Vincent McEveety was one of the four founders of King City, and the third incarnation of his store on that property, a two?story brick?and?stone structure, had survived well over a century after his death from liver disease.
The general store grew over time in size, if not influence, and became McEveety’s Department Store in the early 1900s, which it remained until it was sold in the 1960s to the Cartwell’s chain, which ran it until they went under in the 1980s.
Over the following fifteen years, the building housed many different businesses, none of them lasting long, and decayed with the neighborhood around it.
When developers, supported by the city, proposed tearing down the building and replacing it with an office tower as part of an ambitious upscale revitalization and gentrification of McEveety Way, several citizen groups banded together and blocked the move in court, hoping to delay the project while they tried to have the building declared historically significant.
The opponents were making headway, getting support from all over the state, but before the matter could be legally resolved, the building and most of the city block were destroyed in a massive gas explosion. The cause of the leak, and what ignited it, was never determined, despite an initial determination by investigators that it was arson. The rubble was cleared, and McEveety Tower, named in honor of the historic building that it replaced, went up within a year.
Wade figured McEveety, a ruthless developer himself, would have appreciated the fate of his store and seen the tower, and the victory of commercial interests over historical preservation, as a far more fitting memorial to him, and the values of King City, than his old building.
The fourth floor of McEveety Tower was occupied by Burdett Shipping, which was what brought Wade and Charlotte there late that Saturday night, though Wade had intended to come the previous evening before getting sidetracked by the mini?mart robbery.
They strode into the marble lobby and up to the circular burled?walnut front desk, where an old security guard with a pear?shaped head sat in the center, watching the monitors embedded in the counter in front of him.
The guard looked up as Wade approached and immediately broke into a smile of recognition.
“I’ll be damned. Tom Wade.” The guard stood right up and eagerly shook Wade’s hand. “After what you did, I thought for sure that you’d be someplace where the sun don’t shine.”
“I am,” Wade said, then gestured to Charlotte. “Officer Greene, this is Sam Appleby, retired watch commander at McEveety station, where I started out.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Charlotte said.
Appleby shook her hand.
When Wade worked with Appleby, he was all muscle and sinew, without an ounce of body fat. But he’d put on weight over the years, and now it was all yielding to gravity. Everything on Appleby seemed to be sagging toward his feet. Maybe that was why Appleby sat right back down again.
“I had no idea you were back on your old beat,” Wade said. “What happened to the dream of spending your days fishing at Deer Lake?”
“It’s a vacation when you do it two weeks a year. It’s a new kind of hell when it’s your life.”
Apparently, Appleby had forgotten that Wade grew up on a lake.
“This is better?” Wade asked.
“At least now I enjoy fishing again,” Appleby said. “How’d they get away with busting you down to uniform?”
“Technically, it’s a lateral move.”
“You could have walked,” Appleby said, then waved his hand in front of him, as if dissipating smoke. “Never mind, I forgot who I’m talking to. So what brings you here, Tom?”
Wade handed Appleby a picture of Glory Littleton.
“Ah hell,” Appleby said. “She was such a sweet girl. I heard she’d been killed. What happened?”
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out. Did you know her?”
“Nothing beyond pleasantries,” Appleby said. “I saw her each night when she came in and four hours later when she left. But I’d keep my eye on her until she got on the bus.”
“She lived in Darwin Gardens,” Charlotte said. “How much danger could she be in on a street where Gucci, Louis Vuitton, and Armani have their stores?”
“She’s dead, isn’t she?” Appleby asked.
“Was she here on Monday?” Wade asked.
Appleby shook his head. “She didn’t come in.”
“Did she have a locker here?”
Appleby grabbed a key ring from the desk, hit a button that electronically locked the lobby doors, and got up. “Follow me.”
He led them across the lobby to an unmarked door, which he unlocked and that opened to a corridor with linoleum floors, white walls, and bars of fluorescent lights along the acoustic?tiled ceiling.
“No marble and chandeliers for the help,” Charlotte said.
They followed Appleby into a windowless room with a scuffed?up table in the center surrounded by mismatched plastic and folding chairs. There was a vinyl couch repaired with duct tape, some vending machines, a refrigerator, a sink, a microwave, a utility closet, and a wall lined with gym lockers that looked like they’d been recovered from a junkyard. A maid’s cleaning cart, stuffed with supplies, dusters, brooms, and a vacuum, was parked in a corner.
“Welcome to the employee break room, though nobody hangs out here. They grab their lunches and go outside. The maids keep their uniforms in here and change in the restroom across the hall.” Appleby stepped up to one of the lockers and knocked a knuckle against the tin. “This was Glory’s.”
“You got a key for it?” Wade asked.
“Nope. But the handyman’s closet is over there and I’m going on break.”
Wade and Appleby shook hands, and then the security guard walked out. Charlotte watched him go, a look of confusion on her face.
“What was that supposed to mean?”
“He was saying we don’t need a key,” he replied, walking over to the closet, opening the door, and peering inside.
“We still need a search warrant.”
“This is both.” Wade pulled a bolt cutter out of the closet and smiled. “It’s a very versatile tool.”
He went up to Glory’s locker, snapped the lock, and handed it to Charlotte.
“For someone who rooted out corruption in the MCU,” she said, tossing the lock on the table, “you play pretty loose with the law yourself.”
Wade set the bolt cutters down, pulled a pair of gloves from his pocket, and put them on.
“The cops I testified against weren’t bending a few legal niceties to get the job done.” He opened the locker and began sorting through the contents, starting with a box of tampons and some makeup, which he set on the couch. “They were taking bribes, skimming from the cash and drugs we took as evidence, and running a protection racket out of the police department.”
“This is how the corruption begins,” she said.
“I’m trying to get justice for a girl who was brutally murdered and dumped like trash in a parking lot.” He set a stack of gossip magazines and a cleaning uniform on the couch, then turned back to the locker for more. “I’m not trying to blackmail anybody or enrich myself.”
“But once you start bending the rules,” she said, “then pretty soon you starting thinking none of them matter anymore.”
“That’s why you’re here,” he said. “I wonder what she cleaned while she was wearing these.”
Wade pulled out several pieces of lacy lingerie and held them up for Charlotte to examine.
She gave them a close look. “La Perla. That’s not a minimum?wage brand.”
“Gifts from a wealthy admirer, perhaps.”
“I know what you’re thinking,” she said, “but just because we are in Ethan Burdett’s building, that doesn’t mean that he was her lover. Maybe those were for someone she was seeing after work.”
