by Linda Seals
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The day before the Denver trip I was in Hammett’s visiting with Vicki Sinclair as I cleaned up my plate full of a Dash green special. Willard Franklin and the boys were at their usual table nursing coffee cups, and they lazily gave me friendly nods as I came in. I hadn’t been in for awhile, and I missed the place. Vicki stood leaning against the back of the cracked naugahide booth, always keeping an eye out for Jean.
“He turned out to be just the phony we thought,” she said in her husky voice, referring to the news about Barry Correda. “Asshole.”
Vicki Sinclair had had her own experiences with plenty of asshole boyfriends, so she knew what she was talking about. Her last one had used her good nature to sponge off her for years before she dumped him. Yet she kept an open heart, I acknowledged to myself, and was farther down that compassionate road than I had gone.
“I wonder what’s really going on,” she asked, “like, why did he have to disappear, too, and why did Shannon have to be silenced in the first place?”
“What did Shannon find? Lots of money missing in a real estate deal? I mean, that happened to Andrea,” I said. “Could have happened at Binder Enterprises.”
“Yeah, that or money from a drug deal,” she said. I knew boyfriend problems had acquainted her with that kind of trouble, too. “Every time there’s lots of money involved I think about drugs. Some people’s greed convinces them that they need yet more money, and the quickest way is drugs, they think.” She scowled as I guessed she remembered some related incident in her past.
Isabelle and I had briefly discussed money and drugs in one phone call or another, but we hadn’t made any connecting dots to make the idea work. Now Barry Correda’s faked death made it seem like a bigger group was involved. If Shannon discovered something at Binder Enterprises, then were Phillip and Cowboy Binder involved? Was it drugs?
“Git in here, by god! Do you think I kin do this all by myself?” Jean shouted out from the kitchen. Re-tying her apron and sticking a pencil behind her ear, Vicki Sinclair nodded at me and sauntered back to the counter. I realized that I’d been chatting too long, as usual, and I had work to do, since I would be gone all the next day. First, I had to get the dogs out to Carol’s—they were in need of some running room, and I didn’t want to worry about Patsy digging out in her impatience for me to come home—and then Liz and I had a client’s gutters to clean. I pushed out of the familiar door and on to the street.