Good thing that camera wasn’t on Sammi right then and there; she gave Greer the finger.
As ordered, we trudged over to the mausoleum to wait. Well, some of us trudged over to the mausoleum. I noticed that Absalom kept his distance, just like I saw that in spite of her one-finger salute, once she was away from the group, Sammi didn’t look as angry as she did upset.
Remember how I said that I knew better than to go chasing after ghosts? Well, I knew that having a heart-to-heart with Sammi was not in my best interests, either. Still, I couldn’t help myself. There was something about seeing tough Sammi with her eyes bright with unshed tears that made me feel like it was my duty, as team captain, to say something to cheer her up. I walked over to where she was leaning against the mausoleum, her leg (the one with the electronic monitoring device on it) bent and one foot against the wall, her arms crossed over her chest.
I smiled, but since she refused to look at me, it didn’t much matter. “Don’t pay any attention to Greer. She obviously wouldn’t know fashion if it came up and bit her in the butt.”
She snorted. “And you would?”
I tried not to take the comment personally. I mean, coming from a woman in red shorts and a purple shirt with a saint on it, how could I? “I know a thing or two about the way to dress.”
“For an old-folks’ country club, maybe.”
“How can you-” I bit off the rest of my comment. Sammi’s opinion was just that, an opinion, and dead wrong, besides. She only said what she did because she was itching for a fight. I refused to be the one to give it to her. I didn’t care enough, in the first place. Plus fighting teammates would make Greer salivate, and who knows what Bianca would think of me if she saw me duking it out with Sammi.
I held my arms at my sides, the better to control my temper. “Greer doesn’t shop where I shop, or where you shop.”
Sammi’s top lip curled. She plucked at her purple top. “You think this kind of quality comes off the rack? I make my own clothes. I design them, too.”
OK, so we didn’t share one iota of the same fashion sense, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t impressed. Suddenly, the whole saint-on-the-shirt thing made sense, too. “You’re name is Sammi Santiago. And Santiago, that means-”
“St. James. Yeah.” She looked at me out of the corner of her eye. “That’s how you can tell it’s one of my own designs. I put St. James on all my stuff somewhere. You speak Spanish?”
“Nah. But I know that much. I know creativity when I see it, too. You making your own clothes, that’s really cool.”
She controlled a smile. “You think so?”
“I think that’s more than I could ever do. It’s way more creative than Greer in that gray suit of hers.”
“Yeah.” Sammi looked toward where we heard the sounds of genteel laughter coming from the section where Greer was filming. “She needs to get rid of those man shirts. If she wore that suit with a bustier-”
“That’s too scary to think about!”
We shared a laugh.
It wasn’t much, but it was a small inroad. Feeling more comfortable with Sammi than I had since she stepped out of that van and into my life, I did my best to make small talk. “You ever think of selling your clothes?” Believe me, I was in team-captain mode here, I wasn’t interested in buying. “There are some boutiques over in the Tremont neighborhood that-”
I guess that was the wrong thing to say. Sammi grumbled a curse and walked away.
As it turned out, maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing after all. It meant I didn’t have to deal with Sammi or with introducing anybody to anybody else when Quinn showed up.
“I thought you’d be working.”
I gave him a look that told him I was. “Didn’t think I’d see you today.”
“Hey, I’m a man of my word.” He was carrying a slim file folder, and he held it up for me to see.
“Is that-”
“The file you wanted. The Lamar case, yeah.”
I should have been grateful. I was. Honest. But-
“It’s awfully skinny.” I scrunched up my nose and gave the folder another look. “How can all the information about an entire murder investigation be in such a skinny folder?”
Quinn’s expression reminded me a whole bunch of the one on Sammi’s face before she walked away. “ ‘Thank you’ might be a more appropriate response,” he said.
“Thank you. Why is the file so skinny?”
His lips puckered. Not in the good way they did when he kissed me. “This is what’s called the basic file,” he explained. “There’s one of these kept in the Homicide Unit for every case that’s ever been investigated. It’s not supposed to leave the Justice Center.”
“Thank you.” This time I meant it.
Quinn sloughed it off. “I figured no one else was going to be looking for the file. Not on a murder that old. Especially when someone was tried and convicted. You just going to stand there? Or are you going to take a look?”
I shook away my disappointment and went to stand in the shade of the mausoleum. Quinn came along. “Basic file,” he said, flipping it open. “It tells you-”
“The basics.”
“That’s right. Who was murdered, when the call first came in, who was interviewed, who was convicted.”
“I know who was convicted.” I leaned closer for a better look. Not such a bad thing, considering that Quinn was wearing Flavio aftershave, my favorite. When he left my apartment that morning, he was dressed in the navy suit he’d worn to dinner the night before. But he must have stopped home somewhere along the way. His suit was one I’d never seen before. Grey, with pinstripes that were far more subtle than the ones on the suit that Lamar wore. His French-cuffed shirt was a shade of blue that matched the sky overhead, his dusty blue tie was a box pattern of darker and lighter blues, tans, and gray.
I leaned a little nearer. “You got this file for me fast.”
One corner of his mouth pulled into a smile. “Told you I was a man of my word. You wanted what you wanted, I wanted what I wanted, and once I got it…”
I knew better than to go down that road. The last thing I needed was for my teammates-or Greer-to find me looking starry-eyed with Quinn around. Or worse, giving in to the temptation of getting nice and close and reminding him that there was more where that came from, and next time, he wouldn’t have to get me a file to get some.
That was not the kind of publicity the restoration needed, and it would certainly make my favorite Homicide detective less than happy. With that in mind, I took the folder out of his hands and read it over.
“The victim was Vera Blaine. She was twenty-two.” Seeing the information laid out in black and white made me queasy. “He never told me who was killed, or mentioned that she was so young.”
“He?”
I shook myself out of my thoughts and found Quinn with his head cocked, studying me.
“He. The guy who filled out the papers in Lamar’s cemetery file. You know, the ones that mentioned that Lamar might have been wrongly accused. I just assumed it was a he. And look”-changing the subject was a much better tactic that getting fixated on the fact that my information was coming from the dead guy who’d been convicted of the murder-“it says she was killed at the Lake View Motel in Cleveland. Ever hear of the place?”
Quinn shook his head. “I only hang around in places where there’s trouble. Maybe no one’s been killed there lately.”
“Or maybe the place doesn’t exist anymore.” I read over the address. Even I knew it wasn’t the best part of town. “Twenty-five years is a long time. The motel is probably gone.”
I read the next section of the report. “It looks like the cops interviewed a whole lot of people. Some guy named Steve Ganley, for one. It says here he was Vera Blaine’s boyfriend.”