by Lisa Black
“I can’t see why Jillian would have gone wandering around dusty old buildings anyway. It’s been so cold, and she thought the dry air was bad for her skin. She was always so careful about her skin.” He picked up his wedding picture. “It was all she had, really, her looks.”
That didn’t sound very nice. Theresa wondered if he always managed to be so tactful, or only when under stress. Yet his eyes filled with tears as he gazed at the photo.
He added, as the level of desperation in his voice climbed steadily, “I know wherever she is, she’ll be worried sick about Cara and me. That’s why you have to find her. She knows I can’t raise a baby all by myself.”
This should have been poignant, but sounded flat and tinny to Theresa’s ears. She did not read anything into that reaction; everything sounded flat to her these days. But then he asked, “Are you two going to do the investigation into Jillian’s disappearance?”
“We’ll be working on it,” Frank assured him. “With the Lakewood police.”
Evan Kovacic had smooth skin and short, manicured fingernails; he had tucked the shirt in, so that now he looked like a frat boy who’d grown up to be pleasant and reasonably responsible. But his eyes-the color of the irises dark and solid, and hard as marble-swept her from the red hair that hadn’t seen a grooming product in months to the scuffed Reeboks she wore to cushion her feet during the eight-hours-without-sitting days. He was assessing her competence, Theresa thought, and finding it lacking. Well, screw him.
But then he managed a smile. “Great.”
Taught to be polite. Or a lack of confidence in me somehow reassures him. How much does he really want us to find Jillian?
She let her brain wander on this path for one brief moment. Jillian and her former job had become an embarrassment to the young entrepreneur. Marriage had not changed Jillian’s personality or lifestyle and both had worn him down. He had a good idea where she was-holed up with a boyfriend, on a bender, under the Carnegie bridge with a needle in her arm-and didn’t need that publicity. Having had a few days to think about it since making the original report, he now knew that he didn’t want her back, but as legal husband and nice guy felt obligated to keep up the pretense.
Or perhaps Theresa saw nothing but pain and deceit in her world these days, and this poor guy had made an effort to keep his self-possession while begging them to bring his wife back. Being left with an infant to raise wouldn’t make his busy days easier, and surely Jillian’s looks helped him tolerate any other foibles.
“Good-bye, Mr. Kovacic.” She left the room and the apartment, taking the stairs down.
Outside, the wind cut through her jacket in damp, knifelike slices. They were too close to Lake Erie to avoid the gusting air. Trees were bare, the sky an unrelenting gray. Patrons at the station across the street waited in their cars while gassing up. Unexpected sun in the morning had softened the top of the snow, but now it had frozen to a sheet of new ice once more, the inconsistency harder on living things than a low but steady clime would be. April wasn’t the cruelest month in Cleveland, Ohio. March was.
“What do you think?” Frank said, sauntering up to the unmarked police car, pulling his keys from his pocket and jangling them too loudly.
“About what? Whether this bimbo is coming back or not? How should I know?”
He waited for a truck to pass, then walked quickly into the street to the other side of the car. Once the doors had closed, he started the car before saying, “You saw the place. Neat, clean. She wasn’t some crack whore. The baby’s room is-”
“Immaculate,” Theresa said. “That could be the nanny, though. She must have been there all day every day for at least three days, right, if the husband’s been at work?”
“He works on the premises, but yeah, the babysitter’s been there. I didn’t find any trace of drugs,” Frank went on. “A little beer in the fridge, that’s it.”
“How did you get to look around the kitchen?”
“I had a few seconds while he went to see what you were doing. No prescription drugs in the kitchen cabinets or bathroom. Did you find anything in the bedroom?”
“I didn’t really look, just collected some underwear.”
He opened his mouth to make a comment, apparently remembered that Theresa was his first cousin, and shut it again. “I ran their financials too. Little bit of credit card debt-and who doesn’t have that these days?-and a car loan. I didn’t have time for more than the basic accounts, but when people run out it’s usually because of love or money.”
