Sketch a Falling Star by Sharon Pape Page A

an evening’s light entertainment.
    She set down her cup and withdrew a small pad of paper and a pen from her handbag. When she looked up again, she focused on Richard’s face so that she wasn’t distracted by the barren darkness beyond him.
    “How well did you know Brian?” she asked.
    “Not as well as I should have, as it turned out. You’ve heard the saying ‘Keep your friends close and your enemies closer’? ”
    Talk about an attention grabber. That was quite an opener for someone being interviewed in a murder investigation. In her experience, even innocent people withheld that sort of comment for fear that it might be taken the wrong way. Either Richard had no reason to worry or he wanted to give her that impression.
    “How do you mean?” She kept her tone neutral with a dash of ho-hum, as if she heard that sort of remark in every case she investigated. She called it her “you have nothing to fear from me” gambit.
    “Over time, it became apparent to me that he wasn’t the person I thought he was,” Richard said. “I believe you’ll find that sentiment echoed by a number of the other Players.”
    Rather than press him for details, she finished jotting a few notes then looked up at him expectantly. It was a subtle ploy that had served her well in the past. The interviewee almost always felt the need to fill the silence and answer the questioning look on her face.
    Richard was no exception. “This is somewhat embarrassing for me,” he said, his cheeks and neck pinking up nicely in support of his disclaimer. “Brian told me that he’d invested in a green company, a start-up specializing in renewable power sources like solar and wind. He was very enthusiastic about it, dazzled me with statistics and projections. Gave me a copy of the company’s prospectus. It appears that even at my age, I’m still a naïve fool.” He looked down and wagged his head as if he were giving himself a silent scolding. “Although I daresay most people would be intrigued by the prospect of easy money. But that’s neither here nor there. I was so busy at work that instead of researching things for myself, I begged him to get me in on the ground floor too. I’m sure you can guess the rest—the company was stillborn. And I have mostly myself to blame.”
    “That’s horrible,” Rory sympathized as she scribbled more notes. “After it all went south, did you try to verify what he’d told you about it?”
    “Yes, well, I’m quite good at closing barn doors after the horses are long gone. In any case, I did find out that the proper papers had been filed by a company with that name. Bottom line—I could hire an attorney to try to recoup some of my losses, but the odds were against there being any money to recoup, which meant that I’d just wind up with big legal bills. So I licked my wounds in private and vowed not to be so damn trusting in the future.”
    “Did he apologize to you, try to make it right?”
    Richard laughed, a tight knot of a laugh with no humor. “Actually, he did a rather splendid ‘woe is me’ act and claimed he lost a lot more than I did. To listen to him you’d think we were just two fools caught up in the same despicable scam. Brian was a slick operator.”
    There was that word “slick” again. “Do you know if anyone else in the troupe had business dealings with him?”
    “I don’t think so, but I can’t be sure. People tend to be pretty closemouthed when it comes to finances. And I was feeling so ashamed of being taken that I certainly wasn’t going to bring it up.”
    “It must have been difficult seeing him and working with him since that happened,” she said. “I give you a lot of credit. I probably would have left the troupe or lashed out at him in a fit of rage.” She’d added the last to see his reaction. Sometimes that kind of commiseration was just enough to pop the cork on a magnum of bottled-up confession.
    But Richard just shrugged. “Look, it’s not as if it left