“Who was her latest boyfriend?” Forgash asked, more tentatively this time. “Or was she still banging Wheelock?”
“How the hell should I know? Maybe she didn’t even have one.”
Didn’t have one? Not too likely. I couldn’t imagine her without a current stud. Was he the bastard who killed her?
“Can you give us some idea where she got that coke, Ed?”
“Damned if I know, Gene. She didn’t even drink when we were married. Claimed it was bad for her health. She only ate healthy foods, exercised regularly, strictly by the book, you know.”
Black nodded in acknowledgment. He was the type who took in information slowly, processed it thoroughly, and never forgot it. “Tell me about her,” he said. “What kind of person she was…what she did…”
I considered his question. What could I tell him? That she was elegant. It was the best word to describe her. There wasn’t anything cheap or second-rate about her. That she was loving. When she loved you, she gave everything she had without restraint until she couldn’t give you any more. There was no deception or artifice about her.
That wasn’t what they wanted to hear. There was nothing useful I could tell them now. I’d been out of the picture too long.
“Talk to her sister,” I said. “She can tell you more about Alicia than I can.”
“We will, Ed. Only she’s been out of town. She’s due back today.” Black’s eyes wandered over the top of my desk, inspecting the folders and stacks of paper.
“Was she close to her sister?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “They talked on the phone almost every day. No one was closer to her.”
I finished the last bitter dregs of my coffee and tossed the cup in the garbage.
Then I had a vision. Tall, thin, blond. Lying on the floor with unseeing eyes and mouth open.
“What did she look like, Gene?”
He glanced at his partner with a pained look, then back at me. “One slug through the back of the head. No struggle. Her apartment was ripped apart though.”
“Forced entry?” I asked.
“Nope.”
“What was the time of death?”
“That’s enough, Rogan,” the seamstress cut in. “We’re not here to answer your fucking questions. Now you tell me what kinda gun you carry.”
“Glock seventeen. But I don’t carry it all the time, my friend. It’s at home.”
He squinted at me. “Have no fear. We’ll check it out.”
CHAPTER III
There were just a few peanuts left. Dave Tanner rooted around absentmindedly in the bottom of the bowl. I signaled the waitress for another round of Budweisers and held up the bowl for her to see.
Tanner stared across the tables as the girl sashayed away from us. He’d thickened some since our days of humping through Thua Thien province, but he still played a mean game of pickup basketball. And he still sported a crewcut.
Only now he was an institutional bond salesman with a white-shoe Wall Street firm, one of those venerable second-tier outfits you see in the middle of the tombstone ads.
“Too broad abeam?” he asked.
“What?”
“Her ass.”
I shook my head. “She’s a good kid. Studying to be a lawyer.”
We were sitting underneath an oversized red umbrella in the outdoor patio of Cafe Centro on East Forty-fifth, surrounded by a barricade of shrubbery. It was a hazy late afternoon with just a faint breeze stirring. All around us office workers were scurrying home or out to an evening rendezvous. Men in dark suits with stress lines creasing their faces. Women in flowered dresses carrying shopping bags filled with credit card purchases. A couple at the next table were hunched together, deep in conversation. They’d had a few drinks already and, from the snatches of conversation I could hear, the guy was laying a full-court press on the girl to convince her to take him back to her apartment. Their faces weren’t more than a foot apart. They clutched each other’s hands and the intensity of his gaze would have been enough to scald her on the spot.
I brought the subject up first. “About Alicia…,” I said.
“What do you wanna know, old buddy?”
“Tell me what you know about what she was doing.”
He shrugged. “Cops came to see me too. Not too much I could tell them about her. I just saw her once or twice a year. At parties, mutual friends, that kind of thing, you know.”
He stopped talking and stared at the waitress’ breasts as she came to the table. Her body was fleshy but her waist was trim, so she carried some extra inches around her bust and hips. Her breasts were well-rounded and they swung forward as she bent over to pour our beers. She was wearing one of those barely-visible bras, more for support than for coverage. Her thin white cotton blouse didn’t hide very much.
She finished pouring and straightened up, flashing a bright smile, first at Tanner and then at me.
“Care for some more peanuts?” she asked.
“You sure are one hell of a waitress,” Tanner said.
She tossed her head and ran her fingers through her spun-copper hair. “I’m not really a waitress. I’m studying law at Fordham. Next year this time, I’ll be a lawyer.”
Tanner and I exchanged glances. He scratched his head and said, “Not a waitress. Well, I’ll bet you’ll be a hell of a lawyer. Give me your number. I’m going to need a good lawyer sooner rather than later.”
She laughed and tossed her hair again. She wasn’t pretty but she had the kind of submissive air a lot of men like.
“I won’t have the same number when I start to practice law. I’m going back home to Boston.”
“Shame it is,” Tanner said as she walked away, his eyes studying her backside.
“About Alicia,” I prodded him.
He considered for a minute. “I don’t know too much about her life now. It consisted mostly of her job from what I could see. You know how she was. She always put herself into her work, body and soul. She didn’t have time for too much else.”
I took a swallow of beer. It felt good and cold going down. “How was her work going?”
He shrugged and said, “I dunno. Hard to tell-difficult to say. She never told me anything about it.”
Then I asked the sixty-four dollar question. “Did she have a boyfriend?”
He polished off his beer and swiveled his head around searching for an instant refill. “Yup,” he nodded, “if it’s the same one I knew. A guy named Chisolm.”
“What does he do?”
“He’s chairman of a company called Insignia Biotech in Norwalk. A solid, substantial citizen.”
I knew what he was referring to. “How long had they been going out?”
“Maybe a year, I think.”
“Did she ever talk about him?”
“She once told me he satisfied her needs.”
“What the hell does that mean?” I said.
“She didn’t go into any details,” Tanner said. “You knew her. She was a gal who didn’t like to talk a lot-to open up, you know.”
I nodded.
I remembered.
CHAPTER IV
The morning of her funeral was clear. There wasn’t a cloud in sight. The sun was so bright it reminded you of the way the sky looks on a summertime afternoon in Spain. Colors so vivid and whites like titanium dioxide whitewash on a canvas.
There were maybe thirty people at the cemetery-mostly expensively-dressed, well-coifed professionals wearing Swiss watches and English shoes. People like herself. They were probably her friends and co-workers.
I recognized three or four of her family members. They didn’t exactly roll out the red carpet for me. As a matter of fact, they studiously ignored me, preferring instead to inspect the groundskeeper’s craftsmanship. Tanner was there. He flashed a silent salute when he saw me.
Why was I there?
I owed it to her. For sure, I damn well owed it to her. If I had said yes to her plea, would she still be alive? If I had helped her, would they be putting her in the ground right now? Goddamned if I knew. But one thing was as certain as night follows day-I was going to do everything I could, and then a hell of a lot more, to find the answer. And when I did, I was going to tear off the head of the bastard who killed her. She was only thirty-six. Too young to bring down the curtain.