by M. K. York
He glanced at the clock. It was almost noon. Going in to the jail now would definitely mean being late for painting the spare room.
“Sure,” he said, hating himself.
He kept sneaking glances at his phone as he got ready. He should text Lukas. He should say something about pushing back the time.
But he’d had all night long to stare at the wall and think, What the hell am I doing? To think, over and over again, about what a bad idea dating around work was. And especially, especially someone who was going to testify in his trial.
By the time Lena got there to pick him up, he’d had a chance to work himself into a small but very effective panic attack over it. She texted him, and he ran out to her car through the rain, slamming the car door behind him as he climbed in.
“Any idea what this is about?”
“No.” She stared straight out through the windshield, the wipers softly sighing back and forth. “I’m really fucking hoping this isn’t where she confesses.”
“God. Me too.”
He pulled out his phone to text Lukas as they waited at stoplight after stoplight: Client wants to talk. Going in to jail. Sorry, probably canceling for today.
Lukas texted back almost immediately. No prob, let me know if you want to reschedule.
And he did, of course. He did want to. He wanted Lukas to come over and shoot the breeze while they threw the window open and shivered in the damp air, laying down coats of the eggshell semi-flat paint he thought went really nicely with the whole feel of the place. He wanted to sit on the couch next to Lukas and watch more crappy TV with him and make fun of the universe Agatha Christie appeared to inhabit where there were constantly murders around every corner. He wanted, very specifically, to wait until Lukas was laughing about a stupid pun, and then kiss him, and preferably climb over him on the sofa and straddle him, and all of these were bad ideas. For his career, for Lukas’s career. Hell, for his sanity.
Thanks, he said, and knew he wasn’t going to text again.
When they got into the jail, Gina was waiting for them, sitting bolt upright in her bright orange uniform that looked like the peculiar inverse of a doctor’s scrubs. Someone had drawn little hearts around the hem in marker, and it hadn’t washed out. Her hair was just a frizzy cloud.
“Hi, Gina,” said Lena with a gentleness Mark might not have believed her capable of. “What did you want to talk about?”
Gina was picking at the hem of her top. “I was drunk. I was driving drunk.”
“I know, sweetie.” Lena managed to make it sound like an endearment.
“I know, I know you know, but I—I needed to say it.”
“What else did you want to tell us?”
“I was driving drunk and I knew it was stupid and I went back to the warehouse.” The words were tumbling out, spilling in a slightly tearful flood. “I went back. I know I told you I didn’t, but I did. But I didn’t stay. I went up the stairs to Greg’s office and I heard yelling. He was arguing with somebody. I left. I thought maybe it was Melinda.”
“You didn’t hear anyone else? Just Greg?”
“Yeah. I was only standing there for a couple of seconds. He sounded so angry. And then when I left I went and sat in my car in the parking lot for a while, and finally I started it up and drove away, and I just—I didn’t want to tell you or the police because I was so scared. I mean, they already thought it was me. But you keep telling me you need to know the truth and that’s it. I was drunk and I went there and he was yelling his head off.”
“Did you hear what he was yelling about?”
Gina shook her head slightly, still picking at her hem. “It didn’t make any sense. He was yelling about somebody fucking up a shipment, something coming up short, but I did all the numbers that week. Everything was fine.”
“I see,” said Lena. “Have you said anything to the police about this?”
“No.”
“Okay. That’s good. We don’t have to tell them anything, okay? The most important thing is that you can’t tell a lie in court, so this helps us plan what we’re going to ask you about. Thank you for telling us this.”
Gina sighed, tears slipping down her cheeks. “I just... I couldn’t stand it anymore. I had to tell you. He was—Greg wasn’t perfect but he mattered to me, okay? He mattered. He was important.”
“Okay,” Lena said again, still gently.
Mark, on impulse, leaned forward and caught Gina’s eye. “I understand.” He was surprised to find his voice gravelly. Her grief might be part self-serving, but it seemed real too. One more man she’d hoped might be the solution to her loneliness; one more man gone.
Lena glanced at him sideways, then back at Gina. “Is there anything else you can tell us about that night?”
Gina shook her head.
Mark said, carefully, “When you were sitting in your car, were you just sitting and waiting, or were you doing something else?”
Her eyes darted off to the side. “I don’t know.”
“Gina, were you drinking?”
She sighed again, tears continuing to trickle out. “Yeah. Yes. I had a bottle in the car and I was drinking. Okay? That’s why I was so drunk when the cops found me. I got rid of it before they pulled me over.”
“Thank you.” Mark tried to mimic Lena’s tone.
“Did you pass out at all?” Lena asked.
Gina shook her head. “I don’t—I don’t think so, but I don’t know if I really remember? It’s all kind of fuzzy.”
“Okay. Were there any other cars in the parking lot?”
“Yeah, but there always were. At least half a dozen. Some of the guys leave a car there.”
“Do you know who does?” asked Mark.
Gina blinked at him through wet eyelashes. “Well, uh, Greg did. And Mr. Williams. And one of the accountants. Sometimes random people park there at night too, even though they know they could get towed.”
“Did you ever hear about anything funny happening at the company? Things that didn’t make sense or seemed off?”
