Doris wasn’t able to get around to actually talking to any of her Santa candidates due to an influx of extremely minor domestic and automotive squabbles. She only managed to get shed of them after her normal quitting time and didn’t have a chance to think things over before she got home. Milt had again done the honors for dinner, only this time it was leftovers from the night before—beef stew that actually tasted better for a night sitting in the fridge. Over dinner, she and Milt exchanged the day’s events and after Milt started a fresh pot of coffee, sat back and relaxed. Another cup of coffee was more than Doris could stand the thought of, so she got a beer, opened it and broached the subject of clandestine book mailing.
Milt listened intently. After all, part of the pattern involved the Newport Post Office, his turf, and Doris was enough of a traditionalist to keep jurisdiction in mind. After he’d heard the entire episode, complete with commentary on the vagrancies of postal workers, he looked thoughtful for a moment and then asked, “Doris, why are you pursuing this?”
Doris felt a figurative leash tighten. She would have bristled had Milt’s tone not been so mild, but instead paused for a moment. This was one of those borderland questions married couples wander around in through most of their years of marriage. Slowly, finally, she sighed and replied, “Milt, you know why. It’ll drive me nuts not to know. No, I don’t have any real reason to go looking for our book-legger. But I can’t just drop it.”
Milt shifted ground in as smooth a move as any Olympic Gold Medal gymnast ever exhibited. “You plan on trying to recreate all the notes Norm Lilly sent you?”
Doris blinked. Twice. Her expression grew faintly perplexed as her gears shifted, and cogs meshed sluggishly together. Norm Lilly, a man with a heart as big as a decayed pomegranate seed, had conspired to send Doris a box full of evidence he’d gathered over the years on most everybody in the town of Toledo. He’d counted on both Doris’s dedication as a cop and her inflamed sense of curiosity to delve into that box, and then be forced to file charges on most of the city’s upstanding citizens. She’d fooled him, though. Evidence of crimes or not, she’d burned the contents without looking at any of it. Something that Milt knew he could never have done.
“Well… no. I couldn’t even if I wanted to. Which I don’t.”
“Why is that?”
“Milt, what the devil… oh. Damn.” She fell silent for almost twenty seconds. She’d had no problem destroying Norm Lilly’s box of evidence. Never lost a minute of sleep wondering about the contents. So why should she be forced to stock up on sedatives after getting a trio of Time/Life books in the mail? “Damn you, Milt. Why did you have to bring that up?”
“Because you needed to hear it, I expect. Or I’m bored. You tell me.” His expression left no doubt that it was the former, but being Milt Owens, a cop who almost always kept his options open, he allowed her the luxury of choosing one.
“You’re so smart sometimes you make my skin crawl. That’s a terrible thing to do to me. Now I have to drop it.”
“Doris, you would have anyway, if there’d been much going on in town. If something important had come up, you would have relegated it to a back burner and eventually gotten used to the idea that you’d never find the person. Knowing you, you might even have decided by that time that it was a good thing to have a dark secret like that.”
Doris almost smiled. Milt had a point. It was true. Nothing was going on in town, for which she ought to be grateful, and if something had come up, well… she knew she’d have dumped the book-legger in favor of a real crime. “Hugh isn’t going to like it. What am I going to tell him?”
Milt got up and began to clear the dinner dishes, rinsing the bowls out once before putting them in their dishwasher. He merely shrugged. Doris’s rhetorical questions generally got non-verbal responses from him; that was the best she was liable to get.
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