David began to feel like an idiot. To redeem himself, he threw out: “Has she ever worked for a Mario Ashworth?”
“Who?”
“He owns a construction company. He’s done a lot of large buildings around town.”
“Never heard of him.”
“So Blair never met him? Maybe at a social occasion or something?”
“Never heard of him. And Blair hadn’t been to a party since the last millennium. Jerkface didn’t think she needed any company but his own, and she agreed, poor dope.”
“You didn’t agree with her choice of men?”
“Gee, does it show? I loved her.” The woman pounded one fist into the opposite palm. “He just saw a sweet, gullible thing that might fit into his master plan.”
There could be a vital clue here somewhere, but David had had all he could take of Bonnie Danilov’s furious aura. “Where can I find Mr. Porter?”
“Across the hall.”
He looked at her and she gestured impatiently. “He lives right there. That’s how she met the idiot. But I warn you”—she added as David turned away—“he’ll tell you she disappeared to get away from me.”
The door slammed and left him alone with the stained carpet and a resolutely empty hallway. David sighed, deciding that he’d quit the force before he’d accept a transfer to Missing Persons. Which might be on the table if he didn’t find Destiny Pierson’s killer.
He knocked on 376. Then he knocked three more times, increasing the volume each time, until the door swung open to reveal a handsome young man in a white terry-cloth bathrobe, wet brown hair pointing in all directions.
“Sorry!” the guy said. “I just got out of the shower. How long have you been there?”
“Just a few minutes.”
“Sorry.”
“I’m from the Cleveland Police Department—”
His expression changed instantly, from handsomely friendly to handsomely concerned. “Did you find her?”
“No. I’m sorry but I have no news for you. I’m just double-checking some cases, trying to pick up a clue. Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?”
“Sure. Come on in.” He stood back and waved David in. An attempt had been made to decorate the one-bedroom efficiency with understated style. Unfortunately, the end result matched the building: inexpensive to begin with and not wearing well. David sat down on a white leather couch that did not feel anything like real leather and studied Blair’s boyfriend. The man otherwise known as Jerkface.
“Want anything to drink?” he asked.
“No, thanks. You’re Grant Porter, right?”
“That’s me.” He lounged easily on the other side of a marble coffee table, not at all uncomfortable with his attire. After careful scrutiny he did not live up to first impressions. His eyes weren’t large enough to counterbalance his nose and the shower had reddened old acne scars, but his chest and limbs seemed toned and fit. And he didn’t mind answering the same questions over and over. He told David that he had known Blair for eleven months prior to her disappearance, that they were very happy (though he did not mention any marriage plans), and that she had been a sweet, stable girl. He went through the same chorus of noes that Bonnie had when asked about unusual occurrences before she disappeared. Except when it came to him, Porter and Bonnie were in complete agreement about Blair.
“Have you talked to Bonnie?” Grant asked.
“Yes.”
His pretty face creased into a pout. “I can imagine what she said. She’s a nasty little bitch that couldn’t stand someone else having influence over her sister.”
“What do you mean by influence?”
“Bonnie’s the big sister to Blair’s little sister. They were so used to those roles that Bonnie would tell Blair where to go, how to dress—luckily Blair has much better taste when it came to clothes,” he added, slipping to present tense, then back again. “It’s not that Blair did everything Bonnie said, it’s just that egotistical Bonnie never noticed until I came along. It’s not that Blair did everything I said—it’s just that Bonnie never noticed that, either.”
“What do you do for a living?”
“I’m an Executive Assistant.” He pronounced the capitals. “For Hogan Financial Management.”
“Wow,” David said, pseudo-impressed. “You must handle accounts for some pretty wealthy people.”
“Mostly businesses, but some individuals.”
“Is Mario Ashworth a client of yours?”
Porter raised his eyebrows, a man in the know. “No, I don’t think so.”
“You know him?”
“I know of him. He’s a gangster. I doubt he would let anyone glimpse his finances, and frankly, he isn’t the sort of client that Hogan Financial Management would want.”
“Have you ever met him?”
“No thank you.”
Grant could preen his sophisticated image all he liked, but David had to be sure no connection existed, no matter how slight. “Had Blair ever met Mario Ashworth?”
Grant goggled as if David had suggested that Blair might be the next Dalai Lama. “Blair? No, of course not. Blair didn’t get to meet anyone outside her cubicle. Graphic arts work is a legal sweatshop for artists. She liked it there, don’t get me wrong. But she couldn’t expect it to amount to much.”
“She wasn’t an executive assistant, in other words.”
“That’s right,” Porter said with an unattractive lack of self-consciousness. “What’s Ashworth got to do with it?”
“Nothing that I can see. I’m just shooting in the dark. Thank you for your time.”
“Anything to find Blair,” he sighed.
David returned to his car, suddenly eager for his dog’s company. There were no power struggles in their apartment and Harry never tried to influence him. If Blair Danilov had disappeared of her own free will, it must have been to get away from both of them.
