Free Eleven Little Piggies by Elizabeth Gunn Page A

that’s what you’re trying to find out.’
    Now that
, I briefly thought of saying,
sounds more than a little hostile.
But then I’d be tetchy too if my wife had quit sharing my bedroom. In fact, I’d be too pissed off to think about much else for quite a while, I realized, and wanted to ask Ethan Kester how long ago she had moved out and how the marriage was going since then. But it didn’t seem to bear on the crime at hand so I shook off that distraction and pressed on, anxious to get out of his bleak morning bedroom and get on with his day.
    â€˜Anybody see you arrive at your office?’
    â€˜No. Well, maybe the janitorial service in the building. Sometimes we run into each other, sometimes we don’t. I’m trying to remember if I saw any of them Saturday morning. I don’t think so.’ He thought. ‘I log in on my computer first thing – I guess you could check that.’
    â€˜Uh-huh.’ We looked at each other across our mutual awareness that anybody could boot up his computer if he wanted them to. Did he have a little helper? ‘But nobody else comes in early?’
    â€˜My secretary gets there about eight.’ He paused a couple of beats. ‘Usually.’ He seemed to reconsider. ‘Actually, my Saturday secretary sometimes comes in a little earlier.’
    I was just going to make a note: Secretary, 8 a.m., till he added that carefully considered, ‘Usually.’ I looked up then, in time to see him lick his lips, and add the third estimate of his secretary’s arrival time. By the time he’d said ‘my Saturday secretary’, I had quit writing and was watching him carefully.
    â€˜Your Saturday secretary?’ I asked him. ‘You have different ones for different days?’
    â€˜Only on Saturday. The regular one, Angela, works five days a week, and until recently I got along without help on Saturday. But lately my work load’s been heavier, so we found a student from the college to come in for one day.’ He looked into the corner of the interview room for a few seconds before he added: ‘And sometimes she comes earlier so she can get away earlier. For a, you know, a game or something.’
    I said, ‘How much earlier?’
    â€˜Well, last Saturday I believe it was actually around seven.’ He still seemed uncommonly interested in the corner of the interview room, which was dingy and undecorated and only three feet away.
    I said, ‘Give me her name and address.’
    â€˜Patty . . . um, Patricia. Is it Johnson or Carlson?’ He said he didn’t know, offhand, where she lived – had trouble saying the word ‘offhand’. But, let’s see, he guessed he knew her email address. After some confusion over where to put the dots he said he’d send it to me.
    By now I wanted that Saturday secretary right here in the interview room with us, and the hell with her email address. But I didn’t want Ethan to get back up on his high horse, and I thought that whether they were working or romping she was a witness to his whereabouts, so I just asked him to send it as soon as he got back to his office, and went on with what I really wanted to know: did he stay in his office till he got the news about his brother?
    â€˜Sure did,’ he said, ‘because I was working on a land deal for a difficult client who’s always in a hurry. It was complicated, a three-way swap involving land and money and they both kept moving the goalposts so I—’
    â€˜I don’t need all the details,’ I said. Like all of us, Ethan thought his own work was fascinating.
    â€˜OK, well, I was still working on that when Doris called from the farm. Crying, saying that Owen was dead.’
    â€˜What time was that?’ I was looking for wiggle room, holes in the story.
    â€˜I don’t remember exactly but I’ll get it for you. It was whenever I logged off my