deep, dark family secret.”
Maintaining eye contact, Lowbock said, “I’m sorry if I offended you, Mr.
Stillwater.”
“I’m sorry you did, too.”
“Aren’t you being a little sensitive about this?”
“Am I?” Marty asked sharply, though he wondered if in fact he was
over-reacting.
“Some couples do have a first child before they’re ready to make that
commitment,” the detective said, “and they often put it up for
adoption.”
“Not my folks.”
“Do you know that for a fact?”
“I know them.”
“Maybe you should ask them.”
“Maybe I will.”
“When?”
“I’ll think about it.”
A smile, as faint and brief as the passing shadow of a bird in flight,
crossed Lowbock’s face.
Marty was sure he saw sarcasm in that smile. But, for the life of him,
he couldn’t understand why the detective would regard him as anything
less than an innocent victim.
Lowbock looked down at his notes, letting the silence build for a while.
Then he said, “If this look-alike isn’t related to you, brother or half
brother, then do you have any idea how to explain such a remarkable
resemblance?”
Marty started to shake his head, winced as pain shot through his neck.
“No. No idea at all.”
Paige said, “You want some aspirin?”
“Had some Anacin,” Marty said. “I’ll be okay.”
Meeting Marty’s eyes again, Lowbock said, “I just thought you might have
a theory.”
“No. Sorry.”
“You being a writer and all.”
Marty didn’t get the detective’s meaning. “Excuse me?”
“You use your imagination every day, you earn a living with it.”
“So?”
“So I thought maybe you’d figure out this little mystery if you put your
mind to it.”
“I’m no detective. I’m clever enough at constructing mysteries, but I
don’t unravel them.”
“On television,” Lowbock said, “the mystery writer any amateur
detective, for that matter–is always smarter than the cops.”
“It’s not that way in real life,” Marty said.
Lowbock let a few seconds of silence drift past, doodling on the bottom
of a page of his notes, before he replied, “No, it’s not.”
“I don’t confuse fantasy and reality,” Marty said a little too harshly.
“I wouldn’t have thought you do,” Cyrus Lowbock assured him,
concentrating on his doodle.
Marty turned his head cautiously to see if Paige showed any sign of
perceiving hostility in the detective’s tone and manner. She was
frowning thoughtfully at Lowbock, which made Marty feel better, maybe he
was not over-reacting, after all, and didn’t need to add paranoia to the
list of symptoms he had recounted to Paul Guthridge.
Emboldened by Paige’s frown, Marty faced Lowbock again and said,
“Lieutenant, is something wrong here?”
Raising his eyebrows as if surprised by the question, Lowbock said
archly, “It’s certainly my impression that something’s wrong, or
otherwise you wouldn’t have called us.”
Restraining himself from making the caustic reply that Lowbock deserved,
Marty said, “I mean, I sense hostility here, and I don’t understand the
reason for it. What’s the reason?”
“Hostility? Do you?” Without looking up from his doodle, Lowbock
frowned. “Well, I wouldn’t want the victim of a crime to be as
intimidated by us as by the creep who assaulted him. That wouldn’t be
good public relations, would it?” With that, he neatly avoided a direct
answer to Marty’s question.
The doodle was finished. It was a drawing of a pistol.
“Mr. Stillwater, the gun with which you shot this intruder–was that the
same weapon taken from you out in the street?”
“It wasn’t taken from me. I voluntarily dropped it when told to do so.
And, yes, it was the same gun.”
“A Smith and Wesson nine-millimeter pistol?”
“Yes.”
“Did you purchase that weapon from a licensed gun dealer?”
“Yes, of course.” Marty told him the name of the shop.
“Do you have a receipt from the store and proof of pre-purchase review
by the proper law-enforcement agency?”
“What does this have to do with what happened here today?”
“Routine,” Lowbock said. “I have to fill out all the little lines on
the crime report later. Just routine.”
Marty didn’t like the way the interview increasingly seemed to be
turning into an interrogation, but he didn’t know what to do about it.
Frustrated, he looked to Paige for the answer to Lowbock’s inquiry