He heard low voices, apparently coming from one or more of those offices, but saw no one, so he stepped forward and, following instructions, “Please Ring for Assistance,” pushed the little hotel bell that someone had duct-taped down to the peeling wooden counter.
In five seconds, a tiny and tentative bespectacled young woman appeared from between one of the banks of filing cabinets, wearing what looked to Mickey like a thrift-store cotton dress and a devastated and yet somehow impatient expression. Beneath her wire- rimmed glasses, her eyes were red and swollen. Mickey at once realized two things: that the employees had heard the news about their executive director, and that maybe this should have been an assignment for Tamara-the vast majority of the time, Mickey supposed that men here were going to be the enemy; it came with the turf. Still, he dredged up a look of respectful solicitude.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
Having done his homework, Mickey knew the name of the associate director. “I’d like to speak to Adele Watrous,” he said, “if she’s in.”
“Is there something I can help you with?”
“Are you Ms. Watrous?”
“No.”
“I was hoping to talk to Ms. Watrous.”
“It’s Mrs., and she is having a difficult morning. I’m afraid we all are. Can I tell her what this is about?”
Mickey’s heart went out to this young woman, but he was here to get information-specifically if Nancy Neshek had mentioned to anyone here the question she’d wanted to ask Hunt-and the further down the food chain he went with the staff, he thought, the less likely the result. “I’m afraid it’s about Ms. Neshek, which I can see you already know about. I’m very sorry.”
She opened her mouth to reply, but no words came out, and then she closed it, nodded twice, then again, and finally disappeared back into the maze. After another moment, a grandmotherly woman appeared. Her snow-white hair was disheveled and she, too, had clearly been crying, but she spoke in a crisp, no- nonsense manner. “I’m Adele Watrous,” she said. “Is this about Nancy? How can I help you?”
“I’m working on the investigation into Mr. Como’s death,” he began, “and now Ms. Neshek’s. Nancy’s. She made a call to our office on the night she died, and I was hoping to talk to you about whatever she might have told you, if anything, that might shed some light on her death.”
Nodding wearily, Mrs. Watrous lifted the flip-up portion of the counter and motioned him inside into the office proper, then led him beyond the first door they passed and into the second one. Once they were seated, the door closed behind them, she templed her hands at her mouth and blew into them a time or two, regaining her composure.
“When did you hear about it?” Mickey began.
She sighed. “This morning. The phone started ringing around six-thirty. One of our women out at the Jackson Street facility heard it on the news. After that…” She opened her hands. “Everybody.” Then, suddenly, in a kind of a double take, she seemed to focus on him more clearly. “You said you were investigating Dominic Como’s death?”
“Yes.”
“And you think Nancy’s is related to that?”
“We don’t know. What we do know is that Nancy called the hotline at our office after the reward was announced on Monday and said that she had a question, an important question. And would we please call her the next day, here at your offices, or at her home? She said she’d be at one of the two places, definitely, but never answered at either.”
“No. She never made it in here on Tuesday.” She paused. “But that wasn’t by any means unusual. I mean, she’d often get called out to one of the sites and have to stay until whenever…” Trailing off, she shook her head in obvious dismay and confusion.
Mickey gave her a minute. “Were you both here when the reward on Mr. Como’s death was announced?”
“And when was that, exactly?”
“Around four in the afternoon.”
“Well, then”-she considered carefully-“I’m sure we were here, yes, both of us. But I don’t remember hearing about it here. I know we didn’t talk about it.”
This was more or less what Hunt and Mickey had expected, but that didn’t make the bare fact-that Watrous had no information about why Neshek had called the Hunt Club-any easier to accept. He pursed his lips in frustration. “Might Nancy have spoken to anybody else here about it? Did she stay late, for example?”
Again, Mrs. Watrous gave the question its time. And again she shook her head no. “She left right at five on Monday, or a little after. I stayed on till a little past six.”
Grasping at straws, Mickey asked, “Was that also usual, that she left work right around five?”
“No. Usually she stayed much later. Unless she had a fund- raiser or some event or something like that. The work here is never finished, so we tend to put in some long hours.”
“So”-Mickey barely daring to hope, but here at last was a possible opening-“was there something Monday night, then?”
She started to shake her head again, and then abruptly stopped. “Well, yes… I mean. Oh, God, I hadn’t even thought of that.”
“What’s that, Mrs. Watrous?”
“They were having a COO meeting at City Hall.”
“COO?”
“You know? The Communities of Opportunity. Oh, and speaking of which, did you see that thing in the paper this morning, the CityTalk column? That’s what they must have been going to talk about, that report coming out.”
“Who was that? Besides Nancy, I mean.”
“Well, I suppose all or most of the beneficiaries. Us, Mission Street, Sunset, Delancey, all the others.” Now, her color suddenly high, Adele Watrous tapped impatiently on her desk. “People don’t realize. It’s harder than it looks. You’ve got to put on a song and dance to get people to come out and give you money for these projects. You see what’s in the paper today, you think it’s all about throwing this foundation money away on music or public relations consultants or other nonessentials, but you’ve got to spend money to make money, especially in these times, in this field. Mr. Turner understands that. There’s no other way to do it.”
“I believe you,” Mickey said, keeping his calm. The mention of Len Turner’s name in this other context suddenly put his brain on high alert. “So you’re fairly certain that Nancy was planning to attend this meeting?”
“I’m sure she was. But you can find out if she did easily enough.”
“You’re right, Mrs. Watrous, we can. Well”-Mickey started to get to his feet-“I want to thank you for all your help and cooperation here today. I know this news must have been brutal.”
“It was. I still can’t make myself believe it. And you know what’s really so terrible, almost the worst part?”
“What’s that?”
Suddenly her weariness seemed to overcome her. She sighed again and closed her eyes briefly. When she opened them, she shook her head in what Mickey took to be resignation. “The worst part is that we’re so used to terrible news here. We get terrible news here every single day.”
18
Due to the late night they’d both spent at the Neshek home, neither Juhle nor Russo got into work until just before Hunt arrived to make his statement to them. In Nancy Neshek, they had a fresh homicide to begin investigating, and the crime scene analysis and report to review, but Russo wanted to go down and finish up whatever work remained with the limousine first. After all, they’d gone to all the trouble of getting a warrant and having the Lincoln towed to the impound lot, and that lot was only just across Seventh Street, adjacent to the Hall of Justice, where they currently found themselves anyway.