Hawk Moon by Ed Gorman Page B

lay a most impressive tennis court. Not only was it a double court, it was an illuminated double court. Only one of the courts was presently being used. Claire and Perry Heston were playing, both looking fit and eager in their tennis whites that glowed in the early afternoon sunlight.
    I was still sleepy and it showed in the slowness of my walk. I'd finally gotten to sleep around 9.00 A.M., after telling Chief Gibbs about finding the arm. He seemed wary of the fact that not only had I been one of the dreaded Feds — a criminal profiler, no less — but that I now possessed a private investigator's license and worked freelance for both law enforcement and criminal-defense attorneys. He didn't seem mollified at all that I was writing a book of Iowa history, and that I was presently occupied on a long chapter about law enforcement. He just couldn't find much to like about me at all.
    I'd had five restless hours of sleep — sometimes when I take a certain amount of troubles to bed, I have nightmares about my wife's death again — when I was awakened by Cindy at my motel-room door.
    She was no longer depressed and vulnerable. She was angry. She said that there were certain white men in this town who now had a good excuse to track and kill an Indian, namely David. She said that David would be too afraid and stubborn to turn himself in so, if he ever crossed paths with those men, he would fight back and they would kill him.
    She said I had to help. Had to. There was nobody else she could turn to. She said she'd work the settlement, asking questions of anybody who knew David well, trying to find out about his relationship to the woman in the trunk. By now, I'd told her not only about the arm but also about the fire-gutted mansion I'd followed David to. I said I had a vague feeling that maybe the Hestons, and their hulking friend Bryce Cook, might know something about the old Victorian house. She pleaded with me to go talk to them.
    So here I stood watching the Hestons play tennis.
    From what I could see, and from what little I knew about the game, they looked reasonably good. They certainly looked energetic.
    When Perry Heston finally realized who was walking down the stone steps toward him — he'd been glancing at me on and off for the past half-minute — he did a very strange thing.
    He stopped playing altogether.
    His wife's volley went zooming past his shoulder but he paid it no attention whatsoever.
    He just stood, hands on hips, watching me.
    His face bore the same disdain for weary travelers that the front of his house did.
    Before I'd even reached the courts, he said, "Just what the hell are you doing here, Mr. Payne?"
    "I came to talk to you."
    "Not to me, Mr. Payne. Because I don't want to talk to you. Everything I ever had to say to you, I said last night. And now I want you the hell off my property."
    Claire looked both slightly afraid and embarrassed. "Honey, why don't you give Mr. Payne a chance—"
    "I won't give Mr. Payne a chance to do diddly shit."
    "Honey, please—"
    "Go in the house, Claire."
    She started to say something but before she could get the words out, he repeated: "Go in the house."
    Like a reluctant child, she looked first at him, then at me and then she leaned down and picked up a lime-green tennis ball, tucked her racket under her arm, and left.
    She was just as gorgeous in the daylight, a forty-ish woman who took fierce pride in her face and body. She was going to battle time to her last breath. Only the melancholy of her blue eyes said that there was more to her than another fading country club beauty.
    "He's really not a bad guy," she said to me as she came out of the door of the fencing.
    "I'm sure we'll be great pals."
    She paused a moment, and said, in a voice her husband wouldn't be able to hear, "I'm sorry about the girl being murdered, Mr. Payne."
    "I told you to go in the house," Perry Heston said from the court.
    There were probably at least two or three people on the planet who would