Winston, still smiling, pulled up a chair and sat in it backwards facing Dean. "Why don't you just run it by me for clarification? I'll stop you if you get too far off base."
"It's pretty simple. I followed Jeffrey Byrne and you followed David Dean."
Winston laughed. "Jeffrey Byrne's dead. Haven't you read your own report? He drowned on May 4th in Norfolk, Virginia."
"So the official version goes."
"Come on! A minor insurance company flunky? He couldn't pull off a fake like that!"
"No, not without the help of his friendly government agent."
Winston's smile was a tad less casual. "That's pretty farfetched, isn't it? Why would the United States government help Jeffrey Byrne?"
"Maybe not the entire government. Maybe just Jonathan Winston-for part of a few million dollars, perhaps?"
Winston shook his head. "I'm disappointed in you, David. Do you really think I'd do a stupid thing like that?"
Dean ignored the question. "It was your bug on my phone, wasn't it?"
Jonathan Winston laughed. "I have to apologize for that. When you gave us Vinnie, we wanted to make sure he wasn't a set-up, so we bugged you. Just a precaution. Then we started hearing all this nonsense about Byrne until it got us wondering if there might be something to it, so we did a little detecting ourselves. When you found the bug, I was sure we were dead ducks, but you blamed the wrong guys. Gangsters don't bug phones-us good guys do that stuff."
"I should have known. And the two suits at Willoughby's Bar? No wonder I couldn't find them in any mug books. They were your guys."
"Yeah, Henderson nearly shit when he recognized you! They thought they were busting some con artist who was trying to rip off you and the old man and then you show up and damn near kill them! We had to haul ass back to your place and pull out our bug."
"Tell them not to order ginger ale the next time. I should have known no self-respecting hood would do that. And I spent a lot of time wondering why there weren't any fingerprints on a gun that had just been used by a guy not wearing gloves."
"Nobody's perfect."
"Fred spotted one of them at the hospital in Philly after Arthur Atherton was shot but we couldn't run him down."
"Because we hid him in a broom closet until you guys left," Winston laughed.
"Were they the same guys who broke in and tied up Fred O'Connor?"
"Whoa! That wasn't us. That was Nota and Flanders. They broke in Cynthia Byrne's place too. But it didn't have anything to do with Byrne. They were hunting down your buddy Vinnie. They must have followed you to Maid Marian Lane and thought Vinnie might be stashed there. We picked up their voices on our bug in your house but by the time we figured out what was going on, you were already there and we backed off."