by Diana X Dunn
Julia’s heart skipped a beat, but she decided that it was in everyone’s best interest to ignore the remark. “We need to talk to the other neighbors, find out what they know, what they saw, and what they think of all the other players.”
Blake nodded. “This afternoon we can interview the people across the street,” he told her. “According to our preliminary interviews, all three of the neighbors were home in the houses across the road when the murder took place. Unfortunately, they all claim to have seen and heard nothing until the police vehicles started to arrive, but even if they are innocent, they should be able to provide more background.”
“Do you ever get tired of trying to work it all out?” Julia asked Blake. “Tired of talking to people and knowing that they’re lying or at least holding back information? Tired of trying to solve the puzzle, knowing that you don’t have all of the pieces? Do you ever wonder if you are really making a difference or not?”
Blake studied her for a moment. “I’m doing the best that I can and I do think I make a difference. Sometimes I would love to give it all up and become an architect or an accountant. I imagine having normal hours and not spending all my time dealing with the scum of society. But I get enormous satisfaction when I lock up some particularly nasty piece of filth, and then I want to do it all over again.”
He finished his drink as he gave Julia a considering look. “How about you? Do you ever get tired of being sent off around the world on a moment’s notice to do some job that you knew nothing about an hour earlier? Do you ever get tired of working for an organization that doesn’t officially exist, doing a job that you can’t tell anyone about? Do you ever wonder if you are really making a difference or not?”
Julia smiled at him. “No.”
When Blake had finished his sandwich and Julia had discarded hers in favor of a FADS bar, they headed back to South Side, this time walking at a more leisurely pace, enjoying the spring weather and the chance to stretch their legs.
“Charles and Mary Halpern live directly across the street from the Knight house,” Blake told Julia. “They aren’t married, but she took his last name when they had their first child. They have been together for ten years and have three daughters, aged nine, seven and four, all carried ex-utero.”
Blake glanced down at his M-ped and continued. “Last year they signed a new legal partnership agreement for five more years. The pair have a complicated shared custody arrangement should their partnership break up, but that is the only thing that stands out as unusual.”
“So the typical American family,” Julia commented.
“I haven’t met them yet, but the patrol officer who interviewed them didn’t feel that they were anything other than what they seem to be.”
Julia nodded. “Their backgrounds seem to check out,” she agreed, having glanced at them briefly after reading the initial reports. “There certainly isn’t anything to raise flags there. They both have degrees, Charles has a good job, but Mary quit work to raise the girls. Both seem intelligent enough, so they might be able to provide some interesting background. Certainly it’s hard to see any clear motive, from what I’ve read.”
Blake nodded. “Too bad they don’t seem to be the nosy neighbor type.”
Julia smiled. “Mary must be too busy with the three little ones to be nosy.”
“Who else do we have?” Blake flipped through the reports as they meandered down broad and nearly empty sidewalks.
“Well,” Julia grinned, “I seem to remember that we do have a nosy neighbor.”
She pulled out her own screen and clicked through copies of the reports. “Mrs. Virginia Duncan, aged eighty, a widow,” Julia looked over at Blake. “Little old ladies usually have far too much time on their hands. I bet she knows everything that goes on in that street and then some.”
Blake glanced at the report. “Jacobs interviewed the neighbors on that side of the street. He isn’t the brightest man on the force. He may well have missed something.”
“I certainly hope so,” Julia exclaimed. “Her interview seems to have been short and to the point. I’m hoping she is in the mood today for a good gossip.”
“And the last candidate?”
Julia pushed a few buttons. “Alan Wright and Joanne Quick. Hmm, interesting.”
“What?”
“Well, they signed a five year legal partnership agreement last year, but from the looks of things, they aren’t going to make it.”
“That is interesting. I remember reading that and wondering about them.” Blake agreed. “Why bother to make it legal if you can’t make it work? How many legal partnerships are legally voided each year before they get to the end of the term?”
Julia grinned and typed a command into her machine. “Less than five percent of legal partnerships need to be voided before they run out,” she read off the screen in front of her. “Because of their limited term at inception, most couples manage to stick it out for the duration, I guess.”
Blake grinned. “Or just split up but don’t bother with legally voiding of the partnership. What makes you think that they might go the legal route?”
Julia pulled the earlier data back up on her screen. “There have been five formal complaints filed by one or the other of them against their partner. She’s filed three complaints, two for physical abuse and one for mental anguish. He’s filed two, both for mental anguish. A sixth formal complaint from either will mean a court appearance before the partnership licensing board. They would have to argue quite hard to keep the partnership valid, and I can’t imagine why they would. It seems, from reading these complaints, that they can barely stand one another.”
Blake shrugged. “You never know what happens behind closed doors,” he reminded Julia with a grin.
“I don’t want to know what goes on behind closed doors,” she told him. “But if you want to keep things private, you don’t file formal complaints. If they are having problems, I wonder how much their neighbors knew, or maybe some of the neighbors are involved in some way.”
“Well, let’s go and see what they have to say about it, shall we?” Blake now led the way to the door of the Wright/Quick house.
