“ Any of them ring a bell?”
“ She closed deals with all of them. Let me see.”
“ No, let me see your sales records.”
“ That might speed things up,” she replied.
“ I hope they're up to date and in order.”
“ Around here? Don't bet on it.”
Jessica exchanged an exasperated look with Richard, who had stood back and allowed Jessica to deal with the frustrating woman.
“ Here's the file room,” said the partner.
They looked into a closet in which boxes were piled high, most wedged between two upright filing cabinets. “Always going to get around to the filing next week,” she muttered, “but next week never comes. Well… knock yourselves out.”
“ Whoa up… wait a minute. Are you in the least interested in locating your partner?”
She took in a deep breath. “The woman lives alone with her cat, and she's seeing someone, and by this time tomorrow, she'll come waltzing in here, a big smile on her face, and Nancy will wonder what all the fuss has been about. Her daughter is a little, you know, overprotective. You know how that is.”
“ Has anyone called her boyfriend?”
“ Her daughter said Dave doesn't know where she is either, but Nancy's, you know, a free spirit.”
“ Was she upset with any of the people on that list I read you?”
“ Come to think of it, she was complaining about one of them.”
“ What kind of complaint was it? And which one?”
“ Usual second-guessing. She did a lot of that. Not sure the person renting would be a good tenant, 'fraid he might destroy the place in one fashion or another. She'd go on about such things forever, so I always quit listening after a while.”
“ Which tenant was she complaining about the loudest?” Sharpe's voice was the epitome of unmasked dislike, but it went right over this woman's head.
“ Gee… I don't know. I remember it was one of the single men, Shaw or Brown, but which one, I couldn't tell you.”
“ Can you tell us which properties the two men took?”
She scrunched her petite face into a wadded little ball and said, “Sorry.”
Richard had to fight the urge to strangle the woman.
“ Look, where are the most recent contracts, ahhh… placed in here?” Jessica asked.
“ Look in the in-bin, there in the comer.” She pointed but remained in the doorjamb.
“ Gotcha, and thanks.”
“ Don't mention it.”
“ Don't worry “
Jessica and Richard tore into the stack of papers found below another stack covering the in-basket. “You want to order in some coffee?” asked Richard. “This could take some time.”
“ No, let's work through. Here, you take this stack, and I'll take the other half.”
“ Contracts are mixed with junk mail,” Richard complained.
“ Watch for anything with Brown or Shaw on it.”
They fell silent, searching.
After a moment, finding nothing, Richard said, “You realize this could all be a blind alley, don't you?”
“ Yeah… I know that, but I also keep thinking about Kim Desinor and the clock continues to run out for De-Campe.”
Richard bit his lower lip and nodded and continued to pore over papers.
Jessica then said, “On meeting Miss Manners in there, I thought maybe she did away with her partner or bored her to death, but now I admit, she's too stupid to murder someone and properly hide the body, and she likely knows this better than anyone, so…”
“ Are you kidding, Jessica? Two or three bodies could be below all this paper.”
“ Yeah, reminds me of my days in the dorm when everyone was sweating final research papers. The room was jammed with paper and books. Didn't see my roommate for three days. She was there… I could hear her… we called out to one another from time to time, but no… couldn't see her for all the paper.”
“ Maybe we should just call out Nancy Willis's name. See if we get a faint voice from the other side,” joked Richard. Jessica laughed aloud. It felt good; she hadn't had much to smile about lately. “Mr. Gideon Brown! I got handwriting on a phone form here,” said an excited Richard. “It's requesting a rural or remote rental, something resembling a farm, he says, something with a bam. Wants a place he won't be bothered in his old age, where he can raise chickens and tend a few animals like when he was a boy in Illinois-says here.”
They took the note to Willis's partner, read it to her, and asked if she recalled anything unusual about this man Brown. Carmella said, “I did think him a bit odd, as I recall. Didn't care for the client in the least, and Nancy kept wondering what he could possibly want the old Killough place for. She told me she didn't like the feel of it-the deal that is, but again, I was only half listening. I had heard it all before, you see.”
Jessica turned to Richard and indicated the correspondence. 'Tell me there's a response clipped to it, an address?”
“ No… says he will be in on the eighteenth and that he would be pleased if she had some suggestions for him.”
Jessica again tried jogging the memory of Miss Manners, but she had nothing further she could add, until Jessica's stare bore a hole into her head.
“ All right. Let me see it,” said the partner, who had prepared two cups of steaming coffee for the FBI agents.
After handing the two law enforcement people their coffees, the woman studied the letter for some time. “Oh, yes, I do remember something else of Mr. Brown now. He called in once while Nancy was at lunch. Gruff, callous voice, raw, actually. He was in heat to speak to her, finalize things, and I couldn't help him, and he became angry with me.”
“ Let me guess. He wanted to rent by the month?” asked Jessica.
“ How'd you know? Oh, yes, of course, you are a detective, aren't you. But it was worse. He also wanted a kill fee.”
“ A kill fee? Isn't that unusual?”
“ Shows he was a shrewd man when it came to property. If things didn't in the end suit him, he could step out of the contract and regain most of his down payment, you see.”
“ Why didn't you alert us to this earlier if it's so un-usual?” asked Jessica.
“ You… you didn't ask if anything unusual had occurred in the context of client contract.”
“ Oh… oh, I see,” mocked Jessica, but again the ridicule was wasted on this woman.
“ Look, I told Nancy I didn't half blame him-about the kill fee, I mean.”
“ Oh, and why's that?”
“ The property abuts a chemical factory-actually, a paint factory. It's rather a wasteland. It fronts a dump site. Place has been cited so many times for environmental damage by so many different agencies that no one knows who's handling the lawsuits anymore. “Jessica said, “I think I remember reading something about it, but that was years ago.”
“ They've somehow managed to keep it in court all these years, and the place is producing less product, but still…”
Jessica replied, “If this man Brown is Purdy using an alias, I imagine the place suits the old man's needs perfectly.”
Richard concurred. “I can just see the old man disposing of two bodies there.”
“ You think your partner, Willis, may have had second thoughts on renting the property to Brown? That she might have gone out there to have a look at how he was using the property?” Jessica asked.
“ Actually, she does that sort of thing from time to time… all the time when things are slow. She's a bit of a busybody that way. Costs us a lot of clients. She's a dear, you know, a kind, big-hearted soul, but she has this one fatal flaw in this business.”
“ Oh, what's that?”
“ After the sale, you don't meddle. She meddles. Nancy can't really help herself; it's rather a compulsion with her. Every instinct against it, and yet she goes and meddles after the sale. Like some people have a compulsion to rewrite procedure manuals from one day to the next, she has this compulsion to know how a client uses the damned property, especially a rental.”