Free The April Fools' Day Murder by Lee Harris Page A

windows—I had a sense that Toni didn’t want to be seen, or perhaps didn’t want to be seen with me—and she suggested pancakes and sausage.
    “Sounds good to me,” I said.
    She repeated the order to the waitress and asked for lots of coffee. Then she turned to me. “Mom told me about what happened on Saturday before Dad was killed, how you came upon him by accident.”
    “I was very embarrassed,” I admitted. “I got the policeup there for nothing. They were very nice about it but I’m not sure they appreciated an April Fool’s Day prank.”
    “You did the right thing. I’m sure you know that. Mom knows about you because she’s taught Sunday school at our church and she met the Grants. You helped out a friend of Amy’s a couple of years ago.”
    “Oh yes. That was a very strange case, a tragedy that happened on Valentine’s Day up near Buffalo.”
    “That’s what Amy said. She couldn’t say enough good things about you, Chris. She also told us you’d managed to solve some other murders that eluded the police.”
    “I have. With a lot of help from my husband, who’s a detective sergeant with the NYPD, and also from my former General Superior at St. Stephen’s Convent.”
    “Of course,” she said, as though something had just cleared up for her. “You’re the ex-nun.”
    “I didn’t know that was well-known.”
    “But it is. I think everyone in town knew when the Greenwillow affair happened.”
    I smiled. “The Greenwillow affair” referred, I supposed, to the moving of Gene’s residence into Oakwood and my part in getting it there. “And here I thought I was anonymous.”
    “Hardly,” Toni said. “I want to tell you some things about my father, things I don’t want to discuss with the police.”
    “Do they have a bearing on his murder?”
    “I don’t know. Maybe you can figure it out. Mom and I talked last night about what you said about the gunshot wound. I can tell you it didn’t happen while Mom knew Dad, and that’s a pretty long time, like almost half a century.”
    “Then it happened earlier. And your mother’s probably right. He was in the war. He may have gotten shot.”
    “Dad has an old friend who lives in New York. They were in the war together.”
    “Interesting,” I said.
    “And they’ve been friends forever. Maybe he knows something that Mom doesn’t know. Will you talk to him?”
    “If you’d like me to.”
    “Good. I’ll call him when I get home and set something up. I don’t want my mother to know. She’s very upset, as you can imagine, and she doesn’t need anything else to worry about. My brother is enough of a worry at this moment.”
    “Is there a problem?” I asked innocently.
    “I hope not. It’s just that he’s not available and he should be. I don’t know why he’s working so hard when his father has just died and his mother is grieving. It seems to me there are times that you set aside your work and put your family first.”
    I agreed with her but I didn’t want to break a confidence. Maybe he just didn’t want to be around his wife, I thought. “I understand he didn’t get along with your father.”
    “That’s true.” The pancakes came, fragrant and warm, and she paused till the waitress left. “They look good, don’t they?” She smiled and started buttering hers. “Roger and Dad never saw eye-to-eye on anything. If Roger wanted to read fiction, Dad thought it should be nonfiction. If Roger wanted to study German, Dad thought it should be French. I know these seem like petty disputes, but in my family they were magnified. Dad wanted Roger to becomea doctor or lawyer; Roger majored in history and then kicked around for a couple of years doing nothing. My father thought that doing nothing was about the worst thing a young man could do. They stopped speaking to each other around then and they never really started after that.”
    “What did Roger do eventually?” I asked. I assumed he had a job. The house he owned cost a