Leave the Grave Green

Kincaid held his hand out for the pen. “Well, I have a vested interest in staying in touch with you. I’m looking into Connor Swann’s death, and I think you know a good deal about Connor Swann. It would be very odd if you didn’t, considering the amount of money he paid you every month.” Kincaid drank off another half-inch of his pint and smiled at Hicks, whose sallow skin had faded almost to green at the mention of Connor’s name.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Hicks managed to squeak, and now Kincaid could smell his fear.

“Oh, I think you do. The way I heard it is that you do some unofficial collecting for a bookie here in town, and that Connor was in over his head—”

“Who told you that? If it was that little tart of his, I’ll fix her—”

“You’ll not touch Sharon Doyle.” Kincaid leaned forward, abandoning his amiable pretense. “And you’d better hope she’s not accident prone, because I’ll hold you responsible if she so much as breaks a little finger. Have you got that, sunshine?” He waited until Hicks nodded, then said, “Good. I knew you were a bright boy. Now unfortunately, Connor didn’t discuss his financial problems with Sharon, so you’re going to have to help me out. If Connor owed money to your boss, why did he pay you directly?”

Hicks took a long pull on his lager and fumbled in his jacket pocket until he found a crumpled packet of Benson & Hedges. He lit one with a book of matches bearing the pub’s name, and seemed to gather courage as he drew in the smoke. “Don’t know what you’re talkin’ about, and you can’t—”

“Connor may not have taken very good care of some parts of his life, but in others he was quite meticulous. He recorded every check he wrote—did you know that, Kenneth? You don’t mind if I call you Kenneth, do you?” Kincaid added, all politeness again. When Hicks didn’t reply, he continued. “He paid you large amounts on a very regular basis. I’d be curious to see how those amounts tally with what he owed your boss—”

“You leave him out of this!” Hicks almost shouted, sloshing beer on the table. He looked around to see if anyone else had heard, then leaned forward and lowered his voice to a hiss. “I’m telling you, you leave him—”

“What were you doing, Kenneth? A little loan-sharking on the side? Carrying Con’s debts with interest? Somehow I don’t think your boss would take too kindly to your skimming his clients like that.”

“We had a private arrangement, Con and me. I helped him out when he was in trouble, same as he’d have done for me, same as any mates.”

“Oh, mates, was it? Well, that puts a different complexion on it entirely. I’m sure in that case Connor didn’t mind you making money off his debts.” Kincaid leaned forward, hands on the edge of the table, resisting the urge to grab Hicks by the lapels of his leather bomber jacket and shake him until his brains rattled. “You’re a bloodsucker, Kenneth, and with mates like you nobody needs enemies. I want to know when you saw Connor last, and I want to know exactly what you talked about, because I’m beginning to think Con got tired of paying your cut. Maybe he threatened to go to your boss—is that what happened, Kenneth? Then maybe the two of you had a little scuffle and you pushed him in the river. What do you think, sunshine? Is that how it happened?”

The bar had begun to fill and Hicks had to raise his voice a little to make himself heard over the increasing babble. “No, I’m telling you, man, it wasn’t like that at all.”

“What was it like?” Kincaid said reasonably. “Tell me about it, then.”

“Con had a couple of really stiff losses, close together, couldn’t come up with the ready. I was flush at the time so I covered him. After that it just got to be sort of a habit.”

“A nasty habit, just like gambling, and one I’ll bet Con got fed up with pretty quickly. Con hadn’t written you a check the last few weeks before he died. Was he balking, Kenneth? Had he had enough?”

Perspiration beaded on Hicks’s upper lip and he wiped it with the back of his hand. “No, man, the horses had been good to him the last couple of weeks, for a change. He paid off what he owed—we were square, I swear we were.”

“That’s really heartwarming, just like good little Boy Scouts. I’ll bet you shook hands on it, too.” Kincaid sipped from his glass again, then said conversationally, “Nice local beer, don’t you think?” Before Hicks could reply he leaned across the little table until he was inches from the man’s face. “Even if I believed you, which I don’t, I think you’d look for some other way to soak him. You seem to know a lot about his personal life, considering your business arrangement. Looking for another foothold, were you, Ken? Did you find something out about Connor that he didn’t want anyone else to know?”