“Sure, but I should remember?” He shook his head. “Nice girl. What the cops want with her?”
“Murder.”
His eyes widened. “No?”
“Yeah. And I’m her lawyer and I need to get in.”
“You don’t look like no lawyer.”
“I know,” Steve said. He whipped out his wallet. “Here’s my I.D. Steve Winslow.” He jerked his thumb at the phone. “Call the cops. Ask ’em who Kelly’s lawyer is.”
The super thought that over. He nodded. “Okay. You say that, it must be true.”
Which was a relief. Steve was bluffing. He didn’t really want the super asking the cops if he could get into Kelly’s apartment. Not that they had any right to deny him permission. He just didn’t want to start them speculating on what he was after.
It was also a relief when the super unlocked Kelly’s door and went back downstairs, leaving him to search alone.
Which wasn’t hard. It was, as Kelly had said, the most modest of one-room apartments. The furniture consisted of a single bed, a dresser and an end table.
The box of computer disks was in the top dresser drawer, just where Kelly had said it would be. Steve opened the box, riffled through the disks.
The disk with the gold X wasn’t there.
19
Steve pushed open the office door. “Mark call again?”
Tracy looked up at him. “Are you kidding? I can hardly get off the line with him before he calls again.”
The phone rang.
“See?” Tracy said. “There he is now.” She snatched it up. “Steve Winslow’s office … Yes, Mark, he’s here.”
“Tell him to come down,” Steve said.
“He just got in, he says come on down.” Tracy listened a moment, covered the phone, said with some exasperation, “Mark says he’s got too much stuff coming in right now, you should go up.”
“Tell him to put a man on the phone and come down. Tell him you’re pissed off at being left in the lurch and I’m afraid you might quit on me.”
The phone squawked.
Tracy hung up. “He heard that, and he’s coming down.”
“Great.”
Steve walked into his inner office, slumped into his desk chair, leaned back, closed his eyes and rubbed his head.
Tracy followed him in and stood there looking at him. “What’s the matter?” she said.
Steve opened his eyes, sighed, shook his head. “This fucking case. It’s really getting to me.”
“What about it?”
“I listen to this girl, and she’s either totally innocent or she’s the most accomplished liar I ever heard.”
“Oh?”
“The first story she told us was hogwash, or at least most of it.”
“She didn’t type nude?”
“Yeah, she did.” Steve held up his hands in exasperation. “That’s just it. The parts of her story that sound like outlandish, preposterous lies turn out to be true. It’s the reasonable stuff that turn out to be lies.”
“So what’s going on? You gonna tell me?”
“Of course. That’s why I had Mark come down. Turns out I got a lot to tell.”
“Like what?”
“Like-”
Then came the sound of the outer door banging open.
“There’s Mark now.”
Seconds later Mark Taylor came barreling into the room.
“All right, Steve. What the fuck is going on?”
“Take it easy, Mark. What’s the matter?”
“What’s the matter? The girl’s charged with murder, I’m sitting on a bunch of key evidence, and you ask me what’s the matter?”
“We’ve been through all that.”
“Yeah. Before she was charged. Now she is, and there’s gonna be hell to pay.”
“You call your detectives?”
“Yeah. I can’t reach ’em.”
“Then you’ve done your job. You got information for me?”
“I’ll say. And more coming in every minute. Tracy tells me you took the case. Is that right?”
“Yeah, I took it.”
“Great. So you want me to sit on the evidence?”
“I’m not asking you to sit on anything. I told you to tell the detectives.”
“Right. Which I can’t do, ’cause you told ’em to skip out.”
“I never told ’em that.”
“They knew what you wanted.”
“I’m not legally responsible for what someone infers. I’m only responsible for what I said.”
“Steve, I got a license.”
“I know that. Look, let’s stop talking in the dark. We got information, let’s pool it. Then we can work out what we gotta do. You say you got information for me?”
“Lots of it.”
“How about the fact Kelly Wilder happens to be the sister of Herbert Clay?”
“Who?”
“You’re the one who told me, Mark. The Castleton bookkeeper, went to jail for embezzlement.”
Mark Taylor’s eyes widened. “Are you shitting me?”
Steve shook his head. “Not at all.”
“Jesus Christ, it’s even worse. That’s the motive.”
“That’s how it looks to you?”
“Of course it does.”
“Then that’s how it’s gonna look to the cops. But as far as you know, they haven’t got it yet?”
“If they do, I haven’t heard.”
“Your pipeline good?”
“The best.”
“Then they probably don’t. Okay. You know how the cops got a line on the girl?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Damn. The whole thing doesn’t make sense.”
“What whole thing? What the hell’s going on?”
Steve held up his hands. “Okay. You win. Me first. Here’s what happened.”
Steve gave them a rundown on Kelly Wilder’s story. He told them everything, up to and including the floppy disk that wasn’t there.
Taylor shook his head and said, “Shit.”
“What’s the matter?”
“The more I hear, the worse I feel.”
“Why is that?”
“This girl does not exactly inspire confidence. She tells you one story, it turns out to be bullshit. Then she
