Chapter 11

Ed decided to talk to Bynum's wife. He knew that it would be risky, but he had a strange feeling about the way the investigation was going. Either every detective had suddenly come down with a terminal case of dumb or someone was trying to cover something up. Ed knew that he would have been fired, in his day, for conducting an investigation the way this one was being conducted. He drove to a phone booth and found the Bynum address.

Bynum's house was in an upscale section of town and Ed figured that the house would sell on today's market for at least $1,500,000. The driveway up to the house was over 200 feet long. Ed parked in front of the house and got out of his car.

Ed walked to the front door and rang the doorbell. After a minute or so a Hispanic maid answered the door. Ed showed his badge and asked to see Mrs. Bynum. The maid asked Ed to wait in the hall and went to get Mrs. Bynum.

A pretty woman about 40 came from a room at the rear of the house. She was dressed in a pants suit that Ed could see cost more than he made in a month. Her hair looked like she had just come from a beauty parlor and her makeup was flawless. She approached Ed with a look of consternation on her face.

"I just talked to you detectives about 2 hours ago," she snapped.

"Mrs. Bynum, My name is Ed Harold. I'm a private investigator. This is a little delicate, can we go somewhere private?" he said.

Mrs. Bynum looked at him for a minute and Ed saw that she was unsure whether to take him further into the house. Ed pulled his ID and showed her that he was a private detective. She turned without a word and walked into what Ed saw was a library. She motioned for him to sit in a chair in front of a large desk and she sat at the desk. Ed noticed that she didn't seem broke up at the loss of her husband.

"Mrs. Bynum," Ed started, feeling his way as he talked, "This is hard for me to say, so I am just going to say it as best I can. Your husband hired me to follow you and see if you were running around on him."

Ed saw her face get red and he was afraid that he had made a mistake.

"That bastard," she said loudly, "he ran around on me since the day we got married and he has the gall to hire someone to follow me? I hope he rots in hell."

"I didn't have a chance to do any work on this, because he was killed a few hours after I left his office," Ed said.

"Well, what's the purpose of this visit?" she asked.

Ed pulled out $200 that he had stuck in his jacket and handed it to Mrs., Bynum, and "This is the retainer that your husband gave me. Since no work was done, I feel that I owe this money to you."