“My . . . goodness,” Sabatier said. “And then you popped over to pay me a visit?” His voice had noticeably warmed. Back behind the paper, I rolled my eyes.
“It’s been so long,” Mama purred, dragging her fingertips down his sleeve. “We’re all grown up now, aren’t we? Wouldn’t it be nice to have a real honest-to-goodness catchup?”
“It certainly would.”
“Then what do you say we go for a coffee? There’s a nice café right around the corner.”
There was a pause. I peeked around the paper again; Sabatier was consulting an old-fashioned watch on a chain.
“I shouldn’t go away for long. I’m in the middle of a murder case, you may have heard.”
“Oh my! How fascinating! I wouldn’t dare take you away from such important business. But you could spare just a few minutes, couldn’t you? It’s not good for a man to never take a break. You’ll come back to it in ten minutes with fresh eyes. Won’t that be nice?”
“All right, all right.” Sabatier laughed. “How can I say no? Let me tell my partner I’m going.”
I peeked out and watched Sabatier go in an office across the hall from his own. Craggy’s, I assumed, which was good news. That meant they didn’t share an office, a consideration I hadn’t thought to worry about.
When Sabatier came back, Mama looped her arm through his, and they swept out through the front doors of the station. I tossed aside the newspaper and turned to watch through a window as they walked away up the street. Yes. I owed Mama one—well, she owed me one less.
Now, to get back to Sabatier’s office without attracting attention. I looked around the busy lobby and waited for my moment, and when a pair of officers came through wrestling with a prisoner smelling heavily of booze, I decided this was it.
I hopped up and walked with purpose between the desks and toward the hall, not too fast and not too slow, keeping my chin up and my mouth ready with a smile in case I ran into someone and had to explain why I was wandering around the detectives’ offices. Halfway down the hall, I spotted the door with a brass nameplate that read DETECTIVE LAURENCE SABATIER.
I glanced to the left and right, turned the knob, and slipped inside. My stomach lurched as I caught a glimpse of a man in the corner of the office, but then I realized it was Sabatier’s coat hanging on a rack. I choked back a laugh and shook my head at myself. All this burgling was making me jumpy.
Now for the key. Where would someone like Sabatier keep it? He seemed like the organized type, so he probably had it in a file somewhere.
I skipped over the corkboard covered with notes and slipped behind Sabatier’s desk, a plain rectangle so scratched up it looked like it had been pushed down a flight of stairs twice. There was a shallow drawer in the front and two deeper ones down the right side. I shoved aside Sabatier’s rolling chair and tried the top drawer, but it was locked. I’d brought along my hairpins, but my confidence in my lock-picking skills had worn a little thin, and I figured this drawer only contained pencil stubs and maybe a grooming kit for that luxurious mustache. I went for the deeper drawers and found the top one unlocked and filled with neat dark green folders labeled with names. That was more like it.
I pawed through the files in the top drawer. They were sorted alphabetically by last name, starting with A and ending with F. McDonough ought to be in the second drawer. I shoved the top drawer shut and yanked open the second. My fingers tripped along the folders until they hit the jackpot: McDonough, Arimentha, deceased.
I jerked the file upward and splayed it out on the desktop. On top was a picture of Arimentha I’d never seen before—her shoulders bare, her lips closed and serene, her eyes staring dreamily toward something in the distance. I leaned closer over it. She was wearing the same earrings she’d worn on New Year’s Eve. The same ones that had winked up from her body in the moonlight. I shuddered and flipped the photo facedown on the other side of the file.
Below it were notes written in a neat, slanted hand. These looked like they’d been torn out of Sabatier’s little black notebook. My own name jumped out at me, and I slid the note out of the scattered stack.
Coleman, Millie. 17 y.o. Uncooperative. Lying?
Covering for her friend? Doesn’t trust police.