On the other hand, Blair might be lost to a watery grave, leaving her sister and her boyfriend with nothing but a memory with which to play tug-of-war.
Chapter 21
SATURDAY AT THE WEST Side Market resembled a circus of smells and noise, some good, some bad, like the greasy smell of raw sausage that forced you to think about what made up sausage—and of course you didn’t know, which made it worse. The earthy smell of vegetables competed with the tang of cheese. On top of it all floated scents of the lake water, oil, and dead fish.
Evelyn hadn’t exaggerated about needing to shop. The contents of her refrigerator, excluding items in the process of establishing their own ecosystem, could fit in one of the crisper drawers. Rick and Terrie should just petition for custody, she thought; it wouldn’t take much to prove my lack of nurturing. But she didn’t worry: 24/7 parenting would crimp their style.
She entered through the open pavilion. A rare winter sun warmed the backs of the workers as they busily unpacked crates or tended their stalls. They were black, Hispanic, first-generation immigrants, and children of immigrants from central and eastern Europe who had come over to work in the steel mills. The shoppers were the same mix, plus an occasional set of yuppies who had decided to gentrify the downtown area one loft at a time.
She found Artemis Johnson behind a large glass case of meat: sausages, salamis, pork chops, Cornish hens, and steak. Nothing for Angel here. She studied the woman for a few minutes before approaching. Fiftyish. Slender for her age, but sturdy. A pleasant, round face shiny with effort. Short nails on elegant fingers. The woman somehow made a bloodstained plastic apron look fashionable, a trick Evelyn had not been able to pull off with her lab coats.
Evelyn stood at the end of the counter so she could see behind it without standing on her toes. “Mrs. Johnson?”
The woman looked up from a tray of chicken Kiev. “Yes?”
Evelyn explained herself, trying to gloss over her occupation without success.
One hand went to the plastic apron, covering her heart. “ME’s office? Have you found her body?”
“Seems like you don’t know much,” Mrs. Johnson said, but cautiously, displeased with Evelyn and the entire law enforcement community but unwilling to alienate them. The police might be her only hope of finding her daughter. Alive or dead.
“That’s what I’m trying to fix. Do you mind if I ask you some questions about Thalia?”
“Who else are you investigating? They must be dead if you’re involved, right?”
“Yes.”
“Well?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
The woman’s eyes narrowed. “That would be my cue to tell you that I can’t tell you anything about Thalia, then.”
“I’m sorry.” She really should have let David handle this. Corpses didn’t have to be convinced to give up their evidence. Not verbally, anyway.
“But.” The woman absently arranged overstuffed sausages to fill every inch of space on an aluminum tray. “There’s always a but in life, isn’t there?”
Evelyn nodded, stepping out of the way of a tiny Mexican woman with a brown bag on one hip and a toddler on the other.
“But I’ll do anything to find my baby,” Mrs. Johnson said simply, without looking up from the sausages. “I’ll tell the deepest, darkest secrets I have to the devil himself if he would tell me where she is. You have kids?”
“One. A daughter.”
“Hang on to her.”
A cold chill passed through Evelyn. “I’m trying to.”
Mrs. Johnson looked up at her, as if she heard something in Evelyn’s voice that Evelyn hadn’t known was there. Fear, maybe. Desperation. “What do you know so far?”
“That Thalia disappeared on her way home from work, September first, two weeks before her scheduled wedding to Roger Dean.”
Mrs. Johnson just nodded, squirming the last few meat links onto the tray before she slid it into the window, to rest on a bed of ice. The incessant beeping of a truck backing up pierced the air. The woman at the next stall had three children, including a pale blond girl who communicated her voluminous thoughts only in shrieks. Eardrum-shattering shrieks. Evelyn went on.
“Her coworkers at the law firm noticed her catching her bus about five. The bus driver is sure she got off at her regular stop, a couple of blocks from your house, about five-thirty, which at that time of the year would have been broad daylight.”
Thalia’s mother nodded again as her bloodstained fingers now placed steaks on a wooden board, with a slip of waxed paper in between each one.
“She never came home.”
The woman’s hands stilled for a moment, as if the fact remained unbelievable even three months later. Then she pulled out another piece of waxed paper.
“That’s it.”
“Ain’t much, is it?” The mild tone belied the rebuke.
“Would she have stopped on the way home? A friend’s or a business?”
A shake of the head. “Nothing there but houses. She might call hi to someone, but nowhere she would have stopped.”
“Could someone have happened by and given her a ride?”
The woman frowned. “No one who would murder her. Thalia didn’t make it that long in that kind of neighborhood by being stupid enough to go by strangers.”
Evelyn hadn’t wanted to use the word murder instead of the official term missing, but she didn’t insult the woman’s intelligence by protesting. “Her fiancé, Roger? He spent the day at work, at the Tower City Gap store.”
