Free Here Comes the Corpse by Mark Richard Zubro Page B

one side. In it Donny had stuffed a thick roll of bills including some hundreds and fifties, a credit card with his dad’s name on it, and the remnants of a plane ticket, one-way from Atlanta to Chicago.
    “Why did he come here?” Scott asked. “What wild and romantic dreams were in his head?”
    “Lot of money.”
    The shower stopped. I scooped up everything except one pair of boxer shorts and stuffed it all into the backpack. We dropped his possessions in a hall closet. We sat in the kitchen to wait. The explosion wasn’t long in coming. He marched into the room, hair still wet, boxer shorts on, a towel in his left hand. He had small tufts of hair around each nipple. He was skinny to the point of emaciation, belying the amount of food he’d devoured last night. He had a tattoo of a scorpion around his navel.
    “What the hell is going on!” he demanded.
    “Precisely.” Scott’s quite cryptic when he’s pissed.
    “Where’s my stuff?”
    “Safe,” Scott said.
    “You took my money.”
    “Yes.”
    “You guys are perverts. I’ll accuse you of trying to molest me.”
    I remained impassive. Scott scowled. While the kid glared from one to the other of us, Scott let the silence build several more beats, then said, “Of all the places on the planet to choose from, you came here. Why?”
    “Can I at least have my pants?”
    “Why here?” Scott asked.
    “I told you last night.”
    “Why?” Scott reiterated.
    “I want my pants.”
    “Where’d you get all that money?”
    “Savings. I want my pants.”
    I got up, left the room, made sure I wasn’t followed, retrieved his pants, and brought them back. The kid was standing at the window looking out at the lake. I handed him his pants and sat back down next to Scott. The kid yanked his pants on and then glared at us.
    “Silence is not going to work,” Scott said.
    “You can’t keep me here,” Donny said.
    “That presumes we want you to stay,” Scott said.
    Donny looked a trifle disconcerted at that.
    The intercom phone buzzed. I picked it up, listened, and hung up. I turned to Donny. “The police are here,” I announced.
    “You can’t make me talk to them,” Donny said.
    “What’s the big deal about giving them a statement?” Scott asked. “There was a murder at our wedding, and if they have a few questions, why would that cause you such anxiety? Unless you lied to us last night.”
    “I didn’t lie.” Donny had added a bit of a snap to his usual snarl.
    “Then I don’t see the problem,” Scott said.
    “You can’t let them question me. You can’t tell them I was there.”
    I left the room to let the cops in.

8
     
    When I got back to them, I introduced Detectives Rohter and Hoge from the night before.
    Hoge said, “We stopped by to check a few things.” The detectives sat three feet apart on our white couch. Scott and I sat opposite them with our knees touching. Donny sat to our left, their right.
    Rohter said, “We’ve got thirty-seven people at the wedding who knew Mr. Gahain.”
    I said, “That sounds right. There were a lot of folks there from the old neighborhood. My parents, old friends, people from high school.”
    “And you guys,” Rohter said.
    I said, “Scott had never met him until last night.”
    Rohter added, “Except for his relatives and you, none claimed to have talked to him in the past five years.”
    “I haven’t talked to him much recently.”
    “Why is that?”
    “We drifted apart as adults. He moved to St. Louis a couple years ago.”
    Rohter said, “We haven’t been able to pin down his movements at the reception. No one admits to seeing him heading to that washroom. Mostly he’s reported to have been sitting by himself in a corner or at a table with no one on either side of him.”
    “It was a big party,” I said. “No one was expecting to have to remember details as possible murder witnesses.”
    Hoge said, “We were hoping we’d find someone.”
    Scott pointed to Donny. “He heard the