Tina Whittle_Tai Randall Mystery 01 (12 page)

Chapter 22

The press conference was everything I expected it to be. Landon started with a little speech about Phoenix. Then the Beaumonts took the podium, explaining their reasons for offering the reward, for standing up for one of their own. Janie stood silent through it all, hidden behind the principals, clutching at her cross.

Mark Beaumont brought the proceedings to a close. “It comes down to what we do for each other. Eliza mattered, and I’m here, with these fine women and men, to make sure that she keeps on mattering.”

Not especially profound, but the applause rose rich and thick around Mark as the nucleus, the center of the spin. One of the reporters—this rangy disreputable-looking kid—moved forward and fired off shot after shot just as Charley took Mark’s hand. She looked nervous in the staccato bursts of light, and I wasn’t surprised when one of the security guards took the guy firmly by the elbow. He fought it briefly, flashing a nasty grin toward the stage, and then allowed himself to be led away, still popping off shots with one hand.

When it was over, Landon and Trey escorted the Beaumonts back to their offices. I was about to follow when I felt a hand at my elbow.

It was Janie. “Get me out of here before I blow and start using the f-word,” she said.

***

We went across the street to a wine and chocolate shop that also sold coffee—she sucked down a cigarette on the walk over. I resisted the urge. But I did get two cappuccinos and a gigantic chocolate muffin before joining Janie on the patio. By then, her hands weren’t shaking quite so badly, and she’d stopped fidgeting.

She took the top off her cup. “Thank you. That was starting to get to me.” She stirred her foam with her finger. “I mean, I’m really grateful to the Beaumonts for everything they’re doing. But I just want to get Eliza and go home.”

The sidewalk teemed with people lured outside by the clear undiluted sunshine. But the bright air carried an unexpected bite, especially in this part of downtown, shot through with crosscurrent breezes that ambushed you at every corner. The tourists huddled under the Fox marquee with their Starbucks and street maps. The dog walkers kept their arms folded and practically dragged their Chihuahuas and terriers down the sidewalk.

I offered Janie some muffin. She shook her head. She was still pretty, and I could see the high school girl she must have been once, before she had to grow up and be responsible for everyone around her.

“They told me we could have an open casket. Mama will be relieved.” She said it emotionlessly. “Do you have any news?”

“Maybe.” I thought about the intake report Rico had delivered to me, the one he’d marked for my eyes only. He’d found it filed away at a data collection service when it was supposed to have been expunged, something he said happened all the time. “Did you know William Perkins—I mean, Bulldog—when you were in high school?”

“No, not really.”

“Do you remember if he ever went away for a while?”

She frowned. “Went away? You mean like moved?”

“I mean like juvenile hall.”

She licked the milky coffee from her finger. “Like I said, I didn’t know him that well.”

I pulled out the file Rico had sent me. “I’ve got some information that says he spent six months in a juvenile correctional facility. Of course, he went on to get a grown-up rap for some petty robbery, possession, meth especially. On probation now.”

“So?”

“So it’s the juvie charge that’s got my interest.” I tapped the papers. “Breaking and entering. The report mentions two people committing the crimes, one of them a girl. She’d be lookout while he ransacked the place. She fled the scene when the cops arrived, though, and Bulldog never spilled her name.”

She stared at the report like it was a snake, or a bear trap, something unpredictable and dangerous. In the lot beside us, the stop-go drone of jackhammers intensified into a cacophony.

“How did you get this?” she said.

“Does it matter?”

She lowered her voice. “Do the cops know?”

“They can’t. It’s sealed.”

“So how did you get it?”

“Like I said, it doesn’t matter.”

“Of course it does! If the cops see this, they’ll think she was going to rob your brother’s house.”

“Maybe she was. Doesn’t mean she deserved what happened to her.”

Janie glowered, like she wanted to argue.

“Just tell me,” I said. “Is it true?”

She sat there for a second, then exhaled. “Yeah, it’s true. She always felt like she owed him for that one, and he made sure she kept feeling that way.” Janie shoved the papers back at me. “He did it, didn’t he? He killed her.”

“I don’t know.”

“I told her to stay away, but she wouldn’t listen. He kept telling Eliza he was a better man when he was with her, and she believed that. She liked that.”

Don’t we all? I thought.

“But she mainly kept him around for the drugs, you know? She said she was kicking the stuff, and I believed her…but then I found out otherwise.” She looked me right in the eye, and I saw effort behind it. “They found drugs at her apartment, some meth, some pot. The manager at her place told the cops he’d been suspicious, but that he hadn’t wanted to say anything.”

