call.
“Well, whatever you got, Todd, babydoll, you better die of it. I’m already short a messenger. . . . Walking pneumonia? I don’t need you walking, honey. I need you on a bike.” She listened for a moment, huffed in offense, and said: “You don’t love me. That’s all there is to it.”
She slammed the receiver down, swiveled her tall wheeled stool around, and faced Parker with an imperious glare. “I got no time for you, Blue Eyes. You ain’t nothing but trouble. I can see that comin’ now. A sharp-dressed man with a hat ain’t never nothin’ but trouble. You gonna cost me nothin’ but time and money.”
Parker swept his fedora off, grinned, and held his raincoat open. “You like the suit? It’s Canali.”
“I’ll like it better from a distance. Aks what you gonna aks, honey. This ain’t the offices of
“Did you send a messenger to the office of Leonard Lowell, Esquire, for a pickup last night around six- thirty?”
She stuck her chin out and didn’t blink. “We close at six P.M.”
“Good for you,” Parker said with a hint of a half smile. A dimple cut into his right cheek. “But that’s not what I asked.”
“I send out a whole lotta messengers on a whole lotta runs.”
“Do you want us to interview each of them?” Parker asked politely. “I can clear my calendar for the rest of the day. Of course, they’ll have to come down to the station. How many are there? I’ll have my partner call for a van.”
His nemesis narrowed her eyes.
“What do you call those notes you put up on that board?” Parker asked.
“Floaters.”
“Every order gets put on a floater. The floater goes on the board under the name of the messenger going on the run. Is that how it works?”
“You want my job?” she asked. “You need another line of work? You want me to train you? You can have this job. I’ll go file my nails and watch Oprah and Dr. Phil every day.”
Her fingernails were as long as bear claws, with metallic purple polish and hand-painted pink rose details.
“I want you to answer a simple question, ma’am. That’s all. You can answer me, or I can take all the floaters you wrote yesterday back to the station and go through them one by one. And what about the manifests? I’m guessing you match the two things up at the end of the day. We could take them too. Let you get on with your business.”
“You can get a damn warrant,” Eta barked. She grabbed her radio mike by the throat as incoming static and garbled words crackled over the speaker. “Ten-nine? Ten-nine, P.J.? What the hell do you mean you’re lost? You ain’t gone but two minutes. How could you be lost? You’re lost in your brain, that’s where you’re lost. What’s your twenty? Look at a damn street sign.”
The messenger answered, and Eta rolled her eyes. “You’re hardly across the damn street! I swear, John Remko, if you ain’t taking your meds, I’m gonna feed ’em to you my own self! Get yourself turned around and get gone before I got Money chewing on my tail.”
Ruiz stuck her nose into the mix. “We can get a warrant,” she said aggressively. “We can make your life hard. Do you know the meaning of
Eta looked at her as if Ruiz were an annoying child. “Sure I do,” she drawled. “You ought to take some Metamucil for that, honey. There’s a Sav-on Drugstore the next block up.”
Ruiz flushed red. The dispatcher sniffed her disdain. “Honey, I worked dispatch for the New Orleans Police Department for eight years. You don’t scare me.”
The phone rang again, and she snatched it up. “Speed Couriers. What you want, honey?”
Parker cocked a look at Ruiz, one corner of his mouth tugging upward. “She’s something.”
Ruiz was pouting, angry, offended at being made the butt of a joke.
“Don’t push too hard,” Parker murmured. “We want her on our side. Finesse beats force every time with a woman.”
“Like you would know,” Ruiz grumbled. “You threatened her first.”
“But I did it politely and with a charming smile.”
The dispatcher moved from phone to microphone, one hand scribbling out the order. “Base to Eight, Base to Eight. Gemma, you there, baby?”
The messenger answered, and was dispatched to pick up a package from a downtown law office and deliver it to an attorney at the federal building on Los Angeles Street. The floater went up on the board under the GEMMA magnet.
“I’m curious,” Parker said, leaning on the counter with both elbows, settling in. “You haven’t asked once why we want to know if you dispatched a courier to this office. Why is that?”
“It don’t concern me.”
“A man was murdered there last night. His daughter told us he was waiting for a bike messenger. We’re thinking the messenger might be able to tell us something that could be valuable to the case.”
Eta heaved a sigh. “May the Lord have mercy on his soul.”
“The victim? Or the messenger?” Ruiz asked.
“You’re making me suspicious, you know,” Parker said casually, giving her the up-from-under look—intimate, as if they had known each other for years and he had gotten his way with this look before. “Being difficult like this. Makes me think you’ve got something to hide.”
The woman looked away, thinking. Maybe weighing pros and cons, maybe realizing she’d made a mistake taking the hard line.
“We’ll find out one way or the other,” Parker pointed out. “Better for everyone if we do it the friendly way. You don’t want us to get warrants, haul away half your office and all of your messengers. Do you own this business, Ms. . . .”
“Fitzgerald. No, I do not.”
“So you would have to answer to your boss, explain to him why he’s losing a day’s income, why his files are being confiscated, why the police want to look at his employee files and payroll records.” He shook his head sadly. “That won’t be good for you.”
She stared at him, hard, maybe wondering if she dared call his bluff.
“I know these kids,” she said. “They march to their own drummer, but they ain’t bad kids.”
“We just need to ask him some questions. If he didn’t do anything wrong, he’s got nothing to worry about.”
Eta Fitzgerald looked away and sighed again, her presence deflating as she admitted defeat to herself. The phone rang, she picked it up and politely asked the caller to hold.
“It was a late call,” she said to Parker, staring down at the counter.
“Where’s the manifest?”
“The messenger’s still got it. He didn’t make it back to match up his paperwork. It was raining. I closed up and went home to my kids.”
“And is he working today?”
“He ain’t been in yet.”
“Why is that?”
She made a sour face. “I don’t know! I’m not his mother. Some of these kids drift in and out. Some of them got other jobs besides this one. I don’t keep track of them.”
Parker pulled his notebook out of his inside coat pocket. “What’s his name?”
“J.C.”
“What’s J.C. stand for?”
“It stands for J.C.,” she said, perturbed. “That’s what we call him: J.C. Number Sixteen.”
“Where does he live?”
“I have no idea.”
“Must say something in his employee file.”
“He’s 1099. We got no file.”
