A Cutthroat Business (15 page)

Alexandra nodded. “One of the papers said she was... you know... raped...?”

I shook my head. “If she was, I didn’t see any signs of it. She was wearing all her clothes, and like I said, she didn’t look angry or afraid.”

“That’s good.” She took another sip of Coke.

“Yes, it is.” I thought for a second and then added, “Would you happen to know when she left home on Saturday morning?”

She looked suspicious. “Why?”

“Just curious. I was wondering how much time there was between her getting there and Rafe getting there. But if you don’t want to tell me, that’s OK.”

Alexandra shrugged, looking down at her glass. “I was asleep. I didn’t get downstairs until after ten, and by then everyone was gone.
Austin
spent the night with a friend, and daddy had gone out somewhere. All I know is that she said she had to leave early.”

I nodded. So nobody in the Puckett household had an alibi. Not that I seriously suspected any of them. Except maybe Steven. But he had probably just been across the street, in Maybelle’s bed, stealing some time for himself while Brenda was working. I changed the subject.

“So did you and your mom come here a lot?”

Alexandra shook her head. “Just when — you know — she didn’t want to do things in the office. Because... um...” She faltered. I arched my brows inquiringly, and she added, reluctantly, “Mr. Lamont can be a little strict sometimes, you know. Not very... flexible. About special terms and things like that.”

It sounded as if she were quoting her mother.

“Of course,” I said smoothly. So Brenda had been in the habit of handling things out of the office so
Walker
couldn’t micro-manage anything too closely. Interesting. “When was the last time you were here?”

“Oh, I haven’t been
here
for a few months.” Alexandra looked around at the FinBar’s Irish pub decor. “But we went to Beckett’s just a couple of weeks ago. Something to do with that house on
Potsdam
.”

“Your mother made poor, old Mrs. Jenkins come to a
bar
?”

“Who’s Mrs. Jenkins?” Alexandra said. I explained, and she shook her head. “This was a man. Black guy. Worked in a hospital or something.”

“Tyrell Jenkins?” I suggested optimistically. Maybe Tondalia Jenkins hadn’t signed the sale-papers for her house herself after all. She certainly shouldn’t have been able to do so. Not legally. Not if she thought some guy she had never seen before was her only son. Nothing says
non compus mentis
like that kind of mistake.

Alexandra shrugged. “Could have been. Middle-aged dude, not hot at all.” She took a sip of Coke. “So on the morning she died... did you see anybody? Or anything? You know, suspicious? Or out of the ordinary?” She peered at me through a curtain of long, dark hair, blue eyes furtive.

“Not really,” I said, wondering who she was worried about my having possibly seen. Herself? Her father? Maybelle? “Just neighborhood people, you know. A middle-aged lady waiting at the bus-stop, a black kid in a green car who drove by a couple of times... So tell me more about this guy your mother was meeting with at Beckett’s.”

But Alexandra didn’t know anything else about him. Just that the meeting had something to do with the house on
Potsdam Street
, and that the guy had something to do with the healthcare field. When I asked her how she knew that, she shrugged vaguely.

“Well, was he wearing scrubs or something?”

But Alexandra didn’t know. The man had been wearing a suit, so that wasn’t it, and she couldn’t pinpoint exactly how she knew he worked in healthcare, she just did. I gave up and turned the conversation to innocuous subjects. But at least now I knew that there was something fishy about the listing for
101 Potsdam Street
. If there hadn’t been, Brenda wouldn’t have had any reason to work out the details in the dark corner of Beckett’s Bar.

Alexandra hung around until about 8, drinking Coke and eating nachos, and then said she had to leave. With what had happened to Brenda, Steven wanted to keep his kids extra close, and he had imposed a nine o’clock curfew. I walked Alexandra to her car, which was an almost new, candy apple red Mazda Miata. “My mom gave it to me when I turned sixteen,” Alexandra explained. She looked at the car for a second, and I swear I saw tears in her eyes, before she turned away and opened the car door. “See you,
Savannah
.”

I nodded. “You take care. Call me if you want to talk more.”

I watched her drive away, and then I headed down the street toward Walker Lamont Realty and toward my car, thinking hard thoughts.

Alexandra must have had some kind of reason for contacting me, but I was darned if I could figure out what it was. It didn’t seem as if wanting to talk about her mother with someone sympathetic and not too far removed from her own age had been it. She hadn’t asked me any tough questions, none I hadn’t been prepared for, anyway. On the other hand, she’d been remarkably forthcoming with answers to the questions I asked her, even going so far as to tell me about Brenda’s ways of getting around
Walker
’s professional supervision.

If Brenda had opted to handle the contract for
101 Potsdam Street
at Beckett’s Bar instead of at the office, that must mean that there was something about it she didn’t want
Walker
to know. Brenda was dead and couldn’t object to my going through her stuff, but I was pretty sure I knew what Clarice’s reaction would be if I walked into the office tomorrow and told her I wanted to see the file for 101
Potsdam
. I could go over her head and ask
Walker
for it, but then I’d have to explain why I wanted it, and I didn’t want to do that until I was sure I wasn’t making a fuss about nothing.
Walker
was already reeling from the shock of Brenda’s murder, and then the story in the
Voice
had hit him again. His appointment to the real estate commission might already be in jeopardy, and I didn’t want to do anything to mess it up.

But there was no one in the office right now, to object to anything I did. Clarice was compulsively neat, so it shouldn’t take much more than a minute to find the file. I’d be in and out in no time, without anyone realizing that I’d ever been there. And then I’d know once and for all whether Tondalia Jenkins had signed the papers herself, or whether she had had an attorney-in-fact — Tyrell, for instance — who had done it for her.

