“Gilliam,” he answered, sullen and suspicious. Des wondered if it was her uniform or her pigment. Both, possibly. “Chuckie Gilliam.”
“Hey, you wouldn’t be Sandy’s Chuckie, would you?” Des asked brightly.
“Yeah, I am. And, lady, I don’t want no cat.”
“Are you sure? I’ve got Polaroids. Want to see Polaroids?”
“No!”
“Okay, we’ll come back to that… Chuckie, have you seen Melanie this evening?”
“I saw her go out maybe six o’clock,” he said. “Come home about nine.”
Des nodded. This would square with Melanie’s modeling gig. “Did she stay home long?”
“Left again right away, then came back again a while later.”
“How much later?”
“Lady, I dunno,” he said, his voice a low growl.
“Could you take a guess, please? It’s important.”
“Half hour. Maybe an hour. She popped her trunk, loaded some stuff into her car. She was in a real hurry.”
“What kind of stuff?”
“Suitcases. She made a couple of trips in and out, then she split.”
“What does she drive?”
“A Dodge Neon, blue. Is Melanie in some kind of trouble?”
“She have any men in her life?” Des asked, wondering if Chuckie was one of them. Or perhaps wanted to be. He kept mighty close tabs on her.
“I haven’t noticed nobody. It’s been pretty quiet over there lately. Her brother used to be around, but he split.”
“When was this?”
“Last year. Her mother used to live there, too. Old lady was gonzo in the head. Alzheimer’s. Every once in a while she’d fall. I’d help Melanie hoist her back into bed. But Mrs. Zide’s not around no more. Melanie put her in a nursing home.”
“Any idea where that would be?”
“Norwich, maybe.”
Des glanced inside again at the computer on the card table. “What do you do for a living, Chuckie?”
“Why do you need to know?” he demanded.
“It’s just for my paperwork. I have to fill in those dumb blanks.”
“I’m a carpenter here in town.”
“Is that right? Who are you working for?”
“I’m between jobs right now.”
That was saying something, the way new houses were going up around Dorset. The contractors were so starved for manpower, they’d take anyone who knew which end of a nail gun to use. This had to be one real-live nowhere man, Des reflected. Poor Sandy would be so much better off with a nice pair of cats. “You and Sandy don’t live together, am I right?”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“I’m just wondering if you live here by yourself,” said Des, who was also wondering if Chuckie Gilliam had a sheet. He smelled like he did.
“I’m here by myself,” he said grudgingly. “Anything wrong with that?”
“No, not at all. Some of the smartest people I know live alone, myself included.” She thanked him for his help and crossed the street to fill in Soave.
“It’s unlocked,” he mentioned idly, as the two of them stood leaning against her cruiser. “Her back door. If we want to go in and take a look.”
“Do we?”
Soave shifted his bulky shoulders. “What do you say?”
“I say that it’s your case, wow man.”
“Let’s go for it,” he declared, heading around back once again.
He let Des in through the front door. Melanie’s living room was small and it was dingy. There was a moth- eaten purple love seat and a harvest-gold Naugahyde lounge chair that had been patched together with silver duct tape. Both pieces looked as if they had come from the dump.
The wall phone in the kitchen was off the hook, the receiver dangling in mid-air. Des immediately felt a small uptick in her pulse.
There were two bedrooms. In the smaller one there was an old iron bed, stripped down to its stained mattress. There was no dresser in there. No other furniture, period. The narrow closet was empty except for a few wire hangers.
There was a double bed in the other room. Its covers were rumpled, the linen gray and sour-smelling. Everything in this closet was gone, too, including the hangers. All that remained was an unsigned nude drawing of Melanie thumb-tacked to the inside of the closet door. The proportions were way off, Des observed critically. Melanie’s torso was too long, her calves too short. Clearly the work of an unaccomplished art student.
Soave knelt and looked under the bed. Nothing. He pulled open the dresser drawers. Empty. So were the drawers of the cheap pine student’s desk set before the bedroom window.
Same story in the bathroom-the medicine chest had been cleaned out.
All Melanie had left behind were a few clean dishes in the kitchen cupboards. And some food in the refrigerator. Not much-a half-eaten take-out pizza, a plastic liter bottle of Diet Coke, a quart of low-fat milk. There was a pull-down hatchway ladder in the kitchen ceiling that led up to the attic. Soave gave it a pull. Des handed him her flashlight. He went up and poked his head around. Nothing.
There was nothing in the shallow crawl space under the house either.
Des stood there looking around at the vacated house and remembering the anxiousness in Melanie’s voice when they’d talked that evening in the studio. Melanie had seemed frightened. Of whom? Of what? Was it about Babette Leanse’s case against Colin? Had Melanie been coerced into fingering her boss? Had she been bought? Or did she know something about Moose’s murder? Did the two cases connect up with each other? If so, how? Why had Melanie been in such a huge hurry to clear out of town? What was she so afraid of? What did she know?
Des didn’t know. Didn’t know a damned thing.
Except that Melanie Zide, the one person who might be able to help them make some sense of this whole mess, was way gone.
C HAPTER 9
“So we’re here to catch strays?” Mitch asked her, yawning, as he sat there slumped behind the wheel of his Studebaker pickup.
“In a manner of speaking,” Des responded from next to him in the darkness.
“How come we didn’t bring your have-a-heart traps and those yummy little jars of strained turkey?”
“Different kind of strays.”
“Gotcha,” Mitch said, nodding. “Okay, I’m thinking any minute now you’re going to tell me what the hell we’re doing here.”
“Here” was the parking lot of Dorset’s A amp; P, which was mostly deserted since it was presently two o’clock in the morning and they closed at eleven. The market’s interior night-lights were on, casting a faint, ghostly glow out into the lot. But it was still quite dark. And they were quite alone. The delivery van from the florist next door was parked there for the night. A couple of rusted-out beaters with FOR SALE signs in their windshields were on display-the A amp; P’s parking lot doubled as an unofficial low-end used-car emporium. And there were Des and Mitch, a thermos of coffee and a box of Entenmann’s chocolate chip cookies for Mitch on the seat between them.
“We’re hanging,” she said curtly, her hands folded in her lap.
