bob turned to Benny, still grimacing. “On the phone, you said there’s a casket in your garage.”

“A casket or something.”

“You said ‘casket.’”

“Yeah, okay, it’s a casket or something.”

“What something?”

“Well, in a casket, you tend to expect the occupant to be dead. But I don’t think it’s dead, whatever’s in there. So maybe the box isn’t, strictly speaking, a casket.”

“It?”

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