“Pardon?”
She sighed and shifted on the bench. “There are problems.”
“Such as?”
“The body was moved.”
Myron felt his pulse pick up. “Clu was killed someplace else?”
“No. But his body was moved. After he was killed.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The lividity wasn’t affected, so the blood didn’t have time to settle. But he was dragged around on the floor, probably immediately after death, though it could be up to an hour later. And the room was tossed.”
“The killer was searching for something,” Myron said. “Probably the two hundred thousand dollars.”
“Don’t know about that. But there were blood smears all over the place.”
“What do you mean, smears?”
“Look, I’m an ME. I don’t interpret crime scenes. But the place was a mess. Overturned furniture and bookshelves, drawers emptied out, and blood everywhere. On the walls. And on the floor. Like he’d been dragged like a rag doll.”
“Maybe he was dragging himself around. After he was shot in the leg and back.”
“Could be, I guess. Of course it’s hard to drag yourself across walls unless you’re Spider-Man.”
Myron’s blood chilled a few degrees. He tried to sort and sift and process. How did all this fit? The killer was on a rampage to find the cash. Okay, that makes sense. But why drag around the body? Why smear the walls with blood?
“We’re not finished,” Sally said.
Myron blinked as though coming out of a trance.
“I also ran a full tox screen on the deceased. Know what I found?”
“Heroin?”
She shook her head. “El Zippo.”
“What?”
“Nada, nothing, the big zero.”
“Clu was clean?”
“Not even a Tums.”
Myron made a face. “But that could have been temporary, right? I mean, the drugs might have just been out of his system.”
“Nope.”
“What do you mean, nope?”
“Let’s keep the science simple here, shall we? If a guy abuses drugs or alcohol, it shows up somewhere. Enlarged heart, liver damage, lung modules, whatever. And it did. There was no question that Clu Haid had liked some pretty potent chemicals. Had, Myron. Had. There are other tests—hair tests, for example—that give you a more recent snapshot. And those were clean. Which means he’d been off the stuff for a while.”
“But he failed a drug test two weeks ago.”
She shrugged.
“Are you telling me that test was fixed?”
Sally held up both hands. “Not me. I’m telling you that my data disputes that data. I never said anything about a fix. It could have been an innocent error. There are such things as false positives.”
Myron’s head swam. Clu had been clean. His body had been dragged around after being shot four times. Why? None of this made any sense.
They chatted a few more minutes, mostly about the past, and headed for the exit ten minutes later. Myron started back to his car. Time to see Dad. He tried the new cellular—count on Win to have “extras” lying about his apartment—and called Win.
“Articulate,” Win answered.
“Clu was right. The drug test was fixed.”
Win said, “My, my.”
“Sawyer Wells witnessed the drug test.”
“More my, my.”
“What time is he doing the motivational talk at Reston?”
“Two o’clock,” Win said.
“In the mood to get motivated?”
“You have no idea.”
Chapter 28
The Club.
Brooklake Country Club, to be more exact, though there was no brook, no lake, and they were not in the country. It was, however, most definitely a club. As Myron’s car made its way up the steep drive, the clubhouse’s white Greco-Roman pillars rising through the clouds, childhood memories popped up in fluorescent flashes. It was how he always saw the place. In flashes. Not always pleasant ones.
The Club was the epitome of nouveau-riche, Myron’s wealthy brethren proving that they could be just as tacky and exclusive as their goyish counterparts. Older women with perpetual tans on large, freckled chests sat by the pool, their hair shellacked into place by fake French hairdressers to the point where the strands resembled frozen fiber optics, never allowing it, God forbid, to touch the water, sleeping, he imagined, without putting their heads down lest they shatter the dos like so much Venetian glass; there were nose jobs and liposuction and face-lifts so extreme that the ears almost touched in the back, the overall effect bizarrely sexy in the same way you might find Yvonne De Carlo on The Munsters sexy; women fighting off old age and on the surface winning, but Myron wondered if they doth protest too much, their fear just a little too bare in the scar-revealing, harsh overhead lights of the dining room.
Men and women were separated at the Club, the women animatedly playing mah-jongg, the men silently chewing on cigars over a hand of cards; women still had special tee times so as not to interfere with the breadwinners’—i.e., their husbands’—precious leisure moments; there was tennis too, but that was more for fashion than exercise, giving everyone an excuse to wear sweatsuits that rarely encountered sweat, couples sometimes sporting matching ones; a men’s grill, a women’s lounge, the oak boards memorializing golf champions in gold leaf, the same man winning seven years in a row, now dead, the large locker rooms with masseur’s tables, the bathrooms with combs sitting in blue alcohol, the pickle-and-cole-slaw bar, cleat marks on the rug, the Founders Board with his grandparents’ names still on it, immigrant dining room help, all referred to by their first names, always smiling too hard and at the ready.
What shocked Myron now was that people his age were members. The same young girls who had sneered at their mothers’ idleness now abandoned their own foundering careers to “raise” the kids—read: hire nannies—came here to lunch and bore each other silly with a continuous game of one-upmanship. The men Myron’s age had manicures and long hair and were well fed and too well dressed, kicking back with their cellular phones and casually swearing to a colleague. Their kids were there too, dark-eyed youngsters walking through the clubhouse with hand-held video games and Walkmans and too regal a bearing.
All conversations were inane and depressed the hell out of Myron. The grandpas in Myron’s day had the good sense not to talk much to one another, just discarding and picking up what was dealt, occasionally grumbling about a local sports team; the grandmothers interrogated one another, measuring their own children and grandchildren against the competition, seeking an opponent’s weakness and any conversational opening to jab forward with tales of offspring heroics, no one really listening, just preparing for the next frontal assault, familial pride getting confused with self-worth and desperation.