“He don’t get off till six-thirty,” Mrs. Johnson said, and looked Evelyn in the eye to make sure she got this and got it good. “The cops eliminated him, and I do, too. He went crazy with worry after she disappeared. No one ever treated Thalia the way she deserved until Roger. He’s a fine boy.” She poked listlessly at the steaks, deep lines creating trails in her face. “He still calls me all the time, to check on me, he says, but I know he just wants to see if I’ve heard anything. He wouldn’t even cancel the wedding. He never got his deposit back from the hall or the caterer, because he couldn’t bear not to have things ready if she came back in time.”
Evelyn believed her. No one inspected a man more closely than a prospective mother-in-law. “What about ex-boyfriends? Anyone upset about her wedding?”
For the first time a faint breeze of a smile crossed her face, and she abandoned her wares. “Plenty of them. My daughter—and,” she added with unexpected humor, “I ain’t saying this just because I’m her mama—was a prize. Beautiful, intelligent, sweet, had a good job. There were quite a few of her former young men who thought they’d just come swinging back in their own time and found out they were too late. I told her, the heck with them. They had their chance.”
Evelyn waited as the smile faded into the present.
“But none that would have murdered her.”
The word kept coming up—an obvious assumption perhaps, but she couldn’t destroy the woman’s hope with an assumption. For Mrs. Johnson to use it was one thing, but for her to hear it from a law enforcement authority might be something else entirely. Evelyn continued to avoid the term. “What about work?”
“What about it? She liked her job, everyone liked her. Her boss had just given her a raise. Well, he gave all the secretaries raises, but it came in real handy, right before the wedding.”
“What kind of cases did her law firm handle?”
“Criminal defense.”
Evelyn raised her eyebrows.
Thalia’s mother nodded. “Yeah, we thought of that, too. The cops say they checked it out. I talked to her boss myself. The thing was, she worked in the office, doing research, writing things. She never even saw the scum that firm defends. Mr. Brayer assured me that no way would they even know her name. Thalia told me that herself—she never saw anyone but her coworkers.”
Evelyn digested this. If some former client had been unhappy with his legal representation, why not attack the lawyer, instead of some obscure paralegal? Unless they had kidnapped Thalia in some strange plot to force her employers to provide some legal move. But that course of action required convoluted thinking for the average criminal, and the follow-up investigation did not suggest it. It still didn’t mean that Thalia hadn’t run into her attacker at work and he had followed her home. He could have taken the same bus, but then how did he make off with a five-four, hundred-and-twenty-pound girl on foot?
“I always wondered about one thing, though,” Mrs. Johnson said, pulling Evelyn from her reverie.
“What?”
A look of discomfort hovered on the woman’s face. “I didn’t point this out—”
Evelyn waited.
“We stick by our own, you know what I mean? I wasn’t going to help the police to be any more racist than they already are. But it always seemed to me—” She glanced at Evelyn with a despair that went beyond personal. “We don’t live in Beachwood, you see? No way a white boy wouldn’t be noticed on our block.”
chapter 22
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING here?” Mrs. Anderson asked when Evelyn punched in on Sunday morning.
“I already scrubbed my toilets and mopped my mother’s kitchen,” Evelyn told the thistly receptionist. “Went to church and read the paper. I had nothing else to do.”
“So you come in to work? That’s just pathetic, that’s what that is. And I thought my social life stank. Yours would put a Himalayan monk to shame. Mother Teresa has more of a social life than you.”
“Mother Teresa passed away.”
“That’s what I mean. What, you can’t have a hobby? Like gardening or something?”
“Why waste time trying to convince something to grow when most things grow perfectly well by themselves? Besides, you’re here.”
“I’m reading a book and getting overtime for it. You go and have a great time working yourself to death. We’l
l put that on your tombstone: ‘worked herself to death over people who were already dead anyway.’”
“It’s not just the ones who are dead,” Evelyn argued. “It’s the ones that are still alive and would like to stay that way.” She went upstairs, literally bumping into Ed in the stairwell as he ate Ritz crackers and read an article in the Journal of Forensic Sciences at the same time. The impact nearly knocked her down both flights.
“It’s not ether,” he said without so much as a hello. “It might be chloroform. I have a few more metabolites to check first. It turns to phosgene in the liver and kidneys. It shouldn’t be hard to find if I can get past the damn formalin.”
“Would it work?”
“Sure, hell, yeah, it would work.” He coughed, his lungs making a sound like crinkling cellophane. “But like I said, the person would probably puke. Do they even sell it anymore?”
“Beavell Scientific has both pure ether and pure chloroform. You can get a hundred milliliters for about twenty bucks, according to their website.”
“Mmm.” Ed walked away. Evelyn entered the Trace lab.
“What are you doing here?” Marissa asked. “It’s my weekend on call.”
“I know. But I had nothing else to do and I want to take another look at the victim’s clothing.”
“Girl, don’t you have any life at all? It’s the weekend, for Pete’s—”
“Don’t you start,” Evelyn snapped. “I already got bawled out by Mrs. Anderson.”
They were interrupted by a knock at the door. Half hidden by the gold lettering, David Milaski hovered with both the appeal and the foreboding of a good mystery.
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