by Lisa Black
She watched as a waiter whispered a message to George Panapoulos, who promptly glanced behind him to where she stood behind the lettering on the glass. He frowned, said something to the redhead next to him, and left the room.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
“I wanted to ask you a few questions. I also wanted to see how this works. Those are your girls?”
“Yes. They look like cheap little sluts, don’t they?”
The women wore dresses of clingy, swishy fabrics, but none were exceptionally short; low cut, but not obnoxiously so. Stiletto heels, but nary a fishnet in sight. “They really are beautiful.”
Her tone must have sounded wistful to him because he softened enough to ask, “So what can I do for you?”
“I’m still working on Jillian Perry.”
“I told you-”
“Mr. Panapoulos, I don’t believe you killed her. I don’t believe you had anything to do with her death. But she had a very limited circle of friends and acquaintances and I have run through all of them except for you.”
“And what do you think I can tell you?”
“Who she was. What she was. What went on in her mind-”
“Sheesh, like I’m gonna know. Kid, stop a minute.” He held his hand out to slow down a smooth-faced young man with a black jacket and a tray of champagne, and snatched one of the delicate glasses. “You want one-sure, yeah, you do, have one. Okay, that’s it, you can go now.” He handed the glass to Theresa and let the boy get the door for himself.
She sipped it immediately. She was thirsty, and she liked champagne.
He watched her. “None of that line about not drinking on duty?”
“I’m not a cop. Besides, I never turn down free food or free booze.”
“Good philosophy. Now, Jillian. I wouldn’t have the slightest idea what went on in her head, Ms. MacLean, and I wouldn’t waste a lot of time on it if I were you. Jillian wasn’t some deep, troubled soul, she was a pretty, nice, few-lights-short-of-a-marquee-sign girl. That’s it. What you saw was what you got.” He leaned against the glass and polished wood and focused on his sparkling wine for a moment before looking directly into her eyes. “I know what you’re thinking, that I’m one step out of the cave and should be wearing a fur pelt. But I’ve spent most of my day, every day, for more years than I care to count now with women, looking at women, talking to women, telling women what to do. I dress them. I undress them.
So maybe you should consider that I know my subject.”
Theresa considered herself lucky that he didn’t sell used cars, or she’d have been signing on the line for a used Audi sportster right then and there.
“Jillian Perry didn’t have a dark side, or a flip side, or any side but the outside. She had no secrets.”
“Then who is Cara’s father?”
“Except that one.” He sipped the champagne, frowning. “Okay, that’s the exception in her life that proves the rule. I just know it ain’t me. Beyond that, I don’t care.”
“What if it were a client?”
“That’s his lookout, not mine. Though I’d be a little peeved-I go through all the trouble of hiring these girls, coaching them a bit, and then some idiot knocks her up and she’s out of work for months? Yeah, I’d be peeved. But that’s the great circle of life and all that crap.”
“Did Jillian have a relationship with any of your clients?”
He drained his glass. “Nope.”
“You seem sure of that.”
He leaned back a bit, away from her, as if he no longer cared if she bought the Audi or not. “I am. The girls don’t freelance, it’s a rule. Sure, some break it and I fire them, but not Jillian. She didn’t seem all that enamored of my clientele. It was just a job to her.”
“No one she liked…in particular?”
“Not that I know of. Tell you what, you can talk to Vangie if you want. I’ll tell her it’s okay. I know women, yes, but I also know that they talk more to each other than to me sometimes.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. You ought to do that more often.”
“What?”
“Smile.”
“Any clients that Jillian particularly disliked?”
“Whoops, there it went. Okay, Jillian, disliked…she got along better with Hispanics than Asians, and hated it when old guys would pinch her, but aside from that, nothing sticks out.”
“Her mother says her father called the agency once.”
“Oh, yeah. Daddy dearest thought he’d be clever and check up on his little girl. He requested Jillian, then kept asking for details, would she do this, would she do that-which is kind of weird in my book, talking that way about your own daughter, even if you’re supposedly looking out for her-”
“And you told him she would?”
“No. Not exactly.” He cast about for a place to set the empty glass, then gave up and hung on to it. “I may have given him the impression that, well, they could work that out between themselves. You know, like when the furniture store advertises leather couches on sale for three hundred bucks and you get there and there’s only one at that price, and it’s teal.”
“I see. Simple salesmanship.”
“Sure.”
“So your girls don’t have sex with clients?”
“I wouldn’t know. That’s up to them.”
She made sure her skepticism showed on her face. “I’m sorry, but I need to know. If they do, then you’re a pimp, which isn’t my problem. If they aren’t supposed to but do anyway, and take in money that you’re not getting a cut of-”
He came closer. “I thought you said I wasn’t your suspect.”
“I didn’t think you were.” She would not step back.
“I don’t do violence in this line of work. I don’t need to.”
Toddlers lied with more conviction. “Since you’re already annoyed with me, let me point out that Sarah Taylor used to work for you.”
“Yeah, your cousin was by, asking me about that too.”
