Delete.

  “Hey, Horatio. It’s Juliet. I’m showing my work at a student gallery on campus. Where are you? The opening’s tomorrow night. Lots of hip, artsy college girls will be here, and they really go for that noble sarcasm thing you’ve got going—”

  Delete.

  “Pujols was two for four, with a double and a three-run home run. Just reached down and stroked into the left-center bleachers. A thing of beauty.” Dad. Where I inherited my baseball gene. “Do you get Cardinals games where you are? Holland, or wherever? One of the other fantasy baseball owners offered a trade I want to run by you. Call me.”

  Save.

  “Horatio, it’s Desdemona again—”

  Delete.

  All in all, I got by with just six of my eight other family members calling me, which was low. Most of them thought I was in Europe somewhere, but even there they would have tracked me down eventually. I cleared the rest of the messages, then called Dad to get a brief baseball update and swear him to secrecy. After that I returned the receiver to its cradle with delicate yet refined grace and slumped my way back toward the entertainment room.

  Hamilton had chosen to put in an appearance. He sat on the floor with his back to the couch where Roscoe and Gilbert were sitting. He was taking on one of them—Roscoe?—in Madden Football, and playing all kinds of sloppy, which was my first clue that something was wrong. Hamilton never lost at that game. I took a seat in the back row, sipped my unmanly root beer, and watched. Hamilton scrolled through the playbook with one hand while he took a sip directly from a bottle of vodka. He played another down, getting his player so turned around he started running toward the wrong end zone for a few seconds, which greatly amused Roscoe and Gilbert.

  “Dude, you are so blitzed!” one of them said, laughing. Hamilton took another swig.

  “So what have you guys been up to?” Hamilton asked, his eyes still on the screen. “I haven’t seen you in, like . . . forever.”

  The fat one shrugged. “Same as always, I guess. Hang out. Watch TV. Shoot pool.”

  “What are you gonna do when you graduate?”

  For the sake of my sanity, I assigned each of them names. “I think I might drop out. Get my PhD,” said the one I called Roscoe. I tried not to weep for my generation.

  “I think you mean ‘GED,’ ” Hamilton told him.

  “Whatever.”

  “I don’t know,” Gilbert said with a shrug. “We’ll probably work at the plant like everybody else.” He glanced behind Hamilton’s head at his buddy, and then said to Hamilton, “Guess we don’t have to ask what you’re gonna do.”

  Hamilton took another drink from his bottle. “You mean you know all about my plans to go to Harvard and become a brain surgeon?” he said, starting to slur his words a little.

  The boys laughed. “Right,” said Gilbert. “Like you even need to go to college.”

  “You don’t think I should?”

  “Why would you?” Roscoe asked. He sipped off a two-liter of yellow-green soda. “You could graduate from high school and walk right into running the plant.”

  Hamilton focused intently on running in the right direction for a few seconds, and I started turning things over in my head. For a couple of slacker rubes, Roscoe and Gilbert suddenly seemed to be pretty focused. But just where were they going with this?

  “Who says I want to run Elsinore Paper?” Hamilton asked, getting tackled.

  He couldn’t see it, but his question got him two very skeptical looks from the boys on the couch.

  “Dude, how could you not want to?” asked Roscoe.

  Hamilton went for it on an impossible fourth down where he should have punted. “How would you like it if somebody had been telling you since you were five what you were gonna do for the rest of your life?” Hamilton’s QB got stuffed, and he turned the ball over on downs.

  “See, that’s just because you’re not in charge,” Gilbert said. “You become the president of the company, you can fly anywhere you want in the company jet, do whatever you want. You’d be rich.”

  Roscoe grinned. “Filthy stinking rich.”

  Stinking is right, I thought.

  “Ahh, I don’t know,” Hamilton told them.

  “See, we know that’s why you been moping around here,” said Gilbert.

  “You got ambition. Prospects.”

  “If only your uncle Claude hadn’t gotten in the way.”

