“So you’re here to report a murder, is that it?”
“No, I am here to tell you my wife is missing. As is my duty.”
“But you think she may be dead.”
“Yes.”
“Do you also think you know who killed her?”
“No.”
“It wouldn’t beyouwho killed her, would it, Mr. Grant? This wouldn’t be a confession here, would it?”
Grant, or whatever his name was, leaned closer to me.
“Have you ever heard of the RUF?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Once. Last night, in fact. Why? Do you think the RUF had something to do with your wife’s death?”
“No.”
“If, in fact, sheisdead?”
“Oh, she’s dead, all right, oh yes.”
“How do you know that?”
“She wrote me a note.”
“Saying she was dead?”
“No. Saying if I didn’t hear from her by Tuesday, shemightbe dead.”
“Today is Tuesday,” I said.
“Yes. So she must be dead, am I correct?”
“Well, she only said shemightbe dead.”
“She must have had an inkling,” Grant said.
“What else did she say in this note?”
“Here, read it for yourself,” Grant said, and took a folded sheet of paper from his pocket, and unfolded it, and smoothed it neatly on my desk top. The note read:
Dear Mercer…
“That’s not my real name,” he said at once.
“Then why did she address you as such?”
“I told you. She must have had an inkling.”
Dear Mercer,
By the time you read this, I will be gone.
Do not try to find me, it is too dangerous.
If I am not back by Tuesday, I guess I will be dead.
Your loving wife,
Marie
“That’s notherreal name, either,” Grant said.
“I know. She must have had an inkling.”
“Exactly.”
“So you think the RUF had something to do with her disappearance, is that it?”
“No,” Grant said.
“Then why did you bring them up?”
“I thought you might have heard of them.”
“Is that diamond in your mouth a so-called conflict diamond?” I asked.
“What is a conflict diamond?” Grant asked.
“Is your wife—orwasshe, as the case may be—involved in any way with the sale or transport of illicit diamonds in Sierra Leone or Angola?”
“My wife and I never discussed her private affairs. You will have to ask her personally. When you find her. If you find her. But you won’t find her because it’s Tuesday and she said she’d be dead.”
“Well, you’ve filed a complaint…”
“I’m not complaining,” he said, and grinned again.
“…so I guess I’ll have to investigate. Can you tell me what your wife looks like, please?”
“If she’s still alive, she is a dark-skinned woman of about your height and weight, with black hair and brown eyes.”
“How old is she?”
“About your age.”
“Twenty-nine?”
“I should have thought twenty-five,” he said, and grinned his charming gold-and-diamond grin.
“Any visible scars or tattoos?”
“None that I ever noticed.”
“How long have you been married?” I asked.
“Too long,” he said, and then suddenly ducked his head, perhaps to hide a falling tear. “She was a good woman,” he murmured.
The challenge now seemed clear: Find a good woman in this city. Which was not as simple as it first appeared. With all due respect, Commish, nothing is ever simple in police work, nothing is ever uncomplicated.
To begin with, if this woman…
Now hold it right there, Emilio thought.
Before things gettoocomplicated here, let’s just take a peek at the phone book and see if there reallyisa person or persons named Mercer Grant or Marie Grant or, for that matter, anybody named Olivia Wesley Watts, though he didn’t think a detective would be so stupid as to list herself in the phone book. Emilio had only two directories in the apartment, one for Isola, the other for Riverhead, and neither one of them listed either a Mercer or a Marie Grant, which wasn’t surprising since the guy in Livvie’s report (Emilio was already fondly thinking of her as Livvie) had himself told her it wasn’t his real name. There was no Margie Gannon in either of the books, either, nor anybody named Frank Randuzzi or Jerry Aiello, or Ambrose Fields, so he had to figure Livvie had made up these names for her own protection.
There was no O’Malley’s Bar, either, hey, big surprise!
But Livvie had written:
Let’s start with Margie Gannon and me, or perhaps Margie and I, having an after-hours beer last Monday night in a bar called O’Malley’s a few blocks from the station house.
So okay.
Somewhere in this city, a few blocks from a police station, there was a bar. Find that bar, whatever its real name was, and Emilio would be well on the way to finding a redheaded detective named Olivia Wesley Watts.
Let the games begin, he thought.
The clock is ticking!
8
FIRST THING OLLIE DIDthat Thursday morning was hit the pawnshops again. This time, he had a double incentive. Not only had someone possibly hocked the dispatch case his dumb sister Isabelle had given him two Christmases ago, but someoneelse(presumably not the same asshole junkie) had also possibly hocked a gun that had been used in a bank heist five years ago. He did not expect to win the daily double, and was in fact surprised when even one of his horses came in.
Of course, nobody knew anything at all about the gun.
It would have been a miracle if anyone had.
Not that a great many .32-caliber Smith & Wessons hadn’t been pawned in this fair city over the past