Julia studied the house as they walked. It was in a fairly good state of repair. She knew from the report that both residents worked full-time in reasonably well paying jobs, but neither owned a personal transport. Their parking pad was filled with two large storage sheds that were shut up with high security locks.
Blake knocked, waited a short time and then knocked again. It was several minutes before they heard movement from inside the house. Blake knocked a third time, calling, “Police,” and was finally acknowledged.
“I’m coming, hold on.” A muffled voice sounded from inside the house. A few moments later they heard footsteps approaching the door. Julia heard voices and a woman giggling as the door swung open.
The couple in the doorway looked as if they’d just woken up. The man was about six inches taller than the woman, with short, brown, tousled hair and bedroom eyes. He was wearing a pair of pajama bottoms and nothing else. The woman, wrapped tightly around him, had blonde hair that was pillow tangled. Her eyes were unfocussed as she looked out at them. She was wearing the matching pajama top to her partner’s bottoms. They looked out at Blake and Julia and the woman giggled again.
“They look really, really serious,” she whispered loudly. “Maybe we’re in trouble.”
“How can we be in trouble? We didn’t do anything,” the man hissed back at her.
“Maybe we shouldn’t have drunk so much last night.” The woman reached for the doorframe to steady herself, lurching sideways and nearly falling over in the process.
“Steady there, baby,” the man pulled her close to him and brushed her hair out of his face.
Then he began to nibble gently on her neck. The woman closed her eyes and sighed deeply, pressing herself into her partner’s body. The sudden shift in weight nearly knocked them both to the floor.
Blake and
Julia exchanged looks. “Sorry to interrupt, but we have some more questions about the murder across the road.” Blake spoke slowly and clearly, obviously hoping to penetrate the fog the couple seemed to be wrapped up in.
“Murder?” The woman opened her eyes and then blinked hard. “Murder? Oh yes, that was why we were drinking, wasn’t it, lover?” She turned to the man and grabbed his face with her hands. “We thought we might get killed in our beds so we figured we might as well be drunk as well, isn’t that right?”
The man stared at his partner for a moment as if trying to remember who she was. “Yeah, something like that,” he muttered. Then he pulled her close and kissed her hard, pulling her backwards and trying to shut the door with his foot.
Blake pushed the door open again with a sigh. “I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to insist on coming in and asking you some questions,” he told the couple, looking away as their kiss deepened. He looked at Julia and raised his eyebrows.
“I could zap them both with Clear-Head if you want,” Julia suggested, reaching into her bag for the equipment she would need.
“Are you allowed to do that?” Blake asked in surprise.
“If the circumstances warrant, then yeah,” Julia grinned at his shocked face. “I guess that means the police aren’t?”
“We are allowed to suggest politely that they might want to take something, but we can’t administer it without their express permission,” Blake told her.
Julia only grinned and then turned back to the couple. She took two steps forward, which put her right behind the woman. She grabbed her around the waist and then pulled hard, separating the pair from their increasingly intimate embrace. Julia pushed the woman to the floor and then gave the man a gentle shove so that he was sitting on the stairs.
“Right, do you two want to take Clear-Head and do this the easy way or should we just take you to the police station and wait for you to sober up?” She demanded of them, watching Blake out of the corner of her eye. He looked like he was torn between wanting to hit her or kiss her, so she returned her focus to the couple as she waited for them to make up their minds.
“I’ll have something to clear my head,” the woman finally muttered. “Sorry, but I’m not really myself at the moment.”
“That’s because when you are yourself you are an unmitigated bitch,” the man spoke from the stairs. “Better give me some too, otherwise she’ll just tell you all sorts of lies about me.”
“Hell, the truth is bad enough,” she shot back at him.
Julia and Blake looked at each other again. Seconds earlier the pair had been all over each other, now they seemed to hate one another.
“You okay with them for a second while I get some pills?” Blake checked with Julia.
“No problem.” Julia wasn’t worried about either of them getting out of hand. Neither was sober enough to cause her any trouble.
Blake was out and back in moments. Modern police transports carried supplies of many different alcohol and drug neutralizing agents, but he’d gone for the most popular and most successful, Clear-Head. It had the advantage of being able to neutralize nearly all legal and illegal substances, admittedly with varying degrees of success.
Since they had no idea what the pair might have mixed with their drinking the previous night, it was best to use something that could deal with just about anything. He handed them each a small white tablet and watched closely to ensure that it was swallowed rather than palmed. If he questioned them and they hadn’t taken the tablet, the testimony could be thrown out in court.
“While we wait for the pills to do their job, maybe we could go somewhere a bit more comfortable?” Blake suggested.
“Bed?” The woman purred up at Blake, licking her lips and fluttering her eyelashes.
“Typical.” The man on the stairs stood up with a stagger.
“Come on then everyone,” he said, walking unsteadily down the hall. Instead of going straight to where every other house on the street had their living room, he lead them further down the hall and into a room on the left.