“No.” She blinked harder, looking confused and a bit lost. “What do you mean? Like drugs? There were some dealers who liked to park out there but nobody from the company bought from them. Big black van. Super shady.”
“Really,” said Mark.
“Yeah. None of us! I mean, we weren’t stupid, Greg could have seen you from his window if you wanted to buy.”
“So his window overlooked the parking lot?”
“Yeah, one of them.”
“Do you know whether the dealers were selling anything specific? Did any of them sell Valium?”
She looked at him like he was stupid. “They all do. You think any of them make a living with weed? Around here? There’s four weed stores within ten blocks of us.”
“Thank you,” he said through teeth that were now somewhat gritted.
“I didn’t know them, though,” she hurried to add.
“Did you ever have a Valium prescription?”
“No.” Gina’s lips tightened, her face working silently. “I don’t really—I don’t see a doctor.”
He kept trying to get at whether she thought Melinda knew about the affair, whether there was anything off about the company, but got nothing. Gina could not, even charitably, have been described as observant.
Afterward, driving back, Lena said, “We’re still waiting on discovery to find out whether Greg or Melinda had Valium prescriptions.”
“If the cops didn’t check whether Ron Williams does too, they really should.” Mark propped his chin on his fist, staring out the window. “I’m starting to think Lukas is right.”
“And Ron Williams killed Greg and framed Gina?”
“I don’t think he would have framed her on purpose. Ron didn’t know Gina was going to be in the area that night—nobody knew, because she didn’t make plans. Look, if the fire had spread any farther and if there hadn’t been accelerant, wouldn’t this look like a suicide or an accident? Guy takes a bunch
of pills and booze, drops a cigarette, burns the warehouse down. Somebody who didn’t know the accelerant would leave traces, didn’t know the fire wouldn’t get to the body before the cops came? Would be easy to think that it wouldn’t even look like murder.”
“I’m not sure the cops would have gone for murder so fast if they hadn’t had our client in hand.”
“Right? I’m thinking there’s something wrong about this. Really wrong.”
Lena hummed softly in thought. “Dauer still doesn’t want to investigate company finances.”
“Look, fuck him. We need to know.”
“That’s what I’ve been telling the section head. Apparently financial investigations are expensive.”
“How expensive is fucking up a case? Sending somebody to prison if they don’t belong there?”
Lena lifted a hand from the steering wheel in a gesture of supplication. “That’s what I’ve been saying. I don’t know. I’ll talk to him again, see whether this changes his mind. Drug dealers in the parking lot, Valium, this doesn’t sound like a wronged girlfriend doing something stupid in the heat of the moment.”
“I know! It really doesn’t. I could see her doing a lot of ill-advised things, but planning a murder in cold blood and setting a fire to cover the evidence just does not seem like her.”
“She’s no criminal mastermind.”
“Nobody is,” muttered Mark under his breath. “They all think they are, and then they’re all dumb as a box of hammers.”
“Somebody should talk to the drug dealers.”
“They might have seen something.”
“Or sold something. If the Valium didn’t come from a prescription, they might remember any regular customers.”
“Who’s going to, though? The cops?”
“I don’t want to tell them about this until or unless we have to.” Lena’s mouth was set in a thin line.
“Yeah, for real.”
“You think Lukas would talk to them?”
“God, should he?” Mark made a face. “Is there anything I need to think about with having a PI talk to people engaging in criminal behavior?”
“He might be better for it than the cops. He can’t arrest them.”
“That’s a point. Okay. You want me to call him, put in the request?”
“Let me talk to the section head first. As long as we’re still pushing for the financial investigation, I don’t want to commit to spending money without the go-ahead.”
“Sounds reasonable.”
Lena drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. “Of course, if they testify they saw her in the parking lot—”
“That could be bad,” Mark agreed. “But they might also say she was only in the building for a couple of seconds and left before the fire started.”
“We need to figure out who these dealers even are. Think Gina knows?”
“God, this is why I wish we could work better with the cops. I bet they know who deals there.”
“Do they, though? Wouldn’t they have interviewed them if they thought of it?”
“Would they have bothered if they thought they had it sewn up with our client?”
Lena threw her hands in the air at the stoplight. “Fuck if I know. I’ll talk to the section head, find out if we can afford to have Lukas try and find the dealers and talk to them. Or whether we can get that fucking audit.”
“Okay, good. Thanks.”
The conversation had perhaps come to its natural end, but they were still stuck in traffic, slogging miserably toward Mark’s place.
“So,” Lena said, “how are things?”
“Good, good.” Mark waved one hand toward the distance. “Did a little painting, getting my spare room into shape.”
“Sounds like fun.”
“It wasn’t too bad.”
They passed a moment of silence before Mark felt compelled to ask, “So how are things with you?”
Lena shrugged without looking away from the road. “Fine. Kelly wants to go to Bermuda this year on vacation and I’m thinking about giving in.”
“Well, Bermuda. It’ll be warm.” Mark nodded out at the gloom, rain trickling persistently down the windshield. He thought he was doing a pretty good job of hiding the fact that he had no idea who Kelly was or that Lena did anything as human as take vacations.
