“Of course. And then?”
“We go to other functions. Sophie is fun to be with. She’s good talker—come from good family. When I am in Seattle, sometimes I see her.”
“Other than charity functions, what did the two of you do?”
He thought for a second. “The things that friends do—she was good friend. I cared for her very much, that’s why her death is . . . tragic.”
Toni wrote this down in her notebook, then she looked up at him. “When you say ‘the things that friends do,’ you mean . . .”
He shrugged. “Dinners. Parties. Like that.” He smiled. “I was like . . . big brother to her, her acompañante.”
“Acompañante?”
“Sorry,” he said. “Means companion. Like chaperone.”
“I get it,” Toni said. “A chaperone. You watched out for her.”
He smiled. “Sim! Yes. Exactly.”
Toni looked back down at her notebook and scribbled away before looking up. “Now this next question is a little more forward, and I don’t mean to offend you by it, but it’s something we should know in advance.”
“Please.” He waved his hand. “Go ahead.”
“Okay. Were you and Sophie ever lovers?”
The smile quickly left his face, his eyes flaring briefly. He quickly regained control and smiled before answering. “Ms. Blair, I am married man. I have beautiful wife. We have two babies together in Brazil. I don’t cheat on my wife with other women. I was no lover with Sophie Thoms.” Lucas ran Sophie’s name together so quickly it sounded like one word: Sophiethoms. He sounded indignant, but it’s as if he knew that sounding indignant was expected, the proper response. So he served it up. That said, he didn’t sound very convincing.
“I didn’t think so, but I just had to ask to get it out of the way.”
He nodded but didn’t look too pleased.
Toni shuffled through her notes, then she continued. “When did you stop seeing Sophie? Do you remember the last time you saw her?”
“Hmmm. I think it was springtime, March maybe. We played Mexico I think. Sophie return home from London. We had dinner.”
“And that was it? You didn’t see her again?”
He shrugged. “She start seeing another.”
“Ryan Crosby?” I asked.
“I don’t know the man’s name. Sophie said good-bye. I respected her wishes.”
Toni nodded. “I see,” she said. “Did you talk to her again after that?”
He shook his head. “Sadly, no. My season gets busy—I get busy—Sophie, she always busy.” He paused. “Then, she’s gone. I never get chance to say farewell.”
Toni flipped back through her notes and studied them for a few seconds. “You mentioned that you were introduced to Sophie by her sister, Nicki Thoms.” Toni looked up. “Do you mind if I ask a couple of questions about Nicki?”
Lucas nodded. “Sim. The wild one.”
Toni tilted her head. “Why do you call her that? The ‘wild one’?”
He looked at me, then back at Toni. “You met her, no?”
Toni nodded.
“Then you must know why I say this. She’s a painter. Painters are always a little . . .” he circled his fingers around his temple in the universal sign for crazy, “loco. Wild. It gives them free spirit.”
Toni nodded. “I can see that in her.” She gave me a quick sideways glance to make sure I caught her little dig before she continued. “Let me ask you—what was your relationship with Nicki?”
“Relationship?” He shook his head. “No relationship. Again, just friends.” He paused, then added, “Even if I’m not married to a beautiful woman with two beautiful babies, there could be no relationship with Nicki Thoms. Too much bad with her.” He looked over at me.
“Bad?”
He nodded. “I don’t do drugs,” he said adamantly.
“I see. And you’re saying Nicki does?”
He nodded. “I see her a couple of times with drugs.”
“Marijuana? Cocaine?”
He shrugged. “Both, maybe.”
“Is she a heavy drug user?”
He thought about this for a second, then shrugged. “This I don’t know. I don’t know what means heavy.”
“Did she get high every time you were with her?” Toni asked.
Lucas shook his head. “No. Not always.”
“While we’re talking about this, did you ever see Sophie get high?”
“Sophie?” He shook his head again. “No. Never even one time.”