  They had been building up to this about as subtly as a blitzing linebacker. Roscoe threw a touchdown, and he and Gilbert did a knuckle tap over Hamilton’s head.

  “So, what,” Hamilton said as they lined up for the extra point. “You think I should just kill Uncle Claude, get him out of the way?”

  Roscoe missed the extra point by a mile, and he and Gilbert stared at Hamilton slack-jawed.

  “I’m just kidding,” Hamilton said, waving it away drunkenly. “That’s just the booze talking, I guess. Here.” He handed the other controller to Gilbert. “You guys finish it up. I gotta . . . I gotta go talk to Ralph on the ceramic phone,” he said, clutching his stomach.

  Gilbert made an effort to laugh, but he was clearly shaken. Roscoe too. Hamilton struggled to rise, then swerved toward the door. He saw me sitting there as he left, but he didn’t say a word. I let him get a few steps down the hall, then got up and followed him. He was headed toward his room.

  “That was a nice performance back there,” I called out to him. He stopped in his doorway, then leaned on the door frame like he couldn’t stand up. He staggered into his room without turning around and collapsed face-first on his bed. So that was how he wanted to play it. I pulled the bottle from his hands.

  “Mind if I take a hit off your vodka?” I asked.

  Hamilton knew I didn’t drink, but he heard me take a long drink from his bottle. He sat up and frowned at me, as sober as a cold shower.

  “Okay, there is no way you could know that was water and not vodka,” he told me. I tossed the bottle back to him and went and closed the door so Beavis and Butthead wouldn’t go looking for a bathroom and overhear us. Hamilton sniffed the bottle, trying to figure out how I knew.

  “For one thing,” I told him, sitting across from him in his desk chair, “I’ve seen you play Madden when you’re drunk, and you’re not that bad. For another, you never slur your words when you drink—you just eventually stop talking. And if you had really had as much vodka as I saw you drink just now, you wouldn’t have wandered back to your room to pass out. You’d have just fallen asleep where you were. Plus, you usually never drink vodka—”

  “All right, all right. Enough, detective.”

  “You weren’t drunk this morning when you went nuts either, were you.”

  “No.” Hamilton scootched back on his bed and put the vodka bottle with the water in it on his bedside table. “But I was mad.”

  “Yes, I think your unprovoked assault on the end tables was proof enough of that.”

  Hamilton put his head in his hands. “I—I’m sorry, Horatio. This whole thing has got me so turned around. One minute I’m furious and ready to fight, and the next I’m so depressed I can’t see straight.”

  And in both cases, the drinking made it worse.

  “So why the act with Roscoe and Gilbert?”

  “Come on, Horatio. What are they doing here? I mean, seriously. I haven’t seen either one of them for two years, and then suddenly they show up at my house and move into the guest bedrooms? Something’s up with that, and since everybody thinks I walk around here drunk all the time anyway, I thought I could use that, maybe put them off their guard. But what was all that business about Claude and ambition?”

  I picked up a baseball from Hamilton’s desk and started flipping it toward the ceiling while I thought.

  “Let’s try it like this,” I told him. “Hamilton comes home from school, and suddenly he’s unhappy. He drinks. He doesn’t enjoy sitting around doing nothing and playing video games like he used to. He attacks innocent furniture. ‘What can be wrong with him?’ his recently remarried mother asks. ‘Heavens to Mergatroid,’ his uncle and new stepfather says, ‘who can tell with these troublesome teens? I have it—let’s call in a couple of his former middle school chums.’ ”

  “No way,” Hamilton said, but he was turning it over.

  “Look at where they went. As soon as they got an opening, they went right for the reason you’ve gotten all moody.”

  “And they seriously think I’m pissed off because Claude got in the way of my big plan to run Elsinore and get rich?”

  I shrugged. “I admit it shows a serious lack of imagination, but . . .” I left the obviousness of that one unsaid.

  Hamilton agreed.

  “In the future, though, I think you should keep the cracks about killing Claude to yourself,” I told him.

  “Oh, come on. That was so obviously a joke.”

