Albert was startled to hear his aunt brush off someone else’s concerns in such a brusque manner. It seemed quite unlike her. In fact, he’d seen so much magic the day before that he half-suspected the change in her personality had come from some sort of spell. “But... if they’re Jenny’s family... I mean, I don’t really know her that well, but she seemed cool. Should we—“
The look Marley gave him was frank and pitiless. “Albert, I know you were struck by her—who wouldn’t be?—but assuming we can figure a way to have Jenny released from prison, she’ll be leaving shortly to go to school on the other side of the country. So any interest you might have in her beyond the platonic is wasted energy.”
Albert was surprised by how much that stung, although he didn’t yet have the self-awareness to understand why. “I see your point,” he said without much enthusiasm.
“But you’ll ignore my point anyway, correct? Never mind. I know what young men are like. Here.” She took out her phone and tapped the display a couple of times. “Do you want to see?” Marley handed the phone to him. There was a video already loaded. He pressed play and watched his aunt’s house burn for a minute and a half. Every window had flames roaring out of them.
“That feels weird to watch,” he said. “And awful. I’m sorry your home burned down. That’s...”
“I know.” Marley stirred her hash with her fork. “We’re getting a late start,” she said, “but we needed the sleep. And we’ll have to get you a change of clothes.”
Albert’s fork stopped halfway to his mouth. “All my clothes are burned up. And my books. And my X-Box. Jesus, I lost all my progress on all my games.”
“Well, I can’t replace your high scores, but I can certainly get you a suit. That will be our first stop, of course. Then we’ll see about Aloysius.”
Once their meal was finished, they cleaned and dried the dishes, then put everything back into the cabinet. There was a knock at the door. Albert opened it to reveal a tall, slender, elegant black woman. “Oh! Hello,” he said. She was as gorgeous as the vampires, and he found it difficult not to stare.
Marley rushed forward to embrace her. “Hello, Ubeh. Have you brought the car I requested?”
Ubeh’s French accent startled poor Albert, making his pink skin flush. “Good morning, Ms. Jacobs! I do. Here are the keys.” Ubeh offered them to Albert. “For you, I presume.”
“Thank you,” he said as he took them. “It’s nice to drive a different car every day.”
“Albert.” Marley looked displeased. “If they know my house they know my car. We’re switching for your safety as well as mine.”
“I was joking!” Albert said. He turned to Ubeh. “I tell jokes.”
Ubeh didn’t seem impressed or amused. “I brought you a Volvo this time, Ms. Jacobs. It is nondescript but comfortable and it doesn’t have the awful sight-line problems of so many Japanese models.”
“Thank you, dear.”
“And I’m so sorry to hear about your house last night. Is there anything else I can do?”
“Not at the moment, but thank you. It’s time we were off.”
Their first stop was a trip to Nordstrom for new clothes. Albert had spent the previous day in his interview suit—in fact, those were the only clothes he had left. But while he would have liked to buy a stack of faded jeans and long sleeve pullovers, his aunt picked out five black button-down shirts, two black vests, and five black suit pants. Work clothes for a man in mourning. He also picked up a pair of pajamas, new underwear and socks, and two pairs of faded jeans. The bill was higher than he would have liked, but his aunt ordered him not to fuss and assured him that her insurance plan with the ruinous premiums would cover all of it.
He expected the next stop to be the police station, but Marley wanted to visit a funeral home first.
The director was a serene, soft-spoken young woman who insisted that the body was not ready for viewing yet, but Marley persisted. She asked Albert to wait at the far end of the room and examined Aloysius’s body with a monocle she took from her pocket.
Finished, she sighed, thanked the director, and led Albert out to the street.
“It’s really him,” she said. Albert was startled to think there had been a chance that it wasn’t. Then Marley said it was time to stop by Aloysius’s office.