I laughed. He had that right. I slapped the paper down on Arimentha’s photograph and glanced at my wristwatch. It had already been four minutes. With luck, Mama would keep Sabatier busy for another fifteen or even twenty, but that wasn’t guaranteed.
I flipped through the rest of the file quickly, checking a couple of envelopes that looked like they might contain the key, but there was nothing. I closed the file, pinched my fingers in the middle, and shook it a little, gently, to see if the heavier key would fall out. But the only thing that drifted down was a scrap of paper with Fitzroy DeCoursey’s name on it—and what looked like his home address! I glanced at the still-closed door and stuffed the paper in my pocket.
I opened the file again and bent my head over the desk to look for more notes that could be useful. Underneath newspaper clippings of the stories I’d already read was a glossy photograph of Philip Leveque, looking serious and senatorial. Sabatier had scrawled across the top corner, Alibi confirmed. If Sabatier’s detecting was to be trusted, that meant Philip was off the table as a murder suspect, though not necessarily as a victim of blackmail. I turned Philip’s photograph over so I didn’t have to look at his smarmy face anymore and shuffled through notes that said more of the same details I’d already figured out for myself.
Then a note with the name Altobello caught my eye, and I snatched it up.
Canvassed neighborhood with no results until I went alone into Altobello’s Grocery. The owner, Salvatore Altobello, heard me ask the boy at the register about Mr. Leslie and volunteered that someone by that name lived next door in his mother’s rooming house. The boy at the register, who it appears was Mr. Altobello’s son, became distressed. Concerned they would warn the suspect, I quickly retrieved my partner and knocked at the rooming house next door.
I already knew what had happened next. So, it was Bennie’s father who’d given away Marion’s whereabouts, albeit by accident. That explained why Bennie was so eager to help fetch Marion’s stuff for him after the cops came.
I glanced at my watch again. Eight minutes had passed. I slid the Altobello note aside and flipped through the others until another name caught my eye.
Symphony Cornice, age 18, neighbor and close friend of the deceased. Interviewed at home, both in the company of her parents and alone. She is adamant, as she was at the scene of the crime, that Mr. Leslie is the culprit. My personal feeling is that Miss C is hiding something—possibly about Miss McD, to protect her friend’s reputation after death? When asked about the diary, she
“Miss Coleman!”
My head jerked up, and there was Sabatier, standing in his office doorway. Mama was nowhere in sight.
“I—I was—” I promptly forgot all the excuses I’d come up with.
Sabatier stalked closer, his cheeks flaming red. “What are you doing in my office, Miss Coleman?”
“I was coming to talk to you. See . . . see how the . . . if you had any new leads.” I struggled to regain my footing. “See if you were ready to leave my friend alone yet.”
Sabatier snatched the file off his desk and took his eyes off me long enough to read the name on it. “And when I wasn’t here, you decided you’d get the answers for yourself, is that right?”
I eased around the desk in the direction of the door. “The drawer wasn’t locked. I didn’t see the harm.”
“Miss Coleman,” Sabatier said, his voice low and hard. “You think I’m a fool, don’t you? You think I didn’t see you standing there behind that newspaper?”
My eyes went wide, and I swallowed hard.
“You think I didn’t know what Gladys was up to?” He dropped the fil
e and grabbed my arm, stopping me from darting for the door. “You think I haven’t seen what she looks like when she lies?”
I cocked my head in surprise. There was hurt in his eyes, but it wasn’t fresh and sharp the way it would be if this was a new betrayal. It was an old hurt, and I recognized it. The hurt of being proved right about somebody, when all you wanted them to do was prove you wrong.
“What were you looking for in here, Miss Coleman?” he said. “And why couldn’t you just ask me for it?”
I met his eyes and clamped my mouth shut.
“That’s what I thought you’d say.” The anger drained from his voice, replaced by weariness. His grip tightened on my arm. “Come with me, Miss Coleman. You’re under arrest.”