  “Obvious to you, maybe, but to two guys who honestly believe you’re mad because Claude stands between you and joy rides on a Learjet?”

  “Okay, so they think I want to kill Claude.”

  I caught the baseball and leaned forward. “Hamilton, if they’re reporting back to Claude, and they believe you want to kill him—”

  Hamilton blinked. “But he couldn’t—I mean, he wouldn’t honestly believe—”

  “If you’re right, and Claude is a killer—and I’m not saying you’re right, but just suppose he is—don’t you think that dropping hints about it and smashing up furniture and asking Roscoe and Gilbert if you should just kill him are maybe a bad idea?”

  Hamilton didn’t say anything, but I could tell he was spooked. And he should have been.

  “Whoever killed your dad is a murderer, which means they could do it again—which means that a little more subtlety is required here.”

  “So what can we do?”

  “For starters, we can go to the police, like we should have done from the start.”

  “No,” said Hamilton.

  “Look, I don’t know why you’re being so stubborn about this—”

  “No. You said you would help me, and you swore you wouldn’t tell anyone else. If you can’t do anything, I will.”

  “No, no.” I sighed. “I’ll think of something.”

  “Then think of something already.”

  I flipped the ball in the air, a little miffed. It wasn’t like hitting the intercom and ordering up another drink for yourself. Um, yeah, could you send up another bottle of whisky, and, uh, oh yeah, the name of whoever it was who killed my dad? Thanks ever so much.

  “So, you stopped by the Brown-Water Rafting Race but you didn’t say hello,” I said. “Have you become an environmentalist all of a sudden, or were you just there protecting Elsinore’s business interests?”

  Hamilton pursed his lips and looked away.

  “She’s still got a thing for you, you know,” I told him.

  Hamilton looked at his sheets. I thought he might actually talk about this, about why he kept pushing Olivia away when it was so obvious that they both still had feelings for each other, but then he frowned and got touchy again.

  “I notice that hasn’t kept you from hitting on her.”

  “I wasn’t hitting on her.”

  “Oh? Are you an environmentalist all of a sudden, or just protecting Elsinore’s business interests?”

  I gave him that one and kept tossing the ball.

  “The play,” I said suddenly. I put a little too much English on the ball and it smacked the ceiling. I ducked out of the way as it came crashing down onto his desk, knocking his keyboard to the floor.

  “Damn, Horatio! Watch what you’re doing.”

  “The new play opening in the community theater Friday night,” I said, ignoring him. “Everybody’s going to be there, right?”

  Hamilton put on his disinterested history class face. “Not if I can help it.”

  “You’ll be there, and you’ve got to help me make sure everybody else is too. Claude, your mother, Roscoe and Gilbert, Paul Mendelsohn, Ford Branff. And Olivia.” We shared a look. “I can—I can ask her, if you want.”

  “What does Olivia have to do with all this?”

  “Maybe nothing, but we can’t rule anybody out yet.”

  “You’re nuts,” Hamilton told me.

  “Just make sure everybody’s going to be there,” I said, reenergized. It was a crazy idea, but it just might work.

  “What’s the play?”

  “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.”

  “Sounds boring.”

  “Don’t worry,” I told him. “If you get everybody there, you can go to sleep until the last act.”

  “Why? What happens in the last act?”

  “That’s when we find out who killed your father.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Night swimming is underrated, despite R.E.M.’s best efforts at promotion. Of all the amenities at Casa de Prince, the one I like the best is the Olympic-sized pool and outdoor Jacuzzi. The heir to the Prince fortune sat on a lounge chair while I made like a merman in the pool, the soft shimmering of the underwater lights the only illumination besides the stars. Hamilton was the real swimmer—he’d gone to the state finals both years he’d been on the varsity—but right now the only thing he was swimming in was a bottle. For real this time.

  I emerged near Hamilton and held the side of the pool. “Who’ve you got so far?”

  “For the play, you mean? Mom and Claude are going to be there, of course. I had one of the servants get in touch with Ford Branff, and he said he’d be there. Probably looking for another excuse to see my mother again.”