“You mean Jake Whitaker?”

She shrugged. “I don’t remember his name.”

Suddenly, I was thinking about Whitaker, how he’d lied when he said Eliza was well-liked. And I remembered something else that had been bothering me.

“This may sound off the subject, but how well did Eliza know Mark Beaumont?”

“She’d met him at one of the staff events, said he was real nice. He even sent her this Christmas card one time.”

“So they were close?”

Janie looked at me like I was a little cracked. “He’s Mark Beaumont. She’s a receptionist. Everybody got Christmas cards.”

“But he’s doing all this—”

“Yeah, well, I appreciate it, I really do.” She unfolded her napkin, wiped her mouth, folded it again. “But it’s not really about Eliza, you know?”

Yeah, I knew. The construction noise across the street abruptly ceased, and a startling silence fell. It was disconcerting, like being in the middle of a party when suddenly the only voice you can hear is your own. A mockingbird trilled from the shrub beside me. I guessed it had been singing all along.

Janie didn’t speak. It wasn’t until I reached for my bag that she said, “There’s something else.”

I waited. She stared at her napkin. “I went to the bank to clear out her account. Mama thought we could use it for the funeral. Anyway, Eliza had been getting money, a lot of money.”

“How much?”

“A thousand here, more or less there.”

“For how long?”

“Ever since she moved here, six months or so. The police found a shoebox full of cash on the top shelf of her closet.” Janie cast her eyes sideways, like she was afraid of being overheard. “I know what that looks like, all that money. I know what the police are thinking, especially since she got hooked up with Bulldog again.”

“Was she involved with any other shady people?”

“You mean like that stripper friend of hers?”

“What stripper friend?”

“I don’t know, Bambi, Tricksie, something like that.”

A stripper. I remembered the other thing Rico had discovered—that my mysterious caller had called me from a pay phone right in front of a strip club.

Janie’s eyes went shiny, but her composure didn’t crack. “The cops wouldn’t let me have any of her stuff, not the cards I sent her, not her computer. I went over there to get something for her to wear. She had textbooks for this psychology course and some flowers in a vase in the kitchen, one of those bouquets you get at the supermarket. I keep thinking, if she could have found something to get serious about…”

I imagined the scene, a life cut short in midstream, the rest of the world running on around the absence, eventually washing over it. I thought about my old apartment—the sheets that hadn’t been changed, the half-eaten roll of cookie dough in the fridge, the risqué e-mails from my ex-boyfriend.

She pushed her coffee away. “I’ve got to clean it out eventually. Of course I do, it’s always me. And she’s family, flesh and blood, I ain’t denying it. But you tell me, what the hell do I do with all this?”

“I don’t know, Janie.” And we just sat there for five more minutes. And I was telling the truth—I didn’t know what to do next, especially not with my envelope full of illicit information—but I hoped that I would figure it out, and soon.

The jackhammer started again. Something always did.

Chapter 23

I waited until Trey and I were pulling out of the Beaumont Enterprises parking deck to spring it on him. “Hypothetical situation. Pretend I have some information that I technically shouldn’t have.”

“What kind of information?”

“Juvenile records.”

His eyes snapped my way, then back on the road. “You can’t get information like that without breaking the law.”

“I didn’t break the law.”

“You said this was hypothetical.”

“Hypothetically hypothetical.”

We hit a red light and he turned to face me. “Say it again.”

I looked him straight in the eye. “I didn’t break the law.”

He watched my mouth, focused on my eyes.

“You’re reading me.”

The light turned green, and he returned his attention to the road. “You’re doing it again. Technically truthful but—”

“Damn it, I just want to know what I should do!”

“You can’t use illegally procured information in a criminal investigation.”

“How do you know it’s illegally procured?”

“I know that juvenile records are sealed. Therefore—”

“I know, I know, you’re Captain Rules. Got it.”

Trey stopped arguing. There was a wrinkle right between his eyes, and one hand rested on the wheel, the other on the gearshift. His fingers were fidgety. Tap tap tap.

At the next light, a familiar figure crossed the street in front of us, cell phone pressed to his ear, camera around his neck. He looked like one of those gaunt models in certain blue jean ads, with pale tight skin and black hair spiked above his forehead, and he was so engrossed in his conversation that he didn’t look our way.

“Hey,” I said, “isn’t that the guy who was taking pictures at the end of the press conference, the one they threw out?”

