He stood and looked at me. “I gotta get to work,” he said. “That worth twenty to you?”
I gave him the bill. He folded it over and stuck it in his pocket. Then he had a thought. I could tell he wasn’t used to it.
“Hey, you’re not gonna tell Roy I was talking about him, are you?”
“Why not?” I said.
“He don’t like people talking about him. You gonna tell him, I’ll give you back your twenty.”
“Why doesn’t he like people talking about him?”
“Roy’s a mean bastard,” Pike said. “You don’t know what he’s gonna do.”
“What might he do?” I said.
“I just told you,” Pike said. “You don’t never know what he’s gonna do.”
From his shirt pocket he took a little nip bottle of vodka, unscrewed the cap, and drank it.
“Little cocktail,” he said. “Settle my stomach.”
“I won’t tell Roy,” I said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
“Did Amy Peters have a case?” I said.
“There’s always a case,” Maggie Mills said, “especially if you are one of a discriminated minority.”
She was a senior partner at the law firm of Mills and D’Ambrosio, about fifty-five, and small, with crisp gray hair and hard blue eyes.
“Like women,” I said.
“Women are a good example,” she said. “It is nearly always possible to raise the issue of gender discrimination.”
“Was it justified in this instance?”
Maggie Mills smiled. It was a somewhat frosty smile.
“That would need to be adjudicated,” she said. “Clearly there was something at issue besides her professional competence.”
“Why do you say so?”
“Among other things, she was frightened,” Maggie Mills said.
“I know. Do you think she came to you because she was scared?”
Maggie Mills shook her head briskly.
“She came to me because her ego couldn’t take it,” Maggie Mills said. “She couldn’t stand being fired.”
“Did you gather she was afraid of her boss?”
“I didn’t gather anything,” Maggie Mills said. “She didn’t speak of it. But I have been in business for a long time, and I can recognize a frightened woman.”
“You have any reason to think she was suicidal?” I said.
“The police asked me the same thing,” Maggie Mills said. “And I’ll answer you the same thing I answered them. I’m an attorney, not a psychiatrist. I don’t know what someone is like when they are suicidal. But it seems odd to me, personally, that she would hire a lawyer and then kill herself.”
“At least until the bill came.”
“The death of a young woman should not evoke levity,” she said.
“One of my failings,” I said, “is finding levity where it doesn’t belong.”
“What is your interest in the case?”
“It may be pertinent to another case I’m working on,” I said.
“Do you have any other interest?”
“She came to me and told me she was scared and I reassured her.”
“And you are now reconsidering that?”
“It would have been nice if I’d done something useful.”
Maggie Mills studied me for a time. “So her death is not solely an occasion for levity.”
“Not solely,” I said.
“I didn’t help her either,” Maggie Mills said.
I nodded.
“It seems that both of us might have failed her.”
“Seems possible,” I said.
