“Except Ruth Blackman. She had her arm around me.”
“But you knew everyone there?”
“All I could see was Leroy, crumpled against a tree.” Fresh tears filled her eyes. “I kept thinking he’d swear and sit up.”
Feeling cruel for making her relive her husband’s accident, Diaz thanked her and made his escape. He was glad that in her grief she hadn’t noticed the tenor of his questions.
The Blackmans, an older couple, were home next door. Their house, too, backed on the canyon.
Mrs. Blackman offered him coffee, which he accepted, and they talked readily about the tragedy.
“I heard him yell.” A tall, gaunt man with stooped shoulders and close-cropped white hair, Ron Blackman shook his head. “I was on the computer doing some research on a company I’m considering buying stock in. It took me, oh, a couple of minutes at least to get up and go out to the back deck.”
“As stiff as your back is,” his wife put in, “it might have been longer than that.”
“You saw him right away?” Diaz asked.
“I might not have noticed him at all, if the ladders hadn’t been lying on the rhododendrons.”
“Were you the first to see him?”
He considered. “Well, I don’t know. I heard a shout from the other side of the Pearces’. Jack Gunn. I guess we met at the top of the bluff. Got there about the same time.”
“So you were the first two on the scene?”
Unlike Mrs. Pearce, he was putting two and two together and making four.
“Do you mind my asking why the questions?”
Diaz shook his head. “You’ve probably answered every one of these questions already. I apologize, sir. But even a simple accident gets investigated pretty carefully when it’s a police officer who died.”
His expression cleared. “I understand.”
Diaz got the Blackmans to come up with a list of who had gathered in the Pearces’ narrow backyard. They hemmed and hawed and went back and forth before agreeing, with only slight hesitation, on a final list of names.
“I wish we knew whether he had just reached too far, or whether something distracted him.” Diaz closed his notebook. “Someone said they thought they’d heard him talking to someone a little earlier.”
“I did think I heard him talking,” Ruth Blackman said, a little timidly.
“Really?” Diaz hid his intense interest, keeping his tone casual. “Do you remember how much earlier?”
“Well…right before. I mean, I didn’t think anything of it. The day was a little chilly and damp, so not that many people were outside working, but the mail had come in the past hour. I said hello to Margie across the street when I fetched ours.” She added apologetically, “I can’t swear it was him. Somebody might have been talking in another yard.”
“You didn’t hear a second voice?”
“I don’t think so. I just vaguely wondered who’d made Leroy mad this time.”
So the voice wasn’t conversational. “Obviously, you didn’t glance out.”
She shook her head, her expression regretful. “If I’d seen Leroy up there like that, I would have called for Ron to go insist he get down. What was he thinking?”
“His wife thought she’d talked him into hiring a service to clean the gutters. She knew it wasn’t safe for him to do it.”
Mr. Blackman spoke up. “When he hired someone to work for him, he was never satisfied. A couple of years ago, he was working so much overtime he hired a lawn service, but he said they didn’t edge the lawn the way he liked and they overfertilized, so he’s been taking care of it himself since.”
There was a moment of silence as they all reflected on the fact that Leroy’s widow would now be hiring out all those jobs he would have been doing if only he hadn’t been an idiot and for all practical purposes killed himself.
Unless, of course, someone had given him a push.
Some neighbors weren’t home. Others hadn’t been home when Leroy died. Diaz did talk to Jack Gunn, who lived on the other side of the Pearces’. He came up with a different list of names of who’d been gathered to witness the tragedy. He shook his head and insisted that a couple of the people the Blackmans thought had been present weren’t there, and added a few of his own. Diaz knew from experience that every other person present would remember the scene differently, too. Neither, however, remembered anyone being there that they didn’t know.
Gunn, a beefy fellow in his forties, hadn’t heard voices before the accident, but admitted he’d been running a circular saw in his garage. “Stopped for a smoke. That’s when I heard Leroy yell and then fall.”
“Did you see or hear anyone leaving the scene?”
His gaze was sharp. “Leaving? Didn’t see anybody.” He frowned. “Thought I heard a car engine start up, though. Can’t swear to it. Just an impression.”
Back in his car, Diaz made notes of which neighbors he had yet to interview. He’d do better to come back on Saturday morning, when more people were likely to be home.
He hadn’t learned anything to prove Ann’s hunch, but he hadn’t disproved it, either. Pearce might have talked to someone in angry tones right before his fall—or he might not have. Someone might have started a car and driven away just as the neighbors were rushing to the Pearces’, but people did get in their cars and drive away for legitimate reasons.
He wouldn’t give up yet, but he wasn’t convinced.
“THIS POT ROAST is wonderful, Mary.” Ann sighed in pleasure. “I don’t do much real cooking.”
Mary Roarke, a comfortable, motherly woman, shook her head in disapproval. “You wouldn’t be so skinny if you did.”
Ann grinned at her. “Actually, considering my usual diet is Winchell’s for breakfast, McDonald’s for lunch and frozen meals I can microwave for dinner, my guess is I might actually lose weight if I started cooking good stuff.”
Mary shuddered. “My dear! I know you’re young, but you need to think about your health.”
“I was kidding.” Honesty compelled her to admit, “Partly. I eat more junk food than I should, but I actually start most mornings with a banana sliced on cereal, and I do have a vegetable with dinner.” Sometimes. Occasionally. “And I keep fruit around.”
“Are we going to have dessert or not?” her husband interrupted.
Mary stood as if invisible wires had lifted her. As cheerful as if her husband wasn’t glowering at her, she said, “Lemon meringue pie. Of course you’ll have a slice, Ann?”
“Couldn’t stop me,” Ann assured her. She waited until the plump woman in her fifties had disappeared into the kitchen before she said to her father’s old friend, “Reggie, I have something I wanted to ask you about.”
“Got to do with the job?”
“Uh…maybe. I don’t know,” she admitted.
Despite the couple of beers he’d downed, Reggie Roarke’s gaze sharpened. “Is this something we want to talk about in front of Mary?”
“I don’t know that, either. I was hoping you’d tell me more about your accident.”
His eyes bored into hers. “You got a reason?”
She hesitated. “I