“I met her mother a couple of times, you know? You could just tell she thought Lea hung the stars and the moon. Then something like this happens so close to Christmas.” At the top of the landing, she brushed past me with a contemptuous glance at my wheezing and went to unlock Lea’s door. “If you weren’t a family friend, I wouldn’t even consider letting you in the apartment.” She jammed the key into the lock as if she were angry with it. “Normally, I guard my renters’ privacy like it was my own. The first thing I told Mr. Tandan when he hired me was that I was a building manager, not a snoop or spy.”
She shoved open the door, let me enter, and then stepped in after me. There was nothing special about the apartment — living room, a tiny kitchen, an even tinier bathroom, a single bedroom that opened to a wrought-iron balcony where one piece of the railing leaned as if it too had considered jumping.
“Just to think,” she said.
She shook her head sadly and made the sign of the cross. Then she said she was going to wait outside because she just didn’t feel right being here where poor little Lea had died.
There really wasn’t anything to see. The bed had been stripped and sprayed with disinfectant; the living room was empty except for a single end table with a broken leg that made it list like a drunk trying to hold on to his dignity. I pilfered through the kitchen. There was nothing there either except for a few dried-up roaches, a broken plate, and a couple of batteries that might or might not have been dead.
“You going to spend forever in there?” the landlady shouted from outside the door.
I lit a cigarette, took a deep drag. “I need to look around.”
She huffed and announced that she had an appointment. Then she warned me not to leave before she had a walk-through to make sure everything was all right.
I went back to the bedroom, picked up a cheap cordless phone from beside the bed, hit the Talk button, and got a dial tone. That didn’t tell me anything other than that the phone still worked so I hit Off and put the receiver back where I’d found it.
I wasn’t expecting much. Earlier, I’d stopped by the Union Avenue precinct, hoping that an old friend had snagged Lea’s case. That hadn’t happened. The case had been assigned to Reggie Morales, a newbie in Homicide who’d graduated with a degree in Criminal Justice from Ole Miss. Within five minutes I knew two things about Morales: He was a sharp dresser, and he was still fresh enough to be polite and answer my questions.
Lea Washburn had committed suicide. She and her boyfriend were having problems. Her grades were tanking, and she was in jeopardy of losing her scholarship and being placed on academic probation. On the night of her death she’d been drinking heavily and eating downers like they were popcorn. Her next-to-last call, unanswered, had been to her boyfriend, her last to a suicide-prevention hotline. Evidently, she’d either gotten a busy signal, hung up, or whoever was working the line wasn’t that damn good at the job.
Now I walked around her empty apartment, opened dresser drawers that had already been searched, ran my fingers over the spines of books — psychology texts, grammar handbooks, a collection of John Grisham novels. I was still there, still trying to decide if I should waste another five or ten minutes pacing through the apartment to make myself feel as if I’d done a day’s work or if I should cut to the chase and head for the nearest bar, when I turned and saw a woman standing at the threshold of Lea’s door.
“I thought you were Mrs. Reynolds,” she said.
She was young, in her early twenties, dressed in jeans so expensive they looked cheap, her brown hair chopped just below her shoulders. She wore severe black-framed glasses that emphasized her green eyes, and she had a book in her hand. I tried for what I hoped was a charming or at least harmless smile.
“Do you have a second? I’d like to ask you a couple of questions about Lea Washburn.”
She shrugged her narrow shoulders. “You’re another cop, I guess.”
“Something like that.”
“I’ve already told you guys everything I know. I wasn’t even here when she jumped. I got home thirty minutes later and there were cops and paramedics all over the place.”
“I won’t take much of your time.”
“I’ve got Linguistic Theory in half an hour, and I can’t be late again. Whatever you want to ask, ask quick.”
“Five minutes,” I said. “I just want to know about Lea, what she was like.”
“If that’s all you want, it won’t take more than a minute.”
It took over half an hour. During the course of the conversation I found out that the girl’s name was Ashley and that she’d moved in across the hall a couple of weeks before Lea rented this apartment. They weren’t friends. Ashley was a graduate student in Literary Studies. Lea was pre-law and acted as if her biggest ambition was to be either Martha Stewart or the president of the campus Republicans.
“It was sad,” Ashley said. “Not just because her head was in the wrong place but how she tried to fit in with people who she thought were successes. You know?”
“Not really.”
“She’d buy clothes that looked like the crap all the elitist preppie kids are wearing but she’d buy them at Target and everyone would know. The only thing that those jerks in the Young Republicans hate more than grunge kids and Goths are people who try to look like them and shop at Target. Lea was a sorority girl who couldn’t find one that would have her.”
I asked about Lea’s boyfriend. Ashley sighed, shrugged her narrow shoulders, and said that it was sad but even Lea’s boyfriend had been grabbed off a discount rack. Ryan Beatty had been a third-string quarterback at the university until he’d tested positive for steroids. After he was suspended, he dropped out of school and took a job as a bouncer at a campus bar where he’d met Lea. They’d been dating for months, and they had a “dramatic relationship”—lots of arguments, threats, and tears. A couple of times the arguments had turned physical and Ashley had heard Lea begging him not to hit her.
My cop radar went up. God help me, the truth was I felt better than I had all day. Here was a real possibility — a steroid-addicted, loser boyfriend, with a bad temper. All I had to do was find one mistake, confront him with it, extract a tearful confession, and then I could return to the Refugee, give Cheryl the bitter comfort of knowing that her daughter was a murder victim not a suicide, and then get on with the business of swelling my liver to the size of a beach ball.
“But the thing is,” Ashley said, her voice dropping as if she were afraid she would be overheard. “I’m a committed feminist. The linguistics of gender is my thesis topic, for God’s sake.” She bit her fingernail, looked as if she were about to commit a heresy. “I didn’t really blame him.”
Sleeping around had been more than a hobby to Lea. She’d taken it nearly to the level of a professional. Lea’s bedroom door had always been open — for classmates, philandering professors, casual acquaintances, any willing, well-dressed guy she bumped into at one of the local bars.
“Maybe she needed guys to prove that she wasn’t just a silly wannabe or maybe she just liked sex. Who knows? But the weird thing, the thing I didn’t like, was that she’d always tell Ryan about it. In detail. And he’d cry. I mean I’ve heard him wailing but Lea would keep goading and goading him. Like she enjoyed it.”
“Maybe she pushed him too far and he helped her off the balcony?”
“It’s possible, I guess. I mean, you see things like that on the news all the time. But I never really got the impression that he’d go that far.”