Toni nodded. “Okay. Let me ask you this. Do you recognize this guy?” She set the close-up photo of the guy we knew as “Josh” on the table. Lucas picked it up and studied it.
After a second, he shook his head. “No. I don’t know this man.”
“Really?” Toni said. “This picture is a blowup of a section from this photo.” She showed him the original picture with Sophie, Nicki, Lucas, and “Josh.” “You can see, you’re all sitting in a booth at a nightclub. We think the nightclub was the Genesis.”
A troubled look appeared on Lucas’s face like a kid who’s just been caught in a lie. He studied the picture for a few more seconds, then he said, “I’m sorry. People come to me all the time with camera and want picture taken. Same for Sophie and especially same for Nicki too. I don’t know all these people.”
“But this particular picture was taken with Nicki’s phone,” I said.
He looked at the picture for a second, then he looked back at me. “Then maybe you should ask her.”
The interview wrapped up shortly thereafter. We thanked Lucas for meeting us and promised we’d keep him informed. He gave us a business card with his contact information from the pocket of his warm-ups.
“What do you think?” Toni asked as I drove up I-5 in very slow rush-hour traffic. We were scheduled to meet Ryan Crosby at 7:00 p.m., only an hour to go. It was going to be tight.
“I think it’s amazing.”
“What?”
I switched to a Brazilian accent or at least my lame attempt at one. “The blue feathers of the bird—they are the same as your eyes.”
She went to slug me in the arm, but I knew it was coming so I leaned away, and it was only a glancing blow.
“Butthole. Payback’s a bitch, right?”
“You’re not supposed to call me a butthole, and what do you mean, payback?” I smiled. “We’re a team, sweetheart. I’ll sweet-talk the girls. You sweet-talk the guys. Together, we can’t lose.”
“Yeah, not as long as we keep talking to people like Lucas and Nicki Thoms.”
I swerved around traffic. “You’re saying you’re not buying Lucas’s story?”
“About whether he knows who this Josh character is? He’s lying.”
“And the other?”
“You mean the part about him being ‘just friends’ with the girls? Puh-leeze. He’s lying about that too. If we can’t figure out who this guy is, then we should get Ron to haul Lucas in and lean on him. He’ll crack in front of the police.”
I nodded. “Good idea.”
“You know,” Toni said, “I may admit that I’ve been a little hard on Nicki Thoms—probably justifiably, and we’ll find out. But this guy Lucas is a pure horndog. His poor wife. She’s probably sitting at home, half a world away, barefoot and pregnant with two little ones while this dimwit who thinks he’s God’s gift is out screwing every bimbo he bumps into. And then denying it afterward.”
“Remember, that probably includes Sophie. And Nicki.”
“Well, Sophie doesn’t sound like a bimbo. Then again, if she was doing the deed with Lucas, that lowers my opinion of her a few notches.”
“Why? Just because she wanted to have some fun in the sheets with a guy who happened to be a celebrity?”
“No, you moron. Because she wanted to have some fun in the sheets with a guy who happens to be married. That’s why.”
I thought about this for a second. “That’s true.”
“That�
��s right. And you’d better keep that in mind with the two of us, mister. Side action is a deal breaker for me.”
I smiled. “Message received.”
She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. “Good. Don’t you forget it.”
Chapter 9
“STEP! BLOCK! PUNCH!” WE WERE IN the waiting area of the American Martial Arts studio watching Ryan Crosby take a class of youngsters through a beginning karate class. The children, dressed for the most part in stiff, brand-new white gis, struggled to follow along. Most of them looked like they were new to the sport, still wearing white belts although a few had been at it for a couple of months and had progressed to yellow-belt status. Despite their inexperience, all but a couple seemed tuned in and very enthusiastic.
I closed my eyes and breathed in deeply. The moment I’d stepped through the door, the sights and sounds, even the musty smell of the rubber mats caused memories of my youth to come rushing over me. I suppose I had Tony Faraldo to thank for this.
