The man slung the luggage items into the limo's trunk and looked from Linda to me. Linda avoided his eyes. He tried to speak quietly enough not to be heard, but I have good ears.
"Who's this?" he asked. His voice had a strained note to it.
"Just a friend, Mr. Beckitt. A guy I used to see," she answered him.
More lies. More interesting.
I looked across the limo to the woman, presumably Mrs. Beckitt. She regarded me with a calm face, entirely void of emotion. It was a little spooky. She had the look I'd seen in films, on the faces of prisoners released from the German stalags at the end of World War II. Empty. Numb. Dead, and just didn't know it yet.
Linda opened the back door and let Mr. and Mrs. Beckitt into the car. Mrs. Beckitt briefly put a hand on Linda's waist in passing, a gesture that was too intimate and possessive for the hired help. I saw Linda shiver, then close the door. She walked back around the car to me.
"Get out of here," she said, quietly. "I don't want to get in any trouble with my boss."
I reached for her hand, grabbed it, and held it between both of mine, as an old lover might, I supposed. My business card was pressed between our palms. "My card. If you think of anything else, give me a call. Okay?"
She turned away from me without answering, but the card vanished into a pocket before she got back into the limo.
Mrs. Beckitt's dead eyes watched me through the side window as the limo went by me. It was my turn to shiver. Like I said, spooky.
I went on into the airport. The monitors displaying flight times flickered to fuzz when I walked by. I went to one of the cafes inside, sat down, and ordered myself a cup of coffee. I had to pay for it with change. Most of my money had gone into paying off last month's rent and into the love potion I'd let Bob talk me into making. Money. I needed to get to work on Monica Sells's case, finding her husband. I didn't want to get out of hot water with the White Council only to lose my office and apartment because I couldn't pay the bills.
I sipped coffee and tried to organize my thoughts. I had two areas of concern. The most important was finding who had killed Tommy Tomm and Jennifer Stanton. Not only to catch the killer before any more corpses turned up, but because if I didn't, the White Council would probably use the opportunity to have me put to death.
And, while tracking down killers and avoiding execution squads, I had to do some work for someone who would pay me. Tonight's excursion wasn't something I could charge Murphy for—she'd have my ass in a sling if she knew I was running around asking questions, poking my nose in where it shouldn't be. So, if I wanted money from Chicago P.D., I would have to spend time doing the research Murphy wanted—the black-magic research that could get me killed all by itself.
Or, I could work on Monica Sells's missing husband case. I thought I had that one pretty well pegged down, but it wouldn't hurt to get it fleshed out fully. I could spend time working on it, fill out the hours on the retainer, maybe even get a few more added on. That appealed to me a lot more than trying to work out some black magic.
So, I could follow up on the lead Toot-toot had given me. There'd been pizza delivered out to the Lake Providence home that night. Time to talk to the deliveryman, if possible.
I left the cafe, went out to the pay phones, and dialed directory assistance. There was only one place near the Lake Providence address that delivered pizza. I got the number and dialed through.
"Pizza 'Spress," someone with his mouth full said. "What'll it be tonight?"
"Hey there," I said. "I wonder if you can help me out. I'm looking for the driver who took an order out to an address on Wednesday night." I told him the address, and asked if I could speak to the driver.
"Another one," he snorted. "Sure, hang on. Jack just got in from a run." The voice on the other end of the line called out to someone, and a minute later the high baritone of a young man spoke tentatively into my ear.
"H-hello?"
"Hello," I answered. "Are you the driver who took pizza to—"
"Look," he said, his voice exasperated and nervous. "I said I was sorry already. It won't happen again."
I blinked for a minute, off balance. "Sorry for what?"
"Jeezus," he said. I heard him move across a room, with a lot of music and loud talk in the background, and then the background noise cut off, as though he had stepped into another room and shut the door behind him. "Look," he said in a half whine. "I told you I'm not gonna say anything to anyone. I was only looking. You can't blame me, right? No one answered the door, what was I supposed to do?" His voice cracked in the middle of his sentences. "Hell of a party, but hey. That's your business. Right?"
I struggled to keep up with the kid. "What, exactly, did you see, Jack?" I asked him.
"No one's face," he assured me, his voice growing more nervous. He gave a jittery little laugh and tried to joke. "Better things to look at than faces, right? I mean, I don't give a damn what you do in your own house. Or your friends, or whoever. Don't worry about me. Never going to say a thing. Next time I'll just leave the pizza and run a tab, right?"
Friends, plural. Interesting. The kid was awfully nervous. He must have gotten an eyeful. But I had a gut instinct that he was hiding something else, keeping it back.
"What else?" I asked him. I kept my voice calm and neutral. "You saw something else. What was it?"
"None of my business," he said, instantly. "None of my business. Look, I gotta get off this line. We have to keep it open for orders. It's Friday night, we're busy as hell."
"What," I said, separating my words, keeping them clipped, "else?"
"Oh, shit," he breathed, his voice shaking. "Look, I wasn't with that guy. Didn't know anything about him. I didn't tell him you were having an orgy out there. Honest. Jeezus, mister, I don't want any trouble."
Victor Sells seemed to have a real good idea of how to party—and of how to frighten teenagers. "One more question, and I'll let this go," I told him. "Who was it you saw? Tell me about him."
"I don't know. I don't know him, didn't recognize him. Some guy, with a camera, that's all. I went around the back of the house to try the back door, got up on your deck, and just saw inside. I didn't keep on looking. But he was up there, all in black, with this camera, taking pictures." He paused as someone pounded on the door he had closed earlier. "Oh, God, I have to go, mister. I don't know you. I don't know nothing." And then there was a scrambling of feet, and he hung up the phone.
I hung up the phone myself and ambled back to George's loaner. I worked out the details I had just learned on the way back to my apartment.
Someone else had called Pizza 'Spress, evidently just before I had. Someone else had gone asking after the pizza boy. Who?
Why, Victor Sells, of course. Tracing down people who might have information about him, his possible presence in the lake house. Victor Sells, who had been having some sort of get-together out there that night. Maybe he'd been drunk, or one of his guests had, and ordered the pizza—and now Victor was trying to cover his tracks.
Which implied that Victor knew someone was looking for him. Hell, as far as I knew, he'd been in the house when I'd gone out there last night. This made things a lot more interesting. A missing man who doesn't want to be found could get dangerous if someone came snooping after him.