Донна Эндрюс - Delete all suspects

And it wasn't fair calling Dan ungrateful when he had no way of knowing how hard she was juggling. She lifted her chin, squared her shoulders, and resolved to attack her work with the same fierceness she'd felt when a tangible reward lay at the bottom of the pile. When she finished, she'd go home early as planned. Instead of filling the sudden enormous empty space in her weekend with office work, she resolved to keep the space open. Maybe something interesting would show up to fill it.

She picked up the top document, glanced at the clock, and plunged in.

* * *

Friday-. 11:Q0 a - n -

"Neati cleani shavedi and sober-i" Tim Pin-coski muttered, tugging at the unfamiliar noose-like pressure of the necktie around his throat. "Everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be."

Of course, unlike Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep, he wasn't calling on four million dollars. Still, Mrs. Stallman couldn't be broke. The house didn't look fancy—just a neat, brick dollhouse on an immaculate postage-stamp yard. But single-family homes weren't cheap anywhere in Arlington. This close to the District of Columbia, even a house this small probably went for half a million.

Perhaps the high price accounted for a certain sameness about the houses in Mrs. Stallman's neighborhood. Not just the sameness of similar shape and materials, though that was there. The houses had probably all been built within a year or two of each other—part of the post—World War II building boom that had created neighborhoods like this. But beyond their similar bones, all had a careful, well-tended look. Logical, really. People who paid that much for a house wanted to take care of it, show it off. Despite minor variations from house to house—white painted brickwork instead of natural, brick walks instead of flagstone, azaleas instead of boxwood—it all blended into a peaceful sameness up and down the block.

"An established neighborhood," his friend Maude Graham would call it. Last year, when Maude had been househunting, she'd commented that any time her realtor called something an established neighborhood, * it meant, "You can't afford it."

Tim liked the neighborhood Maude had chosen better anyway. Here, the houses were a little too close together,

and while he knew buyers considered the huge shade trees a desirable feature, they looked faintly ominous to him. Perhaps it was how they loomed over the tiny houses, dwarfing them, or how their roots were slowly but surely lifting up the sidewalks as if liberating the ground from the concrete covering humans had imposed on it.

Not a place you'd want to be in a hurricane, he thought, as he rang the doorbell. Or even a bad thunderstorm like the last two nights'. Most of the residents had already cleaned up the fallen twigs and branches, leaving their front lawns immaculate. Mrs. Stallman hadn't. She'd also ignored the leaves covering her yard in great drifts, unlike the neatly manicured yards on either side. Perhaps she was too distracted by whatever problem she wanted a private investigator to solve.

Tim was about to ring the doorbell again when he saw a face peering through one of the glass panels that flanked the door. After a minute, the door opened a few inches.

"Yes?"

"Mrs. Stallman? Tim Pincoski, Pincoski and Diaz." He held his PI registration and a business card toward the opening. A wrinkled face appeared, inspected them, and then glanced up at his face. He smiled encouragingly.

"I'm Eunice Stallman," she said. "Please come in."

She backed away to give him room to enter, glancing nervously out at the street as she did so. Tim suppressed a smile at this familiar behavior. He'd been surprised when he first realized that some people were embarrassed to be seen consulting a private investigator. Especially people who lived in neighborhoods like this one. If they came to his office, they looked over their shoulders anxiously, and if he went to visit them, they behaved as if both he and his car had his profession stenciled on them. He'd long ago stopped being surprised or insulted by the occasional client who didn't want to be seen with him. He just noted their embarrassment as a potentially useful weapon if they tried to weasel out of paying. It had happened.

"You're not quite what I expected," Mrs. Stallman said.

"No, ma'am." He was used to that, too. Apparently most people expected a PI to be either a weathered, hard-bitten ex-cop or someone as handsome and buff as their favorite TV detective. Tim suspected that when he showed up instead, his slender, five-foot-eight-inch frame and easygoing manner failed to inspire confidence in clients who thought a PI used his fists more than his wits. And in addition to getting him carded occasionally, at twenty-five, his pleasant, boyish, but average face appealed more to little old ladies who thought him a nice young man than women his own age who were looking for, well, something else.

At least his appearance helped now. Mrs. Stallman, after inspecting him for a few moments, nodded approvingly and ushered him into the living room.

"Let me fix you some tea."

"Please don't go to any trouble," Tim said. Which Maude had taught him was more polite than saying he loathed hot tea.

"No trouble at all," she said, and darted through a doorway with unexpected agility.

Tim sighed. Not the first time that the reality of talking to a private investigator sent a potential client scurrying for cover. Maybe the familiar ritual of making tea would help Mrs. Stallman regain her nerve. A remarkably noisy and inefficient ritual by the sound of it. Perhaps she was rummaging through every cabinet in the kitchen as a stalling tactic.

Meanwhile, he surveyed the room. Odds were Mrs. Stall-man had moved into the neighborhood before prices reached their current astronomical levels, he decided. The room was clean and comfortable, if old-fashioned and slightly shabby. Genuinely old-fashioned and shabby, not* the deliberate shabby chic he saw in the decorating magazines Maude and Claudia Diaz, his business partner, read so assiduously. White walls; faded green woodwork; comfortable-looking sofa and

chairs upholstered in tweeds or flowered prints; floor-to-ceiling built-in bookcases flanking the fireplace.

He strolled over to study the bookcases. Which were actually filled with books, rather than knickknacks, and well-used books at that. Mostly literature, history, and a sprinkling of what were probably popular novels three or four decades ago. Though he did spot a small stack of paperback mysteries on one end table. He nodded with approval.

"Milk? Sugar? Lemon?" Mrs. Stallman asked, startling him as she burst into the room with a teapot and two teacups rattling on a tray.

"Just black, thanks," he said.

He waited until Mrs. Stallman had poured their tea and they had both taken tiny sips before he nudged the conversation along.

"You didn't explain why you wanted to hire us," he said, finally.

"Someone tried to kill my grandson," she said.

She sounded so matter-of-fact it took a moment for her words to register.

"Tried to kill him?" Tim repeated. "I'm sorry—if you'd told me that over the phone, I'd have told you that it's probably something the police can handle a lot better than we can. In fact, the police usually don't like Pis getting mixed up in their criminal cases."

"Here," she said, handing him a folded newspaper.

It was the Metro section from Thursday's Post, and she'd highlighted a two-paragraph article. Edward Stallman, twenty-two, was in critical condition at Northern Virginia Community Hospital following a hit-and-run incident on Fillmore Street in North Arlington.

Tim knew the area. It was close to Little Saigon, the stretch of Wilson Boulevard where Vietnamese stores and restaurants had clustered since the seventies. In recent years the neighborhood had become trendy, with an ever-increasing number of restaurants and bars catering to twenty-somethings. As he