CHAPTER
20
THE WOMEN’S SIDE of the jail was sparsely populated on a Tuesday evening, though I had a feeling that would change before the night was over. Sabatier showed me into a dank, brick-walled cell and locked the door on me, then turned on his heel and left without another word.
I was supposed to be at the club in an hour. Tuesdays were slow, but both Duke and Olive were off tonight. They’d be short-handed without me, for sure, and when Cal came to get me—which I could only assume she’d do once my mother told her about this—she’d have to spend whatever they took in tonight bailing me out. Worse than that, the look in her eyes would say, I told you so and What have you dragged me and my club into?
That’s if she bailed me out at all. Maybe she’d think this was a valuable lesson that would stop me from going off half-cocked next time I got a harebrained idea. Maybe she’d let me rot in here a few days. Maybe more.
I sat on a bench at the far end from the cell’s other occupant, a drunk lady listing forward over her knees, arms swinging loose. The smell in here was something to write home about, and the letters would be long. Besides the charming aroma of the seatless toilet in the corner, I suspected the drunk lady had vomited down her blouse.
I slumped against the rough brick wall, nursing my hatred of cops in general, Sabatier in particular, Mama for not convincing him, and Arimentha for locking the stupid box in the first place. Who would try to steal a teenage girl’s diary anyway? Besides me, that is.
By the time Sabatier came back three hours later, I was in a powerful funk. He stopped outside the bars and looked in at me, a pleased expression on his face. I refused to turn my head and acknowledge his arrival.
“Are you ready to have a conversation with me, Miss Coleman?”
I still didn’t look at him. Kept my arms crossed over my chest. “I’m ready to eat a salami on rye. Unless you got one, you can go away.”
Sabatier chuckled, his earlier anger obviously dissipated. This was the unflappable and smug Sabatier I remembered from the club. “I don’t have a sandwich, Miss Coleman, but I do have something else to offer you.”
The drunk lady’s head lifted. “Did somebody say sandwich?”
“No,” I said.
“Oh. Darn.” Her head drooped back onto her chest.
“Don’t you want to see what I have here, Miss Coleman?” Sabatier pulled something out of his pocket and held it up to the bars. I couldn’t resist glancing at it, a wad of navy-blue wool. “This was found on Arimentha McDonough’s balcony last night. Someone broke into her room and dropped this.”
He spun the thing carelessly on one finger, and I saw what it was. My school beret.
Shit. I swallowed hard, trying to keep the panic out of my eyes. How had I not noticed I dropped the damn beret?
“And that someone,” Sabatier said, so close to the bars he was almost whispering, “would be in a whole lot of trouble. Unless he or she chose to cooperate with the police. With me. Now, I’ll ask you again, Miss Coleman. What were you looking for in my office?”
I stared at him, my throat closing tighter and tighter. My brain spinning and spinning, trying to find a way out of or around this. I couldn’t find one.
“A key.” I gritted my teeth, gripped the edge of the bench.
Sabatier looked at me eagerly. “And what does it open? The thing you took from Miss McDonough’s bedroom perhaps?”
I hesitated. If I told him about the diary, he’d be even more determined to get his hands on it. But maybe that could work in my favor.
“It’s a box. With Arimentha’s diary in it. At least we think so.”
“We?”
“I. Just me. I think there’s a diary in it. But I couldn’t get it open. I need the key.”
“I see.” Sabatier’s eyes went bright and contemplative. “Where is this box?”
“Somewhere safe.”
Sabatier smoothed his mustache with one hand, his gaze unfocused. Thinking. Finally, he met my eyes again. “I have a proposal for you. If I let you out of here, you will go get that box and bring it to me. And after I have it, I’ll conveniently lose track of this beret, and we’ll pretend this little incident never happened.”
“So, I’ll have no arrest record? No bail money to get out?”
“That’s correct.”
I looked him up and down. He definitely had the upper hand; he had me behind bars, for Pete’s sake. I could stay in here and martyr myself to keep the diary out of his hands, but then who would be out there trying to find out who really killed Arimentha? Who would be protecting Marion from this bloodhound?
