Free The Wind Chill Factor by Thomas Gifford Page B

windowsill. It was stuffy in the room; the radiator was gurgling, sounding as if it needed a Bromo. Peterson was wearing a navy blue turtleneck and his concession to fashion was making him sweat. He was staring out the window at the snow and a copy of Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key lay open in his lap.
    “You know, Cooper,” he said without looking at me, “this kind of a storm, this really brutish kind of a storm, does funny things to my mind. Do you know what I mean?” He glanced up and grinned, then let his face collapse into seriousness. “I look at all the snow and it makes me realize how insignificant men are in the face of a storm like this. I wonder how important it is to find the person who murdered your brother—what in hell difference does it really make, anyway? We’ll all be dead soon enough anyway.”
    “Murdered,” I said.
    He nodded. He fumbled for a cigar and didn’t have one. “Alice,” he called, “do I have any cigars out there?”
    “Not unless you brought some in this morning,” she answered.
    “Ah, Christ.” He sighed. “Did you tell Alice what you wanted for lunch?”
    “Yes. I thought you were taking me out.”
    “Not in this weather, Cooper,” he said, rubbing his deep-set eyes and swiveling around to his desk, which was cluttered with folders, envelopes, papers. “You’d have to be crazy to go outside in this weather.”
    “You said something about murder.”
    “Indeed I did. Your brother was poisoned, very painlessly, with a nicotine derivative of some kind. I know very little of forensic medicine. I just believe what they tell me. But somebody did for him, just about the time you were getting there.” He shuffled papers, regarding the mess. “I was quite right about the brandy.” He caught my eye, ran his finger around inside his turtleneck. “Very little brandy did your brother drink. Ergo, somebody else did.”
    I sat mute.
    “Curious little thing,” he mused. “Damn! I wish I had a cigar. You don’t happen—no, you’re a pipe smoker, aren’t you? Well, it looks very much like whoever killed your brother—and, of course, he could have poisoned himself but that seems somewhat far-fetched—drank some brandy with him, administered the poison, and then cleaned up.”
    Alice appeared with a plastic tray and our lunch, set it on the clutter between us, and left quietly.
    “You recall our little trip to the kitchen last night?”
    I nodded.
    “And what did I show you?”
    “Brandy snifter and some garbage.” Fighting my irritation at his insufferable bloody ego, I fixed my eye on a team picture of the Minnesota Vikings hanging on the wall. There was another photograph of a huge black head and the top of a football shirt and it was inscribed “To Olaf Peterson from his friend Alan Page.”
    “Right, brandy snifter and some garbage. Now—go ahead, eat your sandwich, won’t hurt you. Won’t taste very good, but it isn’t poisoned, anyway. Now—that brandy snifter had caught my eye when I looked in the cupboard because all the other glasses were covered with dust. You see? Only the brandy snifter was dust-free—it had obviously been washed. Which tended to confirm my theory that your brother had not drunk all that brandy himself.”
    He bit into his own turkey and lettuce sandwich and washed it down with some coffee, making a loud sipping sound.
    “As I’ve said, this is the fun part, Cooper, all this theorizing and what not. This is where I excel. I hate to chase people, shoot at them, arrest them. God! Awful stuff for a man to do. Well, anyway, there was that little bit of garbage, too—cigar butt and ashes. We found cigars in your brother’s coat pocket, so they’re no lead for us, but obviously he didn’t smoke two cigars, then run downstairs and empty them into the trash. That would be hard to believe, don’t you see?
    “So there was someone up there in the bedroom with your brother, someone who drank some brandy, tried to conceal the fact