Dora the Explorer had no comment on that revelation. “Anyway, we had an affair. The sex was incredible. Then it was over. Just like that. He dumped me. No warning. I have no idea to this day what went wrong.”
Dora was a strange lady, but her pain and bewilderment seemed genuine, and A.J. felt sympathy-even if no one had tried to blackmail Dora, her life had still been disrupted. No one had the right to yank other people around like that.
“How long did you see him for?”
“Five weeks. I was in Egypt for one semester. Frankly, I never expected to see Dakarai again, but one day I was coming out of the dry cleaners, and there he was.” Her gaze zeroed on Elysia. “With you.”
Elysia’s eyes widened like a startled cat, but she said nothing.
Dora smiled. “Oh, yes, I recognized you right away. I followed you that day, you see. And it was obvious that I’d been played. Played from start to finish.” She drained her wineglass.
“So you started calling Dakarai,” A.J. guessed aloud.
She wondered if they were about to have a Miss Marple in the Drawing Room moment, but Dora scotched that when she said briskly, “That’s right. I started calling him. And following him. And, in general, harassing him. I didn’t want anyone else to go through what I went through.” To Elysia, she added, “Not that you weren’t old enough to know better.”
Elysia offered an acidic smile.
“In fact I called the DHS to try and get him kicked out of the country. They said they’d look into it, but I don’t think anyone ever did anything.”
“Did you ever try to talk to him directly?”
“I tried, of course. Oh, I admit when I first saw Dakarai I still had feelings for him. Embarrassing but true. They died fast. I realized he was just on the make. And apparently I wasn’t in his target income bracket.”
A.J. thought that was one possibility, but more likely Dora’s hostility and aggressiveness had made her a bad candidate for blackmail, regardless of her financial standing.
“What did he say when you recognized him?”
Dora laughed that edged laugh. “His first instinct, believe it or not, was to pretend I’d made a mistake.”
Not the brightest bloke, Elysia had been right about that. Not even a very developed sense of survival if he’d thought he could possibly get away passing that old line off on Dora. Why hadn’t he just told her his puppy ate his homework and been done with it?
Dora said, “Then he tried to suggest that we should… relive old times.” Her eyes were hard as onyx as they rested on Elysia.
Elysia said mildly, “Well, he would, wouldn’t he? That’s exactly the sort of thing he’d try if cornered. He was a lover not a fighter.”
“He was a user. A liar, a cheat, a-” Dora was on another roll.
A.J. interrupted, “Did you ever hear anything about Massri being involved in the theft or smuggling of Egyptian antiquities?”
Dora didn’t answer for a moment, her gaze on her empty glass. “There were rumors. Nothing overt. It was more a suggestion that he was lazy and not doing his job properly. He was lazy.”
“Apparently it was more than a rumor. He was fired from his position at the SCA.”
Dora’s eyes narrowed. “How do you know that?”
A.J. lied. “I contacted the SCA directly.” She thought it would be better if Dora didn’t know that their own relationship with the police was anything beyond adversarial.
“Well, I’m not surprised.” The teakettle was whistling in the kitchen. Dora rose to get it.
“She has the wherewithal to commit murder.” Elysia kept her voice low.
“The wherewithal?”
“The you-name-it. The gumption, the means, the motive.”
“But she’s got an alibi. Plus…”
“Plus what?”
A.J. opened her mouth, but Dora poked her head out of the kitchen. “Milk? Honey? Lemon?”
“Honey and lemon,” A.J. said.
“Milk,” Elysia said.
Dora disappeared, but her voice floated back to them. “Were you really going to marry him?”
Elysia’s smile was odd. “No,” she returned. “My experience was somewhat different from yours, Dora, but no.”
Dora reappeared with two mugs, which she set on the piles of paper on the long table.
“When was the last time you saw Massri?” A.J. asked.
“Months ago.” She seemed definite on that point. “After I turned him over to the DHS, I decided it was out of my hands.”
“There’s a colorful character,” Elysia commented as they left Dora’s and walked back to where they had parked the SUV.
A.J. snorted. “Boy, if that isn’t the pot calling the kettle black-as the Bard would say.”
Elysia gave her a cool look. “I do think she was telling the truth, though. At least as far as she understands it.”
A.J. agreed. “It seems unlikely that if she had killed Dicky she’d keep talking about how he got what he deserved and how angry she was with him.”
“Mmm.” Elysia said thoughtfully, “Perhaps. She doesn’t strike me as a particularly wise woman.”
“True.” A.J. remembered her impression that Dora might have impulse control issues. “She did seem a little headstrong.”
“If someone is running some kind of blackmail scheme I can’t imagine why they’d kill Peggy Graham and leave Dora running loose. I’d kill Dora, given a choice.”
A.J. said, hoping to discourage that line of commentary, “First of all, we don’t know for sure that Peggy was killed. It’s still very possible she committed suicide. Secondly, if Dora wasn’t being blackmailed, then she didn’t have much in the way of ammunition. Thirdly, Dora seems like a woman well able to take care of herself.”
“She does. Very true.”
“If Peggy really was killed, she must have had possession of damaging information. Dora, well, she knew Dicky was a rat, but there’s no law against being a rat, and however much a misery she made his life, she wasn’t really threatening the business enterprise because she didn’t really know anything.”
“Dora was working to have Dicky thrown out of the country. Had she succeeded, that would have been a disruption to the business plan.”
“True, I guess. Although there was still Cory. Besides, Dora didn’t succeed in having Dicky deported.”
“We need to find Cory,” Elysia remarked.
A.J. gave her an uneasy glance. “One thing. I thought her expression changed when we mentioned Dicky was fired from the SCA. She sort of hesitated.”
“I noticed that,” agreed Elysia.
“Maybe it was just surprise, but what if it was something else? After all, her field is archeology. What if all those artifacts and objets d’art in her apartment aren’t replicas? What if she was involved in some antiquities smuggling scheme with Dicky and he double-crossed her?”
Elysia looked delighted. “Pumpkin, that’s very good. In fact it’s brilliant. You’re beginning to think like me. Just because Dicky was a blackmailer doesn’t mean he was killed because of his blackmailing.”
“But we keep coming back to the problem of that alibi of Dora’s.”
“It is annoying.”
“Yes. I don’t think it’s an easy one to break. You can’t really rush out of a salon with those little foils on your head or hair full of glaze and not expect someone to notice.”
“Perhaps she has a twin sister. I remember once on an episode of 2-”
“I really doubt that’s the solution. Besides, knowing Jake, he probably checked.” A.J. considered their interview with Dora. “Come to think of it, why wasn’t she able to get Dicky thrown out of the country?”
“Perhaps he was here legally. Some people do enter the country legally. I did.”
“It would be one of the only honest things he did,” A.J. said.
Nineteen
