Inherit the Dead (28 page)

A hand that went to Loki’s mouth, but he stayed quiet.

“We’ll have to wait for the full autopsy,” Watson said, “but it does make it look like Julia may have taken her own life . . . Again, I’m sorry for your loss. I need to speak to Mr. Christo a moment alone. If you could just wait in the hall, briefly . . . ?”

Loki nodded, sighed, took a long time getting to his feet but no time at all leaving the room.

Then Perry sat down across from Watson again, though the former leveled the first question to the latter.

“Come on, Henry. You know something doesn’t feel right about this one.”

The detective shrugged, his expression both weary and frustrated. “What? The woman was terminally ill, distraught. She took some pills and threw herself off the balcony. What’s not to feel right?”

Perry shook his head. “I told her I was close to finding Angel. If you hire a PI to find your estranged daughter, and you know he’s getting close, is that the time you pick to kill yourself?”

“You and I both know suicides always leave a lot of questions behind,” Watson said. “If she was in pain, hell . . . maybe it just got to be too much for her.”

“Maybe,” Perry said with no conviction.

Watson let out his biggest sigh yet, and that was saying something. He clicked off the little digital recorder. “That’s it. For now.”

As Perry rose and walked out of the interview room, he couldn’t help but feel that he was missing something important. And so was Watson.

Suicides were unpredictable, all right. But mothers, where the welfare of their children were concerned, were among the most predictable creatures on the planet. And he could not see Julia slipping over that ledge when possible reconciliation with her daughter was so nearly at hand.

C
offee and doughnuts . . .

Police stations smelled of coffee and doughnuts, that’s the way Perry
remembered
it anyway . . . whenever he found himself sitting up late with a drink in his hand and thinking about these big, ugly buildings he’d once spent so long in. The dingy corners and the crowded hallways and the squad rooms that had made his blood pump just a little bit faster as he walked into them every day, until six years ago when everything . . . changed.

That’s the way he dreamed it.

Rose-tinted spectacles. Didn’t sound right when you were talking about the way a place smelled, but it was the best he could come up with sitting there now and breathing it in.

“Somebody taking care of you, buddy?” A young cop—one whom Perry didn’t know, and who didn’t know him. He was glad.

“I’m good, thanks.”

Piss and puke was more like it, and something else that was hard to put into words but that all cops recognized the moment they caught a whiff of it.

Police stations smelled of fear.

Perry sat on the edge of a scarred, wooden bench on the second
floor of the 19th Precinct Station House. Twenty feet to his left was the small, brown door to an interview room, which he had glanced at every twenty seconds or so since he had been asked to leave and the Lokis had been ushered back into for a second round of questioning.

“You sure?”

Perry looked up again at the uniformed cop standing over him. The man had a shaved head and a face like a forgotten potato in the bottom of the refrigerator. “Yeah, like I said.” He sniffed and leaned back. “Just waiting on somebody.”

The cop sucked his teeth and straightened his belt, and as soon as he had turned away, Perry stole another glance at the door to his left. He rolled his head around on his neck. He let out a long, slow breath and dropped his gaze to the patch of scuffed gray marble beneath his feet.

“Yeah, well, that’s bullshit!”

“Try telling someone who cares.”

“I know my rights.”

“Good for you . . . ”

He might have been wrong about the smell of the place, but it was every bit as noisy as he remembered. While the argument echoed up from the floor below, a radio was playing somewhere and raucous laughter drifted toward him from a room at the other end of the hallway. There were high ceilings in here. There was plenty of air. Sound carried in a place like this, and you could hear a whispered plea or a muttered curse from fifty yards away.

He remembered a cop saying once, “Don’t even
think
out loud in here.”

Once or twice in the last few minutes he had thought he’d heard voices coming from the interview room. Not raised voices, just the gentle to and fro of a conversation, but even so he had struggled to resist marching across and pressing an ear to that small, brown door. Struggled, until he’d drawn the attention of the potato-faced sergeant
and thought better of it. He looked up now, and the cop was still watching him, making a bad job of pretending he wasn’t and looking away just a second too late. For a moment or two, Perry wondered if the cop
did
know who he was.

He looked at the door again.

