Doherty’s eyebrows went up. “Why not?”
“Because Walker has no sense of humor about her car. It’s like making apartheid jokes to Nelson Mandela.” Billy, coward that he was, stuffed most of his remaining doughnut into his mouth and choked it down with coffee. “I’m going to check out Redding’s apartment, see if we luck out and he’s home, or if anybody knows anything about enemies. See you at the office.”
For a guy complaining about weight gain, he blew out of there like a race car, leaving me with Mr. Doherty. We stared at one another for a moment before he said, “I feel like we’ve gotten off on the wrong foot, Det—”
“There is no right foot. I gather that, short of pouring you into a concrete block and sinking you in Puget Sound, I’m not going to get rid of you. Fine. Go do your job from stalker distance. I don’t want to see you again. And I swear to God, if there’s one hint, one whisper, of raising my rates or not paying up, I’ll have you and your company in court so fast it’ll make your head spin.” I didn’t know if I had a leg to stand on. I didn’t
I shoved away from the table and stomped out after Billy.
CHAPTER 11
Billy had the grace to look apologetic when I caught up to him. I muttered dire imprecations and we called it good without actually discussing anything, which was how I preferred to resolve temper tantrums.
Archibald Redding lived in Ballard, not particularly convenient to his job, but if he’d lived there more than a few years, it was probably right on the money for what I imagined a security guard’s salary to be. There was no answer when we knocked on his door, but the building manager, a sturdy woman in her fifties, let us in without a warrant when Billy explained the situation.
The two-bedroom apartment was the epitome of a Felix bachelor’s pad: tidy to the point of looking almost un-lived in. His bed was neatly made, his clothes were hung up or folded, and the bathroom sported a carefully rolled toothpaste tube and inexpensive aftershave with an inoffensive smell. A lone, clean pot in the kitchen sink and an old-fashioned teakettle on the stove suggested Redding’s cooking skills were rudimentary, not that I had any room to point fingers. The building manager trailed along behind us, setting imagined wrongs to right as we went through the rooms. “He’s a nice man. Always pays rent on time. Always stops to ask how you’re doing. Oh, but that’s what they always say, isn’t it?” She put her hands over her mouth, eyes large. “‘He was such a nice man.’ And then you find body parts in the freezer.”
Billy and I exchanged glances and I went back to pop the freezer open. It didn’t even have TV dinners, much less body parts: there were carefully labeled packages of fish and chicken breasts, and bags of frozen vegetables. “He must have another freezer,” I said, trying to sound cheerful and reassuring. Somehow it came out macabre, and the poor building manager made a sound of dismay. Billy gave me a look that I probably deserved, then escorted the woman toward the front door, plying her with questions: how long had Redding lived there? Did he have friends we could talk to? Had she known his family?
The opportunity for gossip snapped her right out of her worries. “Oh, no. They died a long time ago. Archie’s been living here twenty years, longer than I’ve been managing, and it’s always been just him. Seems like a real tragedy, such a nice man living on his own, but he says true love never dies, and tells stories about his little girls. We have a Tuesday-afternoon bingo game he joins us at, so I’d say all of us are friends. I can get you a list of all the names, if you like.”
“That’d be great. We’ll be right there.” Billy smiled and the woman went hurrying off too quickly to see how his expression faded. I saw it, though, and sighed as I leaned on the frame of Archie Redding’s front door.
“I guess it’s romantic, but it’s also kind of sad. That kind of attitude, I mean. I mean, the way Gary talks about his wife, I think she really was his true love, but he’s talking about dating again. It seems like that’s good. Being hung up on a life that ended twenty years ago…” I shook my head, then frowned at the sudden uncomfortable idea that I could easily be describing myself.
“Gary’s dating?” Amusement danced around the edges of Billy’s mouth, his own concerns dying for a moment. “How you feel about that, Joanie? I thought the old guy was your territory.”
I summoned up every ounce of maturity at my disposal. “Pblthbth.”
Billy laughed. “Glad we got that straightened out. What I don’t get is how anybody can live in one place for two decades and not leave more mark on the space than this.” He gestured back at the apartment and I turned to consider it.
“Maybe he’s just waiting to die. To be back with his family. It’s morbid, but why bother collecting a lot of stuff if that’s all you’re waiting on?”
“But no reminders of his family? No photos, no mementos? The closets were empty. There are no finger paintings or wedding pictures. It’s like he’s a monk.”
I shrugged. “Photographs fade. Maybe it’s worse to see them turning orange and sepia than to rely on the memories. I don’t know. We’ll ask the bingo…team. What do you call a bunch of bingo players, anyway?”
“Does there have to be a collective name for them?” We closed Redding’s door and followed the building manager downstairs.
Tidy; kind; charming; sweet; not an enemy in the world: the handful of bingo players—mostly women—we were able to contact quickly all used the same words to describe Archie Redding. The other men in the group were variously out of town for the weekend, already in bed or hospitalized: Billy and I exchanged glances, decided to put off further questions until morning and retreated to the station, less defeated than simply tired.
The proverbial “They” say the first forty-eight hours are the most important in a murder case. As it happens, They’re right, but we hadn’t heard back from the coroner as to how long Chan’d been dead, and I was convinced we were running out of time faster than the clock read since his body’d been found. The ghosts had awakened almost eighteen hours earlier, and all I had was a suspect whose aura made him look innocent.
On the off chance that our ghosts had died the same way he did, I spent over an hour searching for bludgeoning deaths around Halloween. There were a few, but none unsolved. Billy finally got a call from the coroner reporting that Chan had died from a blunt blow to the head, probably between eleven and midnight the night before. I said, “No shit,” and he spread his hands, shrugging. They were doing their best, and so were we.
His phone rang again and I muttered, “Don’t tell me, they’re calling back to say it might’ve been a sudden cessation of breathing that caused his death, too.” Forensics hadn’t turned up anything like a murder weapon, or even drops of blood outside the huge smear around the display area. Our killer had been tidy. Just like the missing Archie Redding. I wrote down his name and put a question mark beside it, then shook myself and tried to pay attention to Billy’s report.
They
An unpleasant gurgle squished through my stomach. I was assuming Redding’d been alive when he’d been dragged out, if that was indeed the case. He might simply have been less of a mess, and easier to clean up after. The only way I could think to test the cauldron was to throw a dead body inside and see what happened. A security guard killed in the course of stealing it would be handier than murdering somebody else to find out if the magic worked.
I put my face in my hands, exerting enough pressure against my eyelids to hold my contacts in place while I rolled my eyes beneath them. Tears sprang up and leaked through my lashes, warning me the contacts had been
