Lily stepped back, crossed her arms, and looked disgusted with Ray, which was fairly easy, since she’d had years of practice. “Ray, did it occur to you that Asher handles estates, and that we’ve been doing much better business since he started doing more estates—that the quality of the merchandise is much higher? Probably because he gets there early?”
“I know, but that’s not it. You’re not around as much now, Lily. I was a cop, I notice these things. For one thing, did you know that there was a homicide detective keeping track of Charlie? That’s right. Gave me his card, told me to call if anything unusual happened.”
“No, Ray, you didn’t.”
“Charlie disappeared, Lily. I was watching him, and he just blinked out of existence, right before my eyes. And last I saw him he was going into the fuck puppet’s building.”
Lily wanted to grab the stapler off the counter and rapidly drive about a hundred staples into Ray’s shiny forehead. “You ungrateful fucktard! You called the cops on Asher? The guy who has given you a job and a place to live for what, ten years?”
“I didn’t call the black-and-whites, just this Inspector Rivera. I know him from when I was on the force. He’ll keep it on the down low.”
“Go get your checkbook and your car,” Lily barked. “We’re going to bail him out.”
“He probably hasn’t even been processed yet,” Ray said.
“Ray, you pathetic toss-beast. Go. I’ll close up the store and wait for you out front.”
“Lily, you can’t talk to me that way. I don’t have to put up with it.”
Because he couldn’t turn his head, Ray wasn’t able to avoid the first two staples Lily put in his forehead, but by then he had decided it was best to go get his checkbook and his car, and backed away.
“What’s a fuck puppet, anyway?” Lily shouted after him, somewhat surprised at the violent intensity of her loyalty to Charlie.
The policewoman fingerprinted Charlie nine times before she looked up at Inspector Alphonse Rivera and said, “This motherfucker got no fingerprints.”
Rivera took Charlie’s hand and turned it palm up, and looked at his fingers. “I can see the ridges, right there. He’s got completely normal fingerprints.”
“Well, you do it, then,” said the woman. “’Cause alls I got on the card is smooth.”
“Fine, then,” Rivera said. “Come with me.”
He led Charlie over to a wall that had a big ruler painted on it and told him to face a camera.
“How’s my hair?” Charlie said.
“Don’t smile.”
Charlie frowned.
“Don’t make a face. Just look straight ahead and—your hair is fine, though now you’ve got ink on your forehead. This is not that hard, Mr. Asher, criminals do this all the time.”
“I’m not a criminal,” Charlie said.
“You broke into a security building and harassed a young woman, that makes you a criminal.”
“I didn’t break into anything and I didn’t harass anyone.”
“We’ll see. Ms. McKerny said you threatened her life. She’s definitely going to press charges, and if you ask me, you’re both lucky I showed up when I did.”
Charlie wondered about that. The fuck puppet had started screaming and backed into her apartment, and he had followed her, trying to explain, trying to figure out how this was going to work, and at the same time paying way too much attention to her breasts.
“I didn’t threaten her.”
“You said she was going to die. Today.”
Well, they had him there. Charlie had, in all the confusion and screaming, mentioned that he had to get hold of her breasts because she was going to die today. In retrospect, he felt he probably should have kept that information to himself.
Rivera led him upstairs and into a small room with a table and two chairs. Just like on TV, Charlie looked for a one-way mirror but was disappointed to see only concrete-block walls painted in easy-clean moss-green enamel. Rivera had him sit, but then went to the door.
“I’m going to leave you here for a few minutes, until Miss McKerny comes down to file charges. It’s more hospitable here than the holding cell. You want something to drink?”
Charlie shook his head. “Should I call an attorney?”
“It’s up to you, Mr. Asher. That’s certainly your right, but I can’t advise you one way or another. I’ll be back in five. You can make your call then if you’d like.”
Rivera left the room and Charlie saw the inspector’s partner, a gruff, bald-headed bull of a guy named Cavuto, standing outside the door waiting for him. That guy actually scared Charlie. Not as much as the prospect of having to retrieve Madison McKerny’s breast implants, or what would happen if he didn’t, but still scary.
Cut him loose,” Cavuto said.
“What, cut him loose? I just got him processed, the McKerny woman—”
“Is dead. Boyfriend shot her, then, when our guys responded to the shots-fired call, did himself.”
“What?”
“Boyfriend was married, McKerny wanted more security and was going to tell the wife. He flipped out.”
“You know all that already?”
“Her neighbor told the uniforms as soon as they arrived. Come on, it’s our case. We need to roll. Cut this guy loose. Ray Macy and some Goth-chef chick are waiting for him downstairs.”
“Ray Macy is the one who called me, he thought Asher was going to kill her.”
“I know. Right crime, wrong guy. Let’s go.”
“We still have him on the concealed-weapon charge.”
“A cane with a sword in it? What, you want to go before a judge and tell him that you arrested this guy on suspicion of being a serial killer but he plea-bargained it down to being a huge fucking nerd?”
“Okay, I’ll cut him loose, but I’m telling you, Nick, this guy told McKerny that she was going to die today. There’s some weird shit going on here.”
“And we don’t have enough weird shit to deal with already?”
“Good point,” Rivera said.
Madison McKerny looked beautiful in her beige silk dress, her hair and makeup perfect, as usual, her diamond-stud earrings and a platinum-diamond solitaire necklace complemented the silver handles of her walnut-burl casket. For someone who wasn’t breathing, she was breathtaking, especially for Charlie, who was the only one who could see her hooters pulsing red in the casket.
Charlie hadn’t been to a lot of funerals, but Madison McKerny’s seemed nice, and fairly well attended for someone who had been only twenty-six. It turned out that Madison had grown up in Mill Valley, just outside San Francisco, so a lot of people had known her. Evidently, except for her family, most of them had lost touch and seemed somewhat surprised that she had been gunned down by her married boyfriend who had kept her in an expensive apartment in the city.
“Not like you vote ‘most likely’ for that in the yearbook,” Charlie said, trying to make conversation with one of her classmates, a guy he’d ended up standing next to at the urinals in the men’s room.
“How did you know Madison?” said the guy, a condescending tone in his voice. He looked like he’d been voted “most likely to piss everyone off by being rich and having nice hair.”
“Oh, me? Friend of the groom,” Charlie said. He zipped up and headed to the sink before hair guy could think of something to say.