Page 85 of Murder on Charity Lane

So I silently vowed to never let this man go and said, “Bring ours to his cottage, we’ll eat with him.”

I went home to grab a few bottles of beer, and changed into sweatpants to further enhance the pizza-eating experience. When I got back, Nicholas and Hamilton were sitting across from each other, two pizza boxes on the coffee table.

I cracked the beers and offered the first to Hamilton.

“It’s not flavored,” he said.

“It’s beer-flavored,” Nicholas told him.

He took a sip, and a knock sounded on the screen door. The three of us turned to the door and waited. We expected a Marigold tenant to simply walk in, so we didn’t respond until a man said, “Hello? It’s Pax? CJ’s friend?”

“Oh,” I said. “Hi!”

“Come in, come in,” Hamilton intoned, in his innkeeper’s voice.

“Thanks.” Pax stepped inside, wearing a shirt with pictures of dogs across his muscular chest. “I’m sorry to bother you.”

“Would you like a glass of small-batch artisanal kombucha? Oh, and feel free to keep your shoes on.”

Pax eyed the complete absence of shoes on the entryway floor, then said, “Uh, thanks.”

“We’ve got plenty of pizza, too,” Nicholas told him.

“I really just wanted to talk to you about CJ?”

“Sure.” Hamilton gestured to the couch. “Make yourself at home.”

As Pax took a seat I realized that the text under the bland-looking dog on his shirt said NAMASIT and the text under the rainbow-colored dog said NAMASTE. Cute.

“So I don’t know if you heard the cops arrested her?” he asked.

“We know,” I told him.

“Right. Well, she asked me to take care of Mouse and Mona—her parakeets.”

“She has birds?” I asked.

“I want a cat,” Hamilton said.

“Why didn’t she ask Ocean?”

Pax shrugged one of his muscle-y shoulders. “She, uh, she’s afraid of imposing on her. A few dates, and she’s already living across the courtyard. She doesn’t want to make Ocean take care of her. She, uh … I just wanted to talk to someone about this. The cops can’t genuinely think she killed Frank, right?”

“They’ve got eyewitnesses,” Hamilton said.

“Karina? Surely, that’s not enough to convict her?”

I swallowed a bite of pizza. “What did she tell you about the accident?”

“Frank tripped, she reached for him. Karina never liked her, she imagined the shove.”

“Two people saw her push him,” Hamilton said.

“What? No. I was there. No one else said a word.”

“Sunny Wheeler just came forward.”

“This doesn’t make any sense.” Pax shifted on the couch. “You’ve met CJ. She’s better than that, she’s more evolved than that.”