Trey’s eyes followed him. “Yes, it is. The security guard didn’t get a name.”

The car behind us honked and Trey drove forward, slowly. I whipped around in my seat and watched the guy get into a black Ford Explorer with tinted windows. He roared away from the curb with a lurch, still talking on his cell phone.

I caught the license plate—D MAN—and I smiled. “Wanna bet it’s Dylan Flint?”

Trey watched in his rearview mirror as the SUV rolled down the street. He nodded sagely, but otherwise showed little interest.

I stared at him. “You’re not following him?

“Why would I do that?”

“Because he was following us on Saturday!”

“That doesn’t mean—”

“Then call somebody! Tell them he’s headed down Peachtree…Damn it, which Peachtree is this again?”

“It’s not. It’s Ponce de Leon.”

“Doesn’t matter. I’ve got an idea where he’s headed.” I dragged his folder out of my tote bag and waved it at Trey. “He has a photography studio near Centennial Park. We can catch him there.”

Trey shook his head. “I don’t think—”

I held out my hand. “Rock, scissors, paper.”

“What?”

“You know this game, right? Winner chooses. On the count of three…”

He held out his hand. I counted, went with paper, which I then placed on top of Trey’s closed fist. The light turned green.

“1212 Luckie Street,” I said.

***

From the street, Snoopshots didn’t impress—a small shop front displaying sun-bleached photographs of brides and grooms, their faces sharp and averted like they were fleeing the scene of a crime. It was deserted, in stark contrast to the tan and sandstone squares of Centennial Park, which teemed with tourists. On the nights The Tabernacle held concerts, the street was a chaos of scalpers and music-drunk urbanites. But on this afternoon, the whole block felt like a throwback to Luckie Street’s less lucky—and much less lucrative—pre-Olympic days. Trey parked, but kept the engine running.

I opened my window and took a picture of the front door. “I remember now—his daddy owns this whole building. Converted it to lofts during the boom. I’m guessing our boy doesn’t pay much rent.”

“It’s closed,” Trey pronounced.

“Looks that way.” I put my cell phone in my bag. “So what do you think the best way around back is?”

I tried to open my door, but it was locked. Trey reached across me and laid his hand on top of mine.

“No,” he said.

We froze that way for five solid seconds, neither of us moving a muscle. A family of four passed Dylan’s shop, obviously lost. They all wore New World of Coke visors and carried dark blue plastic bags from the aquarium. The little girl licked a red, white and blue snow cone. The mother’s eyes darted back and forth, like a minesweeper.

“Fine,” I said. “But can we at least wait a few more minutes? Just in case he shows?”

Trey removed his hand from mine. He sat back and switched off the engine. “Five minutes. Then we go back to Phoenix.”

So I watched the doorway. He watched his watch. After exactly five minutes, when there was still no sign of our quarry, Trey shifted the car into first and made a U-turn. I didn’t protest. Dylan Flint wasn’t showing, and I didn’t really want to go snooping. All I wanted to do was go home.

Unfortunately for me, I didn’t have one, not yet anyway.

***

The first thing I did when I got back to the Ritz was take a bath. A long one. I draped a washcloth on my face and ran the water as hot as I could. The bathroom filled with steam and all I could hear was the rhythmic plop plop of the water dripping from the faucet.

My brother was still in the Bahamas. Of course I had other concerns, namely that Dylan Flint was stalking me. And that a convicted criminal had been stalking Eliza and possibly my brother and was now MIA, which meant he was probably stalking me too. Janie had dumped about two pounds of backstory in my lap, along with a mess of inconsistencies, and some unknown woman was making creepy phone calls outside a strip club. And the Beaumonts—the freaking Beaumonts—with their cheese straws and press conferences and conveniently Confederate kinfolk. And then there was Garrity, and Trey, and Marisa, and Landon, and some redhead named Gabriella…

I turned off the water with my toe and sank under the surface.

***

The call came thirty minutes later, just as I was toweling off. I was expecting Rico. I got surprised.

It was my mystery caller again. “We need to talk. Meet me at the Waffle House out front of Boomer’s. Midnight. And come alone.”

I made a noise. “Look, I don’t know what kind of idiot you think I am, but I don’t show up at midnight when some stranger tells me to ‘come alone.’”

“Bring a friend then, just no cops. I smell a cop, you’ll never see me.”

“No cops. Just a friend.”

“Midnight,” she said, and hung up.

My phone said it was five-thirty. I dialed Rico’s number. He answered on the first ring. “What’s up?”

“Hello, friend.”