“This it?”
Sadie looked up and realized that the taxi driver had pulled up in front of Wendy’s building. “Yes, thank you.” She paid him and stepped out onto the curb around the corner from the entrance. After the taxi pulled away, she headed for the door and consulted Ji’s text about having left the keys with the tenant from apartment two—an odd thing for him to do since Ji hadn’t met anyone who lived in the building as far as Sadie knew. There seemed to be something covert in the way he’d left the apartment, and yet she felt paranoid thinking that. If she wanted a relationship with him, she needed to take him at his word and accept that there was a problem with his business without trying to read too much into it or take it too personally. She only wished that giving people the benefit of the doubt was easier for her to do.
She pushed the button for apartment two and waited a few seconds before a man’s voice crackled over the speaker. “Yes?”
She leaned in to make sure he’d hear her; she’d never been on this end of the intercom system. “This is Sadie Hoffmiller, Wendy Penrose’s sister. I understand her son left the keys to her apartment with you.”
“He sure did,” the man responded. “I’ll buzz you in and meet you in the foyer.” The intercom clicked off a moment before the buzz indicated that the exterior door had been unlocked. Sadie pulled it open, walked down the hallway, and stepped into the foyer area at the same time the apartment door across from her opened. She smiled at the young man with dark hair and glasses as they met between the mailboxes and the elevator.
He reached into his pocket, pulling out the key ring and handing it to her. “I’m sure sorry about what happened to Wendy,” he said with a sympathetic frown. “Lousy deal, that.”
“Thank you,” Sadie acknowledged with a nod as she slid the keys into her purse. “Did you know my sister?”
“Well,” he said with a cautious tone. “It’s not a large complex.”
The discomfort of his answer spurred Sadie forward, though she tried to keep from sounding too nosy. “I wasn’t close to my sister, but I understand she could be difficult to deal with. The police said she had a lot of conflicts with her neighbors.”
He cast a sidelong, sympathetic look at her. “Still, everything that happened was just terrible.”
“It was,” Sadie said, wishing he would be a bit more forthcoming but sensing his hesitation was an attempt to spare her feelings. That would be very sweet if it were her feelings she was worried about. “Were you here the night of the fire?” she asked, trying a different track.
He put his hands in the pockets of his khaki pants and rocked back on the heels of his Tom’s. “Yeah—it was intense when the fire department was banging on the door at one a.m. The fire didn’t even trigger the smoke alarm. We were evacuated as a precaution and allowed back in pretty quickly. I didn’t know about . . . Wendy until the next morning when the police came by asking questions,” he said with a frown. “I’m Jason, by the way.” He put out his hand and Sadie shook it.
“I’m Sadie. What did the police ask you about?”
“How well I knew Wendy, when I’d last seen her, if I’d seen anything suspicious around the building—that kind of thing. I didn’t have much to tell them.”
“You didn’t know Wendy, then?” Sadie asked as casually as she could.
“Well, I knew her, but we didn’t socialize or anything. All of us keep to ourselves for the most part. We wave at each other in the halls and stuff, but we don’t really know one another.” He paused and turned his head slightly. “I think Wendy and Shasta were pretty good friends at one point, though. Have you talked to Shasta?”
“Not yet,” Sadie said with a shake of her head. She was encouraged by the information that Shasta and Wendy had a closer connection than Jason did. “But my fiancé met her briefly last night. He said she likes the color pink.”
Jason laughed out loud, his wide grin filling his face. “She told me once that a big-time movie producer back in the sixties told her that pink was her color. She’s an heiress and an actress, in that order. I’m not sure he meant to imply it was her only color, but she took it to mean that it was part of her identity or something.”
“She sounds fascinating,” Sadie said. “How long has she lived in the building?”
“A while,” Jason said, nodding. “Ten years, maybe? They were both here when I moved in.”
“And they were friends?”
“Oh no,” Jason said with emphasis. “But Shasta mentioned that they used to be friends. They had some kind of falling out. I didn’t ask what about.”
“And how long have you lived here?”
“Going on four years. I work just a few blocks away.” He gestured toward the west, or at least the direction Sadie thought was west. She was still rather turned around in this town. “The location couldn’t be more perfect for me.”
“It’s a beautiful location,” Sadie said. “But I understand Wendy had some complaints against the landlord. Were there ongoing issues with the building?”
Jason shook his head. “That was between her and Mr. Pilings. I never jumped on board with her crusades against him.”
“I understand. I was just curious when I saw the complaint in her files. Did she try to get other tenants to join her?”
Jason nodded. “Uh, I don’t know how much I should be saying.”
Sadie gave her best trust-me smile. “I don’t mean to make you uncomfortable,” she said as though backing off from her questions. “I’m sure I’ll find out about it later. I’m trying to get through tons of paperwork and files.” She sighed heavily to indicate how much work it all was. “It sounds like she was a troublemaker, though.”
Jason seemed to vacillate between not wanting to gossip and feeling sympathy for Sadie’s search for information. She was gratified when she saw his resistance soften. “I don’t know all the specifics, just that she’d filed a lot of complaints against Mr. Pilings.”