“Is it safe for us to be out on the streets?” Albert asked. He’d spent the entire morning on edge, expecting a pair of painting vans to cut them off on the road. It was one thing to keep a watchful eye, but that was no guarantee of safety. “Whoever tried to kill you last night might—“ He’d intended to say: …might be expecting you to appear at certain places, but Marley interrupted him.
“I can’t just cower at home, can I? Besides, now that we know for sure that Aloysius was indeed killed and that it wasn’t a vampire, we don’t have any choice but to start digging into his life.”
If Albert couldn’t get her to stay home, he hoped to convince her to go someplace relatively safe. “Aren’t the police waiting for us?” Albert said.
“We have an appointment, dear, and we’ll be going with my attorney. We’re victims, not suspects, and we don’t know anything anyway, do we?”
“Well, I certainly don’t,” Albert said, and that was that.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Betwixt the Saddle and the Ground
Aloysius’s office was on the third floor of a squat office building in Belltown, just a block and a half from the Pacific Science Center. The lobby directory listed them as SPG Attorneys at Law, but the door to their offices had Shankley, Pierce, & Grabbleton painted on the front.
Albert let Marley into the waiting room. The phone at the receptionist’s desk was ringing, but the receptionist herself ignored it. She stared into space, her watery, red-rimmed eyes vacant.
“Hello, dear.”
Marley’s voice seemed to awaken her. She held up an index finger, then pressed a button on her phone. “SPG Associates,” she said into her headset. “One moment please.” She pressed another button, then turned to Marley. “Can I help you?” she asked, punctuating the question with a wet sniff.
“My name is Marley Jacobs. I am... well, I was Aloysius Pierce’s aunt.”
“Oooo!” the receptionist exclaimed. Her arms shot out and she leaped out of her chair. The coiled phone cord reached its limit and snapped her headset off her head, yanking it under the desk. Arms still upraised, she bustled around the desk, her clunky shoes making her stutterstep, then embraced Marley. “Ooo ooo ooo! I’msosorryisn’tthisawful?”
Marley gave Albert a startled look. “Er, yes indeed,” she said, patting the woman’s back. “Just terrible. May I see his office?”
“I’m afraid not,” a new voice said. All three of them turned to a bronzed woman standing by an open office door. She was in her mid-forties, but her hair had gone prematurely silver, giving her the look of an older woman. She wore a gray pantsuit and had the toned muscles of someone with the money and time for a gym membership. “The police have asked everyone to stay out of that room until they’ve had a chance to go through it.”
Albert surprised himself by saying: “But it’s already been a day and a half! Maybe you should send them a Facebook invite, so they’re absolutely sure that they’re welcome.”
“They’re busy with other things,” the woman said. She gave Albert a stoic, measuring stare that he was too inexperienced to recognize as casual interest. “Plus, I don’t think they’re worried about finding new suspects; they’re so happy with their current one.”
“Too happy, I should think,” Marley said. “Can you spare me a little time? I’d like to ask a few questions about Aloysius.”
She sighed and looked at her watch. “Why not? Billable hours are overrated.” She stepped into her office, revealing the name Shankley on the door. Marley and Albert followed.
It was nicely furnished, but not large. The leather chairs were a little worn and the oak desk slightly scuffed but everything was tidily arranged. “
Are you going to be Al’s Miss Marple?”
Marley smiled. “Oh, I shouldn’t think so. I don’t have her brain, Ms. Shankley.”
“Call me Inez.” She gestured toward the chairs. Marley and Albert sat while Inez went behind her desk.
“That’s an unusual name for someone so young,” Marley said.
Inez tilted her head and offered a crooked smile. “Funny how names get that association, isn’t it? I can’t wait for 2070, when everyone thinks of ‘Hunter,’ ‘Tyler,’ and ‘Dakota’ as old people’s names. Anyway, I was named after a family member who did something important many years ago, although I’m sure I don’t remember what it was. It does make it difficult to bring in new clients, though.”
“I’m sure. Please call me Marley, and the first thing I need to ask you is if I can have access to Aloysius’s computer files. I brought a travel drive with me. I’d like to look through his currently active cases—“
“I’m sorry,” Inez answered. “Truly. But I can’t do that. The police asked us not to share the information and Al’s clients deserve confidentiality.”