And what if the diary contained information that cleared Marion’s name?
The only way I could get that information was to share it with this cop.
I stood and grasped the bars in both hands. “I’ll take your deal on one condition.”
Sabatier’s expression quickly shifted from surprised to wary. “What is it?”
“You let me out of this cell and meet me tomorrow afternoon. I’ll bring the box. You’ll bring the key. And we’ll find out together what Minty wrote in that diary.”
“Together?”
“Take it or leave it. That’s the only way you’re getting your hands on that diary.” It was a gamble, considering our relative positions, but it was one I had to take.
Sabatier stared into my eyes, searching for signs of a bluff or a trick, and I met his gaze straight on. Didn’t fidget, didn’t twitch. He could never know with one-hundred-percent certainty that I’d show up with that box, and I could never be sure he wouldn’t bring a bunch of uniformed men to toss me back in the clink. But nobody won at poker by playing it safe.
“Okay,” he said finally, rubbing a hand over his face. “You got a deal.”
* * *
Maybe I should’ve gone to the club first, since I was supposed to be working, but the only place I could think about going was home to talk to Marion. I needed to check he was okay, to be sure he hadn’t done anything drastic like gone and turned himself in to the police to get me out.
No sounds drifted down the stairs from the apartment, and my anxiety grew. But the moment I turned the key in the lock, Marion came barreling at me. He threw his arms around me. “I’m so sorry, Millie. I never should’ve let you do all this for me. I should’ve turned myself in to the police right from the beginning. This is all my fault.”
“No, it’s not,” I said, peeling his arms off me. “Unless you killed Arimentha McDonough, in which case—yes, it’s all your fault, and I’ll never forgive you.”
Marion swiped at his eyes with the back of his hand. It was clear he’d been crying.
“Oh, Mar. Geez. I’m okay. Look at me.” I did a turn to show him. “Right as rain.”
Marion’s tears slowed, but his nose wrinkled. “You look all right, but what dead thing followed you home?”
I laughed and started stripping off my cardigan. “Never go to jail, Marion. You’d have to douse yourself in perfume to survive it.”
“I might have to douse you in perfume.”
I held up a warning finger. “
Don’t you dare.”
Marion let out a giggle that bordered on hysteria. “Millie, I was so worried.” His mouth crumpled again. “When Gladdie came home and told us what happened, I was beside myself!”
Gladdie? Now they had nicknames? I dropped onto Cal’s green chair and bent to unbuckle my shoes.
“What exactly did my mother say?” After she abandoned me to the wolves.
“She said Sabatier was never fooled for a minute. That he spotted you in the lobby and figured out you two were up to something. He pretended to believe her and went along with it just long enough to give you a chance to incriminate yourself.”
“Tricky bastard.” I tossed one shoe and then the other over the sofa toward my bedroom. “He’s too smart for Mama anyway.”
Marion’s brows rose. “I’m surprised to hear you say that about a cop.”
“You haven’t heard the half of it.”
I filled Marion in on the notes I’d found before I got caught, the deal Sabatier had proposed, and what I’d had to give up in return. By the end, he’d had to sit down, too, in the midst of a pile of clothes on the sofa. My clothes, I finally noticed.
“What have you been doing?” I said.
He tossed a shirt at me. “Fixing all your junky clothes. I had to do something with myself while I waited.”
I examined the shirt in the lamplight. He’d neatly repaired a hole under the pocket so that it was almost invisible. “Geez, you’re a useful friend to have around.”
“I could say the same about you.”
“I don’t feel so useful right now. I just got thrown in jail and had to give up our advantage to get my ass out of there.”
“So,” Marion said, his smile fading. His red-rimmed eyes focused on the rug beneath our feet. “Everything Arimentha wrote in that diary . . . all of it will become public knowledge?”
“Not public necessarily. But the cops will know.”
The Boy in the Red Dress Page 18