Tony was a big kid, a little older. Also, he was the neighborhood bully—the kind of guy who liked to throw his considerable weight around, especially against skinny, nerdy types like me (or at least, like I was at the time; I’m still a little skinny but not so nerdy). Our defining moment came in an alley on the way home from school one afternoon when I was in seventh grade. I made the mistake of objecting to a standard Tony Faraldo shakedown and ended up with a bloody nose and a black eye to show for it. And I still lost my four dollars.
Later that evening, my mom had already cleaned up my bloody nose, of course, but there was no hiding the shiner from Dad. He was not happy. Given his prominence in the legal community, I expected he’d march right over to the Faraldos and demand that old man Faraldo fork over my money, probably with penalties. If old man Faraldo failed to comply, Dad would no doubt hit him with a lawsuit.
Boy, did I get that wrong. Instead, the Irishman in Dad came out: he explained to me in no uncertain terms that it was mostly me who he was not happy with. He asked me if I’d had to work hard for that money. Recalling the hilly rides on my bicycle in the rain delivering papers, I said I had. Then, Dad explained, it was my job, not his, to go get my money back, and that he expected me to do so within a very short period of time. At twelve years old, he said, I was quite old enough to stick up for myself against neighborhood bullies. When I countered with the logical question of how I was supposed to accomplish this little recovery operation against a fourteen-year-old who outweighed me by sixty pounds and probably already shaved, Pop leaned back and considered this for a minute. Then, quite abruptly, he dug out his phone book. Twenty minutes later, we were on our way to the Queen Anne Shotokan Karate studio—a place where I spent three or four afternoons a week for the next four years. The sights and sounds of Ryan’s studio brought back fond memories.
Incidentally, I never did get my money back from Tony Faraldo. His old man got arrested and sent up to Walla Walla for six years for possession with intent to distribute and his mom moved the rest of the family out of state before I’d even got my yellow belt (I wasn’t about to try tackling Tony until I had some color). Fortunately, Dad forgot about it. And, I guess, so did Tony because he still owes me my four dollars. Plus penalties. That’s okay. I didn’t forget. And I’m patient. Who knows? Maybe one day, I’ll collect.
Ryan’s class ended a couple of minutes later, and after he said his good-byes to the kids and their parents, we walked up.
“You must be Danny Logan and Toni Blair,” he said with a smile as we approached. We’d seen the photo of him and Sophie at the Genesis, but in person he was boyishly handsome with dark brown hair and blue eyes.
“That’s us,” I said, shaking hands. “Quite a crowd of kids you’ve got here.”
Ryan nodded. “They’re enthusiastic, that’s for sure. They keep me hopping.” He nodded toward the back of the studio. “We have a little office in the back if you want a little privacy.”
“Great.”
We followed him through a door at the back of the studio to a little room not much bigger than a large closet, with barely enough space for a small desk and a couple of metal folding chairs. It would have been completely claustrophobic in there were it not for the wall next to the desk, which was a one-way mirror that looked out onto the studio.
“Reminds me of when I was a kid,” I said. “I started out in a studio laid out very much like this one.”
“Yeah,” Ryan said, “me too. Must be a standard dojo footprint.”
“Probably.” We took our seats. “So as I understand it,” I said, “you’re a third-year law student at U-Dub Law and you intern at the Beatrice Thoms Memorial Foundation. How do you find time to run a karate studio?”
He smiled. “Oh, I don’t run it. It belongs to my cousin Wayne. He started it about three years ago, hoping to be able to use my dad’s police connections to get customers. He asked me to help, and I’ve been a part-time instructor ever since. I teach here a couple nights a week.” He opened a desk drawer and pulled out a small bottle of water. “You guys like one?”
We both declined.
He took a drink and then screwed the top back on the bottle. “I want to do everything I can to help find out who killed Sophie.” He paused for a second, then added, “But—and I’m not complaining and I’ll answer whatever questions you have—but you know, the police already asked me all the same questions you guys are probably going to ask. I spent hours going over everything with Ron Bergstrom. More than once, actually. You can probably just get all this information from him.”
