“Who are you? If you’re a friend of Alice’s, talk to me. I’m her lawyer.”
“I can’t. I have to go. I have to get going.” He backed down toward the grand staircase and hurried down the stairs. Bennie hustled after him, her pace quicker. She could outrun an art student, for Christ’s sake. His Doc Martens clomped down the stairs, with Bennie at his crepe heels. Three feet away, then two.
“Stop,” Bennie called out, almost nabbing him in the middle of the staircase. “Just stop and we’ll talk.”
“I don’t know anything. Leave me alone!” The young man reached the landing and whirled around the corner to the next set of stairs, almost slipping on the marble. Bennie swung for him and missed, and he hit the lobby and raced across the floor toward the exit door. In front of it was the security desk, with a guard and a turnstile that gave Bennie an idea.
“Stop that kid!” she shouted to the guard. “He took my purse!”
“No! That’s not true!” the young man called, too late. The turnstile caught him in his slim waist and he doubled over.
“Wait right there, sir,” barked the guard, a heavyset black man in a blue shirt. A baseball bat with duct tape around its handle rested in the corner next to his perch. “Lady says you stole her bag.”
“I didn’t!”
Bennie feigned surprise. “My goodness, how silly of me. I just remembered. I didn’t bring my purse today. I’m so sorry.”
The guard scowled, looking from Bennie to the young man. “Sorry about that, sir. If you have no library materials to declare, you’re free to go.”
“Thanks,” he said, though Bennie clamped a hand on his shoulder.
“I have no library materials,” she told the disapproving guard and pressed through the exit into the sunlight. The streets were alive with businesspeople, summer tourists, and heavy traffic. Bennie tightened her grip on the kid and pressed him out of the foot traffic and toward Logan Circle. “I have to talk to you about Alice Connolly. I’m trying to help her. If you don’t talk to me now, I’ll subpoena you. Either way, we’re gonna have a chat.”
“You won’t hurt me, will you?”
“I’m a lawyer, not a thug.”
“Is there a difference?” the kid called back, and Bennie gave him points for humor. She led him by the elbow across the street and walked him to the benches under the shade trees around Swann Fountain.
“Now,” Bennie said, “how do you know Alice Connolly?” She plopped him onto a bench and stood over him, close as a lover.
“I don’t know Alice Connolly.”
“You want me to call the cops? Right now?”
“You gonna say I took your purse again?” He pouted up at Bennie in the hazy sun.
“I’m gonna say you’re obstructing justice in a capital murder case. How do you know Alice Connolly?”
The kid slumped into the bench, his back spiny in the thin T-shirt. His forehead looked damp to his George Clooney hairline. “Okay, I know Alice. Knew her.”
“Did she come to the library to write?”
“Yes, for a while.”
“What were you doing there?”
“Papers, for school. I’m at the Academy. PAFA.”
“Did you meet her in the library?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“Fall semester, the year before last. She was new in town. So was I.”
“What was your relationship?”
“We were friends. We talked about things. Not much though. She was kind of hard to get to know. She would work on the computer, I would do research or sketch. We’d break for lunch. You know, friends.” His prominent Adam’s apple bobbed up and down, and Bennie didn’t have to be a detective to come up with the next question.
“You didn’t date?”
“No.”
“But you wish you did.”
“Does it show?” He squinted at Bennie, and she sat beside him on the bench. It was too hot to be shaking down the heartbroken.
“Don’t run away now. I’ll chase you and make you wear plaid.”
“I believe it.”
“What’s your name?”
“Sebastian Blair.”
“Bennie Rosato.” She shook his hand and it buckled in her grasp. “You talk to the cops about Alice?”
“I never talked to the police about anything. I’ve never been in trouble in my life. I don’t want to get in trouble now.”
“Relax. Just talk to me and you can go on your way. You thought I was Alice.”
“Yeah. Are you related?”
Bennie wiped her brow. “So let’s talk. I want to help Alice and I need to know what you know about her. What was the story between you and Alice?”
“I was in love. She wasn’t. We stayed friends. I never even told her.”
“This was when?”
“September.”
“Alice was living with someone at the time, a cop. Did you know that?”
He nodded regretfully. “They weren’t solid.”
“No?”
“Her boyfriend was at the gym all the time, I think he worked out, or boxed or something. She used to go with him to the gym, when she wasn’t working on the computer at the library.”
“She told you this?”
“Yeah. Then, in October she met someone else, another guy. Then she stopped coming to the library.”
“Where’d she meet this other guy?”
“I don’t know. He didn’t hang at the library. He looked like a lawyer.”
Bennie frowned. “A lawyer? What was his name?”
“I don’t know. She never said.”
“You didn’t press it?”
“No.”
Bennie sighed. “Sebastian. You lose the woman to another man and you don’t bother to find out who he is?”
The artist smiled weakly. “I tried, but she didn’t want to talk about him. She didn’t want to talk much after she met the lawyer. After a while, she stopped coming to the library. She kind of ditched me.”
“Her boyfriend was murdered in May of last year. I need to know her whereabouts that day. When she came and left the library, even what she was wearing.”
“Can’t help you there. She stopped coming to the library a long time before that.” He looked away, at the Swann Fountain, and Bennie followed his gaze. For the first time she noticed three kids playing in the fountain, drenched to their shorts and T-shirts, oblivious to the workday crowd. They kicked and splashed in the circular pool, and Bennie was distracted by the slick nudes at the fountain’s center.
“You think she was sleeping with this lawyer?” Bennie asked.
“Duh.”
“So who was he?”
“Some rich guy. He drove a Mercedes. He came by once or twice to pick her up.”
“What kind of Mercedes?”
“Sedan. New.”
“What color?”
“Shit brown.”
Bennie tried to puzzle it out. Connolly hadn’t told her any of this. “What did the lawyer look like?”
“Rich. Preppy.” The young man’s chin sunk onto his hand, like a lovesick version of The Thinker, which sat in front of the Rodin Museum down the Parkway. “Mainly he looked richer and preppier than me.”
“Was he white or black? Light hair, dark hair? Sebastian, you’re an artist, with an alleged eye for detail. Give me a description.”
“I can’t. The subject depresses me, and I’m no good with words.”
“Can you draw him, then?”
Sebastian raised his chin from his hand. “You gotta pencil?”
20
Alice stood behind the inmates at the computers. Their blue shirts bent over the keyboards and they poked at the keys. Her cellie hunted-and-pecked in the middle, and two seats from her was Valencia, reeking like a funeral home. Leonia anchored the end of the row, a mountain of muscle next to Shetrell and the rest of her crew.
Alice kept her eye on them, wondering about last night. There had to be a contract out on her. It would have come to Shetrell, who was connected inside and out. But why? And from who? It didn’t make sense, but Alice wasn’t taking any chances, not with freedom this close. She knew how to deal with it. Leonia, not Shetrell, would do the dirty work. Alice strolled down the row of do-rags and Muslims and stopped when she got to Leonia’s chair. “How’s it going, girl?”