“Do you know what the complaints were for?” Sadie asked. “The letter I found was about a water heater.”
“Ah,” Jason said, nodding. “Each apartment has their own heater, so that complaint would have only affected her. But sometimes the Dumpster is full a few days before the disposal company comes for it, and now and then the elevator’s down for a day or two—which I admit doesn’t affect me as much as the tenants on the upper floors—but those are the kinds of things she’d try to get the rest of us to throw in with her on. Like, she’d come around as soon as something went wrong, wanting us to jump on it before Mr. Pilings even had a chance to resolve it. It was weird.”
“And did you ever join her in the complaints?”
Jason shook his head. “The last time she came by our place—which was last summer—I told her that if she hated it so bad, she should move. She said it was her calling to make Mr. Pilings live up to his commitment and that if I wasn’t part of the solution I was part of the problem. I told her I would never sign any of her petitions so she might as well leave me out of it. After that she wouldn’t acknowledge me when we passed in the foyer.”
“I’m sorry,” Sadie said, embarrassed by her sister’s actions.
“It wasn’t a big deal,” Jason said with humility. “I just don’t get caught up in all the drama, ya know?” He checked his watch. “Um, is that all?”
Sadie got the hint; she’d taken enough of his time. “Yes. Thank you so much for holding onto the keys, and for helping me better understand what Wendy had been doing. I appreciate it very much.”
“No problem,” Jason said before turning and heading back to his apartment.
Sadie moved to the elevator and pushed the button for level three. The elevator groaned and began descending from the second floor, which seemed to be its default location. Sadie wondered if people were open to talking about Wendy because they felt sympathy for Sadie or because they hadn’t liked Wendy in the first place and therefore didn’t feel any loyalty. People weren’t usually so accommodating, but, regardl
ess of their reasons, she was grateful for their openness.
Mario’s music was still playing when Sadie arrived at the apartment, and she scowled at the fine layer of drywall dust that had escaped the confines of the bathroom. She decided to keep her purse with her—no point in getting it dusty. She was disappointed that Ji wasn’t there, but he had indeed moved everything to the main part of the apartment. Only the desk, chair, and Rubbermaid box full of papers were still in the office.
Sadie closed the office door behind her and sat down in the chair, wondering how much longer Pete would be, and picked up a handful of papers from the box. She glanced over the piles on the top of the desk that she’d already sorted and did a double take when she saw January’s phone bill on top of the other phone bills. It had been the only one she’d been missing when she left. A quick scan of the other papers revealed that an additional power bill had been added to that pile too. She looked into the box and realized that Ji must have taken over sorting the box after he’d finished his other tasks. He hadn’t finished, and hadn’t done much, but the box wasn’t quite as full as it had been when she left.
Sadie picked up the January phone bill and counted the calls made to Rodger that month—fourteen calls total. It proved that the increased calls had started in January. Sadie reviewed her lunch conversation with Rodger and asked herself if she believed what he’d told her. Was it conceivable that he had kept in contact with Wendy because she had no one else? Was his version of events realistic? Who was Mr. Green Shirt connected to?
The questions frustrated her. She’d learned a lot about why people behaved in certain ways and how to read between the lines, but when it came to Wendy and the people connected to her, those skills didn’t seem to be all that effective. The things Wendy had done didn’t make sense to her, so how could she reason them out? Maybe if Sadie had a degree in psychology, or had her own adult interactions with Wendy to draw understanding from, she could feel more settled, but as it was, she was learning about a stranger who did strange things for as yet unknown reasons. Which, Sadie realized, was pretty much like every other case she’d investigated, except that it seemed as though this one should be different. Maybe there was no way to make sense of that.
But there were still papers to sort.
Sadie thought of her fortune from Choy’s yesterday: It’s time to get moving. She didn’t have all the answers—heck, she didn’t feel like she had any of the answers—but she did have work to do and perhaps that would lead her somewhere important.
Chapter 19
It was nearly an hour later before Pete buzzed to be let into the building. Mario had left for a late lunch with his helper so the apartment was quiet when Pete arrived.
“Where’s Ji?” Pete asked as he followed Sadie from the kitchen to the office.
Sadie hadn’t realized that he didn’t know, so she told him about Ji’s texts and the information she’d gotten from Jason regarding Wendy and her troublemaking. “I’d sure like to talk to the landlord,” she said. “It sounds like Wendy was making a lot of trouble for him.”
“I read Stephen Pilings’s statement in the file, and he mentioned some claims and things she’d filed, but he owns several apartment complexes and said that she wasn’t the most frustrating tenant he dealt with. It seemed as though he was taking it in stride.”
“Do the police know more about the specific claims she filed against him?” Sadie asked. “I didn’t run into any files about it in the boxes they returned but I wasn’t looking.”
“I didn’t see anything about them, but I can ask Lopez.”
“And I’ll check the files when we get back to the hotel,” Sadie said.
“What’s that?” Pete asked, pointing at the box on the floor.
Sadie looked at the box—he didn’t know about that either? She explained it to him, and he came over and looked at the sorted stacks of paper on the desk.