Cigarettes, too, back in the day. A station was always thick with the fug and stink of cigarettes, and, even though it seemed like a lifetime ago, he suddenly found himself wanting one.

No, not suddenly.

Ever since he’d stood looking down at Julia Drusilla, at what was left of her.

It was guilt as much as disgust, he knew that. After all, it didn’t seem like five minutes since he had been thinking that the woman might have been trying to kill her own daughter, to kill
him,
and now they were hosing her off the sidewalk. Scraping bits into a bag. How could he have gotten it so wrong? When it came to trusting people, he had always been slow off the mark and with damn good reason, but up until now he’d always been able to trust himself at least, to have faith in his own judgment. Whatever else happened, he’d always been able to count on that.

He put a hand on his knee and pressed, tried to stop the tremor in his leg.

Now, Perry wasn’t so sure.

A door opened a little way down the hall, and Perry looked up to see Athena Williams stepping out of what he guessed to be the ladies’ restroom. He watched the nanny straighten her skirt and softly dab a hand against her hair before moving toward the stairs.

Perry stood up and hurried to catch up with her.

“May I speak to you, Ms. Williams?”

The woman glanced at him, kept on walking. “You were rude to Angel back there, Mr. Christo. I have nothing to say to you.”

“I just want the truth,” Perry said. “Isn’t that what we all want?”

“Some things are better off left alone, Mr. Christo.”

“What kinds of things?”

“You don’t know this family.”

“Oh, I think I’m starting to . . . ”

The nanny began walking a little faster suddenly. Perry kept pace with her and dropped a hand onto her shoulder. She stopped and looked at him, waited for him to remove his hand. “I love Angel,” she said. “Do you understand?”

“That’s very touching.”

“I’ve got nothing else to say.”

“Do you love her enough to lie for her?”

“Good-bye, Mr. Christo . . . ”

Perry could do nothing but watch her leave, before he turned and walked back the way he’d come. The nanny’s face right before she’d marched away certainly suggested that he’d touched a nerve.

He was good at that, but it didn’t seem to be getting him anywhere.

He was a few feet away from the door to the interview room when it opened and Angel and Norman Loki stepped out into the hall. They waited for a few seconds, their heads bowed, until Detective Henry Watson followed them, closing the door behind him.

The argument downstairs had petered out, and it was quiet suddenly.

Perry was pleased that his old friend had called them back for a second round. There were certainly a few questions—
more
than a few—that needed answering, and Watson rarely gave anyone an easy ride, least of all when there was a body involved.

Watson cleared his throat and reached out to shake hands with Norman Loki. He said, “Once again, I’m sorry for your loss. And for having to put you through this.”

“Thank you,” Loki said.

“We won’t need to bother you again.”

“It’s really no trouble.”

“You need a ride anywhere?”

Angel laid a hand on Watson’s arm, the fingernails bloodred. “That’s sweet of you,” she said. “But we’ll be fine.”

“You’re
kidding
me, right?”

They all turned to look at Perry, who was shaking his head in disbelief. He had been talking to himself as much as anything, but his words had carried, and he was fine with that.

After returning Perry’s stare for a second or two longer than anyone else would find comfortable, Angel turned back to Henry Watson. “Well, then . . . ”

Loki nodded. “Thanks again for being so thorough.”

Perry had to fight the laugh that rose up, foul-tasting, in his throat.

Angel linked arms with her father, and the two of them turned away from Henry Watson. They paused for a few moments, each taking a deep breath. Then, at a pace that was nicely pitched between funereal and unseemly, and taking care to keep their eyes on the floor directly ahead of them, they began walking down the hall toward Perry.

With her hair tied back and now with an oversize pair of very dark sunglasses, she looks every inch the grieving daughter,
Perry thought, watching her. Or an actress playing the role of grieving daughter. She leaned against her father, who looked equally stricken, and, as they walked, Norman Loki appeared to be getting as much support from his daughter as she was from him.

It was all very convincing. But the two of them were playing at . . . something.

What was it Angel had said before that had flipped a switch in the back of Perry’s brain, that had convinced him she was lying?

When they were only a few feet from him, Angel’s heels
click-clack
ing against the marble floor, he watched her raise a hand and delicately push fingers behind the lenses of her dark glasses. It was a simple enough gesture, an obvious one. It was the way somebody would oh-so-subtly wipe away tears, but short of dashing across and snatching those expensive sunglasses from her face, there was no way to be sure there were actually tears there to begin with.