“Same reason they usually murder too.” She didn’t know why that popped out, since she doubted Jillian had left due to anything other than her own free will.
“Exactly,” Frank said.
He spoke as if she had proven some point of his, which irritated her. “Fine. Where is her car?”
“In their garage. The officer who took the original report said it was locked, no signs of damage, no signs of foul play.”
“And she’s not in the trunk,” she said.
“He checked.”
“Her purse? Cell phone? Any bank withdrawals?”
“Her purse is still there in the apartment. Phone, money, L’Oreal lipstick in Brilliant Pink still there. How about it, cuz? When was the last time you left home without your purse?”
“The third grade.”
“See why I think it’s weird? It’s as if she went out to get a paper and never came back.”
They passed Lakewood Park, and she watched the whitecaps kick up the surface of Lake Erie. At one time this case would have interested her, prompted her to a panoply of theories regarding the fate of Jillian Perry. But that was before watching her fiancé bleed to death. Still, for Frank’s sake and to forestall that sympathetic look she had come to dread, she made an effort. “What about the nanny?”
“You’ve got a nasty, suspicious turn of mind,” he said, as if the fact delighted him. “Apparently Evan only hired her three days ago; she’s fifty-five and a friend of his mother’s. They never needed a babysitter before-they live at his company, and when Jillian worked, her jobs were mostly at night. I’ll look into it, though.”
They passed the Cleveland city limits, and Theresa grew tired of Jillian Perry and questions with no answers. “Okay. I’ve got DNA in case her body turns up. That’s all I can do for now, so let’s get back to the lab. I have to go over the clothes from that woman they found in the park yesterday, make up some more acid phosphatase reagent, run the FTIR samples, order more evidence tape, and maybe eat lunch before Leo comes up with something else to dump on me.”
“I’ll take you to lunch.”
She gave him a skeptical look. Her cousin could be generous to a fault in large ways, but had never in his life volunteered to pick up a check. “What do you want?”
“At Pier W. It’s on the water.”
Especially not at expensive restaurants. “I know where it is. We went there for my senior prom. What do you want?”
“The salty wind in your hair-”
“Lake Erie is freshwater, and glaciers give off warmer air at this time of the year. What do you want?”
“Come with me to talk to Georgie, Jillian’s boss. The escort-service guy.”
“I’m not a freakin’ cop, Frank. I’m a scientist. I work with microscopes and fibers. I don’t interrogate people, and not even lunch at Pier W is worth chatting with a pimp!”
“He’s not a pimp,” he corrected her, while pointedly missing the I-90 on-ramp. “He’s a businessman. Come on, this guy is never around women he can’t intimidate or pay off. He won’t know what to do with you sitting there.”
“Don’t you-”
She had almost said Don’t you have a partner? Before she remembered that no, he didn’t, that his last partner had been shot in a bank robbery, the partner he had resented more than liked, the partner she had been engaged to marry, and since then he had managed to circumvent all efforts of the department to assign him another. And she remembered something
else, something that had existed in another time, another life-sympathy for someone other than herself.
“Okay,” she said. “But I’m ordering lobster. And the Brie plate.”
CHAPTER 2
George Panapoulos-aka Georgie Porgie-worked out of a storefront on West Twenty-fifth, just two blocks from the West Side Market, sandwiched in between a bail bondsman and a used-appliance dealer. He had tried to add a splash of color to the grimy street, however, spelling out BEAUTIFUL GIRLZ! in six-inch-high fluorescent pink letters along the window. The inside smelled of bug spray and cigarette smoke, but the receptionist lived up to the advertising, a petite blond in spandex, her eyes a crystal blue and slightly unfocused.
“I’m here to see Georgie,” Frank told her in the commanding tone he’d practiced on Theresa since she was four. She’d stopped listening at six, but it still worked on other people.