“I am an attorney myself.”
“And I suspect you’re working for his accused murderer. She was your employee?” Marley nodded, surprised to be facing someone who knew so much. “The police will get around to requesting all this material, and her defense team—whether that’s you or not—can get it from them. Sorry.”
“Well,” Marley said, “I can’t say I’m not disappointed, but this isn’t unexpected, either.” She opened her purse and fished around inside of it. “What was your relationship to Aloysius?”
“Actually, can I jump in here with a question? Why do you use his full name? I’m pretty sure he hated it. Around here we called him ‘Al.’ But... did you have something against him?”
“My name is Albert,” Albert said helpfully. “I was his brother. I have other brothers named Alan and Alsace, sisters named Alia, Alice and Allyson, and so on.”
Inez was startled to discover that Aloysius had any family at all, let alone a large one. “Really? You add ‘and so on’ to the end of that? Well.”
Albert shrugged. Marley took a glass vial from her purse and pulled the stopper out of it. “What does this smell like to you?”
Inez accepted it and took a whiff. “Cinnamon.” She handed it back. “There’s a certain resemblance,” she said, examining Albert with that same stoic expression. “Not in attitude, but in your color and around the eyes.”
“Yes,” Marley said. “My sister certainly leaves her mark. What was your relationship with Aloysius?” Marley handed the travel drive to Inez.
Inez spun in her chair and plugged the drive into her desktop computer. “Our relationship was professional and sexual. Oh, don’t make that face, Albert. I don’t mean that he paid me for sex. We shared an office lease, a computer network, and a barely competent receptionist, and we consulted with each other occasionally—well, he sometimes asked my advice. It never went the other way unless I wanted to flatter him a little. We didn’t share clients. That was the extent of our professional relationship.” She began copying files onto the travel drive. “Outside the office, our relationship was sexual, not romantic or personal. Oh, hi, Stan. Did you finish with Mr. Nguyen already?”
Marley and Albert turned to see Stan in the doorway. He was a fat man with a graying crewcut. His flushed red face suggested he was ill in some way and his grey herringbone suit coat was slightly frayed at the cuffs. He strolled into the crowded office with the shoulders-back posture of a man with a lot of belly to counter-balance. “Yes, he’s gone.” His voice had a simpering quality that made everything he say slightly theatrical. “What is this you’re saying about Al?”
“That he and I were lovers, off and on, for years.”
Stan huffed. “That’s ridic— Really?”
“Yes, Stan. Sorry to keep it a secret from you, but Al insisted.”
“You can’t be seriou— You are, aren’t you? You and him? Oh, God, that explains so much.” He covered his face with his hand and walked out of the room.
Inez looked after him, bemused. “He’ll spend half the afternoon trying to decide if he has the right to be angry, then tomorrow everything will be normal again. Back to Al… Aloysius: I hope you don’t think me callous, but he wasn’t particularly important to me. I am not in a place in my life right now where I want a romantic entanglement, but I am a physical person. Al was discreet, capable, not too creepy, and he followed the rules.”
“What were the rules?” Marley asked.
“I instigate our liaisons, not him. He went elsewhere if he was feeling anxious. No dating or other romance. We met only at my place and he wasn’t allowed to spend the night. And finally, we weren’t finished until I was finished. You’d be surprised how hard it can be to find a man willing to live up to that last rule.”
“No, I wouldn’t,” Marley said. “When was the last time you were together?”
“Three nights ago, the night before he was killed. Although I should call it evening because he was out by nine PM. One more thing: we were under a... well, I’d call it a ‘trial separation’ if we were together in any meaningful sense. He sent me an email on the morning he was killed, explaining that he needed to put our liaisons on hold for a while.”
“An email? The two of you share an office. He couldn’t have spoken to you personally?”
