Neely Tucker - The Ways of the Dead

“Sullivan, the suspension. The Judge Foy matter. Reese doesn’t like you, and if what he said to us in a sworn deposition was true I don’t blame him. I also can’t imagine, one way or another, that you hold him dear.”

“You believed him, you didn’t believe me, Eddie. He lied, in my humble opinion.”

“Fair enough. So. I’m not going to pull you off this. You’ve done all the work. But remember that every bit of this reporting has to be above reproach. The interview must be recorded. I would imagine he’ll record it himself. Keep in mind that he’s going to release anything on that recording about you that might not be flattering. So keep your temper. Watch your language. Remember that anything you say might turn up on the evening news, excerpted by other news organizations who would be delighted to have us showing some sort of bias, some sort of personal vendetta. Agreed?”

Sully nodded. “Yeah. Agreed.”

“When do you think you’ll go talk to him?”

“Not for a day or two. I want to hit the neighborhood with his picture. Go to Halo, see if anybody recognizes him from the VIP room or whatever they call it out there, just to check. Go back through Noel’s things. See if I can find a note from him, a picture, anything that would lock that relationship down or spell out more clearly what it was. All the due diligence. Then-then I’d go see him.”

“Good,” Eddie said, patting him on the arm, hard. “But, Sully? If you’re wrong on this? On a fraction, on a day, a date, an hour, on a decimal? If I get one more report of bourbon at your desk? Or of you drinking on assignment? I’ll fire your ass all the way back to Bumfuck, Louisiana.”

On April third, Noel had breakfast at the Hunger Stopper for $4.37 (she’d noted a two-dollar cash tip) and went to work at Satin and Lace, parking at Union Station’s garage for six hours, punching out at 5:19 p.m. She bought groceries at the neighborhood Giant, apparently on the way home, the $38.15 receipt time-stamped at 6:43.

She had been frugal, and she had to be. The lingerie store was paying her about nine dollars per hour, and Halo was two hundred dollars per night plus tips, but she was paying her way through school, paying for her own place, her own car, the works.

Sully and Lorena had been back at the files, building the chronology for hours. The evening was getting on, the delivery pizza demolished, nothing left but bits of crust on the cardboard. Lorena was still in her work outfit, the two of them plowing through datebooks, receipts, everything Noel had left behind. Lorena had run out to a copy shop, and now there was a blown-up street map of the city leaning against the couch. The map’s center, like a bull’s-eye target, was Noel’s apartment on Princeton Place. There were red, blue, yellow, and green pins stuck into the map, with tiny bits of paper flagged to each one, tagging her movements based on receipts that had a time/date stamp. Blue was for the first week of April, yellow the second, green the third, and red for the last week, up until the twenty-fifth, when she disappeared.

“I went by Satin and Lace right after you left this morning,” Lorena said.

“I thought you were going into work.”

“I called in. I wanted to work on this. You’re the first person who’s shown any interest.”

“Okay. What’d they say?”

“I walked in and talked to the girl on the floor, got fifteen seconds into saying something about Noel turning up dead and she used to work there and this girl cuts me off. Said she started six months ago and didn’t know anything. So I asked for the manager. She says, ‘What for?’ You know, with some lip to it. I said, ‘To ask about my sister.’ She goes in the back, comes back out. Says the manager’ll be right with me. Ten minutes later, this redhead with her hair in a bun comes out, said she’s called corporate and says she can’t say anything. I said, ‘This is my sister I’m talking about.’ She puts her hand on mine-bitch put her hand on me-and says, in this whisper, personnel laws, privacy, she was sure I’d understand. I said I sure as fuck did not understand that somebody murdered Noel, her employee, and all she could say was not a fucking thing.”

“I don’t think that-”

“She called security.”

“Ah.”

“I was asked to leave.”

“You can apply for your press card now.”

“I went two steps outside the door and called Detective Jensen, left a message that Satin and Lace had information about Noel’s disappearance and they were concealing it. Real loud. They were standing there staring at me, I was standing there staring at them. Three women in heels, looking like we were ready to take it outside.”

“So what did Jensen do?”

“Called me back fifteen minutes later and asked if I was alright.”

“Were you?”

“I was sitting in my car in the parking garage shaking.”

He looked at her, staring off into space, her face tight, clenched.

“Then I was going to go out to Halo,” she said. “Playing Nancy Drew. Like somebody’s going to tell me something. They’ll see I’m her sister, tell me everything.”

“Maybe,” he said. “But they’re more likely to be more nervous around you for all the same reasons. Why don’t you let me head out to Halo, see how it goes.”

“You think they’re going to talk to you ?” Yooouuuu . The sarcasm.

“I have been known to be persuasive.”

She hunched her shoulders, as close as he was going to get to an agreement.

“Well,” he said. “Sometimes I’m persuasive. I got Regina Blocker, owner of the dance studio, on the phone? Our conversation was shorter than yours at Satin and Lace. But I think you should let me go to Halo.”

“Well,” she said, “if you’re making the rounds.” She was looking in her purse, her bag, then pulling out and tucking a business card into his palm. It was for the Eric Simmons Photography Studio. It took him a second: the man who shot the nudes.

“Thanks,” he said, putting it into his back pocket. That he had already seen the pictures, leaked to him by a police executive, seemed to be something that might be good to forget to mention.

Now he looked down at the chronology. “I’m not seeing anything for the last few days before she disappeared.”

She looked down at the paperwork, reached out and touched it, like she was trying to jog a memory. “I was trying to-to stick to doing it sequentially, and I haven’t gotten that far yet. And besides-” She was sitting on the couch, but her spine had curled and now she was hunched over.

“Too much in one day?”

“Confronting her death? Like this, following her around, her old jobs? It’s morbid. If this is what you do for a living…” She blinked, went in another direction. “My mother, she had to leave us in Jamaica when she first came here. My dad was off working in Kingston, then he followed her here when she could sponsor him. We got left in Maidstone, our village, with Mrs. Bailey, who lived down the road. This is up in the hills. Way up in the hills. We went to Nazareth All-Age School. It was one building, yellow and blue, concrete block, with a courtyard. The boys could play and get dusty and dirty, but the girls couldn’t. In the mornings, you had to clean the floors, which were also concrete, and in the afternoons, the teachers would open the windows and there was this breeze, I guess coming up from the ocean, and it was just the best thing you’ve ever felt in your life. We were there two years, maybe three, with Mrs. Bailey. There were phone calls from Mommy twice a month, on Saturday mornings. I wound up more like Noel’s mom than her big sister. Mommy finally flew back to get us when they could afford to rent a big enough place for all of us here.”