  “Or push his takeover bid.”

  “Same thing,” Hamilton said. He swirled what was left of his drink and downed it. “Haven’t talked to Paul Mendelsohn yet, but he’ll do whatever Claude and Trudy tell him to do.”

  That left Roscoe and Gilbert and Olivia. There was still time to talk to all three.

  Hamilton went for a refill from the bottle at his side but found it empty. He pressed a button on a side table, and a ghostly voice answered from an intercom on the wall behind him.

  “Sí, Mr. Hamilton?”

  “Another bottle of Jack Daniel’s by the pool. We’re out.”

  “Sí, señor. Anything else?”

  “You want anything?” he asked me. I shook my head.

  “That’s it.”

  “Un momento,” the voice promised, and the intercom went silent.

  “It’s so much easier to be a lush when they bring it to you, isn’t it?” I asked him.

  “Why are you riding me so bad about that lately?”

  “Maybe I should have been riding you about it all along.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe it’s getting on my nerves.”

  Hamilton was right—I had always stood by quietly and let him do whatever he wanted as long as he wasn’t hurting anybody else. He was a big boy, and I figured he could take care of himself. I guess now I was beginning to think he couldn’t.

  Someone wearing bright red cowboy boots came out onto the patio, and I didn’t have to look up to know it was Candy. Hamilton took a new bottle of whisky off Candy’s tray without saying thanks and poured a new glass extra-slow and lovingly for my benefit. I wiped something out of my eye with my middle finger.

  There was something else on the tray too, and Candy set it on the table.

  “I took the liberty of bringing some warm milk, señor, for your friend the Boy Scout.”

  Hamilton stared at Candy, absolutely speechless. Thankfully, that rarely happens to me.

  “I appreciate that, Candy,” I told him. “In fact, find me when you get off work tonight, and I’ll be sure to give you a tip.”

  “Ooh,” he said, twisting my threat. “No thanks, big boy. I already have a date tonight.” He whipped the metal tray up under his arm, turned on his high heel, and sauntered back to the kitchen.

  “What—the—hell,” Hamilton said. He sat up. “Do you two know each other or something?”

  “Yeah,” I told him. “We both used to ride for the Pony Express.”

  “How long have you been here, Horatio—three days? And you’ve already managed to piss off every last person in the house?”

  “I only piss off people who deserve it,” I said. “Hamilton, what do you know about that guy, anyway?”

  “Who, that servant?”

  “His name’s Candy.”

  Hamilton shrugged. “He’s just some Mexican. I don’t know.”

  “There is something very weird about that guy. I mean, besides the cowboy getup.”

  Hamilton sighed theatrically. “I try not to bother about the lives of the little people.”

  I knew he was kidding, but in a way it was true. Hamilton pushed buttons and ordered drinks and waited for his car to be brought, and probably didn’t give a second thought to who was doing the work for him. Mrs. Prince was probably the only Prince who knew their names.

  “Yeah, well,” I said, still a little pissy, “maybe if you drink enough, everything will stop bothering you.”

  “That’s the idea. Either that or kill myself,” he added. He suddenly got serious. “I’ve thought about it, you know. Killing myself.”

  “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” I said. I pulled myself up to sit on the edge. “If you’re fishing for sympathy, you’re going to need new bait.”

  “I’m serious,” Hamilton said, staring up into the sky. “I mean, why not? At least then you get to sleep forever.” He closed his eyes and kept his head tilted back, like he was communing with the stars or something. One of the few benefits to living in the middle of nowhere was a dark, clear night sky. It still smelled terrible, but it was pretty.

  Hamilton opened his eyes and stared at his drink. “Then again, that might mean you dream forever too.” He took a sip. “And who knows what we dream about when we’re dead.”

  “We don’t dream about anything,” I told him. “We’re food for worms. Suicide throws away the only miraculous thing you’re ever going to see.”

  “Ah, but ‘there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’”

  I flicked water on him. “Thanks. Because I’ve never heard that one before.”

 

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