The note stated the Galaxy needed a ring job. He’d crossed the highway and phoned him back from the Tornado Lounge and Game Parlor after laying a ten on the proprietor. What the ex-cop told him had made his heart thud against his breast bone and he refused the beer the lounge’s owner offered as a way of change for his money. After getting some initial information from Rook Securities via Coleman, Grant had flown the red-eye out to Akron. The city had remained the home of the half-sister of Dolly, the ex-Mrs. Tigbee. There, on microfiche, he’d found an obit for the half-sister, Edna, in the Akron Beacon Journal. Rook had supplied the information that she’d retired in 1974 after years as a records supervisor for the County Building and Safety Department. Edna Clavert Hayden had been something of a minor celebrity, too. For more than a decade she’d written a gardening column for a throw-away weekly. She’d died of pneumonia in the Silver Crest Rest Home on May 9,1991. The husband, Charles Hayden, was still alive, but pretty much out of it after three successive strokes.
