Niki gasped. “Are you… are you feeling okay? Do I need to hobble over there and take your temperature?”
“I’m fine, I promise. I’m just… weirdly tired. It’s probably because of the migraine. If you want to go see Matt, then go for it. I’ll be fine by myself with Brutus for the evening. I think I’m going to go home and watch TV and drink the last of the pink wine that’s still sitting in the fridge from the other day.”
“You haven’t finished it by now? Okay, now I know you’re ill.”
Leda shook her head. “Nah. Don’t worry about me. I need a night to myself, that’s all. I’ve been so sociable lately. Go on. Get outta here. Go snog Matt and tell everybody at the bar that I love them, would you?”
Eventually Leda talked Niki into leaving. It wasn’t easy, and she didn’t leave without a whole host of suspicions, but she left.
After she was gone, Leda did not go home.
When she was certain that Niki wasn’t watching the door, she collected her purse. She locked the office and took too long to remember where she’d parked Jason. She wiped the chalk off his tire with her foot; it was after-hours in Columbia City, but the parking enforcement officers had been on the prowl earlier in the day—tootling around in their miniature popemobiles, doling out tickets. They wandered the blocks with a long stick that had a piece of chalk on it, swiping tires and keeping track of who parked where, and for how long.
“Screw ’em,” she muttered. She threw her purse on the passenger seat and pulled out onto the main drag. She should have left the car at home that morning, really. She lived within walking distance of her little office, but sometimes she just didn’t feel like making the hike.
Her true destination lay farther north, only a few feet from the interstate.
She parked underneath an on-ramp, where it was safe to do so in two-hour stints—as long as she dodged the puddles of urine and the rats who were the first on-site. The rats had seniority, unless the crows and seagulls did.
Overhead, cars zoomed. All around, vehicles idled.
It wasn’t so far past rush hour that everybody wasn’t trying to leave downtown, so the small roads that crisscrossed under I-5 were packed and people were honking, swearing, and demanding that Siri give them alternate routes—for all the good that would do.
Leda let herself inside the former Tully’s roasting facility, a giant nineteenth-century building that the interstate bowed around. Drivers overhead zipped past so closely that they could look in the windows and see office space, hallways, and doors. Nobody roasted any coffee there anymore, but some of the old space had been set aside for lofts, in case anybody wanted to try to sleep eight yards from eight lanes of traffic.
But a large portion of the facility had been converted to self-storage units, and that’s where Leda was headed.
Up too many stairs and around a few corners, she found the orange door she was looking for. She unlocked it and went inside, turning on the light and shutting the door.
“Forgot about that,” she said to herself, regarding the opened can of soda she’d left sitting on a small end table beside a vintage rocking chair. She sat down in that chair and used her tippy-toes to lean the rocker back and forth. At least it was diet.
And thank God for that, or there would have been ants.
Beside the flat, warm soda was an old radio that still worked. Leda tuned it to KEXP in case there was any good indie rock left in the world. She shoved a few boxes of her own stored items aside and picked up the nearest box of Tod’s personal effects. She tried not to notice how they didn’t smell like him anymore. Not when she sniffed them deeply, not when she held them up to her face, and not when she used them to dry a few tears.
Not at all.
16.
Thursday afternoon, Leda Foley and Niki Nelson met their new detective friend not far from Castaways—in a bar that used to be a mortuary and now had barstools pulled up to the nooks and crannies where cremated remains once were housed. For the umpteenth time, Leda groused, “I don’t understand why this bar isn’t gothier. It feels like it should have black curtains, silver crosses, and more candles.”
Grady shrugged. “I see plenty of candles.”
“They’re tea lights!” she argued. “And there’s all these cutesy little martinis with cutesy little stirring sticks and umbrellas, and weird chunks of fruit on skewers.”
Niki leaned forward, to talk around Leda’s head. “She does this literally every damn time we even walk past this place.” Then, imitating her friend’s voice, she said, “I want to see vampires! Ghosts! Bats! I want to fear for my life every time I order a drink!”
“I never said that.”
“Sure you did. More than once. So where is this woman?” Niki asked. “I thought she was meeting us here.”
“She is.” The detective glanced at his phone, sitting on the small, round table between them all. “She’ll be here any minute. She works out of an office a block away.”
“I thought she was rich? Why does she still go to work?” Niki’s eyes scanned the scene below, where there weren’t many customers yet. The floors were stone, and the ceilings were high. Every click of a woman’s heels, every drop of a plate, clink of silverware, shake of a martini in progress, and friendly toast bounced off every surface.
“I don’t know that she’s rich,” Grady said. “There’s money, and then there’s money. Maybe she doesn’t have enough money to stay rich if she doesn’t work. Or maybe she just likes having a job. Some people get bored, left to their own devices.”
Leda asked, “What does she do?”
“She’s a financial consultant with a big firm, but I think she only has a few clients. Big-name ones.”
“Money,” Leda said, nodding to herself. “Must be nice.”
Over the echoes of early happy hour, all three heard the distinctive sound of hard-heeled footsteps on stairs. They collectively swiveled their heads, and soon there appeared a tall, attractive white woman in her fifties. Janette Gilman wore a gray lady-suit with a midi skirt and heels that were just a hair too high to call sensible. Her hair was auburn—a very good, expensive dye job in Leda’s estimation. She’d been hiding her own baby grays with a box from Walgreens for years. It probably showed, but she didn’t care too much and didn’t have too much to hide.
Grady stood, like a proper goddamn gentleman, and then Leda hastily did likewise in order to participate in the round of handshakes that opened the conversation. Janette Gilman’s hands were soft of skin, smooth of grip, and nicely manicured. But they didn’t trigger any interesting insights.
“Oh, no,” Janette said to Niki—who was still trying to stand, with the plastic boot stuck beneath the table. “Please, stay there. I don’t want to make any trouble for you.” She shook her hand, then claimed the last free seat at the table and crossed her legs tidily at the shins.
Janette told them, “Before I came upstairs, I put in an order for a pitcher of sangria, fully expecting to share. I hope you won’t make me drink it all alone. I could, but what’s the fun in that?”
Brightly, Leda declared, “I never say no to sangria!”