Julia looked around in surprise as they were escorted into a small room at the back of the house that must have been intended to be a dining room. It was nearly empty, with only a few low chairs and a small coffee table. There was nothing else in the room, no video, no music player, no photo players, nothing.
Julia and Blake sat carefully in low chairs across from each other. That meant that the couple had to do likewise. Julia could see the woman’s eyes beginning to regain their focus.
“Can you just confirm your names and status for us please?” She directed her question to the woman, avoiding the man’s now cold eyes.
The woman sighed and sank down in her seat, wiggling to find a comfortable position. The Clear-Head was obviously working and Julia could see the disappointment on the woman’s face as she had to confront reality again.
“I’m Joanne Quick and that…person…is Alan Wright,” she shook her head slowly. “We are legal partners for another one thousand, four hundred and twenty-one days and twelve hours or until I kill him.”
It was clearly a well-rehearsed speech and Julia waited to see how long it would take for the woman to realize to whom she was actually speaking. It took longer than it should have, and Julia wondered if Joanne needed more than just Clear-Head.
“Oh, oops, I guess I shouldn’t have said that,” she said finally, looking from Julia to Blake and back again. “You know what I meant, right?”
When Julia didn’t answer she turned back to Blake. “I’m sure you know what I meant,” she purred, looking at him coyly from downcast eyes. “Our legal partnership simply isn’t working out, and sometimes I get so fed up I could scream.”
Blake raised an eyebrow. “Why not just get it voided, then?” He spoke slowly, clearly making allowances for her mental state.
“It all costs money, don’t it?”
The answer came from Alan, rather than Joanne. “Getting the partnership in the first place wasn’t too bad. Her dad was happy to pay for that, gets her out from under his feet, don’t it? But when it comes time to end things, no one wants to pay for it, do they?”
“You could afford it, you just don’t want to spend your money.” Joanne clearly had her own thoughts on the idea.
“I could, yeah, but then I might not get so much sex, huh?”
“That’s all you wanted, anyway, access to my body. You lying, cheating, conniving son of a ….”
“Enough.” Julia put steel in her voice, forcing everyone into silence. “I don’t know what is going on between you two, and I really don’t care. We’re here because we are investigating a murder. Now we are going to ask you some questions and you are going to answer them, without making any nasty comments about one another. If you can’t manage that nicely, then you can come down to the police station with us and we will run some tests and find out exactly what is whizzing around in your bodies and making you so difficult.”
Alan and Joanne exchanged uneasy glances. Whatever they’d been doing last night involved at least one illegal substance, obviously. Julia smiled. They would behave now if they were sober enough to understand the danger they were in.
“Sorry, we do go on at each other a bit.” Joanne sat up straighter in her seat and blinked repeatedly as if trying to focus. “Of course we want to do everything we can to help find out who murdered Cassie Knight, don’t we darling?”
Alan blinked in surprise, but nodded his head. “Of course we do. It was just terrible, her being killed.”
“I don’t know what we can do to help, though.” Joanne continued. “We were both home asleep when the police came to find out if we’d seen or heard anything. We didn’t even know that anything had happened until they came knocking.”
Julia scanned her computer screen, checking the earlier report. “It says here that you both requested Clear-Head before you were questioned. Is that correct?”
Joanne nodded. “Well yeah,” she said as if it w
ere obvious. “It was Saturday morning and we didn’t have to go to work or anything so we had some fun on Friday night.”
Julia looked at Blake. Clearly the couple spent little time sober, at least when they were together.
“What can you tell us about Cassie Knight?” She directed the question toward Alan just for a change, but apparently it was a good choice as Joanne laughed loudly.
“That’s right, ask him,” she all but shouted.
Julia looked at Joanne in surprise. “Sorry, am I missing something?”
“Only that he was twirling her behind my back,” Joanne told her, her eyes burning with anger at the betrayal.
“It wasn’t like that,” Alan protested wearily.
“What was it like?” Julia prodded.
“She was a nice woman,” Alan told her, “and we got to be, well, friends I guess.”
“Friends who sleep together when their partners aren’t around.”
“We used to go to parties at their house. Cassie liked to have parties,” Alan continued, trying to explain. “Cassie and I used to get talking and stuff. One day she came by to borrow something, I can’t remember what, and we got to talking again.” Alan shook his head as sorrow shadowed his eyes.
“And one thing led to another,” Joanne mocked him.
Alan sat up and gave her a hard stare. “Yeah, one thing led to another. We hadn’t been living here long and I was having trouble settling into big city life. Joanne is from New York, but it was strange to me. Cassie understood that and tried to help.”
“By having sex with you.” Scorn dripped from Joanne’s words.
“By talking to me, really talking and listening. And then, after a while, yeah, we started having sex as well.”
“How long did you two see each other?” Julia asked him.
“Only about a month,” Julia could see disappointment and confusion in his eyes as he talked about the end of the affair.
“She used to come over on a Thursday afternoon when she was off work. I work from home a few times a week so I was always here, too. Then, one day, she just said it wasn’t meant to be and she broke it off.”