Heavy footsteps made the thin walls tremble, and Georgie appeared with a cigarette in one hand and a stack of envelopes in the other. Theresa had expected a stereotype, a used-car salesman with lots of gold jewelry, but George Panapoulos looked more like an aging college student. He had neatly trimmed black hair and wore a maroon sweatshirt with jeans. The only concessions to flash were a stylish goatee and a gold band with one fat diamond on his right hand. He only grinned when he saw Frank, and then his eye fell on Theresa. Like her cousin had said earlier, he opened his mouth to make a comment, then apparently thought better of it. “What can I do for you, Detective?”
“I need to ask you about one of your ex-employees. In private.”
“I’m a little busy right now-”
Frank waited.
“-but I’ll take time for anything that concerns my girls. Come on back.” He turned away from them without hesitation and led the way through a narrow hallway with stained wallpaper.
His office continued to work against stereotype. Papers, manila folders, and pictures of girls covered the desk, the bookshelf, and a battered credenza. More pictures covered the walls-girls of every race, size, and hair color, including a few not found in nature; girls in bikinis or less; girls in full-length gowns-pinned up willy-nilly with thumbtacks or even straight pins. It took Theresa a full minute to find Jillian’s. Theresa now believed in Georgie’s legitimacy-the deluge of young girls seemed no worse than the average magazine or group of billboards, and no way would a pimp keep this much paperwork.
The man no longer in question threw himself into a desk chair covered in 1970s orange vinyl and motioned for them to sit. His guest chairs were the only two uncluttered surfaces in the room. “Now don’t tell me one of my girls is in trouble, because I won’t believe it. They’re all clean. I’m legit now.”
“So you told me,” Frank said.
“It’s worth it, let me tell you. It’s worth the taxes and the forms and having to send out those friggin’ W-2s every January. I can sleep at night, I don’t have to take my gun into the shower with me, and I don’t have to call my lawyer every time someone like you shows up at my door.”
“I’m happy that you’ve seen the light.”
Georgie glanced at Theresa; again, he seemed on the verge of asking who she was, and then didn’t. Her cousin had been right. Georgie Porgie didn’t know what to do with her. She perused the photos of girls with lots of makeup and not enough body fat, and ignored him.
“So what are you here about?” he asked again. A phone rang in the lobby, abruptly cut off as the receptionist snatched it up.
“Jillian.”
“Which Jillian?”
“How many you got?”
“Three.” A dented space heater in the corner kicked on, pushing out puny waves of warm air to do what they could against the heavy dampness, and he raised his voice to be heard over the rattling heater. “Funny, come to think of it. It’s not a common name these days.”
“Jillian Kovacic.”
“You mean Perry.”
Frank absently patted the pack of cigarettes in his front shirt pocket; the heavily nicotined smell of the place must have been tempting him. “So you do know which Jillian I mean.”
“She was Perry here. She didn’t officially quit until she got him up the aisle. Jillian hedges her bets.”
“Didn’t jump ship until she had the lifeboat in position?” Frank prodded.
“Jillian’s not dumb. Besides, she seemed to think her new hubby was going to be a big shot soon and didn’t want her job distracting people from his.”
“You didn’t care that she got married?”
“Why would I care?”
“Maybe Jillian was more than an employee.”
“Yeah, so I killed her because I was jealous?” Georgie shook his head and pulled a cigarette from a pack on his desk, looking less like a college student with every minute as both face and voice lost their phony friendliness. “Listen, I’ve got forty-six girls working for me and Jillian is by no means the hottest one. I expected her to quit once she didn’t need the dough no more. I couldn’t believe she came back after having the baby. She lost that weight quick, though, I’ll say that for her.”
Frank let him wind down. “What makes you think she’s been killed?”
Georgie didn’t hesitate. “Her husband. He’s called here twice a day for the past three days asking if I have heard from her, and insisting that she would never just take off and not tell anyone where she went. And he’s right about that. Jillian was pretty reliable. That’s why I kept her on the payroll even though she couldn’t work once the baby began to show.”