“We’ll want to take this to the PD,” Pete said after picking up the letter of confirmation for the claim Wendy had made against her landlord in May. “And it was all just stuffed into this box that was in the closet?”
“Yeah,” Sadie said, shrugging to show her own confusion. “And some of it is recent, like that letter that had been sent just weeks before she died, but there were other things dated almost a year ago. Did anyone say if her office was organized or not? It looks to me like the police filed all the things they gave back to us.”
“They said there were a few files, but most of the papers had been shoved into drawers and things—kind of an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ thing. One of the desk officers filed everything to make it easier for the detectives to look through.”
Sadie nodded. “So, Wendy just put papers away rather than organizing them, and at some point after early May she shoved a bunch of papers into a plastic bin and stored it in her closet?”
“It’s like bipolar organization,” Pete said offhandedly.
“Yeah, that’s about the fifteenth thing that seems to confirm that bipolar was at least part of her problem.” She paused, thinking on that for a few moments before she looked up at Pete. “I’ve always told myself she was mentally ill, and I think she was, but there are plenty of mentally ill people who still function, have relationships with their families, and treat people decently. She lied, manipulated, abandoned her child, caused problems in the building, and who knows what else—is it fair to blame that all on her mental chemistries?”
“There’s comfort in diagnosis,” Pete said.
Sadie looked back at the box. There was comfort in diagnosis, at least she assumed there would be, but there wasn’t really a diagnosis here. It was guessing and conjecture. Would that ever be enough to get the closure she wanted? Closure. She really disliked that word, but it had fallen back into her vocabulary with this situation. But, as she had amid prior ponderings on the idea, she found herself questioning if closure existed at all. Would learning more about her sister really make her feel better? So far it hadn’t. And yet the desire for closure was motivating.
“Sadie?”
She looked at Pete, realizing she’d gotten lost for a minute. She smiled. “Sorry. Too many thoughts in my head.”
“A penny for them?” Pete asked.
Sadie shook her head. “Nothing you haven’t heard before. I’m just repeating the tape in my head and hoping I can understand it better the thirty-fifth time I play it. Anyway, how did things go at the station after we talked? Did you learn anything new from the case file?”
“Yeah, I think I did,” he said with a proud grin.
“Really? What?”
“The tenant from apartment 5 was tricky for the police to track down. She’d moved to Florida at the end of May. Anyway, they finally caught up with her after the holiday weekend and talked to her on the phone. Everything she said fit with everyone else: she had no idea Wendy was dead, hadn’t seen anything out of place, and hadn’t seen Wendy much in the months leading up to her death. This girl—Rebecca—had a couple weird situations with Wendy when she first moved into the building a couple of years ago so she’d learned to keep her distance.”
“Everyone kept their distance.”
Pete nodded but didn’t break stride with what he was saying. “So, anyway, there wasn’t much new information except that back in February, Rebecca rode the elevator up to the third floor with an Asian girl who said she was Wendy’s granddaughter.”
Sadie felt a tremor go through her. “I had the impression that Wendy didn’t have a relationship with Ji’s children.”
“She didn’t,” Pete said with a sharp nod, holding Sadie’s eyes to further emphasize the contradiction. “When Ji and I were talking yesterday he said that Wendy had never even met his daughters.”
“Did this Rebecca give any additional details that would help us determine which daughter it was? Age? Appearance?” Sadie thought about Min, the daughter who had rung them up yesterday.
“No, the statement was transcribed from a phone conversat
ion, and the mystery granddaughter wasn’t an item they expanded on, though it was flagged as something to pursue in a follow-up call—which they haven’t made yet. I talked to Lopez and he said he’s going to see if he can get me cleared to talk to her directly. I’m wondering if anyone else in the building saw an Asian girl. Lopez gave me the green light to ask the tenants.”
That thrill of excitement rushed through Sadie at having the police department’s permission to dig a little deeper. There was also a sense of hesitation linked to this lead, however, hampering her enthusiasm and eagerness. “Pete, if Ji’s daughter had a relationship with Wendy that Ji didn’t know about . . .”
“I know,” Pete said with an understanding expression. “None of us want any of what happened with Wendy linked back to Ji’s family. But we can’t not look into this. Anyone who visited Wendy in those final months—a time when she’d isolated herself—could have information the police need to clarify what’s happened here. Regardless of who that source of information is, we have to follow up.”
“But what if she had something to do with it?” Sadie said, feeling the burden of discovery that had accompanied so many of her other cases. The truth didn’t always set people free—sometimes it clutched at them with iron chains. And yet Sadie believed that truth was still worth pursuing and that in the end doing what was right was better for everyone.
Pete took a step toward her and rubbed her arm. “That’s a really big leap, and we can’t let the worst-case scenario keep us from looking into it. She’s not a suspect, just a source of information we didn’t know about until now.”
Pete was right, and Sadie knew it, but it still settled like a rock in her chest. She thought about all the pain Wendy had caused Ji in his life. What would he think about Wendy having had a relationship with one of his daughters?
Fortune Cookie (Culinary Mystery) Page 16
