Page 8 of Never Flinch

The nurse, an old vet who still wears head-to-toe white rayon, leans forward and speaks in a low tone. “His doc says a matter of weeks. I’d guess two, maybe less. He would have been shipped home except for the insurance coverage, which must have been a hell of a lot better than mine. He’ll slip into a coma, and then good morning, good afternoon, goodnight.”

Izzy, mindful of Holly Gibney’s pet peeve about insurance companies: “I’m surprised the company didn’t find a way to wiggle out of it. I mean, hedidframe a man who got murdered in prison. Did you know about that?”

“Of course I know,” the nurse says. “He brags about howsorryhe is. Seen aminister. I say crocodile tears!”

Tom says, “The DA declined to prosecute, says Tolliver’s full of shit, so he gets a pass and his insurance company gets the bill.”

The nurse rolls her eyes. “He’s full of something, all right. Try the solarium first.”

As they walk down the corridor, Izzy thinks that if there’s an afterlife, Alan Duffrey may be waiting there for his one-time colleague, Cary Tolliver. “And he’ll want to have a few words.”

Tom looks at her. “What?”

“Nothing.”

5

Holly pulls the last of the Global Insurance forms in front of her, sighs, grabs her pen—these forms have to be filled out by hand if she wants a chance at finding the missing trinkets, God knows why—and then puts it down. She picks up her phone and looks at the letter from BillWilson, whoever he might really be. It’s not her case and she’d never poach it from Isabelle, but Holly can feel her lights turning on, nevertheless. Her job is often boring, there’s too much paperwork, and right now cases—good ones, engaging ones—are thin on the ground, so she’s interested. There’s something else, too, even more important. When her interior lights come on… she loves that. Adores it.

“This is not my business. Shoemaker, stick to thy last.”

One of her father’s sayings. Her late mother, Charlotte, had a thousand pithy aphorisms, her father only a few… but she remembers every one of them. What is a shoemaker’s last, anyway? She has no idea and quashes the urge to google it. She does know whatherlast is: filling out this last form, then checking pawnshops and fences for a bunch of jewelry stolen from a rich widow in Sugar Heights. If she can find that stuff, she’ll get a bonus from Buster the Talking Donkey.Which he’ll probably poop out of his butt, she thinks.Very reluctantly.

She sighs, picks up her pen again, puts it down, and writes an email instead.

Iz—You’ll know this already, it’s pretty obvious, but the guy you are looking for is smart. He talks about the Blackstone Rule, which isn’t in an uneducated man’s vocabulary. I believe the innocent should be punished for the needless death of an innocent might be a cuckoo sentiment, but you have to admit it’s a nicely turned phrase. Balanced. All his punctuation is perfect. Note the use of colons in the heading and how he uses Cc in reference to Chief Patmore. In the old days, when I was doing office correspondence, that stood for “carbon copy.” Now it just means “also sent to,” and is commonly used in business. Suggests to me your Bill Wilson may be a white-collar guy.

Now as to that name, Bill Wilson. I don’t think he picked it out of a hat. (Assuming he is male.) It’s not impossible that he met the murdered man, Alan Duffrey, in AA or NA. (Also assuming it’s Duffrey the letter-writer is on about.) You might be able to reach out to someone who goes to those meetings. If not, I have a source who’s in NA and quite open about it. He’s a bartender (of all things), six years clean and sober. He, or someone you can tap, might be ableto spot someone clean-cut and well-spoken. Someone who might even have said something in a meeting about Duffrey, or “That guy who got stabbed in prison.” The anonymity aspect of AA and NA makes this a long shot, but it might be possible to locate the guy this way. Slim chance, I know, but it’s a line of investigation.

Holly

She puts her cursor on the send button, then adds a few more lines.

PS! Did you notice he misspelled Lewis Warwick’s first name? If you catch someone you think might be your man, don’t ask him to write his name. I repeat, this guy isn’t stupid. Ask him to write something like, “I have never liked Lewis Black.” See if he spells it Louis. You probably know all this, but I’m sitting here with nothing to do.

H

She reads this over, then addsPPS! Lewis Black is a comedian. She considers this and decides Izzy might think thatHollythinks Izzy is stupid, or a cultural illiterate. She deletes it, then thinks,She really might not know who Lewis Black is, and puts the line back in. These sorts of things torture her.

Bill Hodges, who founded Finders Keepers, once told Holly that she over-empathized with people, and when Holly replied,You say that like it’s a bad thing, Bill said,In this business, it can be.

She sends the email, and tells herself to get off her buttinsky (that one’s all Charlotte Gibney) and start looking for the missing jewelry. But she sits where she is a little longer, because something Izzy said is troubling her.

“No, not Izzy.Barbara.”

Holly is computer savvy—it’s how she and Jerome bonded—but she’s old-school about appointments and keeps a datebook in her purse. She hunts it out now and pages through it until she gets to the end of May. There she has writtenKate McKay, MA 8 PM. Maybe?MA standing for Mingo Auditorium.

Holly goes to the movies fairly often since Covid abated (always wearing her mask if the theater is even half-full), but she rarely goes to lectures and concerts. She thought she might go to the McKay lecture, though. If, that is, she didn’t have to wait in line too long, and assuming she could get in at all. Holly doesn’t agree with everything McKay espouses, but when she talks about the sexual abuse of women, Holly Gibney is right there with her. She herself was sexually abused as a young woman and knows few women—including Izzy Jaynes—who were not, in one way or another. Also, Kate McKay has what Holly thinks of asstrut. Never having been much of a strutter herself, Holly approves of that. She supposes she had some strut when it came to the Harrises, but that was mostly a matter of survival. Also luck.

She decides she’ll sort out the double-booking mystery later. Because she still has a tendency to blame herself for things, she supposes she might have written down the wrong date. Either way, it seems to be her fate to be in the Mingo Auditorium on the night of Saturday, May 31st, and as much as she admires Kate McKay’s strut, on the whole she’d rather be with Barbara.

“Jewelry,” she says, getting up. “Must find jewelry.” The Global Insurance forms can wait until later.

6

Izzy has an idea how the First Lake City Bank chief loan officer should look, maybe from a brochure she got in the mail, or a TV show. Slightly pudgy but well-groomed, nice suit, cologne (not too much), pleasant smile, all ready to say,How much do you need?

Cary Tolliver is not that man.

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