Marley’s sympathetic outrage didn’t have its intended effect on Inez, who merely shrugged. “We handled all our sexual arrangements through emails and texts. Besides, I received the message at home; it was Sunday morning, after all. I didn’t object to his request and he knew I wouldn’t. Ah, here you are.”
The files had finished copying onto Marley’s drive.
“You know why I’m telling you this, I hope?” Inez asked.
“Because you don’t want it to look as though you have something to hide.”
“Exactly. And I don’t. I used to be ashamed of the way I felt about this sort of thing—my boredom with dating and the trappings of romance, my preference for solitude, my love of quiet. I used to think that made me abnormal—and my friends would not stop pushing me into blind dates, of all things. Then one day I suffered a cramp while I was swimming in Lake Washington and barely made it to dry land. I don’t know if either of you has ever had a close brush with death…” Marley and Albert nodded mildly, encouraging her to continue. “It puts things in perspective. Suddenly, I decided not to feel like that any more. I’m a free adult. I’m not hurting anyone, and anyone who objects to my private life doesn’t deserve to be part of it.”
Inez ejected the drive and handed it to Marley. “Did he have a password?” Marley asked.
“Of course!” Inez scribbled something on a post-it and passed it to Marley. “Start with the spreadsheet file in the root directory. Active cases have an “O” for “Open” in the appropriate column. It’s all pretty obvious.”
“Thank you.” Marley dropped everything in to her purse. “Has anything strange happened in the last few weeks? Threatening calls or arguments in the office? Did Aloysius’s manner seem unusual?”
“Well, yes, to that last one. Stan had been down in California taking depositions last week. The Sunday Al was killed was Stan’s first day back in the office and they had some sort of argument. Sherilynne might know what it was about; I was at home.”
“What sort of argument? A serious one?”
“They always sound serious, but they never are, if you know what I mean. Oh, and before you get the idea that Stan might be the killer, it’s pretty much impossible. He gets easily winded and has tremendous difficulty lifting his hands above his shoulders. It’s some sort of ailment he has, but I’m sure I don’t know what it is.”
“What about Aloysius’s friends? Did he have any arguments with them that he told you about?”
“Well...” Inez glanced back and forth between Marley and Albert, wondering for the first time if they knew Aloysius at all. “I
don’t want to speak badly of your nephew so soon after he died…”
“But…” Marley prompted.
“Okay. As near as I could tell, Aloysius didn’t have any friends.” Inez shrugged uncomfortably. “I spoke to him about it—teased him, really—but he had no interest in friends. I don’t think he knew what to do with one. He liked money and sex, he liked being around new people sometimes, but I think he saw friendly companionship as a waste of time.”
Marley sighed. “Thank you for answering all my questions, dear, but I really wish you would give me a copy of his computer files.”
Inez turned her palms toward the ceiling. “I know, but I’m afraid it would be impossible.”
“Ah, well. May we call on you again if I have any questions?”
“Of course. Please let me know when the service is going to be held.”
They went into the outer office. The receptionist was staring at her computer screen with glazed eyes. Marley walked up to her and laid a gentle hand on her shoulder. A quick glance showed that she was reading up on eco-friendly funeral arrangements.
“Tell me, Sherilynne—it’s Sherilynne, isn’t it?”
“Yes. I’m so sorry—“
“Thank you, dear. Did my nephew seem different on that last day before he was killed?”
“Well, yes. I haven’t had a chance to speak to the police about it yet, but he did. Do you think I should email the detective in charge to let him know?”
“That depends, dear. How did he seem different?”
“He was softer. He’d always been very alpha male,” Sherilynne said, her weak eyes becoming dreamy at the thought. “Kinda unyielding and sharp toward other people. Very masculine. He always believed in himself, you know? But that day he seemed almost... guilt-ridden.”
“That’s not a word I expected to hear you use. What makes you say that?”
“Well, he called me into his office and told me he was going to try to find me a new job somewhere else. He said I deserved better.”
A Key, An Egg, An Unfortunate Remark Page 9
