Page 86 of Murder on Charity Lane

“Why would they lie?” I asked him.

“Well, Karina saw what she wanted to see. But Sunny? Yeah. I don’t know.”

“Why didn’t he speak up immediately?” Nicholas asked. “Did Karina bribe him?”

Pax shook his head regretfully. “That part is very Sunny. Taking his time to think through what speaking up meant for him.”

“Didn’t he send in a written statement?” I asked Hamilton.

Hamilton nodded. “I’m sure once the cops interview him, they’ll learn more.”

“They’ll learn he was too drunk to know what he was seeing,” Pax insisted, then he gave an apologetic smile and stood. “Sorry for crashing your pizza party. I just—the whole thing is so mind-boggling. And now there’s a second witness.”

“Maybe Sunny’s covering his tracks,” I suggested.

Nicholas nodded. “Yeah, apparently Frank helped Sunny with a legal problem, so they could be, like, entwined somehow.”

“I love a tragic backstory,” I said.

“That’s so playwright of you.”

I chased my last bite of pizza with a sip of Nicholas’s beer. “We need to talk to Sunny. And I still think we’re overlooking clues in the staging. Like in the background. Obvious things we’re overlooking.”

“Not your killer ice cubes again,” Nicholas said.

“You could murder someone with an icicle and there’d be no weapon once it melted,” I informed him.

“Is that from an Agatha Christie novel?” he asked.

“Die Hard 2,” Hamilton murmured.

“I’m just saying those ice cubes on the stairs were suspicious,” I told them. “Anyway, there’s only one thing that will make them dismiss CJ as suspect.”

“What’s that?” Pax asked.

“Finding a better suspect.”

Even as the words left my mouth, I felt Nicholas tense. Like I was about to admit to Pax that we’d “found” better suspects for the murders of James Dedrick and Gregory Ybarra and framed Lily-Ann’s ex-husband, Piotr.

So I added, “That is, the person who actually did kill him.”

“Or we can prove it was an accident,” Hamilton said.

“Is that possible?” I asked. “To prove that nobody did it?”

“Probably not,” Pax said, scratching his flat stomach through his namaste shirt. “I can’t see the police backpedaling from ‘we found the killer’ to ‘oops, he just tripped.’ They’ll keep going until someone’s in jail for life.”

40

OCEAN

The scent of potting soil wafted around Ocean as she crouched in the courtyard. A leaf blower roared across the street, and Miles peered at her from beside the planter, all big eyes and silent pleading.

She pretended she didn’t see him, and focused on planting the new trays of marigolds.

“O-ma!” he said.

“I’m sorry,” she told him, “there’s nothing else we can do.”