"The Golden Calf Obligation" - Chapter 12

[seymoure]

Chester Comes Through

"It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important."

-Arthur Conan Doyle

Chester and I spent a lost evening sifting through those case histories that had been delivered from the insurance company to my room.

There was very little that looked like evidence.

That doesn’t mean there wasn’t anything good; it just needed the flame of the moment to light the way. There might be that moment when the new perspective would make something from this pile of insignificance scream with import.

But, so far, there was nothing.

For dinner, I challenged my gout with cold asparagus, straight from the can.

I slept too long the next morning. What in my youth would have been a glorious rest was filled with aching joints screaming displeasure at me. Had I been home, I would have cancelled everything and had a couple of shots of Amaretto and some forgotten TV shows (maybe some “Tenspeed & Brownshoe” or “The Rogues”) to fill the empty morning.

But I had made a commitment to Eddie, and myself. Also to Chester, who was really beginning to get into being a detective; I couldn’t let him down either.

“Hey, boss,” was Chester’s voice on the phone. “I may have something, or maybe it’s nothing.”

“Deal the cards, I’ll decide if we got a hand,” I was instantly sorry for saying it. It wasn’t me. It may have come from some dime detective novel I had read some time.

But it made Chester sound a little more excited.

“I found some sheets from a desk calendar. They were just scattered in among the papers. But I put them in order and guess what?”

He waited a second, and when I said nothing he went on.

“Out of 12 of the last days of his life Gary Barton had 9 notations of a meeting or something with the same person. It’s somebody named ‘W. Simonson.’”

If I could have whistled, I would have.

“Chester, I think you may have given us a break- through.”

I heard a nice drawing-in of breath on his side of the line. Then, “You really think so?”

“If we can find out who this guy (or gal) is and put them together with Terry Mahoney, we might start to get some picture of what this case looks like.”

“So how do we find them?”

“That’s going to be a lot of grunt work,” I told him. “Phone calls, interviews with other witnesses, stuff like that. The kind of detective work they don’t put in most novels because it’s not very dramatic. But that’s the heart of what real detective work is: going again and again to the well until you get enough water to fill the bucket.”

Now we had something to work with.

 

© C. Wayne Owens

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