We watched each other. He claimed he meant me no harm, but I wasn’t so sure about that. I said, “What was your daughter doing there? Does she work there too?”
Pomp shook his head. “Derek and Tessa were on their way to a concert last night. It would seem they stopped at the print shop first.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“What’s going on there?”
“Nothing, as far as I know.”
“So this was some kind of random event?”
“No, I would say this was quite intentional. If you’re asking was my daughter involved in anything that could get her killed, the answer is that Tessa was a sweet, generous, innocent, beautiful young woman. Very different from Derek, and very different from me. But I have my enemies, and I will figure out which of them is behind this.”
“Why wouldn’t they just go after you? Why would someone go after your family at Arthur’s print shop?”
His eyes narrowed slightly, like he was growing tired of me. “If I knew exactly what happened, I wouldn’t need to ask you questions about it. But generally, Tessa has one of my guards with her. Last night was an exception. We argued over it, actually. Now it’s your turn. What were you doing there?”
“I’m working for Arthur Ungless. That’s all.”
“Why?”
“That’s between him and me,” I said. “If he pulls through. What is this conversation really about? The very excited police crawling all over the office last night?”
Pomp’s mouth twitched. “So you’re aware.”
“No. I know exactly nothing about it, if that’s what you’re trying to find out.”
He didn’t answer that, instead saying, “Did you see who did the shooting?”
“No.”
“Anyone who could help me figure out who did this would be well compensated.”
I almost laughed. “I don’t know, but if I did, you probably wouldn’t be the first person I’d tell.”
He pressed his mouth into a thin line. “That’s unfortunate.”
“What are the cops interested in?”
“I don’t know,” he said, “but if I did, you probably wouldn’t be the first person I’d tell.”
“Clever. But see, the difference is that I genuinely don’t know.”
“How much is Ungless paying you?”
“Also between me and him.”
“I’ll double it,” Pomp said. “If you tell me what you saw.”
“Mr. Pomp. Vincent. I didn’t see anything. I saw a Cadillac driving away, and I saw your son go into the back room to get a towel and then not return. That’s it. And even if I saw more than that, I wouldn’t be interested. I don’t know what the Phoenix Group is, but I try to stay on the other side of illegal, okay? If you know who I am, you probably know my father was a cop. I know a lot of cops. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“Yes. It means you won’t be helping me get justice for my daughter. You’re lucky. Because I’m judging your character by what you did last night, and not by what you’re doing today.”
“Your five minutes are up,” I said.
I pointed toward the open doorway with my gun, expecting trouble. But instead he held up his hands and said, “I’m reaching into my coat for a business card.” He plucked open his blazer by its exquisite lapel and produced a card printed in gold on textured black stock. “If you have a change of heart.”
He walked out of the building and down the sidewalk. Bo opened the door for him and closed it gently once Pomp was inside, then got behind the wheel and drove away. Only then did I shut my door and lock all three deadbolts with sweaty, shaking hands.
* * *
I did a shot of whiskey to calm my nerves, and resisted the profound urge to have another or three. Instead I sat down at my computer. First I quickly pulled some background on Vincent Pomp, which was much easier than my other attempts on backgrounds in this case. He smiled out at me from the website of the Phoenix Group, a firm of nebulous focus of which he was the president. The Phoenix Group offered property management, title loans, structured settlement buyouts, check cashing, tax prep, and notary services, all from a grubby storefront on 161, and Pomp also owned half a dozen other cash businesses: a food truck, two coin Laundromats, a car wash, a nightclub called Shimmy’s, and a housecleaning company. It all seemed normal enough on paper, but Pomp’s talk about his guards and his enemies told me that there was much more to it. Something that could interest law enforcement in a big way. Money laundering? Cash businesses made that easy. Inflate the register receipts, claim that the coin laundry pulled in hundreds more dollars in quarters per day than it really did, and suddenly that cash looks like legitimate income. But Ungless Printing was wholly owned by my client, and not among the businesses held by the Phoenix Group. And anyway, what could this have to do with Marin? I rubbed the place between my eyebrows, thinking. Tessa was an angel, Arthur’s connection to Pomp was tenuous at best—so maybe Derek had been the actual target of the gunman? That would make him lucky, and the person in the Caddy a spectacularly bad shot. But the way Derek had run off in the aftermath, leaving his dead sister in a pool of blood, was deeply strange.
Who the hell were these people?
Pomp had a wife, Ruth, and two sons—Derek, twenty-five, and Simon, twenty-nine. Derek had a series of DUIs and drug-possession busts. Simon was employed by his father’s company, no record.
While I was at it, I turned to Leila Hassan. Twenty-six, residing in a converted warehouse loft a block east of High Street near the corner of Prescott and Pearl—but on the opposite end of the Short North from where Marin was killed. Her LinkedIn profile still showed Ungless Printing as her employer. Electronic publishing specialist, whatever that was. She was pretty, with olive skin and glossy dark hair and wide, almond-colored eyes. She had twelve hundred Facebook friends—one of whom was mutual. I clicked to see who it was and laughed.
Cat Walsh.
“Of fucking course,” I muttered.
