"Broussard, John A - Kay Yoshinobu - Saturday Night Special" - читать интересную книгу автора (Broussard John A)

"So he pleads guilty. Period."

"He's not about to do that." Kay quickly repeated Collin's version of the killing.

Sid thought it over. "That story may not be so far-fetched. I've heard of at least one husband trying to pull off that kind of stunt."

Kay nodded. "And the more I think about it, the more inclined I am to believe that Collin is telling the truth. I'm going to start checking his story, beginning at Denny's Shoot-Out."

Sid exhaled loudly. "Here we go again. There's nothing you like to do more than investigating. Why did you ever bother to get a law degree?"

Kay laughed. "Investigating is a nice break from shuffling paper. Want to come along?"

"No thanks. I've got too much paper to shuffle."

Denny -- if the emaciated male cleaning and oiling a revolver was actually Denny -- appreciated the attractive Kay's presence, but insisted he could be of little help. He'd seen the previous night's TV news and admitted to remembering Collin. And he also knew the victim, but he had no memory of ever having seen them together. He couldn't even remember the last time either had been in, and certainly had never heard that his late customer had been looking for someone to do a job for him.

Collin, it turned out, was an irregular customer. On the other hand, the dead man had been a regular one. "They've been coming here since we opened up, about two years ago. At least once a month."

"They?"

"Sure. Him and his wife, usually. They're the best kind of customers. If one of them's in the mood, that usually brings both of them in. She was the eager one, by the way. Knew her guns. Wasn't afraid of them, the way most women are. Damn good shot, too. Not like him."

This bit of news started Kay on a whole new train of speculation, which she slowly and reluctantly had to admit to herself was absurd. Could Collin have been hired by the wife? Could she have been the one who promised the golden fleece? Ridiculous! Collin had nothing to gain by concealing that and a lot to gain by revealing it. The law took a much dimmer view of the one who hired the killer than of the hired killer, himself.

As it was, the wife's testimony both supported and incriminated Collin on everything that occurred in the front hallway of their home. The husband had drawn his gun, aimed it at Collin, squeezed the trigger, but nothing happened. That was when Collin shot him.

Kay couldn't see how the wife could have been the instigator. Yet there was still the inescapable fact that the husband was dead and the wife was still alive. Kay smiled to herself, amused at what the wife as suspect would do to Sid's view of Kay's actions. He would be even more exasperated now that new avenues of investigation had opened up.

Kay couldn't let go of the notion, and she began to come up with endless questions. Was the wife really the one with the money? Did she own a gun? And why had the police shown up so quickly? The next step was the police report, and then background checks on both the husband and the wife.

"So what has Sherlock uncovered so far?" Sid asked, when she'd returned to the office.

"Lots and lots of stuff, Dr. Watson, some of it pertinent, much of it impertinent. The police arrived when they did because the old geezer next door is the kind of nosey busybody every neighborhood should have. He saw Collin prowling around, so he called 911. The police took about ten minutes to get there, just in time to hear the shot. That's when they stormed up the front steps and into the house to find a dead husband, a wife in shock and a burglar with his gun on the floor and his hands in the air. And our old buddy, the nosey neighbor, pays off in other ways."

Sid raised his eyebrows.

"He says that the husband was two-timing his wife, who incidentally was ten years older than her husband and was the one with the money -- and she'd earned every bit of it herself in the travel agency she owned and ran for thirty years. Anyhow, the neighbor says that once, when the wife was off someplace for a week or so, the husband entertained a young chick who stayed over the whole time."

"Ah, a woman scorned."

"Right. But we don't know that she knew she was scorned. Denny, over at the gun club, says they seemed to get along at least as well as most couples."

"Anything else?"

"Uh-huh. The necklace was real. Not that that makes much difference one way or the other, since the husband could still have lied to Collin about that. In fact, if he was setting up Collin, then it makes sense that he would tell him the pearls were fakes. Collin might have gotten suspicious if the husband had offered to let him steal real ones."

Kay paused for a moment. "Also, the necklace being real does kind of fit with the notion that she's a shrewd old gal. Someone who's not about to be fooled by fake pearls the way the husband supposedly described her."

"So all this makes him really desperate to get rid of her since he couldn't hock the pearls, and he wants to -- maybe needs to -- get his hands on money."