“I grew up in Oakland,” Byrd said. “Finally made it to Seattle a few years ago.”
“In time for the construction boom. Good on you.” I shifted my tote on my shoulder. “Well, I better get inside before visiting hours end. It’s almost shift change, isn’t it? Nice to visit with you.”
Inside, I headed not for the elevator, but for the cafeteria, passing visitors and staff, hospital chatter wafting around me as I replayed Kristen’s summary of the movie in my head. Bought two large coffees, hot and black. Caught a glimpse of a woman in a navy SPD uniform heading into the restroom.
I made my way back to the front door, hoping my luck had held. It had.
“I was getting coffee,” I said, “and figured you could use a cup, too. Hope you don’t mind it black.” I handed one to Byrd.
“My tastes are simple. Thanks.”
I leaned against the wall next to him, in my best best-buddy act. “Quite an ordeal,” I said, in a somber tone. “I gather the police are linking her shooting to one that happened years ago. I didn’t remember much about it, so I looked it up online. They had a good suspect, but he had an alibi. He was at the movies. Lady Bird, the paper said.”
The newspaper account had not named the movie, just as it had not named the suspect because he had not been charged. Yet. Had Byrd read the accounts? Me, if I’d been a suspect, I’d have practically memorized them. But I was puffing, and praying his memory for movie trivia wasn’t as sharp as Kristen’s.
“I loved that movie,” he said. I was surprised. Classic chick flick.
“The mother–daughter tensions are pretty classic,” I said. “She just wants to leave home, spread her wings, but the mom’s more worried about money than her daughter’s dreams. When she changes her name, the parents are all up in arms. ‘What’s wrong with Catherine? It’s a perfectly fine name.’”
“Christine,” he said. “The girl’s name was Christine, not Catherine.”
Pooh. I’d been hoping he didn’t know. “I kinda didn’t get the bit about the brother and his girlfriend, though. Did you?”
“Oh, sure. Miguel was adopted. And Shelly had a bad family situation so the parents let her move in.”
I could not have remembered those characters’ names if you’d paid me a thousand bucks. A thought began to nag me. “What was that bit about the fancy house?”
“Lady Bird is embarrassed about where they live, so she gives her snobby new friend Jenna the address of her old boyfriend’s grandmother’s house, the boy who turned out to be gay. It’s a nice parallel with the scene where Marion invites her to do their favorite thing together, which turns out to be going to open houses in upscale neighborhoods and pretending they live in a fancy house instead of a little sh—” He stopped himself. “Instead of a more modest house.”
Marion. The mom’s name convinced me.
But knowing the movie so well didn’t mean he’d seen it at the Guild three years ago. He could have bought the ticket, gone inside, and slipped out. Sped across Forty-Fifth and over the Mont-lake Bridge to the Hallorans’ house.
I heard a door open to my right and saw Byrd’s gaze following someone. I didn’t want to seem too obvious, but I managed to sneak a quick glance sideways.
All I saw was the back of security guard, as the man moved in the opposite direction. Ramon?
I turned back to Byrd. He blinked rapidly, the skin on his forehead damp and flush.
“Hey, thanks for the coffee,” he said. “I gotta make a quick pit stop inside before I head out.” He stubbed out his cigarette in the big ashtray.
I had one shot. The medieval chants began to play in my head. I forged on.
“When you and Maddie decided to do a project together, whose idea was it to buy the property on Twenty-Fourth?”
“You’re such a great friend of my dear cousin, and you don’t know?”
I’d puzzled it out, but I needed him to say it.
“We weren’t in business together. Maddie, the Golden Girl,” he said with a sneer that made me shiver. He couldn’t possibly know he was using my phrase for her. “All the pictures, all the clippings. Her accomplishments—first in this, first in that, winner of one stupid prize after another.”
“How did you know?” I asked. “You’re older. You lived in California.”
“Her proud grandmother, Rose, sent my grandmother pictures and newspaper clippings of all Maddie’s successes. Rubbing it in.”
Or trying to stay connected to the sister-in-law who’d left the family when Haig died? He was on a roll.
“Making a point that she and her father had picked up the mantle my grandfather dropped. That he nearly destroyed the family fortune, but they built it back up.” His voice tightened and he crumpled his cigarette pack, then shoved it into the trash bin beneath the ash tray. “They blamed my grandmother for being a bad influence. Trapping him in a marriage to a non-Armenian who would never understand what land and family meant to people who’d lost everything and everyone at the hands of the Turkish enemy.”
His double motive added an element that surprised me. “You wanted that property not just to get what the Petrosians owed you, but also to get the better of a Turk. You’d get the last laugh, turning the corner grocery they all loved into a building they all would have hated.”
“If Deanna had done her part, I would have succeeded. She promised me, with her experience and my money, we could make it work.”
“The money was all yours?” I asked. “Didn’t she chip in?”
“A drop in the bucket.” Resentment dripped off his words.
Deanna Ellingson could well have been Jake Byrd’s next victim.
“Is this what your grandmother would have