Perry would not have been surprised to find that she could manufacture them at will.

It was clear that neither Angel nor her father had any intention of acknowledging Perry’s presence. With Norman Loki it made sense, but why the sudden change in Angel? Clearly, she had not liked his questions, but he wasn’t going to stop till he had all the answers.

They began to walk just a little faster and looked the other way, returning the uniformed sergeant’s respectful nod with thin and grateful smiles. Perry waited a few seconds, then stepped casually forward. He fell into step and walked alongside them.

“It’s funny,” he said. “Julia told me she was going to die the first time I met her, but I really don’t think she thought it would be quite so soon.”

There was no visible reaction from Angel or her father.

“I mean, even if she
was
dying, and you know I’m really not convinced that’s true . . . she didn’t strike me as the type to kill herself.” Perry shrugged, pretended to think about it. “Maybe it was an accident.” He looked sideways at Angel and her father, who were now moving a little quicker than before.
“Maybe . . . ”

Now, Norman Loki stopped and snapped his head around to look at him. “What’s the matter, Christo? You worried that now your client’s dead, you aren’t going to get your fee? I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that your services are no longer required. We’ll send a check to you next week—you needn’t worry.”

Perry saw a smile flicker briefly at the corners of Angel’s mouth.

“Why should I be worried?” Perry said. “I know there’s still plenty of money around. I mean, Angel stands to inherit a bundle.” He looked at Angel, then turned back to Loki. “And as you’re the executor, I’m sure there’ll be a few dollars coming your way, too. Maybe a lot more.”

“You know nothing about it,” Loki said.

“You said earlier that you wrote the terms of this weird inheritance. And we both know that everything hinges on Angel’s twenty-first birthday, which is just a couple of days away now.” He widened his eyes, as if he had only just been struck by something that he’d actually been thinking ever since Julia Drusilla’s so-called suicide. “Whatever the hell happened to Julia, the timing’s awfully convenient, don’t you think?”

“Are you making some kind of accusation?”

“Just talking things through.”

“Good,” Loki said, looking around. “Just keep talking nice and loud, okay, because when I sue your ass for slander, I want there to be plenty of witnesses.”

“Shame there were no witnesses around when your ex-wife took that dive from the twenty-fourth floor,” Perry said. “Maybe if there had been, you two wouldn’t be walking out of here.”

“How dare you!” Loki took a step toward him. Angel made a show of trying to hold her father back. “Where d’you get off saying things like that? Julia has just
died,
for Christ’s sake.”

Perry raised his hands and nodded, mock-impressed. “It’s nice to see that you’re so upset. I’m a little surprised, though, tell you the truth. It’s not like you and Julia had a . . . conventional relationship, is it?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Come on, Loki. You forget telling me all about it when you were
drunk—you really want to get into that here and now? We can talk about your pool boy and bathhouses and underground nightclubs if that’s what you want, but in front of your daughter? I mean, isn’t she upset enough already?”

Loki glared, and Angel tugged at her father’s arm. “Let’s go, Daddy.”

Loki was breathing heavily, and the bones in his jaw pulsed against the skin as he clenched his teeth. He managed the thinnest of smiles then turned and began to lead Angel away toward the stairs. Was he running the show now? Had he been all along?

Perry followed, a step or two behind. “I mean, you
are
upset, aren’t you, Angel?” She kept walking, but he could see the tension in her shoulders. “You certainly
look
upset, but it’s so hard to tell with you. I mean, I
thought
you were upset when you told me about why you ran away, when you told me how scared you were. But you also told me that you knew about your inheritance, that the stakes were high, remember? You know, I’m thinking that maybe you’re pretty damn good at getting people to think all sorts of things. The boyfriends who all think they’re special. That politician who seems to think you’re worth cheating on his wife for.” Perry’s voice was raised now, and people in the corridor were staring as the three of them marched toward the top of the stairs. “All of them happy to believe whatever the hell you want them to believe . . . ” Perry needed to get a rise out of her. He wanted her to prove to him she was innocent. He
needed
her to, and yet . . .