Monday, May 10th, 7:00 A.M.
Sunday was eight hours of listening to Vinnie's uninformative babble, followed by a TV ball game, a couple or three beers and a steak. But if Sunday was peaceful, at least by recent standards, Monday was anything but. The day started with Fred meeting Dean at the breakfast table, a most unusual occurrence. As Dean smeared his whole-wheat toast with a coating of peanut butter, Fred poured the coffee, a sure sign he was looking for a favor.
"I've been thinking," he began. "You may be right about Byrne not showing up at his funeral next week."
"Memorial service," Dean corrected him.
"Yeah, but all the same, if it was you who skipped, wouldn't you be a bit anxious about what was happening? Wouldn't you wonder if everyone was really buying the drowning bit? Now, you can't just call up your best buddy and ask, can you?"
"Not hardly," said Dean, reaching for his coffee.
"So what do you do? I'll tell you what you do. You read the newspaper-not the New York Times-you read the Parkside Sentinel."
"Okay, so what are you getting at?"
"They don't stock the Parkside Sentinel in all the libraries around the country like they do the big city papers."
"So?"
"So, a smart detective would go downtown and ask his old friend Monica Cutler at the Sentinel for a list of out of town people who've ordered the paper to be mailed to 'em. The ones who've signed up over the past few weeks. Smart, huh? Then I'll just check 'em out from here by phone."
Dean reluctantly agreed it was a clever idea even though he thought it was a waste of time. While he should have turned the project over to Rita at headquarters, it had, after all, been Fred's idea, so he didn't complain about giving it a shot. "I still think it's whistling in the wind, but it'll keep you out of trouble. Just don't overload the phone bill if I come up with some names."
Dean knew the Parkside Sentinel would be going full steam later in the day, so he stopped by the red brick building on his way to work. It was located around the corner from headquarters and he was early anyway. Monica Cutler was seated in her usual corner amid a clutter of used coffee cups and thousands of old newspapers.
"You here to kill Linda Segal, The Ice Lady, or is this a social call?" Monica asked. Ms. Segal was the reporter who was giving Leland Anderson and the department such a hard time over the missing Wassermann twins. Monica grumbled that Segal was more interested in selling papers than the truth so if he wanted to kill her that was fine with her. Dean laughed and told her his visit was neither social nor to perform mayhem-it was police business, sort of.