“How did you know Frank is my cousin?” she asked out of curiosity.
Georgie smiled in a way she really didn’t like. “I know lots of things. Look, I had Sarah in my stable a long time ago, but she couldn’t stay off the juice long enough to turn a profit, so I cut her loose. Haven’t seen her since. In those days, I’ll admit, my girls definitely slept with clients. That was the whole point.”
“But not now.”
“Okay, look. I’m going to give you a lesson in escorting. Business 101, right?”
“Sure.”
“I charge enough that, whatever arrangement the girls might make with a client, I don’t care. I’ve been paid, understand?”
“Ye-ess.”
“So say the girls make more if they do have sex with the guy. The client is happy and might request them again. The girls are happy to have repeat customers and so am I. Everybody wins.”
“What if a girl made her own arrangement and bypassed you completely?”
“Of course that can happen. No system is without problems. But I would fire that girl, and eventually the client would get tired of her. Now she’s got no client and no job. Everybody loses.”
“I see.”
“It’s a business, Ms. MacLean. Nothing worth killing nobody over.”
“Okay. I get that. So Jillian’s father got angry at the, um, implication that Jillian would have sex for money?”
“I’ll say. Jillian came in later that night for a job, so I told her about it. By then I was laughing, but the poor kid started to cry. We had a cocktail party, like this one, and she kept having to run to the ladies’ room and fix her makeup. Pain in the ass, really.”
“What did her father say, as closely as you can remember? Did he threaten Jillian?”
“Hell no, he threatened me. Said if I touched her, if I even spoke to his baby girl again, he’d come over and bash my head in. Like I’m the one calling on the phone for her, you know? Oh, and then he’d have
me thrown in jail. That was about it. I guess he thought better of it, because I never heard from him again. No visits, no cops throwing me in jail.” He shook his head with sympathy rendered false by the smile on his face. “Poor Daddy.”
“But he didn’t say anything about Jillian?”
“Not to me. I don’t know what he said to her later, because she seemed kinda depressed for a couple of weeks. But she kept working. She’d come in with this sort of grim, go-to-hell look on her face. I’d have to jolly her before the job started.”
“Jolly?”
He cocked an eyebrow at her. “Tell her she looked beautiful, throw in a joke, that sort of stuff. What did you think I meant, force a little Ecstasy down her throat until her mood lightened?”
“Just checking.”
“Not that she wouldn’t do a tablet or two once in a while. But it was never much with her, and stopped totally when she got pregnant. She wouldn’t even drink, then. Nothing but diet ginger ale. For these types of things”-he jerked his head toward the party room-“I’d have to make arrangements with the bartenders in advance for that damn diet ginger ale. The clients don’t want teetotalers around. It makes them feel vulnerable.”
“Interesting.”
Apparently she didn’t sound interested enough, because he straightened and pressed his empty glass into her free hand. “Speaking of clients, I need to get back to mine. If you’ll excuse me, Ms.-”
“Did she say anything more about her father? Her parents?”
“Not to me, and I didn’t ask. He wasn’t the first irate parent I’d encountered and probably won’t be the last. This isn’t an easy business, you know.”
“Then why don’t you get into another line of work?”
He glanced toward the party again. Clouds must have gathered outside and the dimmed light softened the lines in his face. “But I meet so many interesting people.”
I’ll bet. She reviewed the number of expensive suits in the room. Interesting people who then owed him not just the bill but a favor, a consideration, an understanding in exchange for mutual discretion. “Did Evan Kovacic ever contact you or have any problem with Jillian’s job?”
“He called looking for Jillian once or twice, but that’s all. Not at all like Daddy.”
“He was never a client of yours?”
“Nope, never met him.” That fit with Shelly’s statement, that she had introduced Jillian to Evan. “And you know, that’s a good point. Why don’t you just ask Jillian’s husband all your questions?”
She tried to formulate a good answer to that, and failed.
He took his hand off the doorknob. “Oh, I get it. You think hubby killed her.”
Daddy and hubby. George liked his diminutives. “I don’t know yet. I’m working on it.”
“How’d he do it, then? I thought she froze herself to death. Or that serial killer got her.”
“I’m working on that too.”
“All that hard work, and for a government salary.” He pulled the door open, holding the heavy wood with one hand and cocked his head toward the party inside. “Have you ever considered a sideline? Some of the guys get tired of nothing but legs and a giggle. You could wind up with quite the following-”
“No, thanks.”
“Do it for the free booze, then.”
She laughed.
“Suit yourself.” He passed through the door and made a beeline for the group of people, his form breaking up into a kaleidoscope of colors behind the decorated glass panels before the swinging door had time to hit him in the buttocks.
The young man reappeared from farther up the hallway, hustling along as fast as he could with a tray of empty, tinkling champagne flutes, and accepted two more from her with an unhappy sigh.
“I know what you mean, kid,” she told him.
