Come Unto These Yellow Sands by Josh Lanyon

trying to decide if there was an insult in her comment about his living space. It was probably not a compliment.
    “Are you close to her?”
    “No.”
    Understatement of the decade. Even before she had publicly blamed the worry and anguish over Swift for contributing to Norris’s failing health, Marion Gilbert Swift had washed her hands of her “terminally troubled” only child. Forget Dr. Spock. Marion had been into the Three Strikes school of parenting.
    Not that Swift really blamed her. He’d have washed his hands of himself too—in fact, he’d tried pretty determinedly to do just that.
    “That’s wrong,” Cora said. “A mother is a boy’s best friend.”
    Swift just managed to keep from saying I thought it was a dog .
    “My son is everything to me.”
    “He’s lucky,” Swift said politely. Personally, he thought she sounded like a nut. Come hither, my dear Hamlet, sit by me. Surely she was something other than just Tad’s mom? Swift tried to picture her twenty years younger. She was so utterly different from Nerine Corelli. A couple of decades ago she’d probably been a cute armful, but temperamentally she’d have been much the same—in fact, she’d probably mellowed. People usually did.
    “Someone is trying to frame my son.”
    “So you said. Why do you think that?”
    “It’s obvious.”
    It wasn’t obvious to Swift. “You think your ex-husband was killed just to frame Tad?”
    “No, no. Of course not.” Cora turned away, slowly walking the circumference of the main room, studying the paintings and objets d’art littering the shelves. “But whoever killed Mario deliberately tried to implicate Tad.”
    “That seems unlikely,” Swift said, watching her examine a tall bronze finial that someone had sent him after BS had been published. It was supposed to be from the Chapelle Saint-Blaise-des-Simples in Milly-la-Forêt where Jean Cocteau was buried. People had done things like that, back in the day. Sent him gifts. Wrote him deeply personal letters about how his words touched their lives. “The most damaging piece of evidence was the fact that Tad ran, and how could anyone know he’d do that?”
    “Whose side are you on?” Cora demanded, turning to him. Tears filled her eyes and brimmed over.
    “I want to help Tad however I can,” Swift said honestly. “I just don’t follow how or why you think he was framed.”
    “Because whoever killed Mario knew that Tad would be the first person the police suspected.”
    Was that how it worked? Swift had a vague memory of Max once saying that the first person to look at in a homicide was the spouse. Or maybe ex-spouse? Were children equally suspect? What a voracious world it was.
    “Let me tell you about Mario. The divorce was his idea. I didn’t want it. I’m a good Catholic. I don’t believe you end your marriage because you get tired of waking up next to the same person every morning for fifteen years.”
    Swift opened his mouth, but Cora drove right past. “Nerine was a hostess in our family restaurant.”
    “I didn’t realize.”
    “That’s right. A hostess.” Never had a simple job description sounded so sleazy. “And not as young as she acts, either. But he decides he’s going to marry her. Okay. I can’t stop him. But then he decides that a boy needs to be with his father, and he insists that he’s going to have custody of Tad.”
    “Wasn’t Tad old enough to have a say?”
    “Yes. But Judge Vecchio was a golfing buddy of my husband. So was Dave Luthor, my lawyer. Mario knows—knew—everybody in this town. So I got cheated on, and I got partial custody.”
    It sounded to Swift like she had cause for grievance. Of course there were two sides to every story.
    “Do you have any idea of where Tad is?”
    Cora shook her head. “I thought you might. I need to see him. He needs me now.”
    Why did everyone think Swift knew where Tad was? And why the hell couldn’t Tad have confirmed everyone’s assumptions and just gone