Breaking Point Read Online Free Page B

what looked like a hotel lobby. He was an average looking guy, a little short, maybe five feet nine, with a lot of blond hair. He looked like he might go about a hundred and sixty. There was another picture, a five by seven in a gold colored frame that showed the two of them with an older couple on a porch. The older folks were seated on a dark green wicker swing and Charlie and Iris were standing beside them. Iris looked pretty in a pale blue blouse with a tiny white pattern running through it. Her husband was wearing a blue denim shirt, open at the neck to reveal two thick gold chains hanging around his neck. I unfolded the cardboard flap in the back and set the frame on my desk. I'd have to ask Iris who the older people were, just in case it was something I needed to know. You can never be certain what will turn out to be a clue.
                  The third, and biggest box, was full of clothes, underwear, socks, tee shirts, dress shirts wrapped from a laundry service; the kind of stuff you keep in a drawer. There was also a bunch of neckties that looked like she had lifted them off a tie rack and just laid them in here. I looked at the labels on a couple of them. All were silk, mostly from Italy. Why was I not surprised? Nothing was really noteworthy, so I closed the flaps and set that one aside with the first.
                  I went through the wallet and laid the contents out on the footlocker that I used as a coffee table. I checked the driver's license statistics and found I'd been pretty close on Wilson's height and weight; he'd told the state that he was five-nine and a hundred and seventy pounds. I set the license aside along with the registration card for his car, and riffled through the credit cards, counting as I sorted them. There were three for local Iowa City stores, one gasoline credit card and fourteen MasterCard and Visa cards. Turning these over, I picked up the phone and began calling the numbers on the back of the cards.
                  Most of them had five or six digits and then some word, like "Visa" embossed on the back of the card, for customer service. I managed to figure which keys to punch to 'spell' the words, but I really hated that whole idea. Like I was going to memorize the other six digits anyway.
                  The customer service menus were very similar on all the cards. I had to type in his account number and zip code, and then listen for the balance due and available credit. If I wanted payment information, and I did, I had to select another number and there I was. I snagged a sheet of paper from my desk and started a list.
                  An hour and a half later, I knew that Charlie Wilson had almost ninety seven thousand dollars in available credit, with no balance due on any of the cards. Even more interesting was the fact that Charlie's last payment on each of the cards had been made in March and each was for a hefty sum of money. He had paid out over eighty thousand dollars in that month. Now where would he get that kind of money? And what was he buying on all these credit cards? I dialed Iris's number.
                  It turns out she'd known about a lot of major purchases. "Charlie's toys," she said. There were three snowmobiles, a boat, a truck, several expensive hunting trips, flights to the West Coast to see the folks, and assorted gifts for both her and for his parents back in Everly, California.
                  "I've sold most of the bigger things, the boat, snowmobiles, the truck and his sports gear," she said. "I just put ads in the paper and got what I could for them. I don't even know if they're all paid for yet."
                  "He charged all that stuff, on credit cards?" I couldn't believe this guy.
                  "That was one of the things we fought about," she said. "Charlie thought he deserved everything he wanted and he usually managed to get it. He had