Free Last to Know by Elizabeth Adler Page A

brought their families, wives and kids, swimming and hollering and building new frame houses with shingle roofs and porches and wooden jetties; to more recently, when the lake had been “discovered” as a resort and grander homes built, painted white or pastel with proper green-tiled roofs and expensive professional boats moored outside though never, never had powerboats been allowed to desecrate the ecology of the lake, which to this day, as Len would verify, was as pristine as the day he’d first arrived.
    “And when was that?” curious listeners to the lake history might ask. And Len would say, as he always did, it was some time ago now.
    In fact Len was sixty, and looked older. Thirty of those years had been spent at the lake and he considered it his own. He lived in his green A-frame, drank his Jameson, and every now and again went off on his “travels.” He helped out for a fee when a neighbor needed a hand—he was good at things like electrical wiring, small plumbing disasters, the occasional flood. He carved soft pine tables to go out on terraces, made bookshelves, anything people wanted at modest prices. And if he had any other little business going on the side, nobody gave a damn. Len was a fixture, the place simply would not be the same without him.
    Harry and Rossetti were on their way to question Len. “Why are we doin’ this?” Rossetti grumbled, chugging his precious BMW up the dirt slope leading to the Doutzer compound. “It’s killin’ my car.”
    “Nothing kills BMWs.” Harry closed his window so the dust would not blow onto Squeeze. The dog hunkered down in the backseat, not enjoying the ride. “Len Doutzer is the eyes and ears of Evening Lake. Anything untoward, he would be the one who’d know about it. Besides, I believe it might have been him in the second boat that night.”
    “So? Then why wasn’t he down there immediately with the others when the house blew up? Where was he when the girl was drowning? Why has he not come forward since to offer any information he might have, instead of us trekking to his goddamn shack to question him?”
    Harry shrugged. He had asked himself that question and come up with no logical answer. “Maybe he’s a man who knows more than he wants to tell,” he said. “Just maybe he knew things about the Havnel woman, he could see her house easily from his perch up here on the hill, see the comings and goings.”
    “Seems there were not too many of those,” Rossetti said, as Harry swung the car to a stop in a flourish of dust, in front of the seedy A-frame with its grime-encrusted windows and the front door fastened with a ridiculously large padlock.
    “Why a padlock?” Rossetti asked, because it was obvious all a would-be intruder had to do was smash the window and he’d be in inside a second. And anyhow, from the look of the place, there would be nothing worth breaking-and-entering for.
    There was no doorbell so Harry knocked. They waited. Rossetti traced the toe of his shoe in the dust, writing his name. Squeeze refused to get out of the car and sat with his snout sticking out the window, watching. Nothing was happening.
    “He’s probably in his work shed in back,” Harry said, walking round the corner. Rossetti ambled distastefully after him. Give him urban squalor any time.
    The shed was probably less than six hundred square feet, hand-built, without a permit, Harry knew, years ago by Len. Nobody had thought it worthwhile objecting. Len kept his gardening stuff and work tools in there. Oddly for such a rough man who cared nothing for his appearance, Len was known to wear yellow rubber household gloves when he worked. Jokes had been made in the bar at his expense, about him needing a manicure, which he took with silence and a small twisted smile.
    Harry and Rossetti stood outside his workshop and hammered on the door, calling his name.
    Suddenly that door was inched open and Len was looking back at them, his eyes narrowed in a squint as