The Widower's Two-Step (Tres Navarre #2)(21)

Behind the chair was an unzipped black duffel bag filled with more recording cartridges and some microphone cords and a bunch of paper folders and files I didn't have time to look through.

Blanceagle's groaning changed pitch, got a little more insistent.

I helped him untangle his legs from his ears, then got him seated the right way again.

His clothes fit him like a shortsheeted bed and his once nicely combed hair was doing a little swirly unicorn thing on top of his head.

He massaged his shin. "I need a damn drink."

"No, you damn don't."

He tried to sit up, then decided that didn't feel too good and settled back in. He tried to make some thick, fuzzy calculations in his head.

"You ain't Jean."

"No," I agreed. "I'm not."

"But Sheck ..." He knit his eyebrows together, trying to think. "You look a little—"

"Like Jean," I supplied. "So it would seem."

Alexander Blanceagle rubbed his jaw, pulled his lower lip. There was a little U of blood on the gum line under one of his teeth. "What'd you want?"

"Not to get mistaken for Jean and killed, preferably."

He frowned. He didn't understand. Our little dance across the room might've happened a hundred years ago, to somebody else.

"I'm here about a friend of yours," I said. "Julie Kearnes."

The name registered slowly, sinking in through layers of rumhaze until it went off like a depth charge somewhere far under the surface. Blanceagle's freckles darkened into a solid redbrown band across his nose.

"Julie," he repeated.

"She was murdered."

His eyebrows went up. His mouth softened. His eyes cast farther afield for something to latch on to. Nostalgia mode. I had maybe five minutes when he might be open to questions.

Not that drunks have predictable emotional cycles, but they do follow a brand of chaos theory that makes sense once you've been around enough of them, or been made an alumni yourself.

I overturned a milk crate, shook the electrical cords out of it, and sat down next to Blanceagle. I unfolded one of the airline receipts I'd taken from Sheckly's desk and handed it across. " You and Julie went to Europe together a couple of times on Sheckly's tab. Were you close?"

Blanceagle stared at the receipt. His focus dissipated again. His eyes watered up.

"Oh, man."

He curled forward and put the hand with the airline receipt against his forehead, the Great Karnak reading a card. He scrunched his eyes together and swallowed and started shuddering.

I'll admit to a certain manly discomfort when another guy starts to cry in front of me, even if he is drunk and funnylooking and recently guilty of trying to draw a gun on me.

I sat very still until Blanceagle got his body under control. One Muddy Waters, two Muddy Waters. Twentyseven Muddy Waters later he sat up, wiped his nose with his knuckles. He set the airline receipt on the arm of the chair and patted it.

"I got to go. I got to—"

He looked at the sound board, struggling to remember what he'd been doing. He started gathering up the one gigabyte cartridges, sticking them in his windbreaker pockets that were a little too small to hold them. I handed him one that kept slipping away.

"You're copying a lot of music here."

He stuffed the last of the discs in his pocket, then made a feeble attempt to clean the drops of Captain Morgan's Spiced Rum off the sound board's controls, wiping between the lines of knobs with his fingers. "Sheck is crazy. I can't just—I'm in six years deep now, he can't expect—"

Alex padded his shoulder holster, realized it was empty.

"Over there." I pointed. "Sheckly can't expect what?"

Blanceagle glanced over at his unloaded gun in the milk crate, then at me, suspicious how I'd pulled that off.

"What was your name?" he asked.

I told him. He repeated "Navarre" three times, trying to place it. "You know Julie?"

"I was tailing her the day she got murdered. Maybe I helped it happen by applying pressure on her at the wrong time. I don't feel particularly good about that."

Alex Blanceagle pulled together enough anger to sound almost sober. "You're another goddamn investigator."

"Another?"

He tried to maintain the glare but he didn't have the attention span or the energy or the sobriety for it. His eyes zigzagged down and came to rest on my navel.

He muttered unconvincingly, "Get out of here."

"Alex, you've had some kind of disagreement with Sheck. You're clearing out your stuff. It's got to be in connection with the other things that have been happening.

Maybe you should talk to me."

"Things will work out. You don't worry about Sheck, you understand? Les SaintPierre couldn't do it, I'll take care of it myself."

"Take care of what, exactly?"

Blanceagle looked down at his halfpacked duffel bag and wavered between anger and wistfulness. Maybe if I'd had more time and more Captain Morgan's I could've eventually plied him into a temporary friendship, but just then the door of the studio opened and my stunt double came in.

Jean did look enough like me that I couldn't label Alex a complete idiot for making the mistake. Jean was much thicker in every part of his body, though, slightly taller, his black hair curlier. He was also less comfortably and more expensively dressed—black boots, tight gray slacks, a black turtleneck, a gray linen jacket. It must've been a thousand degrees in those clothes. His left hand casually held a gray and black Beretta that matched his outfit perfectly. His eyes were the same colour as mine, hazel, but they were smaller and amorally fierce as a crab's. Put me on the GNC