Last Licks

“I like her,” he promptly replied. “She’s nice and hardworking, and she’s the quickest to come if you buzz for help—” His expression soured. “Aw no, you’re going to tell me she’s the name, right? It’s like you’re only picking on people I like.”

“We just follow the evidence,” Will said.

Sunny gave him a look. “But I’ve got to say in this case, the evidence is thin.” With his broken leg, Ollie was pretty much dependent on Camille. Sunny didn’t want Will’s suspicions to influence the way Ollie treated the girl. She offered her arguments about how fuzzy the statistics they were working from could be.

Ollie slowly nodded, going from patient to hard-nosed businessman. “So you’ve got a theory and a suspect. Someone who was around on the night shift, a staff member who’d know what was bad for patients and who could probably get her hands on whatever was needed. That’s whachacallem—opportunity and means.” He gave Will a tough look. “What about motive?”

Will shrugged. “She’s beating her brains out for chump change, emptying bedpans for rich people. That would start to get to me. And there’s something else.” He looked at Ollie. “You think someone was in here that night, giving Gardner a drink. We don’t think he’d take one from Alfred or Elsa. But he might have taken it from Camille.”

“Might,” Sunny emphasized. “Here’s what I know. She’s dedicated and responsible. The reason she’s taking all the shifts she can is because she still has to pay off her training.”

Ollie pursed his lips in thought. “She didn’t like Gardner,” he finally said.

Mike shrugged. “She’s a nice girl, but plain. Not Gardner’s type. I bet he didn’t waste much of the old Scatterwell charm on her.”

“As a matter of fact, she saw Gardner at his worst, going after Elsa Hogue,” Sunny had to admit. “But we’re talking cold-blooded murder. Is that enough to make someone go so far?”

“Put it all together . . .” Will let the words hang in the air.

“Put it all together, and do we have enough to persuade Frank Nesbit that he ought to look into this case officially?” Sunny looked around at the others. “He’s the one we have to convince, after all. What do you think? Do we have enough to convince him of foul play?”

Mike stopped playing with Portia to offer his two cents. “Admit that he let someone kill patients under his nose at a ritzy rest home? Oh, no.”

That got a sour laugh out of Will. “To convince him, we’d have to catch the killer cutting someone’s heart out. And even then, he might call it emergency surgery.” Will hesitated for a moment, and Sunny could sympathize with him. He’d made a case for some bad things going on here. But he had to face reality. “No,” he admitted.

“I could push him, but . . .” Ollie sat still, making the political calculations. “No.”

That pretty well killed the conversation. They sat for a moment or two in defeated silence.

“Hey, what’s going on, folks?” Luke Daconto came into the room. He was obviously still riding the high of last night’s performance, genial and grinning. “With a concert next week, I’ve been rehearsing my bell ringers pretty hard.”

“After all the free beer those folks at O’Dowd’s bought for you last night, you were able to listen to bell ringers this morning?” Will stared at him. “You’re a tougher man than I am.”

“Well, more like the afternoon after,” Luke admitted.

“The music was good,” Mike said, “but what really impressed me was the way you stared down that crowd to shut them up. That was really something, Luke.”

The guitarist shrugged uncomfortably. “It’s just something I learned from an old pro when I was on the road, playing in joints a lot worse than the one last night.” He grinned at Sunny, a flash of white teeth in his heavy beard. “If you thought that bar was scary, I could show you a few—”

Will rolled his eyes. “That’s all we’d need.”

Remembering some hair-raising episodes from Sunny’s other investigations, everyone laughed—even, after a moment, Sunny herself.

Luke looked a little confused at the big reaction, but pleased. “That’s better,” he said. “When I first came in here, I thought I was crashing a funeral.”

“Oh! Funeral!” Sunny turned to her dad. “I completely forgot. Mrs. Martinson stopped off at the house this morning. She told me that Alfred Scatterwell is having a memorial service for Gardner tonight. She was feeling a little funny about whether she should go, and I kind of promised that you would take her. You’d better give her a call.”

“Are you and Will going?” Luke asked.

Sunny nodded, shooting a quick glance at Luke. “Of course. I’ll represent you, Ollie.”

“Yeah.” Ollie started rooting around in the pile of newspapers on his tray table. Sunny noticed he had both the Press Herald from Portland and the Herald from across the border in Portsmouth. “There’s an announcement of the memorial in here—not what I’d call an engraved invitation, but it seems to be a public event.”