I used that as an excuse to click through a month’s worth of Catherine’s own posts, which were mostly art links and auto-updates from Kickstarters she’d backed. Leila had not interacted with her on any of them.
I looked at my text messages, at the series of dots Catherine had been sending me. It would be so easy to just call her up, ask her how she knew Leila, claim it was for work. Which it was, but I didn’t even know if Leila was involved yet. And things always escalated fast between Catherine and me. An innocent phone call could lead to anything. I put that idea aside and dug around for dirt on Rudy Carmichael, finding a restraining order from an ex-girlfriend three years ago, terrible Yelp reviews from customers he’d yelled at, and a public Facebook profile where he posted semi-daily rants about a rich tapestry of subjects, mostly women and, occasionally, the performance of the Cleveland Indians.
I wrote down his home address too, then dropped my pen in disgust. “Aggh,” I muttered to the empty room.
I wanted another drink. I got up and paced to the kitchen, contemplated the whiskey bottle again. Over the past few months, I’d been trying to stick to three drinks a day. That had gone out the window yesterday. But today was a new day, I told myself. I didn’t need alcohol to cope with stress. I could cope with stress all on my own. It was just that the past twenty-four hours had been extra stressful. I grabbed the bottle by its short neck, rubbing my thumb against the grooves in the crown-shaped cap. Put it down and snapped on the burner under my teakettle.
I wasn’t that person. I wasn’t my father.
After I made a cup of green tea with mint, I returned to my desk and ripped down an old calendar and a page of expired coupons from my corkboard. Then I started scribbling stuff on index cards and pinning them up. Vincent Pomp. Derek Pomp. Tessa Pomp. Arthur Ungless. Marin Strasser. Rudy Carmichael.
It didn’t look like anything.
I sat down at my desk and opened the computer again, and then someone knocked on my front door.
> NINE
I grabbed my gun off the filing cabinet before I went to see who it was. When I parted the curtains on my front door, though, I let out a long, slow breath. Tom was out there. I set the gun down on an end table, not wanting to get into it.
I opened the door. “Live and in person,” I said.
He gave me half of a smile. He looked overheated and dead tired. “I don’t know about live,” he said. “It’s hot as hell out there. Can I have a glass of water?”
“Sure, of course. You sit, I’ll get it.” I said this last part because my dining room was a disaster zone, not fit for company. But he didn’t take the hint and he followed after me down the hall.
“Did you come to spill the beans about what happened last night?”
“Something like that.”
I got him a glass of water from the sink. I noticed he was wearing the same light blue shirt and navy tie as yesterday. “You haven’t been home,” I said.
“No. My body is sixty percent coffee at this point.”
“Do you want, I don’t know, a sandwich or something?”
He leaned against the doorway, watching me. “Do you even have food here?”
“Funny,” I said. “I have bread.” I nodded at a loaf of multigrain on my counter, then gave it a surreptitious squeeze to check for freshness. It seemed to be okay. Good enough for a peanut butter sandwich, something I was starting to get creative with. “Do you want a sandwich or what?”
“I can’t ask you to make me a sandwich.”
“Forget the gender politics,” I said. “I just don’t want you to die in my kitchen. I haven’t had lunch either.”
Tom smiled. “Okay then. That would be nice. Thank you.”
I opened the cupboard and grabbed a jar of peanut butter and a bottle of sriracha, pushing the Crown to the back of the counter. “Don’t watch,” I said. “You’re going to like it, I promise. Go sit in the other room.”
“You’re bossy today.”
“My house, my rules. I don’t need your sandwich judgment.”
He disappeared from the doorway. I opened the fridge and pulled out an unopened bag of shredded carrots. “So,” I called, slathering two slices of bread with peanut butter, “what do you have to tell me?”
From the other room, I heard a sigh. “Two things, and you aren’t going to like either of them,” Tom said.
I looked around the doorway at him.
“Sanko called me a bit ago,” he continued. “All fired up about you being in the middle of this thing.”
“In the middle of it?” I went back to the sandwiches, adding a zigzag of sriracha on top of the peanut butter, then covered both with a layer of shredded carrots. “I wasn’t exactly in the middle of anything—I was visiting my client in the hospital.” And meeting Vincent Pomp, too, but he’d come to me. I kept quiet about that for the moment.
“Here’s the thing. If you’re in the middle of it, I kind of am too.”
I frowned. “Why?”
“Isn’t it obvious?”
“Tom, I don’t know what this has to do with you at all.”
“Are you kidding?”
I frowned harder. “No, actually, I’m not.” I sliced both sandwiches on the diagonal and returned to the dining room. “I’m not even sure what it has to do with me.”
“Maybe Sanko’s overreacting,” Tom said. He took a hesitant bite, chewed, and nodded. “This is weird, but good. Maybe Sanko is overreacting, but I vouched for you with him yesterday. So if he doesn’t like something, I’m going to hear about it.”
“But what doesn’t he like?” I said around a mouthful of sandwich. “Come on, I was just at his office to talk to him. It’s not like I jumped in the middle of it after the shooting just for the hell of it. And I told both of you about the Craigslist guy, and you seem pretty sure that’s nothing. So, I don’t know anything.”