She pulled out of the parking garage onto East Eighteenth and headed south to Euclid, stopping at the corner to wait for the light and to see what currently played at the Playhouse Square theaters. She hadn’t taken Rachael to a show since the Christmas Nutcracker Suite two years before.
So Daddy had been very angry about Jillian’s work as an escort. But that had been several years ago and Jillian’s body had turned up only last week. Evan had not been very angry, but three weeks after marrying him, Jillian died.
Once again, Theresa decided to keep her money on Evan. He had the more immediate motive, a window of opportunity, means…
Her Nextel rang. She peered at it, found the Talk button and pushed it, drifting far enough into the next lane while doing so to earn an irritated honk from a gold SUV. “Hello?”
“I see you’re not at work. I’m not even going to ask why you’re not at work.”
“Hi, Leo. I’m-”
“I said I wasn’t going to ask. Actually, it’s all right that you’re out and about, since you can out and about yourself right over to the old courthouse. You’re wanted in court.”
She groaned. Testifying in court might be the most important part of her job, the end product of all her work, but it was also a colossal pain in the neck. “I didn’t have any subpoenas for today.”
“You do now.”
“But what case? And why the old courthouse?” Criminal cases were always heard high on top of the modern and hideously decorated Justice Center.
“It’s family court. Drew Fleming is calling you as a witness in the custody case.”
She nearly sideswiped the SUV again.
CHAPTER 21
“Can he do that?” she said into the phone.
“The subpoena arrived here with your name on it. Since you haven’t personally received it, I suppose you could, technically, not show up in courtroom number three without receiving a contempt charge. But given how often we in forensics have to work with the court system, and how Mr. Kovacic has recently tarnished your reputation with same, I don’t suggest it.”
“You have got to be freakin’ kidding me.”
“I am not,” he assured her, “freakin’ kidding you.”
“How do I get myself into these things?”
“I wonder that often myself. How you get yourself into these things, I mean, and why you’ve chosen to drag the lab with you on what is looking more and more like a personal vendetta. We cannot be seen to take sides, have I made that sufficiently clear?”
“Yes.”
“Not, apparently, clear enough!” He hung up.
Theresa made two lefts to head back downtown. She wasn’t even sure where to park for the historic county courthouse since she rarely went there. The parking garage eventually turned up, underground, entirely too ominous for her tastes-parking garages had to be a rapist’s dream, isolated, dimly lit, with limited points of egress…when would the powers that be finally figure out that parking garages should be lit with lights designed to blind, like an operating room or a night baseball game? Nevertheless, she managed to get to the ground floor without any felonies inflicted upon her, to be immediately distracted by the sweeping architecture.
From the middle of the marble staircase she stopped to stare at the stained-glass depiction of Law and Justice, and noticed too late the man who paused beside her.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Richard Springer said. The defense expert who had complained about her to the medical examiner appeared dressed for court, in a conservative blue suit and with a leather briefcase.
Theresa had had too long a day for subtlety. “You aren’t here for Evan Kovacic, are you?”
“Never heard of him.”
“Good.” She continued up the stairs to the third floor and followed the signs.
Springer came along. “I suppose you’ve heard that we aren’t going to have to face off on the witness stand after all.”
“No one told me.” Theresa stopped walking when she found courtroom number 3, but still did not look at her temporary companion. If she ignored him, he might go away.
“The charges were reduced to statutory, time served.”
Now she loo
ked at him. In fact, she stared in horror before sinking to the bench and resting her face on one upturned palm. After a moment, she felt a vibration in the wood. He had sat down beside her.
“Look, if it’s any consolation, it had nothing to do with your stupid shoe print.”
What did that matter? The scumbag was still walking free.
As if uncomfortable with the silence, he went on, “It had more to do with the fact that the judge at the preliminary hearing didn’t seem convinced by the girl’s story. It turned out she had neglected to mention quite a few things.”
She lifted her head slightly, still staring at the patterns in the marble tile. “Such as?”
“Such as, she invited him to her bedroom, and not for the first time, and that the weapon used was a rubber pirate dagger, a souvenir of the family’s last trip to Disney World. Basically she had to come up with a story for her parents, and then couldn’t stick to it.”
This did, she admitted to herself but not to him, make her feel better. But it didn’t make her any less guilty. Her work had been sloppy. “Thank you for telling me.”
He grinned, with a glint in his eyes that no doubt charmed most female members of any jury. “Does this mean you no longer consider me a whore?”
She could not hedge to that extent. “No, you’re still a whore. But I’m hardly perfect.”
This did not seem to be the answer he had expected, but didn’t appear to bother him either. He said only, “Until next time, then.” To her relief he did not offer to shake hands, but set off to his next perfor-testimony.
Drew passed him, coming up the hallway. He had given up the knit jacket for a navy blazer she suspected had last been worn for his high school graduation. “I tried to call you directly but it didn’t go through, I guess. Thanks for coming.”
“I didn’t have a choice. You had a subpoena issued in my name. Drew, what the hell are you doing?”
“I have to try to get Cara. You know he’ll kill her if I don’t.”