“Ugh, does it have to be Bermuda, though? Hawaii would be closer. And cheaper.”
“Sounds like you’ve talked about this at some length.”
Lena rolled her eyes. “Of course I have. For all the good it does.”
“What does Kelly do?”
“She’s a Realtor.” Lena snorted. “It’s how we can afford vacations somewhere sunny.”
Mark nodded, trying to reconfigure his conceptualization of Lena as someone with a significant other—spouse?—waiting for her at home, arguing about where to spend time off, listening to stories about selling upscale condos.
It was with a sense of profound relief that he realized they’d finally inched their painful way to his street. “Just let me off here, I’ll walk the last block.”
“Okay.” Lena also sounded relieved, the weight of small talk being removed from her shoulders. “See you Monday.”
“Sure thing.”
*
Mark meant to work on his apartment that night. He did. But the paint cans remained closed, drop cloths in place.
Chapter Eleven
At first, Lukas was hopeful; Mark had canceled, but maybe the next day. And the next day came and went, and then another, and another.
All right. He’d been disappointed before, he could live with being disappointed again. It was almost a reprieve, if he looked at it in the right light.
He kept his head down and focused on his active cases.
His phone rang a week later. He jerked back, startled, where he’d been on the edge of getting into bed for a nap before his stakeout that night. He fumbled it out and saw Katie’s name on the screen. “Hello?”
“Hi, Lukas?”
“Yeah?”
“It’s Katie Deacon. Your lucky number’s up. Want another case?”
“Yes!” His brain caught up a second later. “Public defenders again?”
“Yeah, you’ll be working with—” There were faint noises of shuffling papers. “Gavin. He’s got a vandalism case and he needs to see if the defendant’s alibi holds up. Pretty simple, won’t take long.”
“Yeah, sounds great.”
“Okay, cool. Come on in tomorrow and I’ll get you the details.”
“Thanks, I appreciate the opportunity.”
She made a noise of derision. “You do your work and submit your forms on time. It’s a nice change.”
“Uh, thank you?”
“Yeah, have a good one.”
“You too.”
He maybe agonized—agonized was a strong word—debated, internally, over what to wear the next morning. Which was stupid, he probably wasn’t even going to see Mark. He might swing by Gavin’s office, just to check in. Might. No real need for it, but good communication never hurt.
He saw Katie first. She briefed him on the details. Just a dumb kid, twenty-two, accused of spray-painting over a mural down in SoDo, one passengers could see from the light rail. “Cops picked him up right after they got a call about a vandal, and he had spray paint in his backpack. Not the first time he’s been charged with this.”
“Sounds like a genius.”
“You don’t know the half of it.” Katie rolled her eyes. “Anyway, his alibi is that he was at a friend’s house, so if you could check out what the friend says, that’s really what we’re looking for here.”
“Didn’t the cops?”
“They interviewed the friend very briefly and decided they didn’t believe him. Just get whatever details you can.”
“All right. Thanks.” He paused on his way out of her office, resting his fingers against the doorframe. “Thought I might say hi to Gavin, just check in.”
“Not
a bad idea. You know where his office is?”
“Sort of.”
She gave him clipped directions—he hoped he’d remember them—and then went back to her work. He waved a little as he left. The whole building had a definite, familiar smell to it, a combination of aging linoleum flooring, printer toner, and the sharp chemical undertones of Pledge.
He took a deep breath before rapping on the door of Gavin and Mark’s shared office with his knuckles.
“Yeah?” called someone from inside. Lukas opened the door.
Gavin was at his desk, a pen behind one ear and another pen in his hand, both neglected as he typed furiously. Mark was at his desk, head up, so that Lukas met his eyes almost immediately as he walked in.
“Oh, hi,” said Gavin. Lukas looked back at him. “You’re the investigator, right? Here about the Fordham case?”
Lukas nodded. “Katie gave me a rundown, but I wanted to just check in and find out whether there was anything you wanted me to know before I got started. Hi, Mark,” he added in Mark’s direction. Gavin’s eyes flicked back and forth between them for a second before he bent to dig in the piles of paperwork.
Mark was staring at him like he’d grown another head. “Hi.” Then he seemed to remember something and added, “We’re stalled out on the arson case because we finally got clearance for an audit. If we get lucky, we’ll find something there. We might need you again for some interviews, but it’ll have to wait until we find out how the budget looks once the financial investigation is complete.”
“Okay, thanks.”
“Fordham is the kid with the spray paint,” Gavin said, waving a file he’d fished out of a stack on his desk. “I’m trying to get him to take a plea but he insists he didn’t do it. I guess talk to his stoner buddy about whether they were just getting stoned, like he says, or getting stoned and committing an act of vandalism. I don’t really have anything besides that.”
“Sounds good, I’ll take care of it.”
Gavin flashed him a toothy grin. “Wouldn’t expect anything less.”
“I’ll get that report in to you soon. I should be able to talk to the kid this afternoon or tomorrow.”
“Perfect! Thanks.”
“Good seeing you,” Lukas said to Mark, and when Mark nodded, Lukas let himself back out into the hall.
