Simon Says_. Walk (Kate Morgan #6)(41)
Author: Dale Mayer

 

Rodney snorted as he got into the vehicle beside her. “What now?”

 

“We’ll go take a look at that graffiti and document it for the case. Even though it may or may not have anything to do with it.”

 

He nodded. “Anything to do with Simon is important.”

 

It took them twenty minutes to get to the location of the graffiti. As she walked up to the wall and stared at it, a man spoke from behind her.

 

“Hey, hey, hey, who are you, and what are you doing here?”

 

She turned to see a larger man, running toward her. She held up her badge, and he stopped in his tracks.

 

“Oh.” He raised a hand in a peace gesture.

 

She smiled and nodded. “Are you security or foreman?”

 

“I’m the foreman,” he stated.

 

“Good, I wanted to talk to you anyway,” she muttered. “About your brother-in-law.”

 

At that, Joe paled and nodded. “Yeah, I’m still in shock over that one.”

 

“Doesn’t sound as if he got along with anybody.”

 

Joe snorted. “We lost at least eight crew members due to him, eight crew we couldn’t afford to lose. Even now we’re desperately trying to rehire them all, and it’ll cost us. Some of them are even renegotiating their pay, all because of Luca.” Joe let out a deep sigh. “And I don’t mean to say nasty things about the dead, but he was arrogant, thought he should be boss. I think he was eyeing my job,” Joe added, with an eye roll. “I’ve worked with Simon for ten years, but my brother-in-law was of the opinion that he could walk off the street and do a better job.”

 

“Did he?”

 

He paused for a moment. “The trouble was, Luca didn’t even do his job. He came in, raised shit, insulted everybody, told them they were doing crap work, made people redo perfectly good work.” Joe’s face flushed in anger. “When you have a good team. like ours, you trust them. And, if you don’t trust your crew, you better not keep them.” Joe blew out a heavy breath.

 

“I’ve worked with this crew for a long time, and I have not had any occasion to have them redo anything, not in many a year, not since they were trained to do things the way that Simon wants them. And I can tell you that Simon isn’t an easy taskmaster either. He expects the job to get done and expects it to be done on time, and we had a good working relationship with these guys. Then I hired my brother-in-law,” he admitted on a sorrowful note. “Now everybody’s pissed off at me, and my sister is a mess.” He shook his head. “You do a good turn for the wrong type of person, and it ends up completely ruining everything as you know it. It really sucks.”

 

“What about the day that he died?”

 

He stared at her and nodded. “He never left his shift. I thought he would go home to my sister. Yet apparently he was found in a hotel. Nothing more I can tell you about it.”

 

She nodded. “His feet were trashed, as if he’d been out walking barefoot for hours and hours on rough surfaces.”

 

“That doesn’t make any sense either because Luca didn’t do physical exertion. So not his style.”

 

“Maybe not his style, but sounds as if he got in with a bad crowd potentially.”

 

“No potentially about it,” Joe declared, with a snort. “That’s part of who and what he was. A bad crowd was everything to him.” Joe shrugged. “Luca went from catastrophe to catastrophe. I’m supposed to be grieving and sorry and all that, but the damage he did here and potentially to my job is still a little close to heart.” Joe groaned. “And my sister may never recover. So not really sure how much sympathy I can work up for Luca. But I would have preferred my sister left him instead of this.”

 

“Of course. I do understand your candor.”

 

“Good.” Joe seemed relieved, and then he frowned at her, studying her closely. “You’re Kate, aren’t you?”

 

“That’s what my badge says,” she replied, with a note of humor.

 

He flushed and nodded. “As in Simon’s Kate.”

 

She winced at that, and Rodney snickered. She corrected Joe. “If you’re asking if I know Simon and if we’re dating, the answer’s yes. … Can’t say I particularly like being called his though.”

 

The older man flushed and immediately stammered out an apology.

 

She waved it off. “It’s fine,” she stated, stifling his advances to apologize again. “Don’t worry about it.”

 

But obviously she’d upset Joe somewhat, and she hadn’t meant to, but just something about being called another man’s possession got to her. “Can you tell me anything about your brother-in-law’s associations, friends, enemies, weaknesses?”

 

“Anything to do with gambling,” he replied, “but honestly he was a hell of a pool player, and I think that’s where his biggest weakness was.”

 

“Which fits with the area where we found him,” she agreed.

 

He nodded at that. “I’ve dragged him out more than a few times from various places myself. … They’ve been married ten years, and I think I’ve chased him home at least ten times. When he hits a certain spot in life, he goes back to what he knows, and what he knows is that godforsaken pool hall. Luca grew up in that era. Never really had a chance to get out of it, I guess.”

 

She pondered that.

 

Joe continued. “I remember all the excuses my sister has given me all these years too, yet Luca had every chance to pull out of it.”

 

Kate decided to let Luca off the hook a bit. “And yet gambling and drinking are both addictions, and, like all addictions, it’s hard to leave them behind. It could have been drugs, which may have been worse,” she added.

 

“It was drugs for a while.” Joe faced her. “But I did warn him that I’d personally pay for the divorce and make sure he ended up on the streets if he didn’t get off those.”

 

She didn’t say anything, just nodded. She’d certainly heard similar stories from other people at other times in life.

 

“He wasn’t a bad guy, he was just”—Joe winced—“weak. I think that’s probably the best way to describe him.”

 

“And it sounds as if he had a bit of an ego, someone who thought he could do everything.”

 

Joe snorted. “Oh my God, he was arrogant. Take my job for instance. He was always telling me how he could do a much better job. He just needed a chance, and he’d prove to the world what he could do. But it was always that he needed a chance. He was always the victim of not getting a chance. He didn’t want to hear that I had worked with Simon for ten years or that I had started many, many years ago in the industry to learn all these trades. You don’t become a foreman without having worked your way up and really knowing your shit,” he explained. “That’s not how construction works. Not one of these guys will respect you if you can’t do the same job or do it better than they’re doing. That’s the facts of life, and Luca didn’t want to hear it. He could do better, totally green off the streets, no experience, because of who he was,” Joe shared, with a snort of disgust. “I failed to see what he was doing here, and that was a mistake on my part. I took my eyes off him for a minute, and he cost me so much.”