I nodded. “I know. Ron sent over the transcript of your interview. I think we have a pretty good handle on it, and we know you even passed a polygraph. What we’re looking to do here is to fill in around the edges, maybe uncover something that might point us in a new direction. Could be something that doesn’t even seem important to you but could connect with something we’ve heard from someone else. We’re looking for angles here, right? We’re hoping that if we can reconstruct Sophie’s background based on what we learn, something might turn up.”
He nodded. “I get it. Well, like I said, whatever I can do to help, I’ll do. I’ve been racking my brain trying to put things together, but I don’t have any ideas, either. I’m just about to the point where I’m thinking it might have been just completely random—some kind of insane psychopath asshole.”
I nodded. “That’s a possibility.”
“If it is—some random killer, that’ll make it harder to catch the son of a bitch who did it, won’t it?”
I nodded. “Yeah, yeah it will. But before you get too far down that road, I think it’s a little early to come to that conclusion. Personally, we’re not there yet. In fact, we haven’t reached any conclusions.”
“That’s good.”
“So with that,” Toni said, “why don’t you start by telling us about your relationship with Sophie.”
He looked down at the desk for a second, then said, “I met Sophie in March of this year. Before that—sometime in my second year in law school, I knew I was going to need an intern position for my last year in school, and I knew that if I waited ’til the summer, the good positions would all be taken. I was doing pretty well with my classes, so I figured I’d get a jump on the competition by grabbing an intern slot early—before the end of the second year. I wanted to intern at a nonprofit because it fit in with what I want to do when I graduate. Someone mentioned the Beatrice Thoms Memorial Foundation, so this past March I went over and checked it out. I met with Eric Gaston and Oliver Ward. Eric walked me through the Foundation’s mission and its activities. I liked what the Foundation was doing, so after Eric offered me the position, I jumped at it. He’s actually the person who hired me and technically I answer to him.”
“Is this when you met Sophie, then?”
“No. Sophie was in London at the time, I think. A week or so after I got hired though, I met her when she got back to Seattle.” He cleared his throat, then he continued. “E
ric loaded me up with work right away. He seemed pretty relieved to have someone actually willing to do some work; the Foundation has been around for a while, but Eric was still in the process of converting it to professional management. It was still a little disorganized. It’s what you’d call a ‘work in progress.’ We’re still pretty understaffed, for example. Eric wants to keep it lean, and I get that. Anyway, I was the best person there at spreadsheets and because I was in law school, Eric gave me all the legal documents to look at. He saved a little on legal bills that way. I did what I could and referred the rest of the stuff to an outside firm. I was busy—real busy—so I didn’t see too much of Sophie; I didn’t have a chance, really. Then, one afternoon, I think it was Good Friday, I was working late, and she came into my office. Eric had let everyone go home at noon, and Sophie didn’t have a ride home. She asked me if I’d take her.” He paused and reflected as he recalled the events. “Sorry,” he said. “It’s still a little tough.”
“That’s okay,” I said.
“I was pretty flattered that she’d even ask me, so I drove her to her condo.” He paused for a second. “I mean, I’d noticed her, of course—she was awesome. But I mean, she was Sophie Thoms. I figured she didn’t even know who I was. We’d never even talked to each other, so I didn’t pay her too much attention. But there I was, driving her home to her condo. I remember she got a kick out of my truck—it’s a Toyota Tacoma—pretty much tricked out for off-road. It’s pretty rugged, not at all the smooth ride she was used to: she drove a Mercedes. It sits up pretty high, so I had to help her in and out. We talked a little bit on the way and after that, you can be sure I paid attention to her. Sophie was . . .” he paused and looked out the window at the empty studio for a moment. “Well, she was beautiful and nice and totally classy. And the amazing thing? After that ride home, she seemed to notice me too.” He shrugged. “Things just kind of got started from there.”
Mona Lisa Eyes (Danny Logan Mystery #4) Page 12