Frank gave no sign of accepting this explanation, though it sounded reasonable to Theresa. Instead, he asked, “Can you think of anyone who might have wanted to kill her?”
“Sure. Her husband.”
“Why would her husband kill her?”
“Spoken like the true bachelor you are, Patrick. Husbands don’t need a reason. Neither do wives. Marriage is enough to turn anyone homicidal.”
“Speaking from experience? As I recall, that one girl thought you were going to marry her. What was her name? Debbie? Destiny?”
“Diana. I was, too. I still miss her every day,” Georgie said with patent innocence. But his body had tensed until the cords in his neck bulged under the skin. He flicked open a silver lighter and thumbed the roller against the flint with more force than necessary.
“She had cigarette burns up and down her right arm,” Frank added.
The man took a deep puff, then said, “That’s awful,” with no inflection whatsoever.
Theresa felt a chill that had nothing to do with the space heater kicking off. What was she doing here? Her job was to look at a body or a room or a piece of clothing and discern the relevant facts about those things, to give the investigators what they needed to catch people like Georgie. It wasn’t her job to sit there with Georgie. People weren’t like inanimate objects. People lied.
On the other hand, she might try to observe something useful. She didn’t dare interrupt Frank. She’d started talking in the middle of his guitar playing one day and he’d given her the cold shoulder for a month, which, at thirteen, seemed like a year.
Georgie’s hair had thinned a bit on top, revealing a birthmark and an S-shaped scar near the temple. His pupils didn’t seem to jump when they traveled from Frank to her and back again, which should mean he had no illegal drugs in his system. Nicotine stained his left-hand fingers, but he held the glowing butt in his right hand. Ambidextrous? Or trained to smoke with any free hand? He had another scar across the right thumb. An oil spot marred the elbow of the maroon sweatshirt, and he didn’t rest his back flat against the orange vinyl, which made her think he had a gun tucked into the waistband of his pants. This didn’t concern her much; every day found her surrounded by men with guns. Up the hall, the receptionist giggled into the phone.
“Anybody else might mean Jillian harm?” Frank was asking.
“Sure,” the man said again. “Her other boyfriend. The one she didn’t marry.”
“
How many boyfriends did Jillian have?”
“Just the two. The one she didn’t marry, and the one she did. Those are all I know of, anyway.”
Theresa rolled her eyes, then felt embarrassed when the man across the desk noticed. She buried her nose in a brochure. Beautiful Girlz seemed to be the official name of the place. Available for trade shows, corporate excursions, and private parties. Except that Georgie had misspelled corporate as corporete.
“His name?”
“Drew, and I only know that because he’d call all the time when Jillian worked here. He’d drive the receptionists nuts trying to leave messages, but we don’t take messages for anyone but me here, or else this place would turn into a lonely hearts switchboard.”
“Did he know she got married?”
“He must have. The calls stopped when her employment did. But then he started up again the past three days, looking for Jillian.”
“This ex-boyfriend’s been calling here?”
“Even more than the husband. He’s been driving poor Vangie out there crazy. If you talk to him, tell him to stop or I’ll charge him with harassment.”
“I’ll need his last name.”
“I don’t have it. Vangie might. He’d chat with her and her soft little heart all the time until she got tired of it and learned to cut him short, which made him turn nasty. My other receptionist just hangs up on him. Him, and the thousand other mopes who call here, trying to get private time with my girls.” His mouth took on a pouty shape as he seemed to contemplate the nerve of these guys, thinking they could get for free what he had invested in, cultivated. Theresa almost felt a twinge of empathy for him. It’s probably how a Blockbuster manager feels about pirated movies, she thought.
“How long did Jillian work for you?”
“About a year and a half. Subtracting six months for the baby body, of course. Who’re you, anyway?” he apparently now felt comfortable enough to ask Theresa. She introduced herself, and Georgie’s heavy eyebrows came together. “M.E.? Like you do autopsies?”
“No, I’m a forensic scientist.”