It was the work of a few seconds to unlock the back door and turn off the alarm, and I made sure that Brenda’s office door was latched securely behind me before I turned on the ceiling light. The small strip of light under the door wouldn’t be noticeable to anyone outside the building, and the chances that someone else would show up at this time of night were surely pretty slim. I ought to be safe for the short time it would take me to find what I was looking for and get out.

I was helped by Clarice’s devotion to Brenda and her compulsive attention to detail. Everything was obsessively neat. The piles of paper on the desk were stacked by size, with the largest piece on the bottom, and the smallest on top. Every corner was aligned perfectly. Every paperclip was in the paperclip holder, every rubber band in its place, and every last blank on every last form in every last file was filled in appropriately.

The files were arranged alphabetically, each file drawer clearly marked. A-E, F-K, L-O, etc. The filing cabinets were locked up tight, but there was a set of keys in the desk, where I had found the extra key for the house on
Potsdam
earlier in the week. In the Active Listings drawer, everything was sorted by number, chronologically. I flipped through the manila folders.
16 Sunflower Lane
and
19 Orchard Place
gave way to
1023 Landsdowne Court
and
1141 Tyne Boulevard
. I frowned and went back to the beginning. The folder for
101 Potsdam Street
wasn’t there.

There were a couple of different explanations for something like that. The first, that Clarice had made a mistake and neglected to make a file, I discarded as extremely unlikely. Clarice would never make a mistake like that.

The second, that the folder had been misfiled in all the hoopla, was easy enough to check. After rifling through all the Active Listings folders, I could say with certainty that the file I was looking for wasn’t among them.

The third possibility, that it had been misfiled somewhere else, was more difficult to determine, due to the sheer volume of folders. There were six six-drawer filing cabinets in the room, and that wasn’t even a drop in the ocean of listings that Brenda had handled in her twenty plus years in the business. She had a rented storage unit somewhere, where she kept everything that wasn’t current. The
Potsdam Street
file was current, and should have been in the offic
e, but there was just the chance that it had been taken to the storage unit by mistake sometime recently. Or on purpose, if Brenda hadn’t wanted it sitting around where someone ― like me, or
Walker
― would have access to it. I had no idea where the unit wa
s, but the desk drawer held, in addition to the keys to the file cabinets and the spare key to 101 Potsdam, a key ring with a couple of keys marked ‘storage unit’.

I stood and looked at them for a moment, biting my lip. There were three of them, all seemingly identical, and chances were that no one would notice if I just borrowed one for a couple of days. I could come back tomorrow night or Saturday morning and put it back. I usually do floor duty on Saturdays anyway, and I’m usually alone.

If there was the slightest chance that the
Potsdam
folder was at the storage unit, I should check it out. I owed it to Mrs. Jenkins, not to mention to Walker and the Realtor’s Code of Ethics. If Brenda had been breaking the law, we needed to know. With a key, I wouldn’t even really be breaking in, and since I worked in the same office as Brenda, nobody was likely to question my right to be there. Even so, my heart was beating double-time as I painstakingly twisted one of the keys off the chain.

Between the blood pounding in my ears and the fact that I’d been in the office for long enough to feel comfortable, I wasn’t keeping an ear peeled for noises anymore. As a result, I had no idea that anyone else had arrived until the connecting door into Clarice’s and Heidi’s shared office swung open. All I had time to do, was drop the storage unit key into my skirt pocket and nudge the drawer shut with my hip before I turned to face the door.

Clarice stood in the doorway, looking as if all her dreams had come true at once. “
Savannah
!”

“Oh,” I said dumbly. “Hi, Clarice.”

“What are you doing?” She scanned the room suspiciously, but there was nothing to see. Thank God I hadn’t found the
101 Potsdam Street
file, or it would be sitting in plain view on the desk right now.

I thought quickly. The excuse I came up with wasn’t great, but it had the benefit of being unprovable. “I needed a blank buyer representation agreement.”

“At 9 o’clock at night?” She glanced pointedly at the reproduction filigree clock ticking daintily away on top of one of the filing cabinets.

“I just had a drink at the FinBar. It was easy to stop by on my way home.” And if she thought the drink had been with a potential client, whom I wanted to sign to an exclusive representation agreement ASAP, so much the better.

“And you thought you might find one on Brenda’s desk?” It wasn’t so much a question as a comment on the stupidity of my excuse. It was obvious she didn’t believe me. I shrugged, pouting. She added, with unmistakable relish, “I’ll have to tell
Walker
that you were here, you know.” She smiled in happy anticipation. “And believe me, he isn’t going to be pleased. You may find yourself out on your ear, my fine girl.”
 

It sounded as if nothing would please her more.

“
Walker
likes me,” I said, with more confidence than I felt. “He won’t fire me for going into Brenda’s office. Even after hours.”

“Snooping in other agents’ files, to give your own client an added advantage, is illegal. And
Walker
isn’t the man to let anyone get away with anything illegal.” She tittered.

It was an unusual sound, not common to the Clarice I knew. I looked more closely at her. She was dressed the way she always was, in a dowdy skirt and blouse and sensible shoes, with her graying hair in its usual severe bob, but there was something different about her tonight. Her eyes were brighter than usual, and there was an air of suppressed excitement about her. And I didn’t think it had anything to do with catching me red-handed in someone else’s office. That was just an added bonus, like the cherry on the sundae.

My mother impressed upon me from an early age that one catches more flies with honey than with vinegar. I smiled. “You look nice tonight, Clarice. Are you going on a date? Or coming from one?”

Flattery works (almost) every time. She preened. “Going, actually. Although it isn’t really a date. More like a business meeting. A late business meeting.”