“Once he was drunk? Yes. It is illegal in the state of Tennessee to serve alcohol to anyone who is visibly inebriated.” Which she damn well knew.
Davey rolled her eyes. “In a normal bar, that would qualify as a joke.”
“She’s not wrong,” Vance said as he pushed his way through the door, and I wasn’t sure which of us he was talking to.
“The man’s in pain,” my sister insisted. “He wanted to be drunk enough to talk about it with people who could understand. And this is just about the only place around where that’s the case.”
Another loophole in my instruction for my sister to stay away from the homicidal grieving widower.
“I get it. But my orders stand. I’ll see you both tomorrow,” I added as I pulled the fries from the deep frier and salted them. “Thanks for closing.”
I piled a double order into the to-go box, next to the burger Billy had just assembled. “Thanks. You’re the best.” I patted him on the back as he hung up his apron, then I double-checked all the stove and griddle knobs on my way out, to make sure nothing was still running.
As I bagged up the food and added a couple of sodas from the cooler, Vance helped Bishop into my passenger seat and got him buckled.
“I feel so useless,” Bishop slurred as I drove around the building into the front parking lot, then onto the road.
“Because you’re drunk?”
He shook his head. “I’m not useless because I’m drunk, I’m drunk because I’m useless. Austin’s spent the past two days on that damn computer, staring at the screen until his fuckin’ eyes bleed. Tryin’ to help. Using detective skills I just don’t have. If it isn’t posted on Facebook or searchable on Google, I don’t have any idea what I’m doing, online.”
Most of the information Austin was looking forwason Facebook or Google, but I lacked the patience to explain that to a drunkard. So I kept quiet.
“Meanwhile I just pace around behind him, asking if he’s making any progress, until he basically orders me out of the house. I bet that’s what you’ve been doing all day too. Searching obituaries? Looking for more murder victims?”
“Notallday.” The zone still had to be run, even with a murder case on my plate. As did the Fat Cat. But yes, I’d spent several hours scanning obituaries from the past twelve months, in my assigned Tennessee and Mississippi counties.
We’d divvied up the work, to make sure we weren’t duplicating our efforts.
“Well, all I could think to do was call Yvie’s friends. The ones I had numbers for, anyway.”
“Her friends? Humans, I assume?”
“Yeah. All of them. But I figured that if she wasn’t robbed—if she really had plans for that money—she might have told one of them.”
I turned to look at him while my car idled at a red light. “Bishop, that was agreatidea.” And so simple I hadn’t even thought of it.
“Wish I’d thought to do that sooner. But we just assumed she was robbed when she was attacked.”
“Did her friends know anything?”
He shook his head. “Not one of them. Her old college roommate, though, said she didn’t think Yvie would have spent all that cash at once. She’d been saving for years, and everything other than what she spent on her wedding dress—Yvie and Austin’s parents are dead, so they were no help with the wedding—she had earmarked as a down payment on a bigger house. We were hoping to get one of our own. To stop paying rent, you know? And Yvie’s old roommate said she wanted one with a nursery. That she was hoping to get pregnant, in a couple of years.”
Bishop broke down into the kind of full body wrenching sobs that can tear a man apart. They shook my whole car.
I had no idea how to react. How to comfort him.
I’m not good with emotion. Not the kind you can see, anyway.
Fortunately, by then we were pulling into the Pine Cove parking lot.
I parked in front of 2A and flashed my brights through the window. As I was helping Bishop out of the car, Austin opened the door. “Help me get him into bed,” I said as I looped Bishop’s arm around my shoulder.
“How the hell did he get that drunk?” Austin took his brother-in-law from me, effortlessly supporting the man’s weight. Practically carrying him toward the door as I ducked into the back seat for the food.
“My sister may be the most generous bartender on the planet.” I followed him inside and set the food on the breakfast bar, then I trailed him into the bedroom.
Where I stopped in the doorway, suddenly struggling to breathe.
