In Marvin’s office, he said, “I thought you fuckers had retired.”
“No,” Leonard said. “We were on strike.”
“For what?”
“Better working conditions
Well, you’re shit out of luck.”
“What we figured,” Leonard said. “That’s why the strike is over.”
Marvin eyed me. “You’re awful quiet. Usually I can’t shut you up. No wisecracks?”
“Not today,” I said.
“Hap found a body. Bert, Mini’s stepdad. He’s been killed.”
“No shit,” Marvin said.
“I just missed the murderer,” I said, and I told him what we knew. About how Bert was scared, and claimed to have information, and then he was dead. I told him about the SUV, the phone call from Bert’s phone.
“You tell the police?” Marvin asked.
“Not yet.”
“That’s not smart,” Marvin said.
“I haven’t been feeling smart,” I said. “I have been, shall we say, under the weather.”
“I can work this out a bit,” Marvin said. “An anonymous tip. Let the cops know the body is there, but not who told them. Or I know a couple of them well enough they’ll pretend they don’t know who told them. You all right, Hap?”
“Pretty much,” I said.
Marvin picked up a pencil from his desk and tapped his teeth with it. “How does Bert’s murder tie in with the rest of it?”
“Therein lies the pickle,” Leonard said. “We don’t know.”
The pickle of it all hung in the air like a zeppelin.
“So we don’t know shit?” Marvin asked.
“If we do,” Leonard said, “we haven’t figured out that we do. Not yet. But no doubt in our minds, it’s all connected.”
“You said Bert thought someone was after him?” Marvin said. “Couldn’t it have been someone else did it? Someone not connected to all this? I mean some reason besides our case?”
“Yeah,” I said. “But it’s all a little too sweet to be a coincidence. We talk to Bert. He wants to see us. He ends up dead. And I get a call on his phone, and a hang-up. I think that was a kind of threat. A warning at least.”
“All right, then,” Marvin said. “See if you can tie it all together.”
“We will go about detecting, then,” Leonard said, standing up.
“You mean you two will go about bumbling in the hopes that happens to lead to something.”
“Yeah,” Leonard said. “That’s pretty much it.”