He didn’t respond right away, but his jaw bunched up. Then he said, “That’s good. You need to keep it that way. Your dad—”
But then he stopped and we glared at each other. I could tell what he was thinking: about what he’d promised Frank before he died, a topic I’d been clear about not wanting him to bring up again.
Tom meant well, but it wasn’t like my father had been diligent about looking out for me when he was alive. I could take care of myself. I’d never done anything other than that. But he didn’t look like he was enjoying this any more than I was. I put my hands on my hips and said, “Pretty sure my client list isn’t up to you.”
“I don’t want to argue with you, Roxane.”
“Then don’t.”
He let out a sigh. “I shouldn’t have said it that way—obviously who you work for isn’t up to me, or anyone else. But this is going to be big, okay? Your client is in a bad place. So this isn’t just about Marin and Arthur anymore. This is about a dead nineteen-year-old woman and about ten different jurisdictions. That story’s bigger than both of them. Could be they were involved, or they got caught in the crosshairs of something. We don’t know.”
“Crosshairs of what?”
“I can’t get into it.”
“You know I can find out.”
Tom closed his eyes for a second. “No, no more finding out.”
None of this made any sense. I thought about the seventy-five grand and about Marin’s lack of ties to the community. That felt like an entirely different story than the shooting at the print shop, or a well-dressed thug confronting me on my street. “So this is you telling me to step back. Officially.” I’d relied on him for information a lot over the past year or so, and he’d never told me that before. I wasn’t sure if that meant I should be extra grateful for all the freebies, or just extra pissed at him now.
He looked at me with tired eyes. “I know you have some obligation to your client. And I hate having to say this, I really do. But yeah, I need to ask you to take a step back here. Officially.”
I felt my molars grinding together. “Tom—”
“Hear me out,” he said, holding up a hand.
I bit my tongue for a second, but I thought about all the questions that had yet to be answered. “Did you ever find her car—” I began, but Tom cut me off before I could manage it.
“Roxane.”
I waited. A prickly frustration was working down my arms.
“I know yesterday was intense. I know you’re a little shaken up and you want to do something. But Marin’s car isn’t the focus here. So what about her car? That’s not the key to this. You really want to stake your whole reputation on it? And mine?”
I stood up, now irritated for real. “I don’t think I have to stake anything on anyone. Marin—”
“Marin Strasser is not the one with the secrets here. And yes, we did find her car, we’ve found out quite a lot, actually, and that’s the other thing you aren’t going to like.”
“What.”
He shook his head. “Your client is not as love-struck as he’s telling you, that’s all I can say.” His expression was unreadable, which seemed to be his default state when he looked at me these days. “It’s an ongoing investigation, it’s not something you should get tangled up in.”
“Dammit, Tom, why are you doing this?” I said, with more feeling than I meant to. “You brought it up, but you’re not even going to tell me?”
“I just want you to be careful around Ungless.”
“He’s not even fucking conscious, how careful do I need to be? Spit it out.”
“No. I need you to promise me you’ll take that step back. Not just stay out of the way. Not just be careful. Step back. I mean, how often do I ask you for a favor?”
He was almost smiling when he said it, but it hit me hard. “You’re right.” I said. I grabbed his empty water glass and took it into the kitchen, exerting all of my willpower not to pitch it, fastball style, into the sink. I waited till the tightness in my sinuses abated before I went back in to face him. “This is a very uneven friendship. I don’t even know why you
bother now that we aren’t fucking, free sandwiches aside.”
“Hey, no, that’s not what I’m saying, you know that,” he began, a hand trailing down my arm.
But I yanked my arm away. “It’s fine. Message received. You know, I was in the middle of something when you showed up, so you should probably take off.”
He stood up too. “Roxane, you’re literally the last person in the world I want to upset—”
“I’m not upset.” It came out as a snap, clearly a very upset one. “I’m just busy. I need to get ready.”
I escaped to my bedroom, my cheeks burning. A moment or two later, the floorboards creaked in the hallway as he walked toward me, then stopped in the doorway. I opened a dresser drawer in an approximation of getting ready and refused to look at him.
“We’ll talk soon,” he said eventually, and then he walked out.
“Goddammit,” I muttered to the silent apartment. I stalked back to my office and sat down at my desk. My face was hot.
I couldn’t stay here.
* * *
Rudy Carmichael was behind the counter at High Street Antiquities, yelling into a phone about shipping delays. When I walked in, he scowled at me and held the phone against his collar. “Get out of here. Now.”
I stayed where I was, and he reached over the counter to grab my arm, but I stepped out of his reach and unholstered my gun. “Hang up the phone. And don’t touch me.”
He stared at me, eyes wide, spluttering nonsense.
“You are going to tell me everything you know about the woman with the clock,” I said, sounding much calmer than I felt. What I felt like was a rubber band stretched taut and starting to fray. “No talking, unless it’s about her. Is that going to be a problem?”
“Who are you?”
I gave him a smile. “A friendly antiques dealer from Springfield. Now talk.”
Rudy shakily sat down on the stool behind the counter. “You just want to know about her?”
I nodded.
“Are you going to shoot me if I tell you?”
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