Families are messy - 13

“I got the part!” Marcia said excitedly, sliding into the booth across from Casey. Then she took a look at his face and her excitement dimmed as she asked, “What happened?”

“Congratulations,” he replied, smiling as he ignored her question. “This calls for a celebration.”

“Casey… what happened?”

He leaned forward so that no one in the nearby booths could overhear him. “I think you were right.”

It took her a second to figure out what he meant then she asked for the third time, “What happened?”

He told her, leaving out nothing. When he finished she was frowning a deeply as he was. “Why didn’t you tell the cop?”

“Because it has to be someone in my family and, quite honestly, I don’t want to deal with the police interrogating all of them. And that’s presuming they’d even believe me.”

“Why wouldn’t they?”

“Because this last attempt was supposed to look like suicide. A man, me, so distraught over his pending divorce he decided to kill himself.”

Marcia snorted. “Who’d believe that?”

“Well I’m real sure that’s what the officer was thinking. As for my family, the only one I’m close to is Bing and while he might not believe it now, he’d have been hard pressed to prove it differently if I had died.”

Marcia nodded slowly. “I see you’re point. So what we have to do…“

“What I have to do,” Casey interrupted, “is find someone to investigate this, and that will not be you or me, Marcia.”

She smiled a bit, telling him, “That’s actually what I was going to suggest. Honest,” she added when she saw the look of doubt on his face.

“I believe you, sort of.” He smiled back, reaching across to the table to give her hand a squeeze. “Now I just have to find a PI who’s good at this sort of thing.”

Looking thoughtful, she stared off into space for a minute then gave a sharp nod. “I remember something in the paper about, well a couple of months ago anyway. Some investigator who managed to find the people who killed… oh what was his name, the porn king, you know who I mean.”

Casey chuckled. “Actually I do, and I vaguely remember that story. All I have to do is find it and then I’ll give the man a call, the investigator, not the porn king.”

“I think,” Marcia laughed, “you’d be calling